August's jobs report is out and some economists don't believe the numbers.

“I don’t believe the numbers,” said Tim Hopper, chief economist at TIAA-CREF. “Not only are they very weak, they just don’t match anything else that’s in the market right now.”

Yes, it's difficult to believe. Economists may have been wrong? Impossible.

The long and short of it is, experts predicted a gain of 200,000 jobs and we ended up creating only 142,000. The official unemployment rate dropped from 6.1% to 6.1% - but the usual explanation, that more discouraged workers dropped out of the workforce, is the excuse.

Washington Post:

Still, the new data are sure to be an unwelcome piece of news for the White House and national Democrats, who have been pressing the economy’s rebound as a central justification for keeping the Senate in Democratic hands in November’s mid-term elections.

“The White House can continue to hype the recovery all it wants. The fact is that today’s disappointing jobs report represents a step backward,” said Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, in a statement.

For its part, the White House highlighted the fact that the economy has now added 10 million private-sector jobs since the recovery in the labor market began in 2010.

“This figure is a marker of the progress that has been made, but also a reminder that more must still be done to create jobs, especially for the long-term unemployed, and grow the middle class,” said Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in a statement.

If the report is a hint of a sustained slowdown in hiring, the jobs number could also prompt a new calculus at the Federal Reserve, which is winding down its extraordinary stimulus campaign and beginning to consider when to raise interest rates. Many investors expect that to begin to occur in the middle of next year, though some members of the Fed have been loudly calling for earlier rate hikes, given the strength of the recovery.

Several more months of subpar job creation, however, could slow plans to raise rates, especially if wage growth remains relatively subdued, as it did in Friday’s report. Average hourly earnings increased 2.1 percent over the past year, continuing the pattern of recent years and barely faster than the rising price of goods and services.

I haven't seen any of the cross tabs yet but I would be very surprised if the trend in what kind of jobs being created were much changed from the last couple of years. The Obama "recovery" is very good at creating part time and temporary jobs - record numbers in fact. Growth in manufacturing and technical jobs has been much slower. And wage growth has been flat. So while the Fed ratchets up inflation through its bond buying program, the American people fall further and further behind in their standard of living.

As with every monthly report, the numbers are going to be revised next month. But it would be unprecedented if they were altered to reflect a gain of 60,000 more jobs. The efficacy of "experts" all throughout this recovery has been rightly called into question. They're always "surprised" or developments are "unexpected."

Maybe they'd be better off using a ouija board.