On Wall Street, analysts increasingly don’t believe the U.S. government’s ‘misleading’ job numbers

Jamie Cox, a managing partner at Harris Financial Group in Richmond, Virginia (with $1.3 billion in assets under management), had a visceral reaction to the June jobs number from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “These data are misleading and should be disregarded,” he said in an email to Fortune. “There is zero chance leisure and hospitality posts a negative print in the midst of the World Cup. Revisions higher in the next few months are coming.”He’s not alone. Increasingly, analysts and economists at major banks and financial institutions are saying they don’t believe the numbers. Partly, this is a routine function of the way in which the U.S. government collects economic stats. It takes time to gather all the survey data needed to describe hiring (nonfarm payrolls, in the official lingo), and the BLS publishes a series of revisions to its numbers as the months go by.So not believing the initial figure is par for the course. The numbers will always be revised later as straggling data sets and survey responses trickle in. This chart from Pantheon Macroeconomics shows the scale of the revisions over time—usually downward: But this time, there was a number in the jobs data that, on its face, stands out as being implausible: The leisure and hospitality sector lost 61,000 jobs in June, the BLS reported, even though the U.S. is hosting the single largest sporting event on the planet—the World Cup. Is it really likely that dozens of soccer matches, followed by hundreds of thousands of domestic fans and foreign tourists, somehow resulted in fewer people being employed in hotels, bars, and restaurants? Pimco economist Tiffany Wilding said the sector “was actually expected to benefit from World Cup hiring.” RSM Chief Economist Joe Brusuelas said in an email that the report should be taken “with a grain of salt.” “Expect an upward revision to the top-line June estimate when the July data is released,” he said. There is good evidence that the World Cup has juiced economic