Can We Still Trust U.S. Economic Data?
On Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs numbers for July. The nation provisionally added 73,000 jobs, shy of the 100,000 jobs expected. It wasn’t particularly good news.
More newsworthy, though, were the downward revisions for May and June. What had initially been reported as just shy of 150,000 jobs added each month, turned out to be closer to just 15,000 jobs per month. Quite plainly bad news.
The Trump administration first went to work spinning the numbers as the result of seasonal adjustments. By the afternoon, President Trump claimed on social media that the…
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