What happened to April payrolls? No one is quite sure.
One possibility is that the BLS seasonal adjustment was far off the mark.The unadjusted Nonfarm Payrolls number was 1.089 million. A seasonal adjustment designed to smooth out recurring monthly swings reduced it to the issued figure of 266,000. These revisions are based on the historical record.
Do assumptions founded in normal seasonal hiring patterns have any predictive value for a time frame as unusual as the past 15 months?
In a normal year summer temporary hiring that might begin in April and May would be discounted as part of long-term employment. This year, a good portion of the more than one million jobs reported in the raw numbers were likely not temporary employment at all but a return to pandemic squelched work. Did the BLS models differentiate between the two putting the rebound in permanent employment in the correct category? Even if the problem was recognized, as it probably was, how can statisticians determi