Slowly, the unprecedented payrolls fabrication of the Biden administration, which we spent much of the past 4 years exposing to our readers, is starting to unravel.
Earlier today, the BLS confirmed what we previewed last night (see "Tomorrow's Jobs Report Will Finally Capture The Surge In Illegal Aliens, Lead To Another Big Negative Payrolls Revision"), and admitted what we had been saying for much of the past 3 years - that most of the job gains in the past few years, and especially 2024, were a mirage, and following the dramatic August 2024 preliminary data revision which vaporized 818K jobs (which had never existed in the first place)...
... today we finally saw the details behind this near-record revision.
As part of its annual revision to both the Establishment and Household survey, today the BLS said that the "seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment level for March 2024 was revised downward by 589,000. On a not seasonally adjusted basis, the total nonfarm employment level for March 2024 was revised downward by 598,000, or -0.4 percent. Not seasonally adjusted, the absolute average benchmark revision over the past 10 years is 0.1 percent." As a result, the over-the-year change in payrolls for March 2024 was revised from +2,900,000 to +2,346,000.
Another, perhaps easier way of showing just how dramatic this negative revision to the jobs data series is the following chart showing the monthly change in payrolls pre and post revision. One can immediately see just how much uglier it is, not only because the average increase in monthly payrolls drops for all three prior years (2022 from 441K to 380K, 2023 from 231K to 217K, 2024 from 186K to 166K), but because all of a sudden, those two lonely sub-100K prints in August and October (which only emerged as sub-100K following monthly revisions) were not that lonely and we now learn that June and July were also sub-100K prints.
In short, just as we have been warning since early-2024, the wheels of the US jobs market were falling off in mid 2024, and by the Trump came on board, the jobs market has become one giant Potemkin village on the verge of collapse.
Another highlight from today's data revision, this time impacting the Household Survey is that the massive gap between the Household and Establishment survey which we have noted on multiple occasions in the past, closed nearly by half when the BLS revised the number of employed workers higher by 2.2 million, to 163.9 million from 161.7 million, largely as a result of the BLS admitting that there are millions of illegal workers in the US, a topic which until the election was especially sensitive politically but no longer is. That said, there is still another 2 million jobs to go to close the gap, but we are confident that shouldn't be much of a problem.
And the reason why it won't be a problem is simple: while it won't get much discussion today, the biggest reason behind today's solid increase in the number of employed workers is the same one we have been pounding the table on since 2023. It's all foreign workers, and - as we explained recently - it is mostly all illegal aliens.
That's right, the BLS reported that in January, over a million, or 1,045,000 to be precise, foreign-born workers found a job (and as Standard Chartered explained lst June, this is largely illegal or "undocumented" aliens) compared to only 8,000 native-born workers!
This means that while we just hit another month of record foreign-born (largely illegal alien) workers, at 31.774 million, the number of native-born workers remains unchanged over the past six years, still below levels last hit in 2019, just before the covid crisis.
This also means that since July 2018, the US labor force has added 4.6 million foreign-born workers, while the number of native-born workers has declined by nearly 700K.
And while this (not really) shocking increase in foreign workers, which really is just the latest in a long series of monthly reports confirming that the only job growth in the US in the past 6 years has been for foreigners, is clearly the result of Biden's policies, we would recommend that president Trump do something to urgently if not immediately address this critical topic... a topic which one year ago we correctly predicted would win Trump the 2024 election - and which if left as is, will promptly lead to the transformation of the current euphoria in Trump's presidency, with disappointment.
