Looking ahead to August's jobs numbers

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**Kimberly Adams** (0:31)
What tomorrow's jobs numbers can and cannot tell us about the labor market.
From Marketplace in Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams. Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports how many jobs the US economy added or lost. We're going to get the number for August tomorrow. Forecasters expect we might see a slight increase, maybe 53,000 more people on payrolls. But those monthly numbers are really just the best estimate the government can make based on the data they collect from companies. It can be an incomplete picture if companies don't report on time, or if something like seasonal hiring or a major weather event really skews things.

**Erica Groshin** (1:11)
The economists and the statisticians at BLS have a list of about, I think it's like eight reasons, things that are unexpected that could contribute.

**Kimberly Adams** (1:24)
Erica Groshin is former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who's now at Cornell.
So what does the BLS do to address the imperfections? A couple of times a year, it goes back to the drawing board with more complete data and makes benchmark revisions to that data. In fact, we just got one of these last week. We learned that the economy actually added 79,000 fewer jobs from March of 2025 up through March of this year. So is that margin of error good or bad?

**Erica Groshin** (1:54)
Being off by 79,000 jobs over the entire year, I mean, that's about as good as you could expect. I mean, that's just amazing. And much less than we saw, say, for instance, last year when it happened to be larger.

**Kimberly Adams** (2:08)
Last year, it was nearly a million fewer jobs. You might remember that was a subject of accusations from the president that the data was rigged. It was not. It's just exactly the kind of calibration we've been talking about here. And it looks like the agency is especially on the ball right now.
But what about the performance of the US economy? Well, we're continuing to see a labor market that's stagnant.

**Erica Groshin** (2:32)
Our usual characterization of the labor market is takes the escalator up and the elevator down. This is like we're spending a lot of time on that landing.

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**Kimberly Adams** (3:31)
Even if the numbers in that big federal jobs report tomorrow are subject to revisions, it is a very closely watched data point for us to understand how things are going in the labor market. But it can't tell us everything. For more, I'm joined by Diane Swonk, Chief Economist at KPMG. Good morning.

**Diane Swonk** (3:48)
Good morning.

**Kimberly Adams** (3:49)
What will you be looking for in tomorrow's jobs report?

**Diane Swonk** (3:52)
Well, we're a little bit more worried about more noise than signal. Underlying job gains should be picking up, or not accelerating, but at least a positive report. The problem is this month we could see some distortions from those Haitian workers, 330,000 people in total, about 200,000 workers. We don't know how many actually were working, but the temporary protected status that they were working under lapsed at the end of July, and that could hit the payroll number. They won't show up as unemployed because they're no longer legally able to work here, but that could provide a lot of noise in the number and give us another red ink print on overall payrolls, even as the underlying unemployment rate holds steady at 4.1 percent.

**Kimberly Adams** (4:41)
Switching to the bond market, we're still seeing this ongoing sell-off of bonds, not just here in the United States, but globally. Why is this continuing?

**Diane Swonk** (4:52)
We're seeing the perfect storm. It's not just the US, it's not just the UK as we saw a few years ago. It is collectively we have global debt rising and competing on a country level with the extraordinary capital needs for AI build out. It is an incredibly capital intensive building data centers. It's very expensive and they're issuing debt now.