Fake January Payroll Report: Payrolls Explode By 353K

Feb 2, 2024 | self

[lasereye]

With Wall Street expecting continued declines in the pace of monthly growth, and consensus looking for a decline from last month's 219K print to 185K, the BLS reported that in January the US created a ridiculous 353K jobs...

... double the 185K expected, and higher than than the highest forecast estimate, which as a reminder was 300K. In fact, as shown below, this was a 4-sigma beat to expectations...and putting the beat in the context of the past year, it was an absolute blowout:

What is notable is that once again there was a huge dispersion between the Establishment and Household Surveys, and while the former indicated an increase of 353K, the latter reported a drop in Employment of 31K! The blue line is the Household Survey, Green is the Establishment Survey.

Clearly none of that mattered to the BLS which had just one mission: to make the economy look double super good-good, and it wasn't just payrolls which blew away expectations, the unemployment rate also slipped, staying at 3.7%, vs expectations of an increase to 3.8%.

Recent announced job cuts:

1. Twitch: 35% of workforce
2. Hasbro: 20% of workforce
3. Spotify: 17% of workforce
4. Levi's: 15% of workforce
5. Zerox: 15% of workforce
6. Qualtrics: 14% of workforce
7. Wayfair: 13% of workforce
8. Duolingo: 10% of workforce
9. Washington Post: 10% of workforce
10. eBay: 9% of workforce
11. Business Insider: 8% of workforce
12. Paypal: 7% of workforce
13. Charles Schwab: 6% of workforce
14. UPS: 2% of workforce
15. Blackrock: 3% of workforce
16. Citigroup: 20,000 employees
17. Pixar: 1,300 employees

[cowboyusa]

You can’t fudge Inflation. People feel it.

[srmanuel]

I agree with you but the lies about the economy are so blatant enough people will believe anything that the lies will get into the MSM and convince enough people that everything is fine.

[cowboyusa]

Until they look at thier gas and Grocery Bill.