The US jobs report came out.

Did you hear? Ok, not really, but the good folks at Carlyle took it upon themselves to model the NFP headline in the absence of an official tally from the shuttered BLS.

It should be noted that this isn’t Carlyle’s first rodeo when it comes to estimating key US macro aggregates. They do it as a matter of course, and occasionally they’ll let the rest of us in on the outcome.

According to their estimates, the US hiring impulse was barely perceptible last month. The modeled estimate, a mere 17,000 net job gain, would count as the weakest “up” month of the COVID era. Consensus for the BLS headline, shown in red below, was ~50,000.

Assuming no revisions (and there would be revisions) the three-month average would actually move up as June’s negative print falls out of the lookback sample. But the six-month average would slip under 50,000.

The fact that this estimate was news at all on Tuesday — below the fold or not — underscores an uncomfortable reality for the Trump administration: They’re not going to be able to completely fudge the numbers, even if they succeed in bullying the BLS into submission. The private sector will call bullsh-t.

That’s not what Carlyle’s doing here, and the shutdown wasn’t an attempt on the administration’s part to obscure slower hiring, even if that turned out to be a “happy” consequence of the funding lapse. But we’ve already heard plenty of talk about ADP replacing NFP as the gold standard for tallying US jobs growth. And that’s just the beginning: We’re probably entering a bull market for private-sector macro data, and you don’t have to be a Trump critic to suggest as much.

Part and parcel of Trump’s assault on the BLS is the contention that the data isn’t reliable. That’s a reason for GOP voters not to trust the numbers, and Democrats won’t trust them because Trump’s demonstrated a penchant for firing statisticians who put out figures he doesn’t like. Mistrust of government data, then, is accidentally (ironically) a bipartisan issue. (And it speaks to the broader loss of trust across the country.)

Editorializing around the payrolls estimate, Carlyle’s head of global research called the US macro backdrop “interesting,” citing the rather stark juxtaposition between softer jobs data and firmer numbers across other key aggregates. “If you looked at the employment data, you’d think it’s an economy that’s on the cusp of or in a recession [but] that is nowhere else in the data.”

Readers will kindly perceive the echo of Monday’s “The General State Of Things,” a lengthy comment on just the discrepancy Carlyle described, how it came about and what it means for a riven body politic in our new Gilded Age.