Monthly nonfarm payrolls reporting by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the Tier 1 barometers of the U.S. economy, has deteriorated in the reliability of its initial readings as reflected in the increasing amplitude of later revisions to the first prints. Moreover, the BLS over the past year has consistently overstated payroll gains in its initial reports, resulting in downward revisions, sometimes by drastic margins. DoubleLine Macro Asset Allocation Strategist Ryan Kimmel, who in 2025 began writing on the emerging rise in the margin of error in BLS reports, revisits this phenomenon, its causes and effects, and he shares practices developed at DoubleLine to counter the reduced informational value of initial BLS reports.
Mr. Kimmel joined DoubleLine in 2013. He is a Strategist on the Macro Asset Allocation team and Fixed Income Asset Allocation (FIAA) and Global Asset Allocation Committees. He also co-hosts DoubleLine’s weekly Minutes (Twitter @DLineMinutes, Minutes@Doubleline.com) podcast. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Kimmel was a Proprietary Trader at Gelber Group, trading currencies for the Foreign Currency Group. Prior to that, he was an Investment Banking Analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Mergers and Acquisitions Group. Mr. Kimmel holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and holds an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
