From Yahoo Finance, September 9:
A revised look at America's jobs landscape over the last year is coming Tuesday morning with a number that is widely expected to rip through economic and political circles.
The data is backwards-facing and is expected to show about 700,000 fewer jobs were created from March 2024 to March 2025 than previously thought. What economists are set to look for are any clues about the recent deterioration of the US labor market.
Specifically, the question is to what extent a downshift, which has been in evidence this summer, began in earnest earlier than previously known.
The Trump White House is also set to be watching closely. It could use any revisions as further fodder for its critiques of government economic data — and it may also use the results to try and shift blame for the current slowdown towards former President Joe Biden or, of course, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
The revisions, in spite of the political heat as of late, are a routine and yearly practice where the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) updates its estimates of jobs levels as more data becomes available.
Tuesday's release will cover the period through March 2025 — or roughly the last 10 months of Biden's term and the first two full months of Trump's.
This week's release comes as extra attention is focused on the job market after new jobs data for the month of August, released last Friday, offered flashing red signs of a labor market slowdown. The report showed just 22,000 new jobs were added to the economy.
The political focus is likewise set to be intense as well after last year's release of this same preliminary annual revision fell during the heated final stretch of the presidential campaign — and became an immediate flash point when it showed the US economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than thought.
The political focus on jobs has also been in the spotlight more recently after Trump accused, without evidence, the BLS of having "phony" numbers and then fired the agency's commissioner — citing revisions as a key reason.
Downward revisions
Trump allies have seized upon larger-than normal-revisions seen in recent years to make the case that new approaches to data are needed.Trump's pick for a new commissioner, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, has been one of the fiercest critics of the agency. He is set to face a Senate confirmation hearing before the Senate's labor-focused panel in the coming months and will have his say.
Meanwhile, the data will be released at 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday and will show preliminary national employment benchmarks from the BLS. (Final revised numbers won't be released early next year.)
Expectations are widespread for a number that will be revised down from what government figures currently show.
The median estimate among economists compiled by Bloomberg as of Monday afternoon is for a decline of about 700,000 jobs — meaning the question is less whether there will be a decline, but instead by how much....
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As noted in the introduction to an August 2 Barron's article:
"Trump Fires BLS Chief. He’s Missing the Real Reason for the Big Change in Jobs Numbers."
....MUCH MOREFollowing on Reuters' August 1 report "US payrolls revisions jolt markets, making Fed look behind the curve" which focused on the revisions to prior releases rather than the not good 73K figure from the latest report.
And they were right to do so. What this means is for the last two Fed meetings the folks who sit at that beautiful table were informed by numbers that were incorrect, and dramatically so.
Based on the revisions the Fed should have lowered their target rate by a quarter point at the June 18 meeting after which Chair Powell said (CNBC):
“The U.S. economy has defied all kinds of forecasts for it to weaken, really over the last three years, and it’s been remarkable to see … again and again when people think it’s going to weaken out. Eventually it will, but we don’t see signs of that now”And based on the revised jobs number for June - 14,000 versus the initially reported 147,000, a greater than 90% decrease - the Fed should have cut the target by another quarter-point at the just concluded July 30 meeting.
My only quibble with the Reuters report is their headline; the Fed doesn't just look to be behind the curve, they are behind the curve and should immediately do an inter-meeting cut of a half-point.
Even that, because of the time lags between Fed actions and their effects in the real economy, would still leave the Fed behind the curve coming into the September meeting...
That was followed by:
"Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel says Fed needs to make an emergency rate cut
From CNBC, August 5:
- “The fed funds rate right now should be somewhere between 3.5% and 4%,” Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel said.
- The Federal Reserve kept interest rates at 5.25% to 5.5% after its meeting last week.
- On Friday, the jobs report showed slower growth than expected and an unemployment rate that moved higher to 4.3%, its highest since October 2021....
The problem is not any one report, the problem is that the data the data-dependent Federal Reserve Bank says it uses does not reflect reality.
Leading us to the Mises Institute's Mises Daily, March 22, 2019:
Statistics: Achilles’ Heel of Government
....The individual consumer, in his daily rounds, has little need of statistics; through advertising, through the information of friends, and through his own experience, he finds out what is going on in the markets around him. The same is true of the business firm. The businessman must also size up his particular market, determine the prices he has to pay for what he buys and charge for what he sells, engage in cost accounting to estimate his costs, and so on. But none of this activity is really dependent upon the omnium gatherum of statistical facts about the economy ingested by the federal government. The businessman, like the consumer, knows and learns about his particular market through his daily experience.
A Substitute for Market Data
Bureaucrats as well as statist reformers, however, are in a completely different state of affairs. They are decidedly outside the market. Therefore, in order to get “into” the situation that they are trying to plan and reform, they must obtain knowledge that is not personal, day-to-day experience; the only form that such knowledge can take is statistics.3
Statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer. Only by statistics can they know, or at least have any idea about, what is going on in the economy.4
Only by statistics can they find out how many old people have rickets, or how many young people have cavities, or how many Eskimos have defective sealskins — and therefore only by statistics can these interventionists discover who “needs” what throughout the economy, and how much federal money should be channeled in what directions.
The Master Plan
Certainly, only by statistics, can the federal government make even a fitful attempt to plan, regulate, control, or reform various industries — or impose central planning and socialization on the entire economic system. If the government received no railroad statistics, for example, how in the world could it even start to regulate railroad rates, finances, and other affairs? How could the government impose price controls if it didn’t even know what goods have been sold on the market, and what prices were prevailing? Statistics, to repeat, are the eyes and ears of the interventionists: of the intellectual reformer, the politician, and the government bureaucrat. Cut off those eyes and ears, destroy those crucial guidelines to knowledge, and the whole threat of government intervention is almost completely eliminated.5
It is true, of course, that even deprived of all statistical knowledge of the nation’s affairs, the government could still try to intervene, to tax and subsidize, to regulate and control. It could try to subsidize the aged even without having the slightest idea of how many aged there are and where they are located; it could try to regulate an industry without even knowing how many firms there are or any other basic facts of the industry; it could try to regulate the business cycle without even knowing whether prices or business activity are going up or down. It could try, but it would not get very far. The utter chaos would be too patent and too evident even for the bureaucracy, and certainly for the citizens.
And this is especially true since one of the major reasons put forth for government intervention is that it “corrects” the market, and makes the market and the economy more rational. Obviously, if the government were deprived of all knowledge whatever of economic affairs, there could not even be a pretense of rationality in government intervention.....
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