This is not going to make President Trump happy. But it might make it easier for him to get an interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday said there were actually 20 percent fewer jobs created in a one-year period that ended earlier this year than the government earlier reported.
I’ve been writing for a long time that the BLS’ guesses at job growth turn the monthly employment numbers into a crapshoot. Here’s the proof.
The BLS Wednesday put out its “preliminary benchmark” revisions to the employment numbers for March 2018 to March 2019. They show 501,000 fewer jobs than previous reported.
According to the BLS, that’s a decline of 0.3 percent. But that percentage is very misleading because it calculates the missing 501,000 jobs as 0.3 percent of the entire workforce of 149.864 million jobs.
The really important number — to Trump and the Fed — is this: Without those 501,000 jobs, employment growth last year goes from 2.496 million jobs to just 1.995 million.
That’s growth of just 1.35 percent compared with the 1.69 percent it had been before Wednesday’s benchmark revision.
Put another way, that means job growth was 20 percent less in the March-to-March period than was previously reported by the BLS.
That’s disastrous!
The BLS doesn’t have numbers from March 2019 to the current month. So there’s no way to tell whether the reality of the job market continued to be less robust than the BLS’ estimates.
And it won’t be until February that we’ll know the final revisions to the job figures — well into the presidential campaign.
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