Latest Breaking News

Lower Immigration Projections Mean Lower Breakeven Employment Growth Estimates, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 8/28/25
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/aug/lower-immigration-projections-mean-lower-breakeven-employment-growth



As for today's report of 50k net new payroll jobs, while unemployment rate ticked down 0.1 percentage points, 3 reasons:

1./ The above


2./ The 2 numbers come from different surveys -- the 50k number comes from the Establishment Survey, while the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate come from the Household Survey. The payroll jobs number sampling error: +/- 136,000 at 90% confidence interval And the unemployed numbers are +/- 300,000 (and +/- 0.2% for the unemployment rate).
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm
Note, this is just the sampling error. There are other errors besides sampling error.

Correspondingly, again based on sampling error alone, there is a 50% chance that it is within +/- 55,800, and a 50% chance that it is outside that. So, for example for a reported job gain of 100,000, there is a 50% chance that it is between 44,200 and 155,800, and a 50% chance that it is outside that range based on sampling error alone. Note there are errors other than sampling error that add to the uncertainty


3./ As BRDS said, the labor force participation rate is a big factor in changing the unemployment rate. The labor force fell by 46k in December.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11000000?output_view=net_1mth