Will America’s preeminent economic statistics outfit dare suggest the US economy lost jobs for a second straight month, thereby risking the ire of an executive who’s not shy about firing statisticians?
I doubt it, particularly not with two months to go until interim elections, which is why I suspect Friday’s jobs report from the BLS will show a gain.
Consensus expects to hear the world’s largest economy added 55,000 jobs in August, rebounding from a surprise contraction in July.
Naively assuming no revisions (there’ll obviously be revisions) a consensus print would see the three month average fall to just 17,000, the lowest since February.
The BLS release comes a week on from the bureau’s first attempt at the annual benchmarking exercise, which reflected a downward revision, disappointing economists hoping (against hope) for the first upward adjustment in four years.
Hiring’s been uneven during Donald Trump’s second term. The data, like Trump, is too erratic to trust, but it’s fair to assess the jobs market lost momentum in recent months, even as anecdotal evidence from the Conference Board’s labor differential suggests the situation might’ve improved in August.
The jobless rate, which has been held in check by falling participation, is expected to remain at a very low 4.1% in Friday’s update.
This is a side note, but recall that the employment level on the household survey side is down 1.82 million since December. The updated figure above gives you some context.
Ahead of the BLS release, the market will get the usual appetizers. ADP’s seen printing a 47,000 net gain for private payrolls in August, around the same as the prior month’s addition. The JOLTS release will likely suggest there were around 7.3 million open positions on the last business day of July, basically the same as June.
Also on deck in the US: ISM manufacturing and services, both of which are expected to print in expansion territory for an eighth month. The factory gauge is seen at 55.2, the services headline at 54.1. If consensus is right, August will mark the second month in a row that the US factory sector enjoyed an expansion broader than that seen on the services side.
Are we at the point of assuming that the jobs revisions will always be bad because the numbers are always fudged higher now? I guess the alternative would be that we are in the middle of long-term downward trend — except for a brief upturn possibly due to the World Cup — and that our system of data collection is at best terribly flawed. The downward trend and negative revisions do go back to the Biden administration, but nearly every institution in Washington has undergone the same process since then: attack, denigrate, obfuscate, and control. Regardless of the reason, the result has been to make many of the institutions — and their numbers — much more suspect now. On a side note, Trump hasn’t outright fired someone for some time. Maybe we are overdue. (My money was always on Hegseth, but it’s a crapshoot.)