29 August 2023
Contrary to the expected slight decline to 9.5 million, the July job openings report delivered a significant surprise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed a startling figure of just 8.827 million job openings, marking the first instance of sub-9 million since March 2021. This shocker ranked as the third largest miss on record. What makes matters worse is that, if not for the BLS’s considerable reduction of the May count from 9.582 million to a questionable 9.165 million, the drop would have been nearly 800,000 job openings. This pattern of downward revisions has become a recurrent theme during the Biden administration, leading to skepticism about data accuracy and raising concerns of deliberate data manipulation.