And more signs that we are already in a recession AND that inflation is rising.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the major jobs news today because the jobs numbers have been all over the place and are changed more often than Biden’s diapers. As I’ve been saying for a couple of years, they have been highly unreliable since the Covid lockdowns and are even worse this year because we’re in an election year.
Still, I will note how unreliable the latest dismal, recessionary report proves the statistics to be once again, without making too much about how recessionary it is because 1) we don’t know how much is due to hurricanes and the Boeing strike and 2) the numbers may swing dramatically right after the election is past and 3) this month’s figures will almost certainly be massively revised even worse next month … as is the pattern. So, we’ll deal with it when it gets real.
While the paltry +12,000 jobs (which would have been deeply negative without the government’s job contribution) is far below what economists were expecting, the more interesting thing when you cannot trust the numbers is the abundant evidence once again of how untrustworthy the numbers are! This is the weakest report since the 2020 lockdowns, but who cares when the numbers are so fake other than to say I’m surprised the Biden administration couldn’t cook the books enough get this report up higher to align with all the others, but wait until you read the rest about their book cooking. They can and do blame all of this report on Boeing and the weather; so they had that for cover.
The Household Survey was much worse than the headline Establishment Survey numbers, which the complicit mainstream financial media chose to focus on; yet, the Household Survey is the one that has been consistently more accurate. The Household Survey showed a huge net job LOSS: Full-time employment declined by 164,000, while part-time fell by 227,000. A total of 368,000 fewer people were reported holding jobs.
You’d think that would have been the big headline news, but the rigged media buried the lead as is typical of a press that seems to always want to make things sound rosier than they are as if to help the Biden administration all they can. I don’t know how else to see it. So, there is one big chunk of the ugly truth about the big lies they tell: The press buries the ugly truth behind the ever-so-slightly positive truth, which was created solely by the government’s own hiring.
The other really ugly stuff we see in today’s report is the same ol’, same ol’: Once again, previous months that were reported quite positive by the Biden administration now, as has happened all year, got a big revision down. Now that all attention is on the present month, the administration revised past months down closer to the truth (but this story gets even uglier; just wait).
First, here was the latest report, and you can be certain it will be revised to the actual negative number that you can be certain it actually was (especially based on what the Household Survey said, which doesn’t allow much gov’t manipulation because it is just a survey of what households report):
And of course, as has been the case for the entire Biden admin, previous months were revised sharply lower once again: August was revised down by 81,000, from +159,000 to +78,000 [recessionary], and September was revised down by 31,000, from +254,000 to +223,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 112,000 lower than previously reported.
With that last line, the even uglier aspect of these revisions is that they mean, even the monster downward revision of 818K jobs that happened for the past year in September did not go deep enough because seven of the last nine months were, again, revised even lower! Chop another 100K+! We’re now close to having been off by a million jobs!
Before moving along, let’s also note that layoffs have seen a 42% rise. No doubt that’s just “transitory,” never mind that the decline is consistently spread across three years; so, it is a longterm trend across the length of the Bidenomics era. Layoffs of professional and business-services workers hit a new high. Not bad for trillions of dollars of extra debt to pump the economy along!
Meanwhile, the share of people voluntarily quitting their jobs (a sign that labor is strong in that workers trust they can get or have gotten another and maybe better job) has declined to its lowest since the Covidcrash.
A recessional march
Now let’s move to the economy directly, versus the economy as inferred from lying labor reports that are endlessly revised worse. We have yet another month where manufacturing has been reported in contraction. That’s a sixteen-month low in S&P Global’s Manufacturing PMI report and the eighth month of contraction in a row. Many other reports, such as Fed regional reports, have been showing a manufacturing recession even longer.
Just as important, in light of my themes of late, inflation in the manufacturing report rose again—more pressure in the pipeline that wants to work its way down to consumer inflation.