According to recent analysis from Standard Chartered, this has led to an egregious overstatement of the impending figures for 2024’s job growth. The upshot is that the actual NFP was more like an abysmal 70,000 jobs per month from April through December. This is a stark contrast to the earliest data releases, which showed around 150,000 new jobs being created per month. Economists Steve Englander and Dan Pan are back with the sharp, critical comparison. They think it means that the labor market is far weaker than we realized.
Those sharp downward revisions follow a March 2025 benchmark preliminary adjustments announcement. Even after all these corrections, the overstatement still holds true, signifying a chronic problem in the reported number of job growth. The economists calculate the overstatement to be about 70,000 jobs. That estimation is spot on with the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s own recent assessment. He flagged what proved to be a massive overstatement—more than 60,000 jobs a month—at the December Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
Englander and Pan argue that labor demand began to soften months before the immigration crackdown initiated by the Trump administration. This enormous trend calls into question the narrative that state-level immigration policies were responsible for leading some of the most impressive employment growth.
“Our puzzle is that after all the talk about immigration driving up employment growth, it turns out that 2024 was far from brilliant when revisions are accounted for and we assume the 60k overstatement.” – Standard Chartered’s economists Steve Englander and Dan Pan
This means that true net new job creation for 2024 was probably much, much worse than the market thought according to economists. They blame this misperception on padded statistics. The NFP figures show enormous differences. This could mean that a lot of analysts were duped by the initial reports.
“After correcting for bias, the ‘actual’ NFP likely averaged 70k between April and December 2024, whereas the initial data releases ran at an average 150k per month.” – Standard Chartered’s economists Steve Englander and Dan Pan
The national implications of this new analysis are profound for all those following the health of our labor market. Labor demand is softening, and historical data needs massive revision. With these advancements, policymakers need to reconsider business and labor policy and the role of immigration to respond to industry transformations.