Payroll revisions show the US economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than reported for the year ending in March 2024
- Around 68,000 less each month.
- Initial payroll figures indicated employers added 2.9 million total jobs in the period, or an average of 242,000 per month. Now the monthly pace is more likely to be around 174,000. (28% less job gains)
- Largest downward revision since 2009.
- Revisions are on average +/-0.1%, this year they were 0.5%. These largest revisions are commonly experienced during cycle transitions (and mostly during recessions), where the BLS models fail to catch the turning points.
It is crazy to think this kind of revision could happen, is almost 1/3 of last year’s job gains (and would make a lot of the estimates beats, not applicable anymore,most April 2023 to march 2024 estimates were above 174K). This makes trusting the current data released very difficult.
This is only a preliminary revision, so it could be much worse, final estimates will be available in January 2025. The worst part is that the current free data will not be updated until then.
It seems the market was already expecting a large revision since the reaction today was muted.
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesprelbmk.htm#