Waiting on non-farm payrolls benchmark revisions but a separate report sheds some light

The US BLS was scheduled to publish benchmark revisions to non-farm payrolls at 10 am ET here: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesprelbmk.htm

That hasn’t updated but we’re watching closely. It’s rare to have a hiccup in the release schedule so it’s not clear what’s going on.

However a separate report that covers the same timeline was released — the Country Employment and Wages report. It showed 153.6
million employed and a 1.3% rise year-over-year. That would be 1.97 million jobs, which is short of the 2.9 million reported by the BLS in the year ending in March (-930K).

What’s tough to square is that it also highlights 153.6
million employed, which is only slightly lower than the 153,757,000 reported in the March non-farm payrolls report.

More confusing yet, economist Christophe Barraud (who is usually bang on) also highlights the Country Employment and Wages report, which includes the Quarterly Census of Employment and
Wages — which is what the benchmark revisions are based on.

He calculates 450K job losses, which would be something close but perhaps slightly higher than the consensus.

What’s jarring is that there was a pretty big move at 10 am in USD/JPY, so there are certainly people trying to trade this headline.

Finally, our friends over @newsquawk are report a rumour of -818K, citing a guy who said he called the BLS himself, though it would seem odd to me they would give that number out over the phone when it hadn’t yet been published online.

So what does that clear up? It leaves us with 4 different numbers:

• -930K
• -157K
• -450K
• -818K

The thing is, I don’t really think this number matters but it’s great to see the suspense and digging.

This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.