"This is the final blow. It's clear the U.S. economy is in a recession."
- Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd.

Today's headline numbers were very bad.

Payrolls shrank by 80,000, more than forecast and the third monthly decline, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The jobless rate rose to 5.1 percent, the highest level since September 2005, from 4.8 percent.

That's normally where people stop reading and the MSM stops reporting, and that's why they usually miss the truly horrendous numbers. You see, the BLS revised past employment numbers down.

Over the past 3 months, payroll employment has declined by 232,000. In March, employment continued to fall in construction, manufacturing, and employment services, while health care, food services, and mining added jobs.

Generally this in itself makes a pretty worthy diary to write.
But the bad employment news doesn't stop there. In fact, we've barely even begun.

"If you're ever going to ring a bell on a recession, these numbers do it,"
- Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial

You see, the BLS didn't just revise employment numbers for the last three months. For instance, take a look at the revisions for 2007.

That's 200,000 jobs wiped out over 10 months of last year.
But it doesn't stop there. They continued to revise employment data over the last five years.

You may have missed this in today's Jobs Report, but when we started to update our Excel spreadsheets with the jobs data we noticed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the Jobs Data. It was not the usual revision back a month or two. It went back all the way to early 2003.

Notice the previous job numbers on the left, compared to the revised numbers on the right of this chart.

chart courtesy Jesse's Cafe'

But wait, we aren't done yet. Even these terrible numbers partially mask the awfulness of this economic report.

For those of you who have read my previous economic diaries you might remember how I have ranted about the BLS' Birth/Death Model and how it inflates employment numbers. Even the BLS admits that this model will fail to capture job growth when leaving a recession, and artificially inflate job growth when entering a recession.
About 4 months ago I posted this to show how the Birth/Death Model was creating almost every fictional job in Bush's economy.

Well, the BLS is still at it.

Finally we have the way that unemployment is actually counted.
Besides the fact that more than 1 million people have simply left the labor force in the past year and are no longer counted as unemployed, besides the fact that almost 700,000 more people still in the workforce are working part time because they couldn't find full time work, there are also other ways that people used to be counted as unemployed but no longer.

On a vaguely related note, check out this video at the Bear Stearns protest.