As people dig deeper in the entrails of the most bizarre – and most politicized – jobs report in history, they keep finding more and more irregularities.

Consider this: according to the BLS report, which was based on a survey week from May 10th through May 16th when virtually all of the US was still shut down, the government decided that a record number of new businesses were formed. According to the BLS's Birth/Death model which is used to adjust the raw payrolls data for estimated new business openings and closures, a record 345K new jobs were created due to new businesses opening in a month when – we will repeat again – the US was largely shut down! This also means that over 60% of the business closures from the month of April (April Birth/Death -553K) were somehow undone in a month when the US was still mostly closed down.

Needless to say, this was entirely a statistical adjustment in the "eye of the beholder", one which even the BLS felt ashamed of, because in a little noticed addendum to the jobs report, the BLS announced it had made "changes" to its net birth-death model due to the coronavirus pandemic, changes which apparently included the modeling of massive business reopenings when millions of small businesses were shutting down.