Biden-Harris Administration Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was asked during the Democratic Convention about the latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on how the agency overcounted jobs by 818,000 in the last year. She deflected by saying she didn't believe anything the Trump campaign said. When the poor ABC Anchor told her it was government data, Raimondo said she wasn't "familiar" with that.

For reference, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency most people know for monthly job and inflation reports, issued an annual report adjusting the previous year's employment numbers. They found that from March 2023 to March 2024, nonfarm payroll employment in the United States was actually 818,000 less than anticipated.

This report won't be the final revision; we'll get one more in February 2025 to give us the final job numbers for that period. Why the adjustment? Each year, BLS surveys the "state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file." They take those state records and adjust the monthly estimates for that time frame.

The net result of this report meant that some industries saw larger downward revisions than others. For instance, manufacturing jobs were revised down by 115,000, Retail Trade jobs revised down 129,000, and professional and business service jobs revised down a whopping 358,00.

Rumors had trickled through Wall Street all week about the report, with estimates of the report nearing one million in the negative. Nick Timiraos in the Wall Street Journal noted that this report and other economic data would feed into the Federal Reserve's decision to cut interest rates starting in September.

In other words, the Biden-Harris Commerce Secretary is unaware of a major report that everyone else in the economic space is examining. It's unclear what job she's doing over there. However, she did spend time defending Kamala Harris from allegations of pursuing price controls.

CNBC was unconvinced of Raimondo's attempt to argue that price controls are not price controls. Given that Raimondo is unaware of BLS's downward revision by 818,000 jobs in the past year, no one can claim, with any certainty, that she does anything of importance for commerce or the economy.

That leaves us with the only adults left in the room watching the economy: the Federal Reserve. At this point, the unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve are the ones deciding our economic fate because no one else in the Biden-Harris administration can explain the most basic BLS reports.

As I said above, this report and other data point to the Federal Reserve cutting rates in September. In terms of guaranteed calls, that assumption is about as close to 100% as you can get without hitting the target. Everyone knows a cut is coming, and it's because the economy is cooling with unemployment ticking up.

In his piece laying out the divisions in the Federal Reserve and the larger economy, Timiraos notes, "A handful of private-sector and former Fed economists, including at JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, say evidence that the labor market might be weakening too much should lead officials to make larger rate cuts upfront, shedding their longstanding preference for gradualism."

When it comes to a recession, unemployment is usually the last thing to go. The Great Recession began when the economy started weakening after hitting a peak in 2006. The National Bureau of Economic Research would later date the start of the Great Recession to December 2007. Still, most Americans wouldn't realize that until the meltdown started in the fall of 2008.

The unemployment rate ticked up in early 2008, but nothing alarming happened until spring, when it rocketed from 5% in April 2008 to a peak of 10% in October 2009.

Where are we in our current cycle? April 2023's unemployment rate of 3.4% was just below the notch of 3.5%, the February 2020 number before the pandemic swept the globe. Depending on your view, we're currently sitting at an unemployment rate that's either elevated or at historical norms.

Whatever our final numbers are, 818,000 jobs from the previous year were just wiped off the ledger due to statistical errors being fixed. This is the largest adjustment to such a number since 2009.

If we're on a precipice, the red flags are there. If the Federal Reserve manages to achieve a soft landing, defeating inflation without triggering a recession, they'd be accomplishing something rare. All the warning signs started flashing in 2022, as well, before cooling off.

The biggest red flag of all is that the Secretary of Commerce is unaware of any of these things, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or anything else meaningful for a person tasked with... commerce. Wherever the United States economy is headed, don't ask the Biden-Harris administration. They don't know anything, even when nearly a million jobs get erased from government reports.