00:00 Ben
Last year’s revision here was that the the the the US labor market had 818,000 less jobs than previously thought. That was a major event last year. It happened right in the middle of a presidential election. And the consensus estimates this year are a little lower, but they’re still high. The consensus estimate is about 700,000, what we could see that we could we could learn that the labor market is 700,000 less than we previously thought.
00:27 Ben
But there’s some estimates that go even higher as high as $900,000. And then there’s additional data under the hood here, month by month numbers. a lot all of which is sort of I think we’ll point economists towards the question of when did this labor market slowdown we’ve been seeing this summer begin. Essentially, how how early was the downshift? Was it was it as early as this spring? Was it even earlier than that into last year when we saw a lot of this this labor market softening that we’ve that we’ve that we’ve seen
01:00 Ben
real and evidence this summer. How early did it begin? And that that’ll have a lot of that’ll create a lot of discussion both in Wall Street, but also here in Washington at the White House.
01:10 Speaker A
How do we think, Ben, uh the president might respond and react to the data?
01:19 Ben
Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect of this, why kind of I’m here in Washington interested in this is because I think it can go a couple different directions. As I mentioned, the revisions piece has become a key point of criticism from Trump and his team. Basically, any revision in job data is a sign that something’s wrong, something is something is a miss. And it’s true that that revisions have become bigger in recent years, especially after the COVID pandemic. So there is going to be the sort of headline number of this big revision
01:54 Ben
and that could fuel the ongoing politization of government data. There’s of course a Trump fired the BLS commissioner, that’s where this data is going to be coming from and and their the successor is um is is in the is in the wings. But I think there’s also another this could kind of go a different direction in the sense that 10 months of this data is Joe Biden’s last 10 months in office. So if there’s a a significant softening there, the argument you could hear from the White House is that, hey, this this this shut this slowdown
02:29 Ben
began earlier, the weakness we inherited, we’re just trying to dig ourselves out of it. So you could argue that those are kind of two opposite takes to have to say that the survey is fake but that the it shows Biden it shows this is Biden’s fault. I wouldn’t put it past a Trump to do kind of a version of both of those. So I think that’ll be a real interesting thread to watch tomorrow once we kind of are digging through these numbers.
02:52 Speaker A
How do you think, Ben, just finally, how does this all sort of play into the broader, Ben, political questions sort of just circulating the jobs data we’ve been seeing and getting?
03:13 Ben
Yeah. Yeah, we it’s pretty rare that we have a kind of a big political forum for jobs data, but we’re going to have that in the coming weeks. The Trump’s, Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antony of the Heritage Foundation, is set for a Senate confirmation hearing. We don’t have timing of that, but it’s expected in the coming weeks or months. A lot of times this job doesn’t even have a kind of the full pomp and circumstances of a hearing. So we’re going to have a real kind of conversation
03:46 Ben
about this and I expect that this number is going to be central to it. And Tony’s a pretty polarizing figure. There’s going to be a lot of push back for for his pick, but also kind of Trump’s overall point here, which is that he doesn’t believe the economic data and that that we shouldn’t too and whether whether people are going to believe it. So it’s going to be it’s both kind of coming at a key moment, but also at a moment ahead of a moment that I think a lot of us are going to be watching about what what the legacy of
04:14 Ben
Trump’s move to fire the BLS Commissioner is and and sort of the belief in government data going forward.