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The US economy lost 1.33 million jobs NSA in July. Hallelujah! WooHoo! The recession is over!!
Last July the US economy lost 1.401 million jobs NSA. The 68k gain is about the 66,848 per month margin of error for the BLS’s NFP prelim estimate. (Table 2F)
The Net Business Birth/Death jobs for July are 32,000 – almost half of the gain y/y. This is 7k more than last year. Those zany BLS beancounters keep fabricating jobs in the B/D model that are in excess of 2008 – even though this is the worst economy since The Great Depression.
David Rosenberg in Alan Abelson’s column notes that autoworkers and US Census workers, both real and imagined via adjusting, contributed 100,000 jobs.
The auto industry lost 8k jobs Not Seasonally Adjusted; but after BLS adjusted the data, the auto industry created a fictional 28k jobs – a swing of 36k jobs with the stroke of a pen.
Let’s not forget, as we noted last week, that there are sampling anomalies in July because the 12th fell on a Sunday. And the BLS only samples for one week. Unusual factors can pervert an entire month’s data.
This leads us to another major problem with BLS, NAPM and PMI surveying methodology. With so many companies, partnerships and sole proprietorships disappearing, how are the beancounters adjusting?
If a firm disappears, taking all its workers with it, do the beancounters record a ‘zero’, or sample a different firm, or just ignore the disappearance?
This is a very important consideration because worsening economic conditions could induce beancounters with their unreliable methodology to record better data.
After throwing trillions of dollars into the US economy and financials system and pledging tens of trillions of dollars in guarantees in only 10 months, we have a statistically insignificant amount of jobs gains at best! And there is little or no benefit without the magic BLS pencil.
Oh, 422,000 Americans left the work force in July, because they have given up or they are taking the summer off. If the latter is true, they will soon return and the unemployment rate will jump.
President Obama and the WH are under pressure for tipping the July Employment Report on Thursday night when Obama told supporters at a rally that the US was losing jobs at half the rate of earlier this year.
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