The Conservative Cave
Current Events => Economics => Topic started by: Ptarmigan on August 05, 2022, 06:12:08 PM
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Something Snaps In The Job Market: Multiple Jobholders Hit All Time High As Unexplained 1.8 Million Jobs Gap Emerges
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-snaps-job-market-multiple-jobholders-hit-all-time-high-unexplained-18-million
Something very odd emerges for the second month in a row when looking at the July payrolls report.
Recall last month we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that make up the monthly jobs report, and since March the former was sliding while the latter was rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while multiple jobholders soared near all time highs.
Guess what: at a time when the Biden admin is now being accused of fabricating energy numbers to push oil prices lower, the jarring divergences and inconsistencies in the jobs report just hit escape velocity.
Consider the following: on one hand, the closely followed establishment survey came in red hot, and not only did it soar despite the US entering a technical recession last week, it printed at a 5 month high of 528K, a six-sigm beat to consensus expectations of 250K...
There were 528,000 jobs added in July or was it?
But even if one ignores outside data sources, a more pressing question emerges when looking at the BLS's own far more detailed, if less closely watched, Household survey. Here, unlike the Establishment Survey, the June jobs change was a far smaller 179K increase, following last month's 315K drop.
In fact, since March, the Establishment Survey shows a gain of 1.680 million jobs while the Household Survey shows an employment loss of 168K!
But wait, there's more, because digging in even deeper, we find that this drop in Household Survey employment is the result of both full-time and part-time jobs. In fact, as shown below, since March, the US has lost 141K full-time employees and 78K part-time employees.
The numbers are something else.
So what's going on here? The simple answer: Fewer people working, but more people working more than one job, a rotation which picked up in earnest some time in March and which has only been captured by the Household survey.
And since the Establishment survey is far slower to pick up on the nuances in employment composition, while the Household Survey has gone nowhere since March, the BLS data engineers have been busy goalseeking the Establishment Survey (perhaps with the occasional nudge from the White House especially now that the economy is in a technical recession) to make it appear as if the economy is growing strongly, when in reality all they are doing is applying the same erroneous seasonal adjustment factor that gave such a wrong perspective of the labor market in the aftermath of the covid pandemic (until it was all adjusted away a year ago). In other words, while the labor market is already cracking, it will take the BLS several months of veering away from reality before the government bureaucrats accept and admit what is truly taking place.