Who's Lying?

Somebody is making up numbers

A government report just landed that wasn’t supposed to be possible.

April job openings didn’t tick up. They didn’t beat by a little. They exploded by 731,000 in a single month, blowing past every economist on Wall Street and printing what one analyst called a nine-sigma beat...the single biggest surprise in the history of the report. Consensus was for no change at all. Roughly 6.87 million. The number came in at 7.62 million.

A nine-sigma event is the kind of thing that’s not supposed to happen once in the lifetime of the universe. So either the labor market just staged the strongest comeback in modern record-keeping...or something in the data is broken.

And here’s the part nobody on financial TV wants to sit with. On the very same morning the openings number went vertical, the quits number collapsed to its lowest level since August 2020. Hires fell too. So job openings supposedly surged, demand for workers supposedly roared back...and yet the people who actually have jobs are clinging to them like it’s a lockdown all over again.

Two numbers from the same report. Pointing in exactly opposite directions. Which one is the lie?