The Big Hoax: The Bureau Of Labor Statistics

🚨 UPDATE: Scott Bessent is DEMANDING the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a LOT to make up for their total inaction following a major jobs revision.

"If the Fed says they're data dependent and the data has been atrocious, then it seems like there are probably some makeup… pic.twitter.com/L7M80tGUQC

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 9, 2025

So far, only Byron York at the Washington Examiner grasps the importance of yesterday's revelation:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs.

The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden handed off a strong economy to President Donald Trump, who then weakened it. Republicans maintained that Biden handed off a weak economy to Trump, who then strengthened it. Now, it appears that from a jobs standpoint, the economy has been weaker than thought the whole time.

. . . Last year, there was another story like this one, in which we learned that from April 2023 to March 2024, the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had originally said, wiping out most of the economy’s gains. The number was finalized at about 600,000 jobs, fewer than originally estimated, but the gap between early reports and reality was huge.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse commented,

[This] puts President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the BLS into context.

Legacy media portrays Trump as impulse-driven and narcissistic, but it's hard to avoid thinking his instincts in this area have been correct. Byron York concludes,

The great and the good rose to denounce Trump. That’s what they do. But now, with the latest huge revisions on top of the previous huge revisions, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is something terribly wrong with how the BLS counts the number of jobs created each month. That is not to say that Erika McEntarfer was trying to win the election for Kamala Harris, or that she was acting out of bald political bias. It is just to say that something is wrong.

. . . This is important because many people in many corners of the economy rely on the BLS data. Businesspeople base business decisions on it. Government officials base governmental decisions on it. Politicians base political decisions on it.

Or put a little differently, the Federal Reserve has been setting interest rates based on garbage data, and it looks like they'll be among the last people ever to acknowledge this. What interests me here is the similarity to the underlying issue in The Big Short: the discrepancies between reality and the accepted metrics -- in that case, the ratings of the bond agencies, in this case, employment statistics -- are noticeable, measurable, and at least to some, predictable.

In a statement posted to X, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the revision underscores that Trump “inherited a far worse economy than reported and he’s right to say the Fed is choking off growth with high rates.”

While the preliminary revision announced Tuesday was higher than economic experts anticipated, many expected a sizable write-down. The Fed also factors in an array of metrics when setting policy — most notably inflation numbers — and board members know to bake in some leeway to account for possible changes in BLS numbers. (Fed Gov. Christopher Waller, a potential candidate to replace Powell, said in a recent speech that he expected the annual revision to eliminate around 60,000 jobs per month from the 12-month average.)

The contrarian investors in The Big Short saw the opportunity to profit from the discrepancy between the AAA ratings for mortgate-backed securities and the actual risks posed by the credit ratings of the underlying borrowers.

I can only assume that someone can come up with some type of financial instrument that would allow an investor to arbitrage the discrepancy between BLS employment reports and reality. On the other hand, such discrepancies suggest that wise decisions can be made in areas other than just financial investment -- for instance, if as Byron York says above, government officials base governmental decisions on BLS data. Politicians base political decisions on BLS data.

Which government officials should we trust? Which politicians should we trust? After all, civic trust is a form of investment. As the contrarian Mark Baum said to his staff after interviewing an overoptimistic investment banker, "Short everything he's touched!" We're entitled to distrust every government official and politician on the wrong side of this spread. What we've been seeing over and over is that Trump's instincts have been correct.