{"id":10402,"date":"2026-07-03T12:37:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T12:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=10402"},"modified":"2026-07-03T12:37:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T12:37:53","slug":"nonfarm-payrolls-analysts-dont-believe-the-u-s-governments-misleading-job-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=10402","title":{"rendered":"Nonfarm payrolls: Analysts don\u2019t believe the U.S. government\u2019s ‘misleading’ job numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

Jamie Cox, a managing partner at Harris Financial Group in Richmond, Virginia (with $1.3 billion in assets under management), had a visceral reaction to the June jobs number from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: \u201cThese data are misleading and should be disregarded,\u201d he said in an email to Fortune<\/em>. \u201cThere is zero chance leisure and hospitality posts a negative print in the midst of the World Cup. Revisions higher in the next few months are coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not alone. <\/p>\n

Increasingly, analysts and economists at major banks and financial institutions are saying they don\u2019t believe the numbers. Partly, this is a routine function of the way in which the U.S. government collects economic stats. It takes time to gather all the survey data needed to describe hiring (nonfarm payrolls, in the official lingo), and the BLS publishes a series of revisions to its numbers as the months go by.<\/p>\n

So not believing the initial figure is par for the course. The numbers will always be revised later as straggling data sets and survey responses trickle in. This chart from Pantheon Macroeconomics shows the scale of the revisions over time\u2014usually downward:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

But this time, there was a number in the jobs data that, on its face, stands out as being implausible: The leisure and hospitality sector lost 61,000 jobs in June, the BLS reported, even though the U.S. is hosting the single largest sporting event on the planet\u2014the World Cup. <\/p>\n

Is it really likely that dozens of soccer matches, followed by hundreds of thousands of domestic fans and foreign tourists, somehow resulted in fewer people being employed in hotels, bars, and restaurants?<\/p>\n

Pimco economist Tiffany Wilding said the sector \u201cwas actually expected to benefit from World Cup hiring.\u201d<\/p>\n

RSM Chief Economist Joe Brusuelas said in an email that the report should be taken \u201cwith a grain of salt.\u201d \u201cExpect an upward revision to the top-line June estimate when the July data is released,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There is good evidence that the World Cup has juiced economic activity recently. This chart from Bank of America shows card spending was up 5.4% year-on-year over the group stage of the cup. \u201cThe boost is being particularly driven by \u2018non-locals\u2019 coming into the cities for the matches, whose spending was up 17.4%,\u201d BofA Institute\u2019s Liz Everett Krisberg and David Tinsley said in an email.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cThe U.S. employment report was a convenient reminder not to put too much emphasis onto a single unreliable data release,\u201d Paul Donovan of UBS said in an email this morning. \u201cThere were notable revisions, and the details showed swings in seasonal adjustments moving the figures in a rather maladjusted manner. The trends are still the same. In an uncertain policy environment, companies seem reluctant to hire, but are also not rushing to fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

At EY-Parthenon, Chief Economist Gregory Daco was also taken aback by the weak hospitality number, although he stopped short of saying it might be wrong. \u201cThe biggest black eye in June came from the leisure and hospitality sector shedding 61k jobs\u2014the largest decline since the pandemic\u2014on weak seasonal hiring, despite the hype around the World Cup,\u201d he said in an email.<\/p>\n

Overall, the U.S. economy added 57,000 jobs in June, about half the number that was expected, the BLS reported yesterday. The Financial Times<\/em> suggested that the surprisingly weak hospitality numbers explain why the consensus estimate was wrong:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere may be a way to explain away the bad month, however. Employment in hospitality and leisure might have been expected to rise in June, in the run-up to the North American edition of the World Cup\u2026 But, strangely, the sector crashed hard, losing 61,000 jobs,\u201d Robert Armstrong wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cA statistical blip? It\u2019s possible, and if you take out the hospitality losses, we would be talking about a nice four-month trend.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
Subscribe to\u00a0Fortune Gulf Brief<\/strong>. Every Tuesday, this new newsletter delivers clear-eyed, authoritative intelligence on the deals, decisions, policies, and power shifts shaping one of the world\u2019s most consequential regions, written for the people who need to act on it. Sign up here.<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

#Nonfarm #payrolls #Analysts #dont #U.S #governments #misleading #job #numbers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jamie Cox, a managing partner at Harris Financial Group in Richmond, Virginia (with $1.3 billion in assets under management), had a visceral reaction to the June jobs number from the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1237,1295,816,5633,760,430,7959,12212,4052,11494,599],"class_list":["post-10402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-analysts","tag-dont","tag-economics","tag-governments","tag-job","tag-jobs","tag-misleading","tag-nonfarm","tag-numbers","tag-payrolls","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}