The monthly job numbers have been so consistently good that they haven’t been doing the hoped-for trick of making President Biden look bad, forcing CNSNews.com to fall on its usual trick when a Democrat is president to cherry-pick the numbers. That meant CNS had to find something else to keep up its narrative, and Craig Bannister found that for a Dec. 19 article:
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has revised the number of new jobs created in the second quarter of 2022 down by more than a million, prompting a Bloomberg market expert to issue a warning.
In its Q2 Vintage Early Benchmark Revisions of State Payroll Employment released last Tuesday, the Philadelphia Fed reports that actual job growth was “significantly” different than the number reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):
[…]On Monday, Bloomberg Senior Editor for Markets and Opinion Columnist John Authers characterized the revision as a “startling finding ” that could prompt the Federal Reserve to continue to raise interest rates:
Because that number was too good to look into further, Bannister didn’t report what other observers noted, that the Philly Fed’s metric is new and untested, seasonality is not fully accounted for, and that private sector numbers did not show a dramatic employment slowdown for that period.
Even then, the jobs numbers continued to prove too strong for CNS to effectively spin. Even Susan Jones’ favorite cherry-picked number, the labor force participation rate, looked good enough that she led with it in her main article on December’s employment numbers:
Reversing recent declines, the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work increased slightly to 62.3 percent in December, up one-tenth of a point from November, and four basis points higher than the 61.9 percent in December 2021.
In its final report for 2022, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics counted a record 159,244,000 employed Americans in December, an increase of 717,000 from last month’s 158,527,000 (revised number); and the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force dropped below the hundred million level to 99,879,000.
Despite higher interest rates, the economy added a strong 230,000 jobs in December, above expectations of 200,000. Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, health care, construction, and social assistance.
Along with the record number of employed Americans, the number of unemployed — no job but actively looking — dropped by 278,000 to 5,722,000 last month, producing an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent, one-tenth of a point lower than it was in November.
The only sidebar this month was editor Terry Jeffrey’s counting of manufacturing jobs, and even he couldn’t spin things: “There were 12,934,000 people employed in the U.S. manufacturing sector in December 2022, which is more than in any month since November 2008, when there were 13,034,000 people in this country employed in manufacturing.”