Yet Another Month of Bogus Job Numbers

Once more the headline is that far more jobs were created than expected.  Once more this is likely a fantasy concocted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  As usual the good people at Zero Hedge do the heavy lifting on analyzing the data.  One clue that something is amiss is that ADP, which does payroll and benefit services for a large number of companies, has real data about job growth at those companies and shows nothing like BLS, which relies on surveys with very low response rates.  336,000 new jobs were supposedly created according to the employer piece of the BLS surveys, way above any estimate.  And the prior two months were revised upward.

But…….once more the details underneath don’t look so rosy.  The household survey, which is generally more accurate, showed only 86,000 new jobs.  Unemployed workers rose to over 6.3 million, the highest since January 2022 and the unemployment rate remained at 3.8%, instead of dropping as expected with such a supposed high job gain.  “Adjustments” played their usual role as well, in this case seasonal ones which magically turned a 466,000 loses of leisure industry jobs into a 96,000 gain.  Now I call that some real adjustment wizardry.  So how did we get unadjusted job growth at all–why the government sector of course, a lot of new indoctrination, er, teacher jobs were added.

And the real indicator of the wooziness of the economy and labor market is that all the job growth in September was accounted for by part-time jobs, full-time jobs actually declined.  And one mirage is that the number of multiple job holders rose substantially again this month, and in the establishment survey, those people get double or triple counted, depending on how many jobs they need to make up for Bidenflation.  To sum up, another month where BLS fulfills its mandate to make the economy look great, while the real data shows rottenness at the core.   (ZH Post). You can find all the source info here.  (BLS Data)