Today is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly report giving the number os jobs gained or lost in the previous month plus any revisions to the numbers for the two preceding months. The last two jobs reports were awful, with job growth essentially stalled since May, indicating that the growth in economy has slowed dramatically, possibly indicating a recession. Trump fired the commissioner of the BLS in early August following the dismal job numbers for July (claiming that she had dishonestly manipulated the numbers to make him look bad) but things got even worse when the August numbers were released.

However the BLS did not release any numbers today and the official reason is that it is due to the shutdown. But that seems likely (what a surprise!) to be a lie.

The data for the release have already been collected, according to two former heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But the Trump administration has so far defied calls to publish the report.
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Earlier this week William Beach, who led the BLS for four years under Trump and Joe Biden, also said the jobs data for September “have been completely collected and processed” by the BLS. “The jobs report is likely written in final draft,” he wrote.

Other indicators suggest that the jobs report would have been again awful, lending support to the idea that it has been suppressed.

According to a private jobs report from the payroll processing company ADP, US firms lost 32,000 jobs in the month of September, contrary to expectations from Wall Street of job growth of 45,000 for the month. ADP also revised its August job numbers from a growth of 54,000 jobs to a loss of 3,000 jobs.

But it is the BLS numbers are considered the gold standard and used by the Federal Reserve and many sectors for making judgments about the state of the economy in order to make long term policy decisions. Another number is the monthly inflation report due to be released next week and which is also likely to be suppressed if the numbers are bad.

Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner during the Obama administration, said: “Without today’s jobs report and next week’s scheduled inflation release (the data for which are already collected), the Federal Reserve, US treasury, financial markets, businesses and households will be flying blind.

“They will be less certain of current conditions at what may or may not be the beginning of a recession – precisely when their decisions are most consequential.”

We are living through a real-life experiment to see for how long in the US actual data can be manipulated or suppressed. Other countries have tried it before but they were explicitly authoritarian societies where government had control of large sectors of the economy and manipulation of data was taken for granted. Trump would clearly like that to be the case here and he and his cult followers are heading down that road by firing career professionals and replacing them with hacks. But such societies eventually collapse because reality can be denied for only so long. This is especially so in the US where the government does not own and run most of the industries and companies. Those entities have to operate in the real world and thus cannot afford to believe in fantasy numbers. Given uncertainty about what the actual conditions are, companies will do what normal human beings do when they are not sure what to believe and that is to do nothing, hoping that this state of affairs will pass. So we are headed at best for a period of stagnation and a tworst for a recession.

The cartoon I posted a couple of days ago bears repeating.

(WuMo)