The Labor Department will re port big increases in the number of newly created jobs in each of the next two months — and this is going to cause a bunch of problems.

Call it statistics on steroids.

As I correctly predicted last Thursday, the number of alleged new jobs created in April was much better than Wall Street expected. How’d I get it right?

It’s simple. Until the “experts” take into account the statistical juice being provided by Labor to its numbers in the form of optimistic assumptions, they will continue to be off on their predictions.

Wall Street’s record on anticipating economic stats coming out of Washington is abysmal. The million-dollar economists employed by the financial community would have a better track record if they made their calls using Lotto balls. This problem has been going on for nearly three years: Washington’s adjustments for the seasons of the year have been thrown off because the severe recession and the anemic recovery have crossed up the government’s computers.

That’s precisely what happened to Friday’s employment number.

The Labor Department reported that 244,000 new non-farm jobs were created in April. Wall Street expected only about 180,000 — and the difference between those two numbers is worth billions to investors.

To get its job count up to 244,000, the Labor Department added 175,000 jobs that it thinks and hopes — but can’t prove — actually exist.

These 175,000 jobs are what Uncle Sam believes are being created by newly-formed companies. This is called the Birth/Death Model by Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics for those of you who’d like to look it up on http://www.bls.gov.

Since economic growth in 2011 has clearly slowed (even the Commerce Department’s gross domestic product figures, as well as other employment data, show this) Labor’s guess on the number of new companies being created is a case of wishful thinking and faulty computer programming.

And the optimism — and the resulting problems — will only grow with the May and June employment numbers.

That’s because Labor added 191,000 and 131,000, respectively, in May and June of 2010 for the jobs it hopes, but can’t prove, are being created by newly formed companies. At the end of each of those years the government needed to issue corrections because most of jobs added under the Birth/Death Model proved illusory.

This year’s guesstimates have been running higher than 2010’s, so the job count that will be reported on June 3 and July 8 (for May and June, respectively) are going to be strong.

That’s a guarantee.

Why is this bad?

For one thing, it’s not good to frustrate job seekers by sending them out on a search for employment that doesn’t really exist. Even worse, if large numbers of people suddenly start looking for jobs (and not finding them) the nation’s unemployment rate could rise sharply from the already bulky 9 percent recorded last week.

If Labor ends up reporting two more months of large employment gains (as hokey as I’m telling you these numbers are), then the Federal Reserve will need to prematurely start tightening credit conditions. The Fed may not intentionally raise interest rates, but it will have to start talking tough.

Talk alone will cause the financial markets to boost borrowing costs, which will slow an economy that come summer could be crawling. (Even Labor’s bubbly employment numbers will lose their fizz by August.)

And this’ll all happen because nobody realizes that Labor’s numbers are wrong. (This would all be darkly humorous if it wasn’t so potentially disastrous.)

Barry Bonds‘ home run statistics are always questioned because of his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. Labor’s figure should be viewed in the same way.

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Retailers like to compare “same store” sales to show how their business is doing from one year to the next. But there’s a problem with this gauge. Can you figure out what it is?

Well, what about stores that have been closed since the previous year?

For instance, if Kmart has a store in Middletown, NJ, and it’s still open but one of its nearby stores closes (or a similar retailer closes), then that surviving store will obviously get more business from people who used to go to the closed store.

But overall consumers won’t necessarily be spending more at stores.

So, in other words, this too is a misleading economic indicator. Just thought I’d mention it before anyone else figures it out.

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There is a lot of chatter lately about management changes at Goldman Sachs. The New York Times used up a lot of space recently wonder ing if Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was ready to retire.

Me? I’m wondering if retirements will come before indictments.

Congress recently referred evidence of wrongdoing concerning Goldman to the Justice Department. But, as I’ve been saying, Goldman’s bigger risk is that someone will look into whether the firm repeatedly received confidential information from its government friends during the Bush Administration. john.crudele@nypost.com