It looks like the Bureau of Labor Statistics moved all the goalposts until they got a favorable result to come up with an increase of 467,000 jobs, if you believe Zerohedge’s analysis. They appear to have used seasonal adjustments that were the greatest ever used historically.
Every ten years, they can readjust for population and that was their cover, along with COVID. They used those issues to possibly make overly dramatic seasonal adjustments. They had to go back four years and adjust the numbers to make it work, and they did.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did an amazing job of coming up with a seasonal adjustment like no other to show an increase of 467,000 jobs. This came after ADP predicted minus 301,000, and Goldman predicted minus 250,000. The media expected 125,000.
If you thought seasonal adjustment (seasonal adjustment is a method of data-smoothing that is used to predict economic performance or company sales for a given period) was meant the Christmas – New Year’s holiday and the summer when we have all the temporary workers, you might have to rethink that because the BLM is spreading out the wealth to January and they’re redid prior years to make it all work.
The Atlanta Fed GDPNow data shows Q1 GDP rising only 0.1% That’s not a flourishing economy which the jobs report seems to reflect.
Zerohedge believes they have been fudging the numbers all along and never caught up because of the downturn over COV so they had to fudge in the opposite direction.
Zerohedge explains here, but we address it generally here. Everything was manipulated heavily in the administration’s favor. Next month, the chickens will come to roost if this is accurate or they will pull out some other gimmick. We’re guessing they have some accounting legerdemain worked out already.
THE HISTORICALLY REMARKABLE HUGE ADJUSTMENTS
The historical adjustments were remarkably large: December increased from 199,000 to 510,000, November from 249,000 to 647,000, and so on.
From just December to January, while the seasonally adjusted number rose by an astonishingly impressive 467,000, the unadjusted number collapsed, tumbling from 150.349 million to 147.525 million, a 2.8 million drop (that happens). That means the 3+ million January number is due to arbitrary adjustments made to the data, Zerohedge reports.
They wiped out the COVID monthly impact in 2021, as they spread the data where they wanted it.
Just look at the crazy chart:
And, in order to get to a point of being able to claim 467,000 job gains last month, the BLS had to revise four years’ worth of claimed jobs and population data.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised 2017 job growth lower by -61,000, 2018 lower by -26,000, 2019 revised lower by -43,000, while 2020 was revised higher by 124,000, and 2021 was also revised up 217,000, or in total a 211,000 upward revision over 5 years or 3,500 jobs per month.
In 2021, March-July was revised lower by -1,061,000 while Aug-Dec was revised up by +817,000.
How did a -2.8 million actual drop in jobs translate into an adjusted 467,000? They appeared to use dated seasonal adjustments, Zerohedge claims.
As SouthBay Research notes, “there has never been a January Seasonal Adjustment of this magnitude.”
Look at this HUGE seasonal adjustment:
A normal seasonal adjustment would bring it to 166,000 jobs, which is close the media’s summary of predictions. In other words, that’ could well be the real number.
In the private sector, the changes were more ‘grotesque’, as Zerohedge describes it. If they used normal seasonal adjustment, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!
ADP had it at down 301,000 and -272,000 sounds more like reality.
They’re going to have a big problem next month if this is true when we see the seasonal workers laid-off and the population of workers changes. They raised the entire population of workers and used it as a baseline so now they seemingly have to live with it.
By ignoring the COVID months and manipulating the data, the workforce is 149.16 million in December – an increase of roughly 6 million workers from the revised 143.0 million in January.
THE ECONOMY IS STILL NEARLY 3 MILLION JOBS SHORT
US economic activity didn’t expand, and we’re still 3 million short on jobs we had before the pandemic lockdowns.
We lost 9.2 million jobs in 2020 because of the lockdowns and gained 6.5 million in 2021. In other words, we are still close to 3 million short from what we had in 2019 before the pandemic. In 2018, we created 2.3 million jobs, and in 2019, we created 2.01 million jobs. Then the lockdowns, a self-imposed disaster, caused the loss of 9.2 million jobs. People came back to work, but not in the numbers that existed in 2019.
There is a good explanation at CTH.
