824,000 Jobs Will Disappear on February 5th

So, reports Bloomberg. That means that about 824,000 jobs that have been reported as lost recently will be presumed to have been lost 10 to 22 months ago. So, the really bad news was THEN not NOW. Thus, from April 2008 to March 2009, though we thought we had lost 4.8 million jobs, we really lost 5.6 million. Wow, we should have been crying a lot more back then!

You see the Bureau of Labor Statistics is using a, er, "revision" modeling program that "assumes most of the time jobs created at new companies make up for losses at companies that close." It also assumes the economy and employment are bound to grow.

In other words, employment reality, unlike with the global climate, is assumed to remain stable to slightly positive no matter what happens in our little anthropogenic environment. So, in climate terms what reporting agencies need to do is spread the global warming (or cooling) back so it won't have inconvenient waves and troughs.

And the really cool thing is that it will take another year or so for current figures to be revised up or down to align with BLS assumed reality. Which means right now that the model has to account for 824,000 jobs lost in the April 2008 to March 2009 cycle, by assuming that an offsetting 990,000 jobs were created between April 2009 and March 2010.

Unfortunately, if BLS assumptions don't jive with job reality, we may finally find out in 2011 that we didn't really gain almost a million jobs. Maybe we even lost some. Which will mean a another huge negative revision for April 2009 to March 2010 with an even larger (1.8 million?) assumed gain in jobs from April 2010 to March 2011.

Until employment reality starts to line up with BLS assumptions, the job reporting swings could get kind of wild.

H/T OregonGuy