In my last Deeper Dive, I wrote,
Even after the Bureau of Lying Statistics puts out its regular deeply flawed numbers, and after they revise those numbers down in following months, they STILL often have had to make an even more MASSIVE downward revision of half-a-million-to-nearly-a-million jobs once a year to reconcile their hiring/firing seasonally-adjusted (i.e., politically manipulated) statistics to match known actual employment. So, even their early revised numbers are nearly always overstated. Moreover, their data sampling has become much thinner over recent post-Covid years and thinner still under DOGE as they have fewer people to collect the data.
From there I pointed to information that, if accurate, would make this year’s revision the largest ever:
“A report out yesterday told us that the feds are about to announce a big revision in the unemployment numbers – in which almost a million jobs will disappear….”
If that is what happens, I believe that will amount to the biggest annual … revision ever. We’ve had others that came close, and they are another reason I have always said the BLS monthly numbers are routinely over-optimistic so that the head of the BLS should have been fired for always being overly positive in order to make the administration she served look good….
Once again, you are likely about to find out that the real job numbers this year have been much worse than statistics show
Well, the revised numbers are now out, and they were, indeed, the worst downward revision in the history of this metric at a -911,000 jobs for the period between March, 2024, and March, 2025:
As you can see, the BLS almost always runs too optimistic all year and then has a major correction downward in this annual benchmark adjustment. This year’s revision takes the numbers down to a monthly average for that period, which ended last March, of 120,000. That is solidly below the 150,000 level that is considered the threshold for recessions, which further confirms may statements last year that we were already slipping into a stealth recession under Joe Biden, by which I explained I meant a recession that was not showing up in the inaccurate and possibly rigged numbers but was a fact of life all the same.
These job corrections are off Trump’s plate. He can’t be blamed for this set because only a small slice of the pie applied to the weeks in the referenced period that happened under his watch. So, Karoline Leavitt at the White House is right today to make it clear that these downward revisions primarily cover Biden’s final year:
“Today, the BLS released the largest downward revision on record proving that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
“This is exactly why we need new leadership to restore trust and confidence in the BLS’s data on behalf of the financial markets, businesses, policymakers, and families that rely on this data to make major decisions,” she said.
So much for Bidenomics.
Even so, the numbers became remarkably worse in the months following the period covered by the revisions:
The summer months of June, July and August saw average payroll growth of just 29,000 per month, below the break-even level for keeping the unemployment rate steady.
Far below it! As I pointed out in that Deeper Dive, one of those months actually went negative (-13,000) for the first time since the deep Covidcrash days of 2020. AND, those recent months were not in the latest annual revisions so will likely be subject to their own additional negative annual revisions a year from now if the normal pattern holds.
With the help of tariffs and chaos freezing up hiring and stalling some future planning, the situation in the US has deteriorated below Biden’s stealth-recession days. It’s still a stealth recession, not an official recession, since GDP doesn’t show it due to understated inflation metrics (see Shadowstats.com) and the front-running of tariffs that juiced the economy (but only as an anomaly that will be paid back quickly as businesses work from their banked inventory, rather than order more new stuff, for as long as they can).
Until the recession does show up in GDP numbers, the National Bureau of Economic Analysis, which officially declares recessions, won’t declare one. Nevertheless, as these job revisions keep coming in worse and worse and unemployment rises, and as manufacturing has been in recession all year, people are starting to wake up to the reality that the economy is a lot weaker than they thought.
One of the big factors that kept many economists from believing the US was in a recession in the first quarter of the year when that quarter did come in with negative GDP growth was the fact that they believed (wrongly, as I kept saying) that labor was uncannily strong. It was not, and now we know that. I even pointed out along the way that we’d likely see that once the annual revision came in. Now the major objection economists had to believing the US was sliding into recession has been put to rest.
Hence, one of my several predictions for the remainder of the year, for paying subscribers, was a fairly easy shot from the hip, which today’s report adds further weight to:
… continually increasing unemployment from this time forward to the end of the year….