Today, the BLS issued a restatement of the prior jobs numbers from April 2024 to September 2025. There is still some work to do on revisions, but this was the first blocking and tackling.
-911.
Conspiracy theorists are already saying they did that number because it is so close to 9/11. Those of us who think the BLS cooked the books see it as a restatement of more accurate numbers. The books were cooked to help the incumbent party get re-elected.
Government bureaucrats are not some angelic King Solomon creatures.
The best analogy is that Trump is the new CEO taking over and is restating all the old numbers to clear the slate for new initiatives. In public companies, a changing of the guard on poorly performing companies happens all the time. Trump’s cabinet isn’t full of credentialed but inadequate apparatchiks, but private sector CEOs, so I assume they are supportive.
It is clear that the way the BLS collected data in the past does not give a good picture of a 21st-century economy. New methods have to be developed, means tested, and implemented to give a better picture. Too many big decisions come from this particular data set.
I have said previously that the Fed should have cut by .50 basis points. Maybe in September, they do a mea culpa, blame the prior administration’s fake data, and shock the world with a .75?
I do not think it is AI or tariffs taking jobs. I do think the federal government is laying off tons of workers, and red state governments are following suit. AI will take jobs eventually, but it’s not there yet. Right now, AI is extremely useful to compile and summarize datasets, write, and things like that. It can read X-rays. What that does is help critical thinkers ask the right questions to get better answers and results.
I think this short essay is pretty good regarding AI.
I think tech moves at a faster pace than it used to because of learning curve effects.
There is a lot of hype around AI and jobs. It's no different than the hype cycles we have seen before in the 90s with the internet, crypto, quantum etc. The people in the venture community get paid to come up with a version of the future and make investments based on the thesis of that vision. That’s why so many VC investments fail.
Robots are being touted, too. They aren’t ready for prime time yet at scale, but someday will be. Currently, seeing them mow fairways on golf courses and lawns is pretty cool, though. Robots will take commoditized jobs from human workers in the next decade.
Trump has touted billions of dollars that will be invested in the American economy. That’s great! However, that will take years to happen, and the results of that investment won’t be seen for probably a decade at least. This assumes everyone follows through on their words.
Some data shows a decently strong economy with inflation under 2.5%, and GDP growth at 3%. With investment and exploration for energy, and investment in energy production (refineries, pipelines, etc) we should continue to see inflation tick down.
Labor costs are another story. They aren’t going lower. If a business were illegally relying on cheap illegal immigration labor to produce, that game is over. I don’t think that is the case with a lot of businesses. The ones that do are outliers or unknowingly hire illegals, which make up a small percentage of their workforce.
The market loved the downward revision only because it expects the Fed to cut next week. You can see where sentiment changed in the CME 3-month SOFR contract.
We aren’t going to see a 99.00 print anytime soon, but I think 97.00 is possible.
There will be no stock market crash. Too many circuit breakers. There is a lot of chaff that needs to be burned off in the Federal government. Trump will get some of it done, but it’s going to be the next President that realizes most of the gains.
ADDED 3:00PM CT.
I just thought of this and should have been smart enough to put it in the original post. Sorry about that. But, if the jobs numbers have been revised by this amount, wouldn’t it stand to reason that GDP under Biden was ALSO “cooked”? The job market isn’t a compartmentalized vacuum. Markets and data affect everything else to a certain extent.
The question you have to ask is what economic numbers released during the Biden Administration, especially in the last year running up to the election were real and which ones were manipulated to look better than they actually were?
Before you scream at me, President Biden used an autopen to give pardons. Don’t tell me he was aware. The Marxist ideologues in his administration had full run of the place. For example, do you believe one economic report out of China? I do not. I don’t think they are far, far off, but they aren’t on the level.
Thanks, Jeff, but I think there's an extra layer to this onion that's getting peeled.
A couple of things to take as givens as they're searchable, first, in Michigan, a group of legislators conducted an audit of some sort and discovered that whole agencies were being created funded, and "staffed' for the sole purpose of laundering the salaries for themselves. Two, California, I think two years ago, freely admitted they paid out some $3.1 Billion in Unemployment Claims, but had no records of where it went. Recall Unemployment Claims are federally financed, but state distributed. And thirdly, Sec. Kennedy recently testified that Medicare and Medicaid were getting double enrolled as their leg of the fraud problem. Where does this info lead this Chicago trained sceptic?
The BLS wasn't fired for "politicizing" the employment data. She was fired for helping cover up the industrial level fraud by fudging the data. Suddenly the "why?" behind Rahm moving the Census Bureau into the White House as his first act as iBama's Chief of Staff making much more sense. As these fake numbers continue to "come out of the data' with each successive raid by ICE, the employment data will start to resemble "Reality", just not quite yet.
"It's a big club. And you ain't innit." was in no way a punch line.
Mildly deflationary, I would think.
I think a lot of the layoffs and hiring reductions being credited/blamed on AI are actually just because too many companies hired too many people and are now realizing it.