Source item

Quoted context

These are the quoted author’s words.

If you call this strong, then you have to explain why so much of the strength disappears before seasonal adjustment. Private payrolls fell 173,000 raw and became +127,000 adjusted. Private services went from −206,000 raw to +86,000 adjusted. Retail went from −47,600 to +1,400, professional and business services from −8,000 to +10,000, and health care from −7,000 to +12,900. Leisure and hospitality went from −91,000 raw to +62,000 adjusted. Restaurants went from −700 to +59,200. Manufacturing added only about 4,000 raw before becoming +16,000 adjusted. Those adjustments are not automatically wrong, but pretending they prove the economy was cranking ignores the entire issue. In a low hire, low fire regime, businesses may have hired far fewer seasonal workers earlier, leaving fewer workers to shed later. If the seasonal model still expects the historical August drop, merely losing fewer workers than normal can show up as substantial adjusted job growth. Meanwhile the 3 month payroll average is only 71,000, and the household survey’s +569,000 employment jump does not even clear the BLS threshold of roughly 650,000 for statistical significance. So before declaring a new AI driven economic boom, the more important question is whether the seasonal assumptions are increasingly out of sync with a labor market that has already stopped hiring normally.

onechancefreedm ↗