Saturday, February 4, 2023

Unbelievable job numbers largely seasonal adjustments...who watches the BLS?

January’s ‘too good to be true’ jobs report was based on 'adjustments'




Bloomberg, which exists to serve active traders on Wall Street, is throwing shade on the January jobs report that “surprised” a lot of people with its positive numbers. Before addressing the technical factors used to produce the rosy numbers, consider the buried lede hundreds of words into the piece: Stripped of all the technical jargon is this stark reality:

On an unadjusted basis, payrolls actually fell by 2.5 million last month.

 Molly Smith writes:

Employers added 517,000 jobs in January — nearly double the prior month’s advance and above all estimates in a Bloomberg survey. The unemployment rate also unexpectedly retreated to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969, according to Labor Department data released Friday.

Those are the numbers that grabbed headlines and enabled Team Biden to claim credit for what they want to bamboozle the public into thinking we have a great economy.  But it turns out that there were changes in the way the data were gathered and reported that made things look rosier:


No comments: