Grapevine

U.S. job growth revised down by the most since 2009. Why this time is different

People line up as they wait for the JobNewsUSA.com South Florida Job Fair to open at the Amerant Bank Arena on June 26, 2024, in Sunrise, Florida.

There's a lot of debate about how much signal to take from the 818,000 downward revisions to U.S. payrolls — the largest since 2009. Is it signaling recession?

A few facts worth considering:

By the time the 2009 revisions came out (824,000 jobs were overstated), the National Bureau of Economic Research had already declared a recession six months earlier.

Jobless claims, a contemporaneous data source, had surged north of 650,000, and the insured unemployment rate had peaked at 5% that very month.

GDP as reported at the time had already been negative for four straight quarters. (It would subsequently be revised higher in the two of those quarters, one of which was revised higher to show growth, rather than contraction. But the economic weakness was broadly evident in the GDP numbers and ISMs and lots of other data.)