US Jobs Revised Down By 818,000 In Election Year Shocker, Second Worst Revision In US History

How big is the 818,000 revision in context? As the chart below shows, the 2024 revision was the biggest in the past decade, and the second biggest on record, with just the 824K downward revision in 2009 just (barely) greater.

The revisions confirm that - as we had been warning for much of the past year - the labor market started moderating much sooner than flawed conventional wisdom thought. It wasn’t until earlier this month that markets and economists grew concerned with the release of the July jobs report. That set off alarm bells with a weak pace of hiring and a fourth month of rising unempolyment, but other metrics like jobless claims and vacancies have suggested a more moderate slowdown.

Putting it all together, we now know - as we reported first back in March - that the labor market is, and was, far weaker than conventionally believed. In fact, no less than 800,000 payrolls would end up "missing" when one uses the far more accurate Quarterly Census of Empolyment and Wages data rather than the BLS' woefully inaccurate and politically mandated payrolls "data", and if one looks back the the monthly gains across most of 2023, one gets not 218K jobs added on average every month but rather 150K, a 31% decline. Needless to say, the market would look very different if it had known that effectively all the payrolll"beats" of the past year would be deleted!