Powell Admits The Biden Admin Is “Overstating” Jobs

Every first Friday of this year (here, here and here) we have spent hours deconstructing the glaring propaganda peddled by Biden’s Labor Department, meant to show just one thing – how “strong” the economy is under the current administration – and exposing just how ugly the underlying labor data truly is. Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls was the most recent case in point: for those who didn’t read our extended analysis titled “Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Years“, which dissected the laughable claim that the US added 272K payrolls (more than the highest estimate), here is what we found.

While the Establishment Survey did indeed report that 272K “jobs” were added, this number also included multiple job holders; stripping those out, we get that the actual number of “employed” workers plunged by 408K…

… which is also why the unemployment rate actually went up to 4.0% for the first time in over three years, despite this marvelous “increase” in payrolls. More importantly, it means that gap between the always upward sloping (and market moving) Establishment Survey – which counts the number of payrolls – and the flatlined Household Survey – which counts the number of actually employed workers – which hasn’t made a new high since late 2023 and is back to where it was last summer, is now a stunning 9 million, the biggest on record.

But how is it possible that payrolls rose nearly 300K while overall employment tumbled by more than 400K? Well, this is where another propaganda gimmick so frequently abused by the BLS comes into play: the birth death adjustment, a statistical fudge factor that imputes job growth for any given month based on the entirely subjective assumption made by a group of pro-Biden bureaucrats of how many new businesses were created (or destroyed) in the US economy any given moment. Well, in May, the Birth/Death adjustment – recently exposed by none other than Bloomberg – “added” 231K payrolls to the pre-seasonally adjustment number; more astounding is that the Birth-Death imputation has resulted in 56% of all “payroll growth”, or 1.9 million statistical “payrolls” in the past year, when according to the BLS a total of 3.4 million “payrolls” were crated.