From EJ Antoni on X today:
Not even hiding it anymore – since when is a 119k increase just “edging up”? And since when is a 193k increase “little change”? They mentioned Apr b/c that’s when Trump announced tariffs; whether you’re for or against Trump’s trade policies, this is obviously a biased narrative:
Well, NFP was +119, but that was after downward revisions in August and July, totalling -40. Hence, relative to where we thought NFP was in August, NFP was up only +79K, which for me I would term as “edging up” (I show this aspect for both NFP and private NFP in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (September release official) (dark blue, left log scale), NFP employment (August release official) (blue, left log scale), Bloomberg consensus (light blue square, left log scale), private nonfarm payroll employment (September release official) (dark red, right log scale), NFP employment (August release official) (red, right log scale), Bloomberg consensus (light red square, right log scale), all in 000’s, s.a. Bloomberg levels calculated using August level and Bloomberg consensus change. Source: BLS, Bloomberg, and author’s calculations.
Dr. Antoni lauds the +193K increase in NFP employment since April. It’s useful to note that +193 on a per month basis is +39K, hardly a strong growth rate. If I look at the q/q change then it’s a +62K/mo pace.
I will note that alternative measures of NFP don’t show substantially different results over 2025:
Figure 2: Official nonfarm payroll employment (blue), implied preliminary benchmark (tan), early benchmark (green), CPS employment adjusted to NFP concept, 3 month moving average (red), all in 000’s, s.a. For preliminary and early benchmark series, M04-M09 data is based on official reported changes in employment. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Philadelphia Fed, and author’s calculations.
Interestingly, the only series based on non-establishment data is represented by the red line. This series is essentially unchanged versus 2025M04.
