The Rear-View Mirror On Jobs

One little-noticed aspect of today's report is in National Review of all places:

The Labor Department once again made large upward revisions to prior months.

Including these revisions, nonfarm payrolls were up 168,000 and private payrolls were up 196,000, both beating consensus expectations. Some analysts ignore these revisions, but we think that’s a big mistake. Normal monthly revisions to the original payroll report have now been positive for ten straight months and have averaged about 40,000 per month during this period. As a result, without revisions, analysts have a systematically and downwardly biased impression about the job market.