Silly me. When writing about last month’s lousy jobs report, I forgot to mention last month’s lousier downward revisions to the previous two jobs reports. But John Crudele has got you covered:
A couple of days after the announcement of the January job growth, I wrote a column that pulled the 257,000 figure apart. I concluded that the strong January growth was really a seasonal adjustment anomaly and that when you look at the raw data (the non-seasonally adjusted figures), the increase should have been a lot less.
Guess what? As part of last Friday’s announcement, Labor reduced the January gain to 201,000 jobs. The original 257,000 figure had already been reduced last month to 239,000.
The same thing happened with February’s number. The original announcement said there were 295,000 new jobs created after seasonal adjustments — a figure that sent the financial markets into a tizzy because it meant that the Fed would certainly have to raise interest rates.
I wrote in a March 12 column that seasonal adjustment quirks were making job growth in February look too strong. I wrote that job growth this February should have been somewhere in the 227,000-to-247,000 neighborhood — not 295,000 — based on adjustments in March of previous years.
Last Friday, the February number was also adjusted down to 264,000. And there’s one more revision scheduled.
That’s all well and good, but the truth is that seasonable adjustments make for nicer-looking trend lines — and nothing else. It’s time the BLS started acting like grownups and just giving us the raw numbers of jobs lost and created each month.
Assuming, of course, they actually know.
And also assuming they can be trusted to do so accurately.
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