🌍 Payroll revisions expose an economy materially weaker than the headline data

“I predicted this would happen, and I didn't know exactly how we would get the correction, but now it's come out. By the way, it's not just this 818,000 jobs. If you look at the last 12 months and out of all the restatements, it's been something like 1.2 million.”

“Yeah, I mean, I think the economy is a lot slower than what people thought”

“So just to be clear about what's happening, 85% of this quarter's GDP was induced by the government.”

“I do think that that's one big turnaround that's happened in the last 90 days, which is really, I think, a big surprise to a lot of folks is just how robust things are”

“And we talked about this before, where this is also a problem at the federal level when you look at GDP and job growth, because it looks like a lot of these jobs are actually fake, manufactured, government-type jobs.”

“One of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from non-farm payrolls to GDP, that they've become so unreliable.”

“I am surprised that we don't see even more dramatic revisions. And that probably again is like errors on top of errors. I really don't trust, like, you know, you showed the GDP data or you showed the unemployment rate, Jason?”

“And it's a really important point also that we should mention, is that the last four years, the economy has looked OK. But part of that is because government's been hiring like mad.”

“on the hard data, the part that's most surprising is that consumers have very weak sentiment, but in the meantime, consumer spending is remarkably resilient.”

“And what I was noticing was that we were going to come in, I said, in the low threes. And I think, you know, if Atlanta Fed is right, I don't think they are, but I think it's going to be in the low to mid threes. It's going to be meaningfully greater than what people are expecting.”

“There's a lot of spending in there, as we've talked about here, putting that aside, it feels like the economy is in really great shape.”

“obviously the 3% number is way ahead of expectations. It's a fantastic number. It just feels like everything is humming on all cylinders here.”