Jobby-Jibby-Job

July 07, 2023

by Karl Denninger Market-Ticker.org

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 209,000 in June, and the unemployment rate changed little at 3.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in government, health care, social assistance, and construction.

But wait! How is this possible when ADP can, one presumes, actually count how many paychecks they issue — and they had a much higher number. One wonders what sort of amusement is found inside this report — then again, ADP has notoriously been “wrong” (if you accept the BLS data as “fact”) for a very long time — like, forever.

On the unadjusted household survey we saw 1.025 million people come “off the couch” last month — and 557,000 people found jobs who didn’t have them. This of course means the other 400,000, give or take, didn’t, so “absorption” would be those plus the change in the working-age population (~180k) or negative 600,000, more or less.