Who Gets Fired Now?
The August jobs report was not good.
Via NPR: The U.S. added only 22,000 jobs last month, showing cracks in the labor market.
U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs in August, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department, while revised figures showed a net loss of jobs in June for the first time since 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.
Overall, the labor market has shown little growth since April, and the unemployment rate inched up in August to 4.3%.
But, you know, Trump is a businessman who is going to fix the economy!
A reminder that a similarly poor jobs report led to the firing of the BLS: In Front of Our Noses: Firing the Messenger.
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The jobs numbers aren’t actually that bad. A lot of workers are taking jobs that are under the table, that used to be held by illegal aliens. The lam stream media is leaving that out. OK, yes…this post is BS. Just having a little fun, but I could see right wing outlets coming out with something like that.
Trump is a one-man “human pandemic” having the capacity to disrupt global supply chains and unpend entire economics. The man is contagion, writ large with tiny fingers.
They will mostly just blame the prior head of BLS for a while and continue to try to replace people on the Fed board. Actually, I dont think Trump needs to do very much. One of the things I think we should have learned is that people dont care very much about unemployment unless it affects them directly. Unemployment affects more people indirectly as it slows growth and has long term effects so in some ways it is worse than inflation. You can still have growth with inflation and if wage growth outgrows purchasing price inflation most people are actually better off, but people concentrate only on the price side and it affects everyone so it gets a larger group of people angry.
Steve
I backed still further away from stocks just a few days ago because I don’t see how low consumer confidence, a dramatically weaker employment picture, tariffs randomly applied and endlessly tinkered with, universal worldwide hostility toward the US and gigantic piles of debt add up to profit.
And I think AI is a massive bubble. I see the industrial use cases or AI, but I don’t see the consumer uses and without that element, plus Trump’s wrecking of supply lines, and China’s threats to Taiwan, I don’t get to where we end up with AI-powered robots cooking me pasta.
If the Fed lowers interest rates there’ll be a sugar rush that will most likely raise housing prices still further. I don’t have much faith that people are going to start building factories in an environment of creeping nationalization, corruption and policy chaos.
@Michael Reynolds:
I have the persistent feeling that Tim Cook etc. are just playing Trump with their promises to build, build, build. Are any of these promises tied to contractual agreements? They may have a desire to rebuild american manufacturing. but that desire is secondary to doing what is economically sound for their various corporations.
I predict that the world wide tariffs will not hold, either by judicial decision or change in political administrations. If the tariffs don’t hold, the “game” that Trump is playing now collapses.
Nothing is as sure as change.
@steve222:
I think the June jobs numbers are the final – most accurate based on the survey participation rate – until the yearly reconciliation (that incorporates unemployment claims). If the June numbers (final monthly revision) dropped, there is every reason to suspect that the July “finals” (due in October) will be even lower than the original July numbers.
Of course these jobs numbers are based on hard data inputs from the employers.
I agree that the unemployment numbers tend to be “squishy” as they reflect the input from telephone surveys (current population survey) versus the jobs numbers that are mostly based on affirmative digital inputs from actual employers (current employment survey).
@Michael Reynolds:
Having professional encounters with “AI” on an increasing basis, it’s highly effective in certain cases.
Such as mass-scale searches of medical data, bulk review of medical tests and scans, analysis of possible enzyme and catalsyst chemistry, massive OCR of scanned text, etc etc.
Where it fails is expecting large-language models with no capacity for consistent internal, as opposed to external satistical based, rule-generation, to somehow conjure a generalisd genuine AI capble of dealing unmediated with reality.
Therefore the generalised application of such model to real-world use-cases is likely rather less than the enthusiasts imagine.
Or, in short, it’s a bubble.
AI with capacity to internally develop consistent rule-sets would be a diffrent matter. There is no logical reason for supposing that to be impossible.
But it seems unlikely LLM “stochastic parrot” black-boxes are going to get that job done.
Then again, I may be wrong. 😉
How long before Trump sacks everyone involved in US economic data collection for lese majeste?
How dare reality disagree with kayfabe?