All of a sudden the economy isn't as strong as previously reported.

The U.S. economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the 12-month period through March 2024, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

As part of its preliminary annual benchmark revisions to the nonfarm payroll numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the actual job growth was nearly 30% less than the initially reported 2.9 million from April 2023 through March of this year.

The revision to the total payrolls level of -0.5% is the largest since 2009. The numbers are routinely revised each month, but the BLS does a broader revision each year when it gets the results of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

And this was only the yearly revision. The BLS does monthly revisions as well.
However, this isn't the most corrupt part of this story.

For more than half an hour on Wednesday morning, economists and investors were stuck repeatedly refreshing their browsers, looking for a delayed report on the U.S. job market from a government website.

Not everyone had to wait that long.
A number of Wall Street investment firms obtained details about the report — which showed a large downward revision to job growth in 2023 and early 2024 — at least 15 minutes before the information was posted on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. That head start could, at least in theory, have given in-the-know investors an opportunity to profit on the information before the public at large.

That isn't the first time this has happened.

In February, an employee of the labor bureau sent information about housing inflation — at the time, an issue of intense interest to many investors — to a group of “super users” that included a number of hedge funds...
Then, in May, the agency said it had inadvertently posted data on the Consumer Price Index — one of the highest-profile monthly economic reports — 30 minutes before the scheduled release time. The files in question are closely monitored by Wall Street firms but not by less sophisticated users.

For those keeping score, that's 3 times so far just this year.
It isn't just the BLS. It's been a few years, but the Federal Reserve isn't above leaking data to Wall Street banks as well.

Last December, ProPublica reported that confidential information from the Federal Reserve Board committee that sets the nation’s monetary policy had been leaked to a private investor newsletter in 2012. This week, the Fed for the first time put out a summary of its investigation into the leak — one that raises new questions about how the matter was handled.

The leak has become a focus of bipartisan criticism in Congress because of concerns about the Fed’s internal controls and whether the leaked information, involving deliberations by the Federal Open Market Committee, could have provided an unfair advantage to investors who received the newsletter.