The job market data keeps getting quietly rewritten.
21 out of the last 30 months have seen downward revisions—over 1 million jobs erased from the original reports. That's roughly 35,000 jobs per month vanishing after the headlines fade.
June and May alone? Down 103,000 combined. June dropped to just 20,000 net jobs added. May fell to 63,000—and that's after being revised down twice.
If the pattern holds, June could flip negative next month. Pair that with July's already-reported loss of 23,000 jobs, and we'd have back-to-back monthly declines for the first time since 2020.
Markets price the initial number. Reality shows up later in the footnotes.
The gap between what gets reported and what actually happened is widening. And that gap matters when the Fed is making rate decisions based on data that keeps changing after the fact.
21 out of the last 30 months have seen downward revisions—over 1 million jobs erased from the original reports. That's roughly 35,000 jobs per month vanishing after the headlines fade.
June and May alone? Down 103,000 combined. June dropped to just 20,000 net jobs added. May fell to 63,000—and that's after being revised down twice.
If the pattern holds, June could flip negative next month. Pair that with July's already-reported loss of 23,000 jobs, and we'd have back-to-back monthly declines for the first time since 2020.
Markets price the initial number. Reality shows up later in the footnotes.
The gap between what gets reported and what actually happened is widening. And that gap matters when the Fed is making rate decisions based on data that keeps changing after the fact.