Economist: U.S. Employment Data Could Face Significant Downward Revision, Potentially Triggering Rate Cut Bets

BlockBeats News, September 8th: In the year ending in March of this year, U.S. job growth may have been far weaker than currently indicated by government data, highlighting that the U.S. labor market had already entered a slowdown phase well before the summer hiring slowdown this year.

Economists at Wells Fargo, UBS, and Pantheon Macroeconomics expect that the annual benchmark revision data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday will show that the March employment figure was nearly 800,000 jobs below the current estimate, averaging about 67,000 jobs per month. Nomura Securities, Bank of America, and Royal Bank of Canada said the downward revision could even be close to 1 million.

While this data may be somewhat outdated, a significant downward revision will indicate a significant weakening of last year's labor market momentum and strengthen market expectations for a series of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. A second year of substantial revisions to employment data could also provoke the ire of U.S. President Trump, who has criticized the accuracy of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (Jin10)