I'm very smart!
> The chair's main responsibility is to carry out the mandate of the Fed, which is to promote the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
(per Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/082415/what-...)
You’re correctly quoting your source. But this is crap, as their source [1] makes no reference to “moderate long-term interest rates”.
The Fed is mandated to promote “maximum employment” and “stable prices” [2]. (It defines the former as “the highest level of employment or lowest level of unemployment that the economy can sustain while maintaining a stable inflation rate.”) If inflation is unstable, the economy is above maximum employment.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_about.htm
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fedexplained/mone...
3 years ago. September 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/23/economy/powell-fed-labor-...
When unemployment rates were back down to the pre-covid 2020 levels, only time they were even lower was before the 1969 recession. When inflation was at the highest it's been since the 80s.
The statement & monetary policy decision was entirely appropriate at the time.
I actually tried a brief search to get a more accurate time, but all the results were skewed heavily to the last few months so I gave up. I'm impressed you found it.
This is basic monetary economics via the Phillips curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve). There's a strong relationship between unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Of course, that is based on historical data in normal times, and, since 2010s and the financial crisis with years of ZIRP, we are now in very unnormal times with Trump's tariffs and general fuckery of the economic system.
If you decide to have kids today, you should factor in the cost that they may significant require financial support into their 30s. I know a couple of guys over 40, including a laid-off SWE, living with their parents again.
From my general understanding, those are already the numbers for elite colleges.
I hear complaints about kids that have published research, have started local charities, and have completed most of an undergrad degree already, that they are still getting rejected from top colleges.
But if you make under $200k a year they wave tuition, and over that you start paying a prorated rate until assistance phases out.
But holy smokes, there are some A-game kids out there that are prepared and willing to put in the work for an opportunity.
I don't remember it being this competitive when I was a student. Maybe I wasn't in that top echelon like they are, but still.
How are children supposed to know the adults in authority positions around them are full of shit?
I think that was my underlying point. It isn't blame, its just that they don't know any better. They've been sold the One True Path To Adulthood and Success and Happiness and it is a false bill of goods.
Insurance and overhead (eg. safety harass) exist for a reason other than to drain your wallet. Roofing is also a physically difficult job. You won't find many 50+ year old to couch on a rooftop all day, regardless of pays.
This is in general a really bad idea. Not only can you be on the hook if they make a mistake with the install, or mess something up like venting that ends up damaging appliances or plumbing, but if one of them falls off your roof, depending on the circumstances you could be personally liable for their possibly life long medical treatment (or end up in an extended lawsuit as they try to claim that you personally directed their work). Make sure your contractors have insurance.
Are they Asian by any chance?
There was one piece of absolute shithole land I looked at because I was in the process of building a house.
Some dead guy decided to encumber it by requiring me to build a gigantic house if I wanted live there. Reversing it would require something as onerous roughly as getting all people in a 10 mile radius to stand on one foot while reciting the entire bible from memory. Technically possible so it holds up in court as not being a perpetual covenant, but for all intent in purposes was.
You would not believe how much land boomers basically ruined forever when they mindlessly engaged in some wack covenants back around the 80s.
Almost certainly not. Institutional investors are too little of the market. And every time someone has seriously investigated this hypothesis, the evidence has been lacking.
Cut back/tax on legal immigration, tax remittances harder, and penalize those employing illegal immigrants. None of this ICE kabuki theatre is needed (and frankly is cruel and immoral).
Obviously this won’t happen because both left & right want immigration.
The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
For legal migrants, many of them are in respectable homes. For the illegal yes it’s lower quality, but regardless supply and demand will hold true. Safety in many of these lower quality homes will increase as well.
> The jobs they hold are available to you today. No one wants farm wages.
Because we’ve allowed capital to increase their bottom line at the expense of labor. The conditions and pay today are only what they are because we let capital play by different rules. We should not structure America to benefit the few.
There’s also a large existing housing stock.
I have young kids. I don't worry too much about how they're going to afford college education or get a job or afford to retire, because I don't believe college or jobs or retirement will exist in the form it does today. They'll be replaced by systems that actually work in the world that they'll grow up in. My job is to help them survive, and ideally to keep them fed and clothed and housed in the meantime. I'm training them to be adaptable, to think and act for themselves, and to have a good grounding in fundamental skills like reading/writing/rithmetic that I don't think will go anywhere. But the specifics of today's world will definitely be going away, because today's world doesn't work.
Sure there is a lot that can be done online, but that hasn't really impacted the fundamental experience of "going to college" for most young adults who decide to do that.
The college experience hasn't changed much (indeed, if anything it's improved) because colleges are sinking large amounts of money into providing a good experience. That, after all, is what a lot of students base their purchase decisions on. But the point of college isn't to be a 4-year party & vacation, it's to get an education that will help you the rest of your life. Increasingly a college education doesn't help you lead a better life.
[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-tim...
youre also right that todays world doesnt work
i think weve already moved too slowly in the US to prepare the societal changes were facing and culture is not adapting, but clinging harder to old expectations. i hope US culture shifts, even if its long overdue, but i dont think it will before many more dramatic economic events
[citation needed]
This was my experience leaving college in the dot-com bust 25 years ago, and I heard it was similar for graduates around 2008-2012.
That's very much not the reason for plummeting fertility rates, those are just your pet issues. It's rare for people to acknowledge the true cause of reduced fertility, because it's a huge bummer and the only even remotely plausible solutions are pretty much unthinkable for all but the most regressive.
If anything your investment in an ADP competitor significantly undermines your credibility.
That is not the same thing. You may interpret it that way, but that's you. I think companies using ADP correlates highly with companies treating their employees like shit. I also think companies using ADP correlates with underperformance in current market conditions.
Every. single. "startup" we tried screwed up at least one payroll. Gusto ruined three.
ADP don't miss.
Paychex, Workday, etc have been eating at their lunch for years and years now. My perception of companies using ADP is either that they're slow behemoths or they still have some niche issue that's keeping them from switching.
ADP is also incredibly cavalier with your personal data. As a potential employee I would see its use as a strong minus.
My experience has been that they're 25% of the market for a reason.
They work.
After that, it's not that ADP will fabricate the numbers, they'll just stop making them public, and when e.g. analysts buy them the contract will come with a term forbidding public disclosure.
1. Claim it is Biden's economy and his job numbers. 2. Claim the lost jobs are actually indian immigrants going back. 3. Your point about ADP. 4. Threaten any media that reports these numbers.
And where's the sentence about how the greatest presidency in the history of the United States has CREATED MORE JOBS than ever before in history?
We really should do more tax credit for solar panels and EV credits, I know a doctor that has really struggled to buy his 3rd AirBnB rental.
There we go.
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Yikes
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
> If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
> In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
While it seems our president use less coke that he did in 2018-2019 (to be clear, the only instance where i have heard a direct testimony is during the filming of the presidential new year vows of 2019, but a lot of people speculated about his coke habits until 2021), he do use a lot of more legal stimulants, at least during international trips. Age does not mesh well with this kind of stimulants, that can accelerate mental fatigue.
One of my pet theory is that Biden's "decline" was actually caused by drug overuse, and my guess is that he should be a bit more "here" now that he was a year ago.
The fact that Trump don't seems to work a lot and goes rest/golf often is actually a good thing in my opinion, because it will limit his needs for stimulants.
that said, he has no problem putting drunkards in charge of national security...
I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual?
There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
If records surrounding this topic are always correct and require revision maybe that's just how the data presents itself.
You only know the true amount of rainfall that happens after the storm passes.
Were they so completely incorrect?
> That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000.
Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
Yes, utterly. having number off by an order of magnitude in the complete opposite direction tells us at best that we are in unusual times and at worst that our estimates no longer work in this job market.
The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade.
People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
This is a massive hand-wave and only applies to companies that have an in with the administration. If you're a small/medium-size business that doesn't have a budget for "government relations," or you're in a field like renewable energy or EVs where the admin doesn't like the vibes? Too bad for you.
> Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
Yes they will, and aggregate output will decrease because producers are now spending more money on worse domestic substitutes for foreign products. Also, you're now shoveling corporate welfare to those new domestic producers, so they have no incentive to step up their game and innovate. (If you want an example of this look at the consistent failure of US automakers to compete globally, because tariffs incentivize them to optimize for building pickup trucks domestically.)
Import substitution has been tried many times before, it doesn't work.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-...
Hell, even the Heritage Foundation thought NAFTA was a good idea instead of tariffs:
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/the-north-american-fre...
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!I’m not sure if you’ve driven in the US, but we have paved roads here, too! And an excellent interstate highway system! Driving around the unique, rugged American terrain is left for car commercials and a very small percentage of Americans.
They're not all hicks waving submachine guns with a beer in the other hand standing on the back of a Ranchero driving over sand dunes after fleeing mexican families.
And, the typical stereotype of "European cars are all small." Oh, boy.
Every heard of Chelsea Tractors?
No one is honest about what is in those shipping containers (and no one wants to check). The longshoremen and their unions are corrupt AF and shouldn't even exist, let alone make more than google engineers. No one is honest about reporting what their goods are on customs forms. As of last time I checked, effective tariffs on GPUs and other important semis was actually slightly lower than under Biden. Not defending Trump but saying that what the executive says and what actually happens are different universes in regards to trade.
Oh and BTW, there's a whole parallel court system related to trade in the USA which does all the boring work of adjudication related to implementation of trade. No normie knows these guys exist and they are the reason that you can safely ignore whatever nonsense percentage trump says outloud next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Interna...
also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_International_Tr...
Also I buy a lot of clothes which are "made overseas" (Bronsen, soso, unbranded brand) which seems to have dodged the tariffs (Bronsen prices didn't even go up and they're made in china!!!) or made in the USA/Canada but with overseas material, i.e. Naked and Famous. In theory my clothes prices should have doubled or more. In practice almost nothing happened.
But hey, maybe 30 years from now, your friends will be right about America producing more.
After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revis...
The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data.
As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators.
Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
Correct, why I said “BLS surveys and payroll data.”
> you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor
True.
Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting.
In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently.
If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...
My first reaction to 32k for the US is that it's obviously negative but a pretty modest decline.
This is a man speeding at 100 MPH into a blizzard with a 1000 car pileup 2 miles ahead!
mdhb•4mo ago
daveguy•4mo ago
1121redblackgo•4mo ago
bdangubic•4mo ago
1121redblackgo•4mo ago
wslh•4mo ago
This isn't in any way an opinion about the current government but an observation of lags between decisions and measurable metrics.
ngetchell•4mo ago
Tarrifs on the whole world is a pretty large smoking gun.
runako•4mo ago
However, tariffs have been extensively studied in a number of countries around the world. What we are observing in the labor market is more or less what economists would predict given the magnitude of the tax increase and the uncertainty around its application.
Further, data[1] shows a rapid deterioration in the labor market corresponding to the initial tariff announcement.
1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
jfengel•4mo ago
In this case, though, the President is taking actions designed to have quick effects. Presidents (of both parties) generally try not to do anything radical. (They promise to, then blame inaction on Congress.) This President is actually fulfilling his campaign promises, for once.
So I think he will deserve a higher fraction of the credit and blame that he would have gotten anyway. The lag is shorter because he's bypassing the usual process for change, and is able to make much more radical changes with shorter term returns.
georgemcbay•4mo ago
According to Trump, when Biden was in office it was Biden's failing economy that was the problem (despite the fact that Biden took office directly after Trump v1.0).
Also according to Trump, when Trump is in office now it is also Biden's failing economy that is the problem.
Its the same situation with the roles reversed because of Trump's gap of being in office so either the economy is a lagging problem from the last administration or it isn't, but somehow neither situation is "Trump's fault", according to Trump.
The "Biden economy" wasn't as rosy as proclaimed by the Biden government, in large part because run-away wealth inequality is making all of the statistics we historically track very misleading (eg. consumer spending looking good, as long as you ignore the huge red flag that 50% of that spending is being done by the top 10% of wealth holders).
So I'm not fully defending Biden here (both parties are ultimately allowing the economy to unravel because they refuse to deal with wealth inequality, though I do give Biden some credit for [temporarily] getting some things on the right track by, for example, putting Lina Khan in charge of the FTC) but economically things were still fundamentally much better under Biden than Trump, and we haven't even seen the depths of how bad Trump's economy is going to get (but have plenty of leading indicators of things getting much worse) and virtually all of the problems with Trump's economy can be traced pretty clearly to his own actions, such as his wildly irresponsible tariff policies.
Like even if you believe tariffs work the way he thinks they do (they don't) anyone with any understanding of business at all would have to understand that changing the values wildly sometimes from day to day makes doing business impossible for a lot of companies due to a complete inability to plan. Its crazy shit.
ActorNightly•4mo ago
The "both sides" stance is almost worse than just being a conservative at this point. Dems routinely have to fix Republican fuckups, and are judged negatively on the things they don't fix - meanwhile Republicans are judged positively on the things they manage not to fuck up.
For example, the BBB has set Medicaid to expire in 2028. Anyone wanna take a $10k bet that if we have fair elections and Dems somehow win, they are going to get blamed for not fixing that?
UncleOxidant•4mo ago
More like 4.3%. Historically, that's a really low unemployment number.
vjvjvjvjghv•4mo ago
alfiedotwtf•4mo ago
Trump basically did what Britain did, but against the entire world.
… it might be more than a generation for the whole world to trust any trade agreement with the US if every 4-8 years agreements can be torn up so easily
drstewart•4mo ago
... it will be at least 700 years before Europe can trust the UK again if it can just leave from the EU any time it wants
phatfish•4mo ago
I assume the tariffs the parent is talking about were when England/The UK was a world power similar to America now. And it was just a dick move by a bully.
Terr_•4mo ago
Directly equating them remains hyperbole due to the death-toll, but... it's not a joke anymore, or at least not a funny one.
____
[Edit] In brief, a disastrous attempt in 1958-1962 to quickly force China into an industrial powerhouse, with a lot of weird autocratic commands. It backfired with a severe economic recession, the killing/exile of subject matter experts, officials lying about how well it was going to avoid being punished, and tens of millions of peasants dying from famine.
jmclnx•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
Mostly due to economic mismanagement. I’m not sure we’ll see starvation from Trump’s incompetence. But preventable health-related mortality? Probably.
heavyset_go•4mo ago
aiauthoritydev•4mo ago