by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
I can’t take it anymore. Fake numbers that are released by the government get turned into fake news by the corporate media, and many Americans don’t even realize that they are being conned. Major news outlets all over the country are breathlessly trumpeting the “blockbuster jobs report” as if it is a sign from heaven that good economic times are ahead. We are being told that the U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs last month, but that isn’t true. Sadly, the truth is that the U.S. economy actually lost 2.5 million jobs in January. Yes, you read that correctly. So how in the world does a loss of 2.5 million jobs become a “gain” of 517,000 jobs? Every month, government bureaucrats apply “adjustments” to the numbers that they believe are appropriate, and at this point their “adjustments” have become so absurd that they have turned the monthly employment report into a total farce.
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As I have been documenting on my website for weeks, there has been a tremendous wave of layoffs over the last several months.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Lyft, Twitter, Walmart, McDonald’s, FedEx and countless other large corporations have decided to conduct mass layoffs.
But now the government expects us to believe that the U.S. economy is actually adding jobs at a very brisk pace?
That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Unfortunately, the corporate media is totally buying it. For example, CNBC just posted an article that described the jobs report as “stunningly strong”…
The employment picture started off 2023 on a stunningly strong note, with nonfarm payrolls posting their biggest gain since July 2022.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 517,000 for January, above the Dow Jones estimate of 187,000 and December’s gain of 260,000, according to a Labor Department report Friday.
And a CNN article has quoted one expert as saying that “the labor market is more like a bullet train”…
“With 517,000 new jobs added in January 2023 and the unemployment rate at 3.4%, this is a blockbuster report demonstrating that the labor market is more like a bullet train,” Becky Frankiewicz, president and chief commercial officer of ManpowerGroup, said Friday.
Really?
After all of the layoffs that we have witnessed in recent months, does she really believe that?
Not to be outdone, Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi boldly declared that any concerns about a coming recession “should be completely dashed by these numbers”…
The January jobs report should “dash” concerns of recession, Moody’s chief economist said Friday, but warned that the numbers may overstate job growth.
“Any concern the economy is in recession or close to a recession should be completely dashed by these numbers,” Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi told CNN’s Matt Egan on Friday, adding that it would take “an awful lot” to send the US economy into a downturn.
Come on man.
You are smarter than that.
The U.S. economy did not add 517,000 jobs last month.
That is the “adjusted” number.
The “unadjusted” number actually shows that the U.S. economy lost 2.5 million jobs last month. The following comes from Bloomberg…
For the establishment survey, the government’s updated seasonal factors may have impacted the headline payrolls figure. On an unadjusted basis, payrolls actually fell by 2.5 million last month.
That is actually what was measured.
But if you brazenly add more than 3 million jobs to the report that simply do not exist, it makes it look like the U.S. economy is doing just great.
Needless to say, Joe Biden was quite eager to take credit for the “spectacular” jobs report, and he also told reporters that he takes no responsibility for the raging inflation crisis that we are currently experiencing…
He replied with an emphatic ‘no’ when asked if he took any accountability for the price rises under his presidency. ‘It was already there when I got here, man.’
‘Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing the damn thing here. We were in real economic difficulty.’
Inflation in January 2021 when Biden took office was 1.4 percent. The latest December figures were 6.5 percent, down from a June 2022 peak of 9 percent.
For the next month, the Biden administration is going to endlessly boast that 517,000 jobs were added to the economy in January, and most Americans will never even know that it is a number that is entirely fictional.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that economic activity is slowing down all around us, and many people are starting to become quite desperate…
Video out of Austin, Texas, shows desperate people climbing into supermarket dumpsters to retrieve food that may have been discarded due to a widespread power outage.
The shocking footage Thursday from behind an H-E-B grocery store in Southeast Austin featured people having a free-for-all from dumpsters, in what one commenter on Instagram described as a “dystopian hellscape.”
From now on, I really wish that the government would only release the raw, unadjusted employment numbers to the corporate media.
Because there is way too much guesswork that goes into the “adjustments” that the government bureaucrats are coming up with.
But that is never going to happen.
Every month they are just going to continue to tell us that things are better than they really are.
At least that will give me something to write about.
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