Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Years

On the surface, it was a blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, with the two largest US banks – JPMorgan and JPM – both expecting a below-consensus print at 150K and 165K, respectively (well we did, and we said that the jobs print “will beat” shortly before it was published)

Goldman (165K) and JPM (150k) are below the median NPF estimate of 180k.

It will beat. pic.twitter.com/v2UxP2TBky

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 7, 2024

Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in May the US unexpectedly added a whopping 272K payrolls, not workers since the establishment survey double-counts multiple jobs even if held by the same employee, which was 50% higher than the consensus forecast of 180K and 14K more than the highest Wall Street estimate (258K from Regions Bank).

In fact, this was a 4-sigma beat to estimate, unheard of in the past year.

And while the hourly earnings data showed an unexpected increase, with both the monthly and annual prints coming in hotter than expected…

… this is where things quickly took a turn for the bizarre because while the headline payrolls number was clearly – and purposefully – stellar, the unemployment unexpectedly increased from 3.9% to 4.0%.

How is this possible? Simple: as we explained earlier, it had to do with the staggering divergence between the Establishment and Household Surveys, with the former surging 272K while the latter tumbling 408K…

…. … which means that the gap between the always upward sloping (and market moving) Establishment Survey and the flatlined Household Survey, 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!

Bloomberg’s chief economist Anna Wong agreed, and not only that, but she also agreed with our recurring contention that the Household Survey is far more accurate…

“May’s jobs report presented contradictory views of the labor market, as we expected. The establishment survey shows robust gains in nonfarm payrolls — yet the unemployment rate rose to 4.0%. We believe the latter currently offers a closer approximation of reality than payrolls, as BLS’ model for estimating business births and deaths – which added 231,000 jobs to the nonfarm-payrolls print in May – is lagging the reality of surging establishment closures and falling business formation. We think the underlying pace of current job gains is likely less than 100,000 per month.”

… not least of all because it accounts for the grotesque data manipulation by the BLS in the form of the ridiculous monthly Birth/ Death adjustments, which even Bloomberg now admits are artificially inflating the monthly jobs print by about 100K. To get a sense of just how unprecedented this statistically manipulation is, consider that the birth-death model has added 1.9 million jobs since last April, or a whopping 56% of all payrolls added during this period. This means that more than half of all “job gains” in the past year are from an excel spreadsheet which assumes that 1.9 million new jobs were created from new businesses.

But, as usual, there’s much more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of “new jobs” has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in May 2024, the US had 133.3 million full-time jobs and 28.0 million part-time jobs. Well, that’s great… until you look back one year and find that in May 2023 the US had 134.4 million full-time jobs, or more than a million jobs than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by more than 1.5 million since May 2023 (from 26.493 million to 28.004 million).

Here is another visualization of the labor composition in the past year: 1.2 million full-time jobs have been lost, replaced by 1.5 million part time jobs!

And here is just May: more of the same as 625K full-time jobs were lost in one month, replaced by 286K part-time.

But wait there’s even more, because with the first debate between “felon” Donald Trump and “senile geriatric” Joe Biden in just three weeks, and in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in May the number of native-born worker tumbled again, sliding by a massive 663K to just 130.445 million, while foreign-born workers (mostly illegal aliens as Standard Chartered calculated earlier this week), surged by 414K.

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 4 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers, but there has been negative job-creation for native born workers since December 2019!

Looking at just the past year, it’s even worse: native-born workers have lost 668K jobs while foreign-born workers (mostly illegals as we now know for a fact) have gained 934K jobs.

This is a huge issue – especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the border…

… and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding an explanation for what happened – i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why the Biden admin will do everything in his power to insure there is no official recession before November… and is why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get more and more ridiculous.

Finally, to this point, we are delighted to observe that after everyone had been ignoring what we have been saying for the past year, namely that all job growth has gone to illegals…

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

… earlier this week none other than Standard Chartered’s chief macro economist Steven Englander admitted that not only has all job growth in recent years gone to illegal immigrants, but that America is now being invaded. We can only hope that whoever is doing Trump’s debate prep for him will make this the one – and only – issue that will be hammered on the upcoming debate against Biden, because just this alone, even ignoring the galloping inflation unleashed by Biden’s policies, exposes Bidenomics for the hollow fraud it has been from day one.