The BLS has announced today total nonfarm employment continued to drift downward in June, at a published rate today that didn’t seem to raise a lot of eyebrows.  When you look at the total nonfarm employment and unemployment over time, it adds a bit of perspective – here are the graphs right out of the BLS docs (June 2008 Employment Situation news release). 

We agree with Barry Ritholtz who authors the Big Picture blog (great read – succinct, direct, occasionally irreverent, and intelligent) that the big news is probably in the revisions (down another 52K) for April and May.  The revisions aren’t making news today, but they should.  This is another great example of why we track 6 month rolling averages over time when looking at a lot of BLS data, the anomalous bumps tend to get smoothed out. 

Barry doesn’t buy the increases in construction and leisure and hospitality sectors reported; given what we see in reviewing markets around the country we’d buy those numbers as reasonably believable given the seasonality of both supersectors. 

Bottom line, the data isn’t disastrous news, but in today’s macro-economic milieu it ain’t good news either. 

We’re hearing increasing levels of criticism regarding the reliability of the BLS (and any Fed produced data for that matter) – given the lack of comparable resources we think we’re all stuck crunching BLS data for better or worse at this point.

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