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Labor market revisions rarely garner Wall Street's attention.
Wednesday was an exception.
The annual benchmark revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out Wednesday were closely watched by investors, with the report showing there were 818,000 fewer people employed as of this March than had been previously reported.
As the team at Capital Economics pointed out in response on Wednesday, this implies the average monthly job gains seen from March 2023 through March 2024 were closer to 174,000 rather than the 242,000 initially reported.
Economists don't expect this report to change the Federal Reserve's view that a 0.25% interest rate cut is warranted next month, with more to come later this year. Bank of America's economics team said this data would "minimally" impact the Fed in a note on Wednesday.
We've known the labor market is slowing for some time. As the months pass, we're learning more precisely how much things are cooling off.
Average job gains have slowed, and the unemployment rate has risen to 4.3%. But there is still a sense from many corners of the investment world that this data understates softness in the labor market.
And Wednesday's report offered a clue as to why the kind of worker who is paid or has the time to comment on revisions to BLS data might, specifically, believe this to be the case.
The BLS report on Wednesday broke down these labor market revisions by industry. And the biggest loser in terms of magnitude was professional and business services. This industry saw estimated employment as of March fall by 358,000, more than double the next-closest industry, leisure & hospitality.
Add in downward revisions to information (read: tech) employment of 68,000 and financial activities of 76,000 and we're looking at more than half a million jobs that can be broadly characterized as white collar revised out of the labor market.
And this data is consistent with the general sense of malaise that has hung over industries like tech and finance since the bear market of 2022. According to layoffs.fyi, there were more than 165,000 layoffs in tech in 2022, over 260,000 layoffs in tech in 2023, and another 130,000 this year.
In total, Wednesday's revisions took 0.5% off the estimated size of the workforce as of March. But for these three industries — business services, information, and financial activities — the drops were 1.6%, 2.3%, and 0.8%, respectively.
Meaning the three industries that most broadly capture jobs that can be described as "tech," "finance," "sending emails," and "taking Zoom calls" were hit harder than the overall workforce by these revisions.
A helpful lens, perhaps, through which to understand why things like a sharp three-day sell-off in the stock market are enough to kickstart the recession conversation: For the folks paid to watch these things carefully, it already feels like one.
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