Business

Oops Report spills the beans on jobs nos.

Thursday is Oops Report time.

That’s when the Labor Department will tell us if it has been correctly tabulating the number of jobs in this country. Or, more precisely, it will tell us how much it has erred in the reporting of the job market.

My guess is that the department has over-counted jobs by several hundred thousand. And if that’s the case, we’ll understand better why jobs, jobs and jobs are the three most important issues in the race for who gets the White House job.

Why do I think Labor over-counted? Well, because no matter how hard Washington and its agencies try to be impartial, they always seem to report economic numbers that are better than real life.

It’s also because my gut tells me there aren’t anywhere near the number of jobs the bureaucrats would like us to believe.

And, lastly, for this reason: A company called Sageworks Inc. says that revenue growth among privately held US companies has slowed dramatically while the profit margins of these outfits have improved nicely.

When revenue growth slows but profit margins rise, it can mean only one thing — private companies are cutting back on expenses.

In fact, Sageworks says that the average annual sales growth for the 50,000 private companies it tracks is now just 5.4 percent. That’s less than half the 11 percent growth experienced last January. And today’s growth is significantly lower than the 8 percent of a year earlier.

And while some of these private companies may cut back on office supplies or their holiday party — or even new computer equipment — the most likely and substantial expense reductions come from lopping off personnel or not hiring new workers.

Look at the profit levels that Sageworks is reporting.

At this time last year, private companies were reporting profit margins of just 6.2 percent. Now, margins are around 9 percent.

This isn’t much different from what’s happening among big companies. Executives have a vested interest in keeping profits high even when revenues sag. And they are doing the same thing as small companies are — being cheap with the hired help.

And that gets me back to the Oops Report.

The biggest fudge factor in the monthly employment report that everyone watches is a guesstimate for newly formed companies that Labor can’t count but assumes exist. So in almost every month Labor adds a generous number of jobs to its report for these possibly nonexistent jobs.

Even if these newborn companies do exist, austerity may be keeping them from hiring quite the number of people as Labor thinks.

We’ll see Thursday how big this discrepancy really is.

I call it the Oops Report, but officially it’s the Current Employment Survey Preliminary Benchmark Revision. Abbreviated that would be CESPBR — which is probably a dirty word in some language.

So I made up my own name for it.

The figure on Thursday will correct the March 2011-to-March 2012 count. And it will only be preliminary, with the final Oops Report coming out early next year. But Thursday’s report has election implications.

As I’ve reported before, in 2009 the Oops Report erased 902,000 jobs from the official count. In 2010, there was a downward correction of 378,000 jobs. But in 2011, the department actually added a small number of jobs to its count, although that was a complete surprise, considering how weak the economy was.

The 2012 economy has been weakening — as many of the package-delivery companies are reporting. And analysts who were predicting a pickup in economic activity have already had their Oops moment.

Thursday will be Labor’s turn.

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This could be a sweet spot for the stock market.

Last week, shares were helped by the fact that it was an options expiration week, during which professional traders do their best to keep prices up.

This week, we are coming up to the end of the quarter, when professional traders try their best to keep stock prices up so they can report good news to clients.

But the positive vibe from the Federal Reserve’s latest quantitative easing seems to have worn off pretty quickly — in fact, it amounted to one good day of gains for the market.

So enjoy the rally if you dare — but be careful. The economy is weakening, the Fed is out of tricks to manipulate the financial markets, and, as always, there are bad things happening around the world.

My prediction: Stocks will keep going up until, one day, they will come down — and hard.

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I want to finish my thoughts that I started last Tuesday about Quantitative Easing Ad Infinitum.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has managed to get interest rates down to dirt-cheap levels. But that hasn’t helped the US economy, which is barely growing and could very well already be in another recession.

And despite a positive jump in existing home sales reported last week by the National Association of Realtors (a group that had to revise its sales figure downward by a massive amount not too long ago), even the housing market hasn’t benefited much from Bernanke’s efforts.

Most of the sales improvement seems to be coming from bargain-hunting investors. The Fed itself reported recently that mortgage lending fell to a 16-year low in 2011, despite the lower borrowing costs.

But the worst effect of all of Bernanke’s policies is this: People who rely on the income from their savings are getting squashed from both ends — higher prices for things like gasoline and a lower return on their savings.

john.crudele@nypost.com