From EJ Antoni on X today:
Not even hiding it anymore – since when is a 119k increase just “edging up”? And since when is a 193k increase “little change”? They mentioned Apr b/c that’s when Trump announced tariffs; whether you’re for or against Trump’s trade policies, this is obviously a biased narrative:
Well, NFP was +119, but that was after downward revisions in August and July, totalling -40. Hence, relative to where we thought NFP was in August, NFP was up only +79K, which for me I would term as “edging up” (I show this aspect for both NFP and private NFP in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (September release official) (dark blue, left log scale), NFP employment (August release official) (blue, left log scale), Bloomberg consensus (light blue square, left log scale), private nonfarm payroll employment (September release official) (dark red, right log scale), NFP employment (August release official) (red, right log scale), Bloomberg consensus (light red square, right log scale), all in 000’s, s.a. Bloomberg levels calculated using August level and Bloomberg consensus change. Source: BLS, Bloomberg, and author’s calculations.
Dr. Antoni lauds the +193K increase in NFP employment since April. It’s useful to note that +193 on a per month basis is +39K, hardly a strong growth rate. If I look at the q/q change then it’s a +62K/mo pace.
I will note that alternative measures of NFP don’t show substantially different results over 2025:
Figure 2: Official nonfarm payroll employment (blue), implied preliminary benchmark (tan), early benchmark (green), CPS employment adjusted to NFP concept, 3 month moving average (red), all in 000’s, s.a. For preliminary and early benchmark series, M04-M09 data is based on official reported changes in employment. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Philadelphia Fed, and author’s calculations.
Interestingly, the only series based on non-establishment data is represented by the red line. This series is essentially unchanged versus 2025M04.
If one looks at the path of employment gains under the felon-in-chief or since the felon’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, casual empiricism does suggest that the felon’s policies are bad for employment. Good of little Antoni to draw our attention to that fact.
Here are some recent monthly averages of non-farm employment gain:
2021 342,972
2022 521,563
2023 278,604
2024 173,444
2025ytd 107,889
2025 since April 64,500
2025 Q3 35,556
From the BLS website:
“…the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 136,000.”
Notice that the monthly average gain so far this year, and especially since April, is smaller than the 90% confidence interval.
BLS will often characterize changes which fall within the 90% confidence interval as “little change”. The same is true for the unemployment rate, with a threshold for the confidence interval at around 0.2 ppt. So in March, a 0.1 ppt increase in the jobless rate was described as “little changed”. If BLS folk are trying to implicitly criticize the felon-in-chief’s policies, calling a rise in the jobless rate “little changed” is an odd way of doing so.
I guess one needs to be familiar with BLS conventions to know how these terms are used. Remind me – whom did the felon-in-chief try to put in charge at BLS?
The White House from Stephen Miller announced that “2.5 million “native born” joined the work force as “675,000 foreign born” have left it (the actual decline of foreign born 1,451.000 per FRED). The suggestion being made is native born have been substituted for foreign born workers removed from the Work force by ICE or self-deportation with the expiration of HB1 Visas and temporary work permits. I also note that the unemployment rate, per FRED, of the native born was only 3.7% in December 2024. They are under some delusion that this will make them popular.