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Rotten Jobs Reporting

By December 3, 2022Commentary

There is so much going on with all the work Dave has done on how Minnesota DOH calculates vax effectiveness, which we are now extending to CDC reporting, I am behind on a number of other areas, including research summaries, so I am going to try to catch up.

If you don’t read Zero Hedge you should.  There are people who question what we are told and who do a tremendous job of uncovering inconsistencies and getting closer to reality.  That is what you will find at Zero Hedge in regard to economic and business issues especially.  So read this post of the job numbers.  We had another release yesterday purporting to show strong job growth, at a time when we can all read about layoffs taking place.  The Labor Department tracks employment statistics through a survey of businesses, the “Establishment” survey, and a survey of households, the “Household survey.

The headline numbers you see in the media are typically taken from the Establishment survey, which for the past several months has purported to show strong employment growth.  Not so fast, says the Zero Hedge post, look at the Household survey and the divergence between the two surveys that is growing over the last few months.  The Household survey is showing basically no job growth.

As the post explains, kind of curious that this seems to happen in the months before elections.  And if you look further down you will see the kind of methodologic issue that is always a tipoff to me that something is wrong.  Note that the response rate to the Establishment survey was far below normal levels, meaning the data is even more made up than usual.  I suspect the state of the employment market laid out in the post is accurate–people are losing high-paying jobs, and instead having to work multiple, low-paying part-time jobs.

Sooner or later reality will become apparent and there will be a massive revision to the numbers, now that the election is over.  (ZH Post) 

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  • Mark Culham says:

    Thanks for linking to this. I read it just yesterday and had read some of their earlier articles to the same effect. I have long ignored the BLS numbers. They are intentionally misleading and incomplete and, as ZeroHedge notes, driven entirely by political considerations. Keep up the good work.

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