On a stronger-than-expected jobs report and upward revisions to April and May’s figures, mortgage rates are moving higher this morning.
Against an expectation of 120,000, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that 132,000 new jobs were created in June. This not a huge deal in and of itself.
It’s the revisions that are causing markets to move today.
Revisions are a normal part of government data. They occur because the government bureaus cannot survey every business in the country prior to get an exact figure.
The government, therefore, talks to a small subset of business and then projects that data across the whole economy using sophisticated statistical analysis tools.
The Non-Farm Payrolls report, for example, is usually released on the first Friday of a month — hardly enough time to get a comprehensive look at jobs data country-wide.
This is one of the reasons why the BLS also released data for April (+ 42,000 jobs) and May (+ 33,000) — it’s had more time to pin down the actual number after the original “estimate”.
It’s the revisions that are mostly to blame for higher rates today. Overall expectations were beat by 87,000.
