The unemployment rate fell in January to 9% according to the Employment Situation Report. However, only 36,000 jobs were added on a seasonally adjusted basis, significantly below Bernanke’s estimate of 100,000 jobs needed for stability (and therefore an even bigger gap from Reich’s estimate). This is also below the expectations illustrated by the Bloomberg consensus range of 55,000 to 200,000.

600,000 people are no longer unemployed, but the labor force was unchanged. That’s an interesting gap between the household survey (determines the unemployment rate) and the establishment survey (determines number of jobs added). Typically, changes in the labor force help explain the gap. This report is a bit unusual, though, and offers us a substantial population revision (Table C). This revision does not cause the BLS to change their official data for prior months, but they detail what the impacts would have been. The BLS points out that this policy has the unfortunate side effect of making historical comparisons less useful.

January is a negative employment month. On a seasonally-unadjusted basis 2,898,000 jobs were lost. Of those, 339k were due to a negative month of the Birth/Death model. This means that the BLS estimates that a lot of small businesses shuttered in January that were unaccounted for by the establishment survey.

Table A-15 provides alternative measures of labor utilization. U-6, sometimes referred to as the “actual” unemployment rate, fell from 16.7% to 16.1% on an adjusted basis and grew from 16.6% to 17.3% on an unadjusted basis.

This was a disappointing report, but one that was subject to some pretty substantial swings in some of the source data. The substantial changes in the data cushion the blow a bit, as things like the seasonal adjustments are crucial for interpreting the data, particularly this time of year. For actual working people, January is a very unfriendly month in any year. For those tracking trends, it’s merely mediocre this year.