Gold, a static commodity, outperforming stock indices is practically a shout from the top of a mountain that companies are doing terribly because they cannot produce returns greater than the inflation of commodity prices.
Look at how many treasuries the large banks are buying in anticipation of lower rates.
The corporate media and the Federal Reserve (of Public Relation) just want to paper over it long enough for the large players to get positioned before the rest of the market realizes it.
For the next 50 years or so, we have to accept that the US is a housing-anchored gerontocracy, with younger people expected to be the underclass serving the elderly. There are no checks and balances against the elderly in the US government, and of course there never will be.
* eliminate taxes on employing people
* stop runaway inflation
That first sentence really sets the tone, not just of the article, but also of the current political climate.
Trump did (baselessly?) fire the BLS head, but it was because of revisions that looked convenient for the last administration.
Yes, revisions are valid and happen. Yes, a look at historical revisions don't show any bias.
But where are you seeing that half made Trump look good?
For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:
1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous
2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.
US labor and economics statistics is famously most reliable in the world, going further back in time than any other statistics source. Its not only used by the government but by banks, companies, and international organisations to predict and analyze economic trends.
But surely this year when the numbers looked a bit bad, they made the numbers to intentionally look that way? Simply no. The administration firing the people collection statistics is the real concern. (and its not the first time the administration has removed historical statistics either)
(manual revisions are made in statistics to compensate for anomalies. Companies stocking up on product to escape tariffs created a false peak in GDP that does not correspond to real consumption for example. But that's how statistics work, and the US is the gold standard in proper statitics)
"many businesses do not have their payroll data ready to report by the scheduled date that BLS initially releases the data."
"BLS continues to collect outstanding reports from the businesses in the sample as it prepares a second and then a third estimate for the month. With each subsequent estimate, more businesses have provided their information."
"and occasionally the revised data produce a different picture altogether."
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numb...
"the revisions aren’t mistakes. They’re a deliberate, transparent part of a statistical process designed to balance two competing goals: providing timely economic information while ensuring the greatest possible accuracy."
https://govfacts.org/federal/labor/why-job-numbers-change-ho...
What does the last administration even have to do with this? Job growth plummeted under the current administration. I get that Trump blames Biden for everything because he always needs a scapegoat, but am shocked that anyone still gives that any weight given that Trump has very publicly and deliberately created the current economic trouble.
Trump fired a statistician because the numbers reported were politically inconvenient, not because they were incorrect.
But a sudden drop in jobs would be a pretty good indicator of the collapse of those businesses.
Truly just masterstrokes of policy from the current administration. Well maybe people will finally start paying attention when what's left of American manufacturing eats shit. You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical though. Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.
They're right here on HN as well.
And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.
Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?
This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.
It's much easier for huge, established companies to do this (easier to absorb because they already have huge teams of procurement specialists, lawyers, etc). I think that's at least part of the point in the first place.
They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).
In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.
Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.
The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).
Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.
Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.
Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit. The Jones Act has not saved American shipbuilding from a moribund, barely-alive state; the chicken tax just makes people buy stupidly huge and overpriced trucks which can’t be exported and contribute to the international effectiveness of the US auto industry; sugar tariffs make us all unhealthier by giving bailouts to corn farmers to put HFCS in everything, and so on.
I can’t think of a single case of the United States surgically using tariffs to build a healthy domestic industry that benefits American citizens— I don’t think even competent adults could pull this off, never mind the clown circus we have now.
Maybe some better-run country could use tariffs well; when you have doofuses like ours it’s probably best to stick with the safe route of free trade and friendshoring.
Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.
We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.
But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.
Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.
A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.
Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.
IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.
Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.
The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.
Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.
Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.
Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.
For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"
It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.
[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...
> When the authors look only at the preferences of average citizens, it appears that they do have a pretty big effect on policy change. But when they add the preferences of economic elites and interest groups to the analysis, the impact of average citizens vanishes entirely. Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.
There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.
To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.
The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.
(Note I am not saying I 100% agree with the near-global tariffs, but I can see why they cover so many regions.)
- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?
- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?
- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.
Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?
That's too subtle and long term for Trump. The subsidies have been torn up and the tariffs tripled. Now it'll be far more expensive to build the manufacturing capacity in America.
And another ~1/3 were comfortable enough with this to not bother voting.
I think people deserve what they vote for.
Kinda have to agree with this.
It's a team sport.
Learned that in high school.
Fourth and one inside the two yard line? Sorry bud. Coach called a pass play, so you get to take that L with everyone else.
Shoulda had a better coach.
Benefit of democratic government is that you get exactly the government you deserve. We can recover. There will be more elections. But even then we'll get what we vote for, no more and no less.
That's not a run race.
Job numbers during Biden's presidency, and early in Trump's presidency were also wildly over-estimated.
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
Tariffs might be a factor, but there's also a wider economic downturn globally at the moment. Canada lost 66k jobs in august, UK unemployment rate rose to 4.7%, Europe as a whole has slowing growth, deflation is becoming crisis-level in China and unemployment is rising.
All economists and financial analysts seem to say so:
“It will be difficult for the U.S. to avoid a recession if the tariffs stay at the level that’s been announced,” Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors.
"Fong says that could lead to changes in businesses’ cost structures, such as downsizing operations and laying off workers."
https://time.com/7275987/trump-tariffs-global-economy-recess...
"J.P.Morgan ratcheted up its odds for a U.S. and global recession to 60%, as brokerages scrambled to revise their forecast models with tariff distress threatening to sap business confidence and slow down global growth."
https://www.reuters.com/markets/jpmorgan-lifts-global-recess...
"industries impacted by tariffs have shed tens of thousands of jobs."
"Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, observed job growth in tariff-impacted sectors is negative, while those not affected by tariffs have seen slower growth but remain in positive territory."
https://fortune.com/2025/09/08/tariff-job-losses-trump-trade...
“Tariffs represent a negative supply shock, which hurts production and raises prices – a much smaller scale of what we experienced in the pandemic,” Nationwide economist Kathy Bostjancic wrote earlier this year.
https://thehill.com/business/5488614-us-economy-adds-22k-job...
Tens of millions of people voted for this rather exuberantly.
- Not believe the data (it's a hoax, rigged, fake news etc) or
- Blame the current issues on the previous administration or do a whataboutism justification or
- Don't really care because deporting immigrants / owning the libs / pretending trans people don't exist etc are more important
Americans still have it pretty good in that respect. Over here in EU my country gets to enjoy 9% unemployment rate and many times more job seekers than jobs.
Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.
It's no secret that companies put up job listings they either have no intention of filling or are simply H1B fraud (impossible listings used to justify an eventual H1B hire).
This would make the "true" number of open jobs within a sector far, far worse than reported.
Comparing jobseekers to job openings is also a very imprecise approach. For certain industries, the gap is bound to be far worse than for others. And the same is true when you look at it by level, experience, etc.
The US is thus in a weird position where equity markets look OK... largely boosted by gains in a small selection of companies (in what's perhaps an AI fueled bubble) and the economy looks a tad rough but not horrible. The real impact of tariffs + broader economic policy is being underrepresented in the data.
This can only last so long. Eventually, inventories will be depleted and tariff impacts will rear their head. Eventually, the true unemployment rate will result in increased eviction rates, lower savings rates, and lower median consumption.
Agreed and on multiple fronts.
e.g. I can imagine that white collar workers may not claim unemployment due to a combination of embarrassment/"I don't need it as much as other folks" so the numbers are probably under-reported there.
I've also heard it's bad for recent grads but then a recent grad I know sent me the below:
"I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, and honestly, it’s pretty silly. Yes, tech majors are definitely over saturated, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t be able to go to school for four years, do the bare minimum the entire time, and get a great job after college. From my experience, everyone who worked really really hard and knew their stuff got to a place that they’re happy with"
The above could have been what I said back in 2002 right after the dotcom boom. In other words, it's unclear if companies are hiring fewer junior folks, junior folks were benefiting from ZIRP/boom market or a combination of both.
It also notes that health care isnt productive. It's a measure of societal overhead, basically. Yet that was by far one of the largest sources for new jobs.
https://archive.ph/2025.09.08-053701/https://www.ft.com/cont...
It is absolutely worrisome, and does connect with my own personal experience visiting other states for work - there is a slowdown in most states aside from those with large diversified economies like CA, TX, NY, FL, and NC that also benefited from the IRA [1], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
Those states with moderate expansion like PA, OH, IN, AZ, and SC are also those that had manufacturing industries that benefited from the IRA [0], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
The states marked as "Treading Water" or "In Recession" didn't receive significant economic stimulus on a per capita basis (eg. Clean energy jobs created in GA vs IN were similar despite GA receiving double the amount of IRA funding and GA having almost 1.7x the population of Indiana) and lack diversified or semi-diversified economies
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160699
[1] - https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/map-which-states-ar...
[2] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...
Much of real estate is also a net drag that isn't productive...
Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.
I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
But he's wrong that it's new: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bls-jobs-report-revision-trump-...
Who knows if it'll end up improving with someone new. The BLS is using pretty outdated and poor data collection methods, but it hasn't changed in decades. My guess is that nothing will change with someone new, but who knows.
1. From money printing
2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.
Any job growth numbers and conclusions about the economy need to take the above into account.
And the Federal layoffs from the DOGE nonsense haven’t even started to hurt since so many are still getting paid.
Something else is the source of this…
A US president is allowed to print money? Please cite your sources that Biden printed money.
> 2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.
Federal govt. employee count has stayed relatively stable since the 1960s at 1.5% and 2% of the total US workforce.
Here is the share of US Federal Civilian Workforce Compensation as a Percentage of GDP (2016–2024). If you look closely you might notice that the cost of federal workforce compared to GDP actually went down in the Biden years.
Year Share of GDP (%)
2016 1.49
2017 1.49
2018 1.46
2019 1.36
2020 1.42
2021 1.42
2022 1.37
2023 1.31
2024 1.27
Furthermore, federal govt. employee count remained steady under Obama. And grew during Trump's first term. And then shrunk under Biden.
If you are voting based on your incorrectly held beliefs, you are doing us all, your fellow countrymen, a disservice.
Optimistically, the drop could be from temporary higher employment due to folks rushing to import additional goods before the tariffs came into effect. This might dissipate as excess stock levels reduce.
How much though remains to be seen, as tariffs generally will make things tougher, unless something else compensates (unlikely).
cranberryturkey•5h ago
trod1234•4h ago
javanissen•3h ago
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
Supermancho•2h ago
It seems to apply, despite your dismissal. Inflation is an ongoing and pressing concern, as stated by the Federal Reserve. The tightening of monetary policy has contributed to unemployment. GDP is irrelevant, as stagflation is a paradox, not a goalpost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
To whit:
> In economic theory, there are two main explanations for stagflation: supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly.
quantified•4h ago
nickff•3h ago
m00x•2h ago
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
It's strange that CNBC here decided to use the unrevised numbers instead of the more accurate revised numbers, especially when leading into the election.
Supermancho•1h ago
Tech and Manufacturing have been.