Thread by @RealEJAntoni

Jan jobs report🧵- here's what you need to know that the talking heads and gov't statisticians won't tell you, including why the real unemployment rate is btwn 6.3% and 7.4%...

First the headlines:
Nonfarm payrolls rose 353k last month
Unemployment rate steady at 3.7% (more on that later)
Note that updates to the BLS' data make it difficult to compare Jan '24 to prior months, so this monthly change needs an important qualifier...

https://x.com/RealEJAntoni/status/1753416226812948683?s=20

In brief, things once again look good b/c prior periods were revised down; the new seasonal adjustments and other changes reduced the number of payrolls in every month last year except Dec; cumulative monthly difference is -1.3 million w/ average monthly difference -126k...

So, do we have more jobs or not? Depends on which survey you look at: establishment survey, which allows for double counting, continues rising while household survey declines - there's an unprecedented gap btwn the 2 right now:

Another important divergence is part-time vs. full-time; even after adjusting for seasonal changes which are huge in Jan, economy still lost full-time jobs and only gained part-time jobs...

That's a continuation of an established trend: part-time has trended upward fairly consistently while full-time has leveled off; economy has lost ~1.6 million full-time jobs since Jun '23 and replaced them w/ ~1.6 million part-time jobs, which helps explain the next red flag...

Weekly hours are plummeting, now down to lowest level since covid lockdowns; aside from abnormalities of '20, it's at the lowest level since the Great Recession w/ housing meltdown and global financial crisis; firms are cutting hours and replacing full-time jobs w/ part-time:

As people work fewer hours, their paychecks buy less, even w/ hourly raises, b/c prices are still rising faster than weekly earnings; significantly higher hourly wages still leave workers behind - about 4.3% behind Jan '21...

As far as where the jobs are, they have overwhelmingly been created in gov't and gov't dominated/funded healthcare sector - take away both direct and indirect gov't expenditures funded by debt and Y/Y job growth turns negative, pointing to unsustainability...

Interesting to note who has the jobs: they've all gone to foreign-born workers; not only are native-born workers way below their pre-pandemic trend, but they're even below the pre-pandemic level (Jan '24 vs. Jan '20):

In just the last year, a net 193k native-born workers lost their jobs, while a net 1.2 million foreign-born workers gained jobs (important to use Y/Y comparisons w/ these datasets b/c they're not seasonally adjusted):

And the number of people missing from the labor force remains stubbornly high, artificially reducing the unemployment rate...

Depending on which methodology you prefer, you can calculate a more realistic unemployment rate that accounts for all of these missing workers: somewhere btwn 6.3% and 7.4% - that's not horrific, but significantly higher than "official" 3.7%...

TLDR: economy is still adding jobs, but they're overwhelmingly lower pay, fewer hours, and either directly or indirectly paid by gov't; also, Fed will need to look for a different excuse to cut rates and end QT - another banking crisis would fit the bill perfectly...