Source: Golden Ten Data
The actual employment growth in the US in 2023 is far below the “Biden economics” effect claimed by the White House, and the inflated figure is likely to increase further in 2024...
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's latest “State Payroll Employment Early Benchmark Revision Report”, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been fabricating jobs.
In December of last year, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve overestimated the non-farm payrolls data for March to June 2022 by 1.1 million. This time, analysts at the Federal Reserve discovered that the number of new jobs added in 2023 was exaggerated by 800,000 jobs, and that number is likely to increase further in 2024.
According to BLS data, the US added an average of 230,000 new jobs per month in 2023 (green), but the actual average number of new jobs per month after the QCEW (US Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Survey of Employment and Wages) was revised was only 130,000 (red). Analysts believe that the actual employment growth in the US in 2023 is far below the “Biden economics” effect claimed by the White House.
CES is a monthly survey that collects rapid data through sampling. QCEW, on the other hand, is a quarterly survey that provides more accurate and comprehensive data based on state government unemployment insurance records. Therefore, QCEW is more comprehensive and detailed than CES, and is commonly used to revise CES estimates to ensure long-term data accuracy.
The above analysis also examined employment changes in each state from June to September 2023, and found that there was a significant difference between the results and current employment statistics (i.e. institutional survey, CES) data used in the BLS non-farm payrolls report.” Specifically, employment changes in 24 states were lower than estimated, employment changes in 3 states were higher than estimated, and changes in the remaining 23 states and the District of Columbia were also lower than estimated, but the difference was small. This indicates that BLS employment data may need to be revised.
Some more detailed data also showed that the pre-benchmark CES estimate may have overestimated actual employment growth, while the QCEW revised data more accurately reflects the actual situation. Throughout 2023, the actual data for employment growth in the 50 US states and the District of Columbia (1.5%) was lower than the forecast CES estimate (1.9% and 2.0%), and the QCEW revised growth rate was consistent with the actual data (1.5%). Similarly, in the third quarter of 2023, the actual growth rate (0.5%) was also lower than the forecast estimate of CES (1.7%), and the QCEW revised growth rate was once again in line with the actual data (0.5%).
Furthermore, since QCEW data takes a long time (for example, more than a year) to be processed and included in the official report of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment data released during this period may not fully reflect the actual employment situation.
In fact, BLS has been continuously lowering almost all of the initial employment data for 2023, and 10 of the 11 employment reports as of December 2023 have been downgraded.
edit/lambor