The data covers the period from March 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,000.
50% error. This is more or less consistent. How can a department have this error % and still have their job. I understand the data collection mechanism is not the most sophisticated, but even accounting for that, this consistent error % is not to be overlooked.
I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.
My null hypothesis might be that the BLS works for the government, so how can they not be under (implicit) pressure to goal-seek their figures.
Once the figure has been published, and widely reported, it can be revised downwards months later, few will care. The system may be broken by design.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Q: Why would one trust initial BLS jobs figures under this - or indeed any other - administration?
> This is dressing your conscious biases in sciensism
BLS figures being revised downward month after month after month is data, not bias.
Actual data would be measuring predictions vs accuracy over several decades.
The quarterly numbers come from better data sources (tax withholding, unemployment insurance payments, etc)
The worst case is that both the statistics orgs and the users are adjusting the numbers for a bias and overshooting.
This means there's a certain inertia: it can be better to handle the interim reports the same, even if they've been biased one way for several years, than to introduce a change that makes the numbers not comparable to history.
> 50% error.
It's not a 50% error; it's a 50% error in the magnitude of the change.
That's like saying that my room increased from 71.4 to 71.6 degrees, but my thermometer only saw an increase from 71.4 to 71.5; therefore, my thermostat has a 50% error.
This is a very interesting point. So if BLS suddenly became more accurate, all the agencies have to re-tune their own biases and corrections => Could lead to short term discrepancies.
What one sees as inefficiency is actually efficient from a totally different lens.
But you don't want to change what you're doing all the time, so you stay an easy product for everyone else to use.
(Interesting that this "overreport jobs in the preliminary numbers" bias has showed up; in older data using similar methodology it didn't exist, but now it seems to...)
Over time they get better numbers relating to previous quarters and they revise their numbers.
Also employers can report revised numbers for a quarter, to make corrections.
Revisions and surprises are routine. Data comes in gradually, but estimates are useful even before all data has arrived. Early data is based on business reporting and businesses that report on-time aren't necessarily representative of all businesses. Those people who use this data know this, and prepare for revisions.
I hope this helps and you understand better. Anyone here who still thinks this is still incompetence or corruption because surveys come late?
>I wonder why there is such lack of accountability from firms whose data pretty much feeds the world's economy.
Create punishment system? Unless compaies report data back to BLS very fast, they pay big fee or are taxed higher. Small shops would hate it.
Or incentivize companies to report accurate data pretty fast. Payroll management systems can be plugged in real time, but that costs money and yeah small businesses are not going to be happy. So incentivization works better than punishment I think.
Calling this a 50% error rate is simply wrong. If an earlier report said a single job had been created and that was later revised to two jobs, that would be super humanly accurate and yet you would be calling for everyone to be fired over the 100% error rate.
I get it and yeah my tone is very exaggerated. I don't think anyone in BLS should be fired and whoever is suggesting that does not understand how public institutions work.
I am just curious why there is so much of a discrepancy. This has been pretty much the status quo in BLS for a long time. They issue numbers and then they revise them later. However, you'd expect the revision to be moderately within an error %age.
Also how will this retroactive change help everyone involved. Ok, the new job numbers reflect a gloomier past (or a more vibrant past) how is that even helping everyone who is so focused on 'what's going to happen tomorrow'.
I retract my stance about BLS being intentionally corrupt - that's uncalled for.
I advise you to do a little reading on how these reports are corrected. People relying on them understand how they work. People freaking out about them don't.
A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example).
What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volatile 20% of jobs (mining, manufacturing, retail, etc.). The BLS can't really change their methods to catch up with this change for classic backwards compatibility and tech debt reasons.
Part of the reason 'being a quant' is so hot right now is that we truly are in weird times where volatility is much higher than most people realize across sectors of the economy (i.e. AI is changing formerly rock-solid SWE employment trends, tariffs/electricity are quickly and randomly changing domestic manufacturing profitability, etc.). This means that if you can build systems that track data better than the old official systems, you can make some decent money investing against your knowledge.
I think this is a bad state of affairs, but I don't have a good solution. Any private company won't release their data b/c it's too valuable and I am reluctant to encourage the BLS to rip up their methods when backwards compatibility is a feature worth saving.
Manufacturing and mining are becoming much less correlated to the overall jobs market (likely, as you point out, b/c the government smooths the other sectors).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc3I
This is despite being a relatively flat % of employment since 2010 (after a long period of decline).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc4f
As mentioned, there is also the weirdness of SWE's going from 'better than the overall market' to 'worse than the overall market'.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mcer
Retail employment is also dislocating.
Those are just the examples I can think of with no research, I'm sure there are others.
The lag is because it is based on employer submissions that are quarterly or annual.
Parsing tax or SS payments for what a "job" is would be a logistical nightmare, because that's not what the system is designed for (unlike the BLS's system, which is designed to count jobs).
It isn't until the employer files their quarterly Form 941 that you'd see employment numbers. Form 941 includes the number of employees and total wages and withholding.
It isn't until the annual W-2 filings that you would see a breakdown that includes number of employees and the individual pay.
Who has that data then? Treasury?
I came across this claim last week regarding recent US jobs figures:
> "All jobs gains were part time. Full-time jobs: -357K. Part-time jobs: +597K"
If this claim is true, and I have no means to tell if it is, then - regardless of one's view on whoever is in power right now - do we really expect any elected representatives to be brave enough to say that out loud at a press conference?
I don't :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
I sure hope not, because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themselves unable to raise prices further and consumers find themselves unable to demand greater pay at work.
Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation. It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_F...
It worked. Volcker's actions are widely credited with ending self-reinforcing high inflation. His actions also triggered a recession.
Stagflation itself triggered a stock market crash in 1973-1974. It took over 20 years, until 1993, for the US stock market to recover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market...
Like I said, it would be extremely unpleasant, for everyone. I hope we don't end up with stagflation.
Politicians of course tried to take control of the Fed. They also tried to fire him. At one point he needed Secret Service protection. Here's an article from the 1980's about it:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-05-fi-492-st...
I knew that, but my puny little brain somehow didn't catch it as I was writing my comment.
What's the mechanism? People are distracted by the amount of cotton production, which is the perfect time to falsify an earnings report?
I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts?
What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metrics. We'd all be doing our best to get fat as fuck.
Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.
Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.
This is what they did in Weimar Germany, Erdogan’s Turkey and Argentina. You’re describing massive deficit spending and inflation.
> If bids are won but they go and fuck all the money away send them to jail
Add in Ba’athist Iraq.
Also, guess what you do to fuck over your competitors in this system? You sabotage their supply chains. The politically connected wind up with all the tenders because they’re the only ones who can build.
> This is how stuff worked before people became obsessed with metrics
Literally never how it has worked in any functioning society. When you see this sort of strong arming, it describes a society in decline. The Late Roman Empire. The British in Suez. The French in Indochine. The Russians in Ukraine.
Is jailing fraudsters really the equivalent of some failed Iragi regime? I think you could make a better argument.
What do you think should be done about the state of the USA economy? Do you even see any problems that need addressing? I have a feeling venture capitalists see wildly different incentives from the laborers.
Media and GOP have talked about other items like immigration, taxes etc which impact the economy.
And if this is about metrics then GDP, budget deficits etc are also economic metrics talked about in the media.
https://fortune.com/article/buffett-how-inflation-swindles-t...
Does it get better?
Hint: What time period do you think he's talking about?
And why wouldn't the stock market be considered a valid investment in the presence of inflation? Where else are you supposed to park your cash if you want to outperform TIPS? Remember that in the 1970s there basically was no retail stock market compared to what we have now, where everyone and their dog has a 401(k) and trading is basically free.
Even if valid, his point doesn't seem relevant. It is going to be hard to apply any lessons from the 1970s to what we're facing now, when incompetent and erratic policymakers are driving the US economic picture rather than external influences like OPEC and Viet Nam. (And if we thought OPEC was a malevolent cartel, just wait'll the rest of the world starts forging its own trade agreements without inviting us to participate.)
The last time we had sudden unexpected high inflation was 2022 and stocks crashed did they not?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA
I have no opinion on whether the article is relevant I was only responding to the sentence you quoted which didn't seem obviously incorrect.
Also, a 'crash' that recovers in 90 days isn't much of a 'crash', but the fact that people consider it a 'crash' is admittedly kind of scary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_stock_market_decline
Perhaps you would have preferred if I said "bear market" rather than crash.
At any rate the first sentence of that Buffet article you hated didn't deserve your ire.
[EDIT] If you think we're in for a long period (decades) in which nobody will do what's needed to break out of stagflation and we're going to head the way of various inflationary South American economies over the past century, I guess look at Europe? IDK, it'll be bad everywhere if that happens.
Depends on the type of debt, of course. If it's a fixed term loan, and you'll definitely never need to refinance it, sure.
What exactly would one do with a 2 million dollar loan? Please don’t say real estate.
What a mess.
Thanks for the help.
/I haven't got a base pay increase in 4 years
In some cities you get time-sharing beds. In 2003 I lived (for 3 weeks) in a house in London, I had my own room - the largest in the house. A smaller room had a couple with a baby, the loft had 3 mattresses in it but 4 people living there, time-sharing with the mattresses like you have in a nuclear submarine.
There's plenty of opportunity for landlords to increases costs even if peoples incomes can't support an increase.
So the solution historically has been stable goods. Gold is the historic standard, but probably Bitcoin now as well. Possibly foreign stocks/currencies. But since everything is so interlinked now with pensions and 401ks that the financial world is far different place than the 70s. If you really want a safe bet, it's that there will be a fair bit of volatility and every asset class will have more risk with spikes up and down. All of this depends heavily on how the U.S. responds along the way.
https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Amid-Low-Expected-Returns/d...
Deciding that stagflation is coming and changing you asset allocation based on a solicitation of opinions from random people is probably a bad idea.
If nothing else you should look for academic papers on ways to estimate expected inflation instead of asking for opinions here.
If you’re aggressive, issue long-term, fixed rate debt and buy whatever you think everyone else will view as personally meaningful or currently-productive, provided someone didn’t beat you to it.
Arguably we’re 40 years into the “cash is trash” trade so everyone is in a little bit of suspense what happens next.
In the case of inflation/stagflation it would be physical assets that increase in value under such circumstances. Gold/Silver meet this, as do many other assets. Under such environments counterparty-risk must be carefully evaluated.
All of your mentioned standard strategies have opaque and significant banking counter-party risk. There are also details such as the YTM loophole where the assets you hold may not have been marked to market (when interest rates go up).
This is particularly true of any bonds, or bond backed securities, and the leverage involved in many such markets is next to impossible to discern, and as a result the average advice of passive investment breaks down towards losses in the near term but not long-term.
None of this is financial advice, just reiterating things people should already know about. The stock market's synthetic share problem coupled with dark pools, and the commodity market's (COMEX) fail to delivers and failure to loadout (physical delivery), are things to know about. Unspecified risk from bad actors.
Its all paper with substantial counter-party risk until you hold it in your hands.
My guess is that real estate will not do well in general. However there are always exceptions, but I don't know if the exception is in Dallas Texas (random big city), or Chaseley North Dakota (random place not even a town, cannot support even one store)
Anyway... gold is all about wealth preservation, not growth, so I don't know what to tell you. But it is up 44% over the last year.
[1] www.bogleheads.org/forum
Also, not enough people talk about housing prices in high interest rate environments. Mortgage payments are the thing that tether housing prices, and act as a lever. We see it today with just an extra 4% with low housing volume and people reluctant to sell, because then they’d need a new mortgage at the new rate. People who would like to downsize don’t since their mortgage payments often ends up similar.
However as 15% interest rates implies an inflation rate far higher than 2.3% that argument breaks. With 7% inflation on a 100k house it's worth 760k after 30 years, more than the 600k in the 300k range.
Of course what that means in terms of big macs you can buy is different.
Not only that but if your salary keeps up with inflation, and you overpay the mortgage, you'll have cleared the 100k/7% inflation mortgage in 10 years but it will take 18 years to clear the 300k mortgage.
Sure, having your wage not decrease in real terms is a different challenge, but if that does happen then you're far better off with the 15% interest rate situation.
If we were to also raise broad based taxes, it would allow the Fed to cut interest rates, stoking long term investment, loosen up the housing market (which would allow more people to move), lower the Federal deficit, and improve the trade balance (as if that actually mattered).
But given Trump policies in toto, I am having trouble coming up with what a winner looks like here.
Big oil I suppose. But that's a damn narrow demographic if everything else is hurting. And overall economic malaise won't juice oil demand.
If anyone can characterize the class of economic winners ... ?
If democrats don't retake congress we are cooked. This means people are okay with whatever is happening.
Or it means the game has been rigged which is exactly the point of all the gerrymandering going on right now. Tons of people are not okay with what is happening but their power to replace their government representative has been or is currently being effectively stolen from them.
We’ve already lost export market share. China, Russia and India have already begun building a trade bloc. FDI has already been trashed.
We’re already in for a world of hurt. And personally, I’m eager to ensure it lands disproportionately on his voters and donors.
That would certainly be nice, but we're all in the boat together. There is no safe haven when idiots are in charge.
But you see, dogs and cats were being eaten, and the other lady cackled too much...
I fear you're right, but hope you're not.
Yes, this is wishful thinking on my part.
I don't want to wish ill on anyone.
The horse has bolted, you can't ctrl-z this.
I have some bad news. It's already some 8 months too late for "rapid".
> Not enough time has really passed for things to change _that_ much
Here in Brazil we are in a mini economic boom because every single country is willing to pay a premium on anything that didn't come from the US. The EU is shutting up internal racist and protectionist dissidents (strong on their 2 largest economies) so that they can diversify from you. Most of the world is discussing independent payment systems... Nato countries are organizing to defend against the US and China and Russia are promising military protection to Latin America.
I wonder if things changed that fast when WWI started, but it absolutely never changed that fast in my lifetime.
I'm European, not American. I think that if given strong guarantees that Trump had been declawed, the EC would be happy enough to return to prior arrangements (though probably move ahead with the Mercosur deal and other trade treaties at an accelerated pace, granted).
Probably more importantly, the US has lost trust.
Plenty of countries have elections that are neither free nor fair. More likely Election Day suddenly ceases to occur.
"A republic, if you can keep it"
The question I put to every individual American is: can you?
Our closest allies do not see us as a reliable partner anymore.
That's not going to change for quite some time, AFTER we start moving in a direction amenable to them again.
We are still swimming violently against the currents of our allies.
Trump's inconsistent tariff and policy flip flopping means no one trusts the US to behave rationally and predictably.
The fact that the US population elected him a second time means that the US as a whole can't be trusted to behave like rational adults.
Decades or centuries of reputation has been thrown away. That can't be changed just by a new face saying "sorry we want to take it back".
It's amazing how few people seem to understand this. Countries are oil tankers, they take years to turn even a little - and that's a good thing. In 2000 the world broadly knew what was going to happen, Gore and BushII would implement pretty much the same policies. Same thing in 2008 when it was McCain and Obama.
Sure you get some minor tweaks to policies which don't really affect much in aggregate.
Even in 2016 Trump was unable to make massive changes, because the state is built to prevent that from happening. The US does not elect a monarch. Things take forever by design, and it's really frustrating when you want it, but it also means one person or one administration can't make a major impact, it takes a generation of pushing the overton window in the direction.
Once you break that, you have a jetski zipping around, then you can't rely on stability, it becomes riskier to invest than investing in a country with a dictator.
It is a constitutional monarchy with an elected, time-limited king.
Monarchies generally have (and had) lots of checks on the king's power. Not necessarily the kinds of checks we would like, of course. The rights of the nobility were well-protected, the rights of landless commoners were not.
Executive orders are memos, not laws. The President has no power for legislation or budget or tariffing. We're supposed to require legislative review of any emergency actions, like using the military.
> It is a constitutional monarchy with an elected, time-limited king.
> Constitutional monarchy, also known as limited monarchy, parliamentary monarchy or democratic monarchy, is a form of monarchy in which the monarch exercises their authority in accordance with a constitution and is not alone in making decisions.[1][2][3] Constitutional monarchies differ from absolute monarchies (in which a monarch is the only decision-maker) in that they are bound to exercise powers and authorities within limits prescribed by an established legal framework. A constitutional monarch in a parliamentary democracy is a hereditary symbolic head of state (who may be an emperor, king or queen, prince or grand duke) who mainly performs representative and civic roles but does not exercise executive or policy-making power.[4]
This is largely but not entirely true. It's also largely true by convention/Realpolitik ("try and exercise your powers and see how long you stay king!") and not by law.
> absolute monarchies (in which a monarch is the only decision-maker)
The monarch was essentially never the only decision maker in absolute monarchies. Nominally, yes. In practice, not at all. Going against too many established interested was seriously bad for the monarch's health.
No, that's the guy that got elected. The one very smart at nuclear
This! I mean think about it for a second. That is around 80 million voters.
Trump or no Trump, our country isn't the cool kid on the block anymore.
What I'm saying is that these types of systems have "inertia" and can be exceptionally long lived in their 'bad' state, regardless of the policies used to try to get them out of that state.
That's how we get Boomers going on rampant climate change denialism.
Since I tend to be interested in systems, especially emergent ones, this is something I find interesting but recognize that the world generally considers economists more boring than accountants :-). When one discusses the 'graph going up' or 'growth' is that prices? GDP? Employment? Opportunity? I've been in conversations where several different definitions of 'growth' were being used that got confusing because there wasn't an agreement on what the y axis was measuring.
What they’re less convinced about is what to do about it. I agree with those who say we need to do practical preparation for the inevitable consequences rather than try to turn back the clock in a fit of fear and futility.
Norway can exit oil today and return its entire population to pre-WW2 poverty and last time I checked the effect on the world’s climate would be a .1% reduction in Co2 emissions, rounded up.
Meanwhile nobody, and least not a western country, is going to tell India and China to reverse course back into the obscurity of underdevelopment.
So any sane conclusion is that oil will eventually run out, so let’s use it as efficiently as possible to prepare for the inevitable change in climate we’re already seeing, regardless of its cause because it’s an unstoppable object.
The other point that simplified analysis fails to consider is that you are inside the system so as it "grows", it also "changes". If you lived in the 70's with the tales of how we're going to run out of fossil fuels by 2000, looking back you can see how things changed (cars got more efficient, other sources were discovered, etc).
My macroeconomics professor had a funny saying that you could take any segment of a sinusoid and use that to extrapolate forward and get the wrong answer about what the waveform was going to do. In my differential equations class we got to see how you could predict some things if you new both the initial conditions and you continued to refine your model. But to predict all things your model needed to take into account all variables and their impact, and it was the unknown variable problem that messed up predictions using that method.
We are absolutely not printing money fast enough to realize this dream, unfortunately. I propose we mint a new bill, the 100 trillion non-Zimbabwe dollar, and 10x our printing speed.
The Trillion Dollar Coin[1] was a real thing oddly. And I have always wondered if was the inspiration for Sam Bankman-frieid's crypto scam with FTX to mint your own crypto token that you could claim was worth billions so that your ledgers added up "in theory."
In fact, every person in the country could take turns with the banana for a brief period of time (provided they quickly sell it to the next person) which should enable broad prosperity for all.
There will be no broad prosperity for all from that banana trading, all it serves is to further pump the inflatable house, and it will eventually pop and leave people to realize they've been conned by "financial engineers". And then, the pitchforks will come out.
I think one danger for western countries is having governments that just move from one bad policy of one kind to a bad policy from the other end of the political spectrum. Look at what’s happened recently with resignations at the highest levels of government in multiple countries. And in America, if Trump gets replaced by someone who is put forth as a reaction to him, are they going to really do any good? Even if they had great policies, they’d be in danger of being undone a few years later. There isn’t the same guarantee of consistent forward progress that a country of China seems to be enjoying.
And obeying the Constitution
And a lot of other things that are never going to happen
It will take a decade to dig out of this hole
And then there will be 11 million people "disappeared" from labor market
They are on a crime-spree, you don't do this much damage without malice
Look at what they are doing to the WhiteHouse Oval Office, Rose Garden, ballroom, look at the BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance for a personal jumbo jet, etc. etc.
Edit: having said that, "these economic problems are ENTIRELY the result of bad policies". That's a very bold claim, which warrants some strong evidence. No one has provided any strong evidence that it's ENTIRELY from bad policies.
Avg monthly "clean energy" jobs so far: - 2023: ~3.38M - 2024: ~3.45M - 2025: ~3.42M
Any impact to the economy due to "green job project cancellations" wouldn't have surfaced yet.
Uncertainty about tariffs: it was already on the books to earn $2.3T (conventional) / $1.5T (dynamic) over the next 10yrs, and inflation is far more under control than it was last year despite the tariffs. Of course legal challenges have disrupted it now. This is also completely ignoring the massive investment foreign countries/companies are making on US Soil to employ US employees.
In my opinion, the AI hype cycle has temporarily buoyed the economy from more serious pain. If significant economic gains aren't realized from it soon I think we'll begin to see that pull back.
I do, however, think a return to ZIRP by the Fed would result in a significant economic boost. Psychologically, everyone remembers how advantageous low interest rates are and I think it could result in real investor/borrower optimism, temporarily, if we go back to that. Unfortunately, that would likely mainly stimulate the demand side of the economy, and not as much supply. I don't have high hopes for how that would affect inflation.
God at least back in the day partisan hacks tried to hide it a little bit
You coyly suggested that there were other contributors at play to multiple people who suggested what bad policies are causing the economic issues and then didn’t provide them until called out.
You’re running partisan defense when you act that way
You aren't trying to have a conversation. Have a good day, I have better things to do.
Tariffs affect households unevenly [0], but I think it would be fair to characterize them as broad based taxes.
[0] Some good info here: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-septemb...
Tariffs are broad based regressive taxes, falling predominantly on the lower deciles of the income distribution.
The OP seems to be proposing broad based progressive taxes. However the place to start first, politically speaking, is raising taxes the 10th decile.
When has it not been? It's how we actually determine the allocation of resources
Wasn't a news story then, but is now b/c trump.
At least, this allows Europe to rise, again.
I dont recall too many foreign leaders stating that they envied the American economy.
Last administration cooked the books on BLS numbers for nearly 2 years
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...
There are a number of subjects now where its almost to the point where any discussion is fruitless because anyone talking is getting punished by third-parties, and moderation aint doing a thing about them.
Your right it will be real bad, much worse than before because most of the Volcker recovery was on the back of the global adoption of the petrodollar. The situation is the exact opposite today where you not only have petrodollar pools of money coming back domestically but also runaway government spending.
If you compare our modern economics with that of Argentina over the past 100 years, we seem to be following the same policy pitfalls. These things largely only happen because of excessive money-printing under fiat, certain government policy and regulation can cause it as well.
Markets currently don't expect significantly higher inflation in the long term, as the "10 year breakeven inflation rate" ("The latest value implies what market participants expect inflation to be in the next 10 years, on average.") is fairly stable: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE By my understanding, this is supposed to trend towards 2.0% when everything is hunky-dory; things are not perfect, but they look fine to me in historical perspective. Similarly for e.g. this 5-year forward chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIFR
> Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation
Yes, and that's how we made sure that the inflation peak in 2022 didn't become self-reinforcing. And as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, it worked.
> It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
Right. Current circumstances are very different. Posting this much about what you "hope doesn't happen" comes across as fear-mongering, given the lack of reason to expect it to happen. The tariff discourse allows people to throw around large, scary-sounding percentages, but in practice the corresponding price increases are on average much smaller. And the employment situation in the US is still very good in historical terms. (There are valid concerns about the methodology behind the headline unemployment rate, but it's still the same methodology.)
I should add: historically, increases in the unemployment rate have a tendency to accelerate and then produce a spike, which is then brought under control by some other mechanism, and tends to correspond with a recession. But this is just the normal boom-bust cycle, and seems rather unavoidable. The rate can't keep going down forever, and having it level out doesn't seem feasible, either. The magnitude of such a spike doesn't necessarily indicate the severity of economic downturn, either.
To the extent I come across as doubtful and concerned, it is only due to recent firsthand experiences buying food, clothes, and electronics. My perception is that prices are still rising in many product categories. Anecdotal evidence is not data, so I can't and won't make a prediction, but I think it's fair for me to express doubt and concern.
All I know for certain is that we'll find out as more data becomes available.
I'm not smart enough to fully evaluate if that's true, but it was an interesting theory to me at least.
Although raising interest rates tamped down inflation on the demand side, we don't give enough credit to Carter for attacking the supply side by deregulating energy markets.
Carter typically doesn't get credit because prices didn't really ease until he was out of office. However, it looks like energy prices wouldn't have decreased if Carter hadn't deregulated the oil and gas industry, which allowed domestic producers to become competitive. (Ironically, Carter thought deregulation would raise prices and foster a move to alternative energy. Instead we got shale oil and fracking. Unintended consequences.)
That's just not happening, no matter what happens.
The President is obsessed with lowering rates, because it personally enriches him, regardless of how it affects the economy. The cronies he has in line to replace Powell and the SCOTUS seeming like they'll back his unlawful removal of the Fed governors he doesn't like, means the independence of the Fed is guaranteed dead in, at most, 2026.
The businesses that should be pushing back just... Aren't? 5 billionaires just had a foot-kissing session with Trump. Law firms are capitulating. Most education institutions are capitulating. Companies would rather bribe Trump with gold statues (Apple) for their own short-term kickback than speak up even a tiny bit to prevent a mid-term economic collapse.
I genuinely don't see the US avoiding a self-inflicted (global) depression anymore.
As opposed to the current economic environment and that of the past 5 or so years, which absolutely nobody thinks is unpleasant.
Is there government waste? Sure, but that requires micro tweaks, aka instead of hiring more TSA agents maybe decide they shouldn't be randomly selecting every 3rd precheck user for additional screening/etc, or maybe decide that investing in even slower scanners isn't the right choice. Plus, in TX having seen some of these contracts the city/state gives out, the idea that private industry is more efficient is laughable. In some cases they are basically contracting out for millions of dollars a year a job that could be handled by one or two actual government employees paid less than $100k a year.
Republicans have done the exact opposite of balancing the budget at least since Reagan (inclusive) non-stop, zero R presidents have even done as well as democrats at pursuing a balanced budget since then, so they're not serious about it, including and perhaps especially Trump—but they really, really want to get their hands on social security, it's so much money out of the hands of rich people that they just can't stand it.
The federal tax revenue as percentage of GDP is remarkably stable regardless of widely varying income tax rates over the decades (ranging 15-20% since the 1940s): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN. This holds up no matter which regime (D or R) is dominant, because the economy reorganizes itself around incentives or disincentives created by various tax policies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_N...
A 100% equities (or 100% Enron) portfolio is not the only or best option available to the SSA. And the SS portfolio can't be panic-sold by the individual retiree in a market downswing. Using equities to achieve some additional upside for SS in one way or another is plausibly a reasonable idea.
Social Security is funded entirely by payroll tax deductions and invested only in treasury bonds. Bonds which have had very low yields in this century. Guess what you collect less of as automation and AI ramp up? Payroll taxes.
EDIT: I saw your comment here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45191291 Sounds like we agree.
The thing that makes these policies work, of course, is the $1 is cut from a billionaire's taxes, and the $4 is paid by the rest of us. Voters seem to like this policy, for reasons that are beyond me.
April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...
Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
There could be various reasons Trump wants to report bad numbers, such as pressuring the Fed to lower rates, or to establish a horrible baseline from which he can then report improvement on by the midterms.
It reminds of the soviet union reporting all sorts of bogus improvement statistics by implicitly using the worst possible baseline they could - from decades earlier.
Trump doesn’t play 3D chess like this, he just doesn’t. This is just him failing to have the iron grip he wants to have over things. Perhaps he’ll fire more civil servants in response, or he’ll get distracted by something else before he can do so.
That may someday be the case, but is is not yet. Trump fired the head, but the analysis and reports are still being produced by the professional career statisticians that have long worked there.
...who all know that if they want to remain employed they better produce reports The administration likes.
I doubt they like it, but probably few of the rank and file can afford to take a stand.
Summary of the benchmark revisions The March 2009 benchmark level for total nonfarm employment is 131,175,000; this figure is 902,000 below the sample-based estimate for March 2009, an adjustment of -0.7 percent. Table 1 shows the total nonfarm percentage benchmark revisions for the past ten years.
It would be quite easy to say "Added 911,000 fewer jobs from March 2024 to March 2025" or "the year starting in March 2024", but they are clearly aiming to deflect from the Biden admin by implying last year's revisions are the fault of the administration inaugurated in January 2025.
Judging by the comments here, it worked marvelously.
To be clear, these are this administration's revisions, about what happened in the previous administration.
They also don't have much credibility. One problem with firing the economist running the BLS for reporting numbers the administration didn't like, and replacing her with a political loyalist is that no one will take the numbers the BLS reports seriously anymore.
Pretty sure the last five years of significant consistent downward revision did that.
I can't tell what your point is though. It almost sounds like you're trying to say the initial BLS numbers have been politically manipulated for years since revisions have been consistently down for a while? Surely not, though, because that doesn't make any sense -- continuously applying an upward boost on initial numbers, only to have them consistently revised downward, for several years, would simply cause the system to adjust to the new norm. The absolute numbers have never been important; it's the relative numbers that count, so a consistently applied manipulation effectively becomes no manipulation over time.
Anyway, there's a lack of proof of manipulation. Well, until recently, when the political manipulation was made publicly.
OTOH, I suppose simple facts and logic aren't important in our post-fact world though.
Note that survey data about the present is collected and aggregated piecemeal by a sizable bureaucracy and is thus hard for a dedicated ideologue to systematically revise without that leaking. However, when the data about today comes in below estimates the number of people involved in reconciling and dating the discrepancy to ascribe it to the past is much smaller.
That's been so widely known that I have a really hard time believing that you guys don't know this, which makes me wonder why you're out here propagandizing like this.
You need to understand it's a net loss in persuasion, this gaslighting.
That is gaslighting.
Also, I'm not sure why it's allowed to have someone come from SA/Zimbabwe and comment on posts of US political candidates.
Now coming to the Right! I believe they are the single biggest reason behind America's current rot. Which problem are they trying to solve? They always contradict themselves.
This is the mindset we are forced to deal with https://x.com/ENERGY/status/1964010741247168958
It should be compulsory for voters to vote and have them go through training to make them understand how the economy, the Fed, world trade, US intelligence, foreign policy, interest rates, and bonds work. One might argue that it should be done in the schools. Sure! But then why are we here? Of course, Right would scream as usual No, my choice. No son! Enough with your damn choices. Not voting should invite severe legal, financial, and civil penalties. That's how we are going to fix this mess!
> First, political commentary should be regulated
Who does the regulating? The current Trump regime? Huge first amendment violation
> come from SA/Zimbabwe and comment on posts of US political candidates.
Because those posts are being made on a private platform. Are you sure you want something worse than UK's Ofcom proving your American identity just to speak?
> It should be compulsory for voters to vote
Maybe, but definitely not in a 2 party system.
> make them understand how the economy, the Fed, world trade, US intelligence, foreign policy, interest rates, and bonds work
Not specifically those. Please just have universal free education. There's no need to specifically teach kids how to think politically. That's definitely going to get abused for propaganda
Mine was not, but yours definitely felt like it.
> Who does the regulating? The current Trump regime? Huge First Amendment violation
When you are running a YouTube channel or anything similar with millions of subscribers or even a few thousand, you are no longer an individual; in fact, you become just a news channel at that point. FCC has rules [0] for news channels, and those rules should apply to these unhinged political podcasters as well.
License Revocation: In extreme cases, the FCC has the power to revoke the station's broadcast license.
In other words, work with the firm (Meta\Google) to get that channel suspended.
Alternatively, let people add facts. I don't think YouTube does that currently.
> Are you sure you want something worse than UK's Ofcom proving your American identity just to speak?
What's wrong with only allowing citizens and residents to comment on their country's political matters?
* Tariffs and Trade Uncertainty – Elevated tariffs and rapidly shifting trade policies are raising costs for manufacturers and discouraging hiring and investment (Investopedia; Atlanta Fed survey; CBO analyses).
* Automation and AI Displacement – Automation and AI, especially in low-skill occupations, are reducing new job creation and wages for some workers (academic studies in arXiv and PMC).
* Restrictive Immigration Policies – Tightened immigration and visa processes are straining labor supply, particularly in sectors that rely on immigrant workers (Axios, 2025 labor coverage).
* Small Business Strain from Economic Pressure – Tariff-related uncertainty is leading small businesses to slow hiring or lay off employees (Joint Economic Committee report, 2025).
* Offshoring and Outsourcing Trends – Technological advances are enabling offshoring and automation, substituting domestic labor with remote or machine-based alternatives (academic research in World Development, 2024).
"highly probable, high-impact, yet neglected threat that is obvious to many but often ignored until it causes significant damage."
"event that is known and possible, but which is assumed to be unlikely."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Wucker#Gray_rhinos
Can they be trusted anymore since Donald is now dictating what they say?
Everyone with a W2 pays into SS. SS also has everyone's birthdate, so it's easy to bucketize everyone into "can work" and "can't work."
They can join that with Medicare/Medicaid data to find people with disabilities. The can compare pay periods to see who's unemployed etc. They can find people on disability with help from Medicare.
Why is BLS waiting for state data? To find the unemployed and collecting?
logifail•5mo ago
(edit - see for instance Aug 2024: https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b... )
gdulli•5mo ago
georgeecollins•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
It would be good for everyone if the BLS figures were trusted.
Even "not professional economists" might lose trust in figures which are regularly revised downwards ... months after being published.
SpicyLemonZest•5mo ago
Hamuko•5mo ago
mandevil•5mo ago
Because these numbers are so important- to journalists, to the Fed, to financial markets, etc. they wanted a few million dollars extra, over a few year period, to run the new methodology and the old methodology side-by-side for a significant portion of a business cycle, to understand the differences before they switched, and to gain confidence in the system. Because an important part of this particular data set is what it signals to those others, it is important not to move quickly with this data set, but to give time for everyone to understand all the nuances. It's things like, how the market views the meaning of corrections would be different under a different system, and so they want time so that they themselves and all those other people whose jobs depend on understanding it to be fully aware.
Basically, they wanted to run a blue-green deployment strategy for their updates, but couldn't get the budget for it- and their budget has instead been cut so far. So they have prioritized continuing the system that everyone understands rather than experimenting with new things that no one understands. Because these are smart, well educated people who spend their entire lives thinking about these problems, and understand how the data is used, this is something they have thought about a lot and want to do the best job they can.
kgermino•5mo ago
albumen•5mo ago
babblingdweeb•5mo ago
However, it's extremely common in forecasting to revise the forecast once actuals come in. In the case of the BLS, it's the documented approach for a very long time.
Every month the numbers are adjusted and annually. All of the notes as to why, the method, etc are in the actual reports*.
*I don't recommend reading them or the footnotes unless you have insomnia. :)
** Also, if the source data is inaccurate, corrupted, etc; if the models are non-transparently adjusted, that would be horrible and cause for alarm. At the moment, we don't know if that is the case. Yet.
michaelbuckbee•5mo ago
Though honestly, I wish the terminology were changed to "forecasted" and "actual" to be clearer.
DavidPeiffer•5mo ago
A few notes from an interview on the Odd Lots podcast, interviewing Bill Beach, former head of the BLS:
* Response rates among surveyed employees are roughly:
Month 1 68%
Month 2 83%
Month 3 93-94%
* Large employers tend to respond sooner, and are staffed to handle these requests better.
--------
April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...
Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
triceratops•5mo ago
bluGill•5mo ago
Different companies react differently as well. Companies that have a steady flow of cash (food is very inelastic - people eat about the same every day) realize they can give smaller raises, and this is a good time to invest in the company by building so they often hire. Companies that make luxury goods for the common man (think small boats - large yachts for the rich are different) tighten their belts because they are the first place people in fear cut spending.
xnx•5mo ago
MarkusQ•5mo ago
botro•5mo ago
MarkusQ•5mo ago
0cf8612b2e1e•5mo ago
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...
The monthly revisions are historically all over the place, up and down. My 2024 count says six months were revised up and six were revised down.
daymanstep•5mo ago
bananalychee•5mo ago
jeffbee•5mo ago
orwin•5mo ago
I think we created a new status for Uber/Deliveroo and other workers to put them out of the category three years ago and it fixed a lot of our employment data issues.
jeffbee•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
These are two separate metrics, they measure different things, and the figures often differ (unsurprisingly).
The BLS "establishment" survey (aka Current Employment Statistics, CES) surveys 120k+ businesses and government agencies, it measures jobs (not people), counting the number of payroll positions. This is "non-farm payroll employment", excluding the self-employed, farm workers, and private household workers.
The BLS "household" survey (aka Current Population Survey, CPS) surveys ~60k households, measuring individuals, whether they are employed, unemployed, or not in the labour force. These data are used to calculate the unemployment rate and labour force participation. This includes farm workers, the self-employed, and domestic workers.
mensetmanusman•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
You assume the data gatherers were at fault... <chuckle>
These data gatherers work for their government. How do you ensure they're happy to gather and publish data which is essentially critical of that very government?
chasd00•5mo ago
matthewdgreen•5mo ago
wredcoll•5mo ago
ndiddy•5mo ago
We see large corrections in employment numbers when there's rapid changes in the job market that mess with the models, or when the changes are focused towards small companies. Right-wingers have somehow decided that all of this is instead due to the BLS somehow being out to get Trump, despite there being no significant changes to how the jobs report is made since the mid-90s.
notmyjob•5mo ago
You can have non-biased indicators that have error with mean 0.
Maybe a better question, when judging current operations, is how precise the biased estimates are becoming overtime. Is the size of the error increasing or decreasing.
mensetmanusman•5mo ago
Such simple statistics and data gathering should be simple for a federal organization.
spicyusername•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
Simple?! "Sweet summer child..."
On a more serious note, how would one ensure that a government department be sufficiently independent that it can publish data (implicitly) critical of its own political leaders without fear of retribution?
Answers on a postcard, please...
0cf8612b2e1e•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
This was broken long before DOGE was a thing:
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b...
"There's still ongoing chatter about the huge revision to U.S. job growth seen yesterday and what it might signify for the economy and markets. 818,000 jobs were wiped out in the 12 months through March 2024 (or 68,000 per month), resulting in the biggest downward adjustment since the global financial crisis."
seanmcdirmid•5mo ago
babblingdweeb•5mo ago
The BLS (USA) does adjust the numbers every month (for two months after the initial release) and annually. Regardless if the numbers go up or down, this is fairly common with statistics and forecasting in general. When actuals come in, the forecast is adjusted closer to reality.
Anecdotally: It gets lost in the mix of headlines when those adjustments show that the initial projections were on trend, or "close enough the talking heads don't care enough". However, it gets "interesting" when it's off-trend; or confirms prior notable good/bad news. In this case, it confirms* what was suspected, mostly confirms what was reported. As actuals came in, the reality was worse than projected.
*"Confirms" use case here: job growth is poop right now.
CGMthrowaway•5mo ago