You may have missed this in today's Jobs Report, but when we started to update our Excel spreadsheets with the jobs data we noticed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the Jobs Data. It was not the usual revision back a month or two. It went back all the way to early 2003.
Admittedly they could have worked this revision in February or even January, since we don't often go back into prior years to look for major changes. But the fact remains that the data has been significantly revised, and downward.
We're working with really large numbers here overall, and its hard to see these changes in graphs. We're not sure its even worth looking at the monthly changes in the graphs.
What is important is the TREND. And the revised numbers showed a significant confirmation in the downtrends, that our 12 Month moving average has been showing since the beginning of last year.
The US is in a slowdown. More precisely, the US entered an economic recession in the first quarter of 2008 at the latest, and perhaps the fourth quarter of 2007. We'll say what Nouriel Roubini probably wishes he could say: anyone who says we are not in a recession now is either a stooge or merely ignorant.
Look for the Wall Street and government spin to shift from denying that we are in recession, to a new slant that we are in recession but its now half over and its time for stocks to start pricing in recovery in the second half of the year. 
Let's see if the President's Working Group can keep stocks propped up to give the average Joe the impression that things are not so bad.
There is only one play in this current team's playbook: fraud - bubble - bust. Because that's all that they know how to do.
They don't know how to facilitate a productive economy to build genuine prosperity for the nation. For the most part they have never created anything worthwhile in their lives, but lived off the labor of others. But they do know how to enrich a few of their cronies, and to deceive, inflate and try to patch the mess once the bubble they created breaks. At least so far.
And here's a report on the Jobs number from John Williams over at Shadow Government Statistics.
March Payroll Decline Easily Topped 120,000
When a Fed Chairman begins talking recession, a recession is in place. Chairman Bernanke's comment on Wednesday that the U.S. economy "even could contract slightly" in the first half of 2008 was more reporting than a prognostication. He certainly had an advance idea of the March employment data that now show a decline in average first-quarter 2008 payrolls versus fourth-quarter 2007, where seasonally-adjusted March 2008 payrolls are down at an annualized 0.7% rate from December 2008.
Despite the bad news in the monthly jobs data, the reported numbers still were overly Pollyannaish, thanks to extreme gimmicking. As anticipated, the industrial production benchmark revisions showed considerably weaker economic activity than previously reported, while the purchasing managers survey again showed a deepening economic contraction and surging inflation.
Also on the inflation front, money supply M2 continued to surge in the latest weekly reporting up a seasonally-adjusted, annualized 24.3% in the week ended March 24th, with annual growth in March M3 now a fair bet to top 17.2%, up from the 16.9% historic high set in February. The money supply numbers will be updated over the coming weekend on the Alternate Data tab at www.shadowstats.com, after tonight's data releases.
Jobs Data Should Continue Fueling Recession Forecasts.
The reported third consecutive decline in monthly payrolls, as of March, will do much to reinforce recession outlooks, but the data remain severely gimmicked, understating the monthly declines in payroll employment, thanks to the usual statistical shenanigans at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Net of gimmicks, the decline in payrolls and the rise in the unemployment rate were statistically significant......
Seasonal-Factor Gimmicks.
Year-to-year growth should be virtually identical in both the seasonally-adjusted and unadjusted series, and applying the unadjusted annual change to the seasonally-adjusted year-ago numbers for February and March suggests that the seasonally-adjusted month-to-month change should have been a contraction of 124,000. This reporting gimmick is made possible by the "recalculation" each month of the monthly seasonal factors. If the process were honest, the suggested differences would go in both directions. Instead, the differences almost always suggest that the seasonal factors are being used to overstate the current month's relative payroll level, as seen last month and the month before....
Household Survey.
The usually statistically-sounder household survey, which counts the number of people with jobs, as opposed to the payroll survey that counts the number of jobs (including those of multiple job holders), showed household employment dropped by 24,000 in March against a 255,000 decline in February.
The March 2008 seasonally-adjusted U.3 unemployment rate showed a statistically-significant increase to 5.08% +/- 0.23% from 4.81% in February. Unadjusted, U.3 held at 5.2% in March. The broader U.6 unemployment rate rose to an adjusted 9.1% (9.3% unadjusted) in March, versus 8.9% (9.5% unadjusted) in February. Adjusted for the "discouraged workers" defined away during the Clinton Administration, actual unemployment, as estimated by the SGS-Alternate Unemployment measure, rose to 13.0% in March, up from 12.8% in February....
Purchasing Managers Surveys Show Inflation and Recession.
The stock market truly is irrational if it rallies sharply on a minor upswing in a still-negative purchasing managers survey (manufacturing in March was 48.6 versus 48.3 in February). The alternatives are that either silly hype can rally these extremely vulnerable markets, or that some analysts have a compulsion (or real need) to explain all market movements in terms of any published news, regardless of actions or market manipulations by major players and/or government/Fed. Both factors likely are at play....
