Let’s check out BLS job report revisions from January 2023 through June of 2024 in a series of four charts. 
The trend is obvious. There were only three upward second revisions in 18 months.
BLS Nonfarm Payroll Revision Magnitude
Sum of BLS First and Second Revisions
Note: The sum of revisions is first to original and second to original, not second to first.
Average BLS First and Second Revision
Average monthly revisions are about -35,000 a month for the second revision.
This is barely a start of what’s really happening.
At tip of the hat to Gary Brode at Deep Knowledge Investing. He asked me if I had anything on revisions and I told him I would produce some charts.
He has a post coming up on this subject but I was a little late in getting my charts to him. You may wish to subscribe to his reports.
QCEW Revisions
These monthly revisions do not incorporate annual BLS benchmark revisions based off more complete QCEW data.
QCEW (Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages) is a count of Unemployment Insurance (UI) administrative records submitted by 11.9 million establishments. It represents about 92 percent of data.
The monthly nonfarm payrolls are based on about 6.5 percent of the data with inaccurate imputations on top of that.
Nonfarm Payrolls NSA Minus QCEW
QCEW data is not in a friendly format to download. I manually added the above quarterly numbers from a QCEW download into a better formatted CES quarterly download from the St. Louis Fed.
In normal times, neither heading into or out of recessions, the differences seem to vary randomly in a tight range of about 2.5 million.
QCEW vs BLS
The base discrepancy is ~2.5 million. At the end of 2023 the discrepancy was ~3.4 million.
That implies an overcount in the monthly jobs reports of 0.9 million in six months.
That’s 150,000 a month on top of the monthly revisions!
For discussion of the above chart with more details and charts, please see How Much Does the BLS Overstate Monthly Jobs?
So, how much faith do you have in the monthly reports?
“Nonfarm Payrolls NSA Minus QCEW”
Not clear if you are consistently using revised numbers or not. It appears that QCEW revisions are minor, but Non-Farm Payroll adjustments are huge. So unless you consistently use final numbers the graph would be skewed.
QCEW revisions are 500% of normal according to the BLS.
800,000 is not normal or minor.
BLS: “For National CES employment series, the annual benchmark revisions over the last 10 years have averaged plus or minus one-tenth of one percent of total nonfarm employment. The preliminary estimate of the benchmark revision indicates an adjustment to March 2024 total nonfarm employment of -818,000 (-0.5 percent).”
https://mishtalk.com/economics/a-breakdown-by-sector-of-the-negative-818000-bls-job-revisions/
The country’s $35 trillion in debt and interest on that debt is the 2nd biggest item in the budget. We’re in a debt trap and that’s the elephant in the room. It’s astonishing that our Powell is not banging on the table with his shoe. We defaulted in 1971 when France wanted to convert their dollars to gold. Nixon wouldn’t do it; that was when the deficits and debt started becoming a serious problem. America is basically bankrupt. When you borrow trillions to pay the interest on debt you incurred from interest costs on money you’ve previously borrowed, you’re basically defaulting and pretending you’re solvent.
They do not want to report the actual numbers before the upcoming November election.
So they report just enough optimistic numbers to help Biden and then slow roll the adjustments so the actual numbers are reported by early 2025.
The problem is the mainstream media is intentionally ignoring the downward adjustments and the independent voter demographic is oblivious to the fact that the economic statistics are being carefully reported to help Biden.
This should not be a surprise to Mish’s readers since there is a Democrat in the White House.
BLS employment data can’t be trusted any more than BLS inflation. The Fed took a lesson from corrupt mortgage brokers, that bribed the major credit rating agencies to give worthless CMOs AAA ratings, which led to the mortgage crisis. These data collectors were the check and balance of a free market. Manipulated low inflation data allowed the Fed to keep rates effectively zero for a decade after the mortgage crisis bailout, until real inflation overwhelmed the contorted data. Distorted employment figures give the impression that socialist government policies work.
An interesting question Mish. And, as expected, many here have little faith in most economic numbers.
However, since most of those folks are not making multi-billon dollar decisions for major companies, or running large investment funds, it really doesn’t matter what they think. What matters is what those big decision makers think. And since markets appear to move, sometimes violently, with the release of every one of these numbers, one can “assume” that those people pay pretty close attention to these numbers and take them very seriously.
For the Mish readers who are hiding in their bunkers, waiting for the next depression and are always too afraid to invest; it doesn’t really matter if they believe the numbers. Because they never act on them.
The people who compile all Federal and state govt. reports are ultimately supervised by the President and the various state governors. The concept of “conflict of interest” seems to be lost on the older people. When you supervise the people whose work you could benefit from, you are always under suspicion of the fluffing the numbers. Its seems like the UK has more independent bean counters than we have.
At least we can have faith in the food pyramid. /s
ZERO faith. The Government is driven by politics.
Until the jobs reports acknowledge that a substantial number of jobs created are due to working age people being disabled or killed by the Covid Vaccines…
The job reports are completely WORTHLESS.
A lot of the job openings are due to attrition given the major demographic change of baby boomers retiring.
I remember a coworker telling me back in 2002 to expect an improvement in the job market starting around 2012 due to baby boomers retiring.
And consider also the proliferation of healthcare jobs due to baby boomers going on Medicare and needing more medical care.
What happens to the healthcare job market when the baby boomer demographic dies off ? Will there be an oversupply of healthcare workers ?
Nope – everyone is wondering why there are so many job openings despite a struggling economy… it makes no sense … a super healthy job narrative? How can it be?
The data IS the data. Stop trying to avoid the issue
Edward Dowd Presents Irrefutable Evidence Vaccine Mandates Killed & Disabled Countless Americans
https://dailyclout.io/edward-dowd-presents-irrefutable-evidence-vaccine-mandates-killed-disabled-countless-americans/
Many if not most job openings are fake also, there’s tons of stories out there about it – just Google “job openings fake” or “ghost job postings”
I could see if you were Covid Vaxxed… why you would prefer not to acknowledge this…. could be you next… or your kids…
Financial Analyst Ed Dowd says – Disability Claims Among Women Shot Up 55% After Rollout of COVID Vaccines.
Financial analyst and data expert Edward Dowd said a new U.S. Department of Labor disability survey shows employed men and women ages 16-64 reported record harms since February 2021, with women suffering an unprecedented 55% increase in disabilities.Since February 2021, more than 1 million working U.S. women ages 16-64 have told the U.S. Department of Labor they are disabled, according to a new government report, writes reporter for the Defender, Mike Capuzzo.
https://expose-news.com/2024/01/03/financial-analyst-ed-dowd-says-disability-claims-among-women-shot-up-55-after-rollout-of-covid-vaccines/
“I am not a number, I’m a free man!” — The Prisoner
I go with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny before BLS. Just another excuse to push money around.
Very little.
.
I’ve always wondered why people watch jobs?
It’s not the news per se, but the market’s reaction to the news, that is informative.
I suspect people look at trends as far as economic stats.
They may think the stats are falsely overstated such as GDP but they look at how GDP fares over 12 months to gauge if a recession is looming.
You just hope that the federal bureaucrats don’t massage or cook the numbers too much to hide that GDP is decreasing.
That graph doesn’t go back anywhere even remotely close to far enough. It should span several decades, and put revisions in percentage terms. The relevant question is not whether the first report is wrong, but rather how wrong it is. If the errors are not materially different in magnitude or direction over time, it really doesn’t matter.
What I fail to understand given the constant revisions is why the business news make such a big deal of the data when released.
Because data is empirical, factual and true when presented as a fictional character in the so called financial news.
Patrick, I try to look at trends to get an idea of how the economy is faring such as discretionary spending and its associated stocks like Carnival Cruise Line.
So I usually figure they over-report just enough on GDP (say 15 to 20%) and under-report on unemployment by the same amount.
My concern is that the federal bureaucrats will go to even greater lengths to hide a decline in GDP in order to prevent the reporting of a recession.
That is possible if you even have that much loyal ideologues in the career civil service who will go along with this to help the Democrats keep the White House.
AD
Absolute faith that the BLS will do whatever it takes to make those currently in power look good and the facts be damned. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he used the BLS as the model for the Ministry of Truth in that novel.
I have and maintain 0% Faith in Any & All Government Data, Analysis, Charts, Graphs, Etc.
They constantly revise all of the information they supply to the Public, because it’s based on whatever number it has to be. They are looking to promote an Agenda with a Specific Ideology Tilt. It is the Only Way to hide it all…
How about ZERO . . . NADA . . .
But the market algos are fed (pun intended) by the headline numbers every month. So really my complete lack of faith is irrelevant. The same folks that were the source of your last piece on scripted questions and a teleprompter-like interview with POTUS, the same folks that gathered up 51 intel officers to deem, out of hand and falsely, that the laptop was Russian disinformation, the same folks that said inflation was only like 8% at the recent peak (lol, right!) and that it was transitory….. are all part of the same evil cabal.
But, if your sole intention is to get rich and play the market algo game (Papa Dave, MP45v02 or whatver the letters are), well, this works magnificently as long as you exit at the right time.
I’ve always said, it wouldn’t really matter except real peoples’ lives are at stake here. Many people are harmed by policy misinformed by miscalculated data. Of course as long as the “correct” people are enriched wildly and in enough numbers, they will continue.
They are changing the name to the economic politbureau. There are lies, there are damn lies and then there are statistics
Enough. Even if it off by 20%, that means unemployment is around 5%. While the numbers may be recessionary I think it is faulty to compare it to the Covid recession. How many times in the last 24 years have the Nonfarm Payrolls NSA Minus QCEW been above 3M and a recession occurred. I think we are still at stall speed and maybe around 0-1% GDP. Still not a recession. Employment is still too high for this to be a recession. I don’t see enough pain.
Didn’t realize recessions are quantified by the pain you see. 🙂
The same amount of faith I have in the CDC.
Very little, if at all.