Since there still is confusion regarding yesterday's whopping "surge" in non-farm payrolls, which represented a 243K jump in the Establishment survey (of which 490K was temp jobs, same as in the Household Survey where temp jobs soared by a record 699K), yet only to arrive at an employment number last seen ten years ago, when the US population was about 30 million lower (think about that: 30 million increase in population and no change in the total employed), here is the final explanation of what happened yesterday.
As everyone knows by now, January is when the BLS imposes its annual seasonal adjustment revision (more on that in a second) for the previous January-December period. What this manifests itself most directly in, is the divergence between the Nonadjusted January number of the establishment survey of any given year and the Unadjusted number. And while the January adjustment is always substantial, it is the fact that the so-called beat was entirely based on assumptions that makes yesterday's NFP number so meaningless, and hardly the basis to assume that the US economy has taken off.
The chart below shows the adjusted and unadjusted employment survey data for total Nonfarm Employees. The annual January overadjustment is more than evident. Just as evident are the subsequent under-adjustments as seasonal data is lowered to account for volatility in the NSA data. What is very notable is that in January, absent BLS smoothing calculation, which are nowhere in the labor force, but solely in the mind of a few BLS employees, the real economy lost 2,689,000 jobs, while net of the adjustment, it actually gained 243,000 jobs: a delta of 2,932,000 jobs based solely on statistical assumptions in an excel spreadsheet! LINK
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