Jobs Mirage: BLS Slashes 911,000 Positions from the Economy | SchiffGold
The Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped a quiet bombshell on September 9, unveiling a preliminary benchmark revision that erased 911,000 jobs from March 2025 payroll tallies. The 0.6% markdown is roughly triple the average adjustment of the past decade and instantly casts doubt on months of breezy “resilient labor market” headlines. Almost the entire shortfall came from private employers, not government, hinting that Main Street’s footing was far shakier than Washington believed. With the official tables unlikely to show the change until February 2026, analysts are left wondering how many policy calls have already been made on faulty figures.
Sector-level details paint an even grimmer picture. Trade, transportation, and utilities lost 226,000 positions, with wholesale trade alone shedding 110,300 (–1.8%). Manufacturing payrolls were clipped by 95,000 (–0.8%) and construction slipped by 29,000 (–0.4%), corroborating anecdotal reports of stalled projects and thinning order books. The information sector suffered the steepest percentage hit at –2.3%, wiping out 67,000 previously celebrated tech jobs. Only transportation and warehousing (+6,600) and utilities (+3,700) eked out faint upward tweaks.
Why the giant miss? The BLS attributes the overcount to “response error” and “nonresponse error”—in plain English, firms overstated headcounts while many struggling businesses simply stopped answering surveys. Benchmark revisions normally hover near 0.2%, so this year’s three-times-bigger downgrade suggests either a sudden surge in business closures or a systemic blind spot in data collection. Either way, the revelation undermines the narrative that a tight labor market will effortlessly glide the economy through higher interest rates and “transitory” inflation.
Complicating matters, the final benchmark won’t filter into official headline numbers until the January 2026 jobs report. That means the Federal Reserve, Congress, and Wall Street will probably continue referencing inflated employment totals for at least five more monthly meetings. Central planners armed with fuzzy statistics risk overconfidence—hardly comforting when the Consumer Price Index continues to flirt with multi-decade highs and federal deficits run at a trillion-dollar clip.
The BLS can adjust spreadsheets, but it can’t rewrite economic reality. A near-million-job miscount is more than a statistical footnote—it’s a flashing caution light for policymakers and households alike.
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