The first jobs numbers of 2025 are out. The American economy gained 143,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 53,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate dropped slightly to 4.0%.
This is obviously a fairly weak jobs report, but at the same time the participation rate is up; the employment-population ratio is up; and the unemployment rate is down. So it's not all bad.
It will be bad within six months once we let a bunch of federal workers go and all the grants/funding gets cancelled (waste!). That funding rolls down into millions of jobs, which are apparently waste as well. Hopefully mortgage and auto loan servicers consider payments to be waste.
Looks pretty good to me. On your chart, above trend. Hard to make 4% unemployment look bad. And it may well be the best we’ll see for years.
Fun factoid - Every Republican president has had a recession in his first term. Back to 1900. One can argue about whether to regard this as a Trump first term, but I’m betting on a recession.
That is the smart bet. I see your bet and raise you a market crash.
I don't know if we're due for a recession. Contrary to some people, I don't think one's coming this year. Beyond that, it's too hard to forecast when the next one comes.
Every Republican president ... back to 1900 ...
That kind of streak is a curious thing. When I was young, the streak of note was that every president since Lincoln elected in a year ending in 0 died in office. It had happened 6 times in a row. Then Reagan was shot and was an estimated minute from dying, but he survived because the bullet missed his heart by an inch. The streak wasn't a thing anymore when Dubya won in 2000. He made it through 8 years in decent health (though the country barely made it through intensive care). Maybe if Trump really wants to make America great again, he could ... well, you know. By the looks of him, his odds are good.
I don't know if we're due for a recession, but I predict that Trump's insane economic policies are going to get us one unless Congress reins him in, hard, which doesn't seem likely to happen in the next two years.
As for the Republican recession streak, is it just coincidence or is there a causal link?
Sounds like you believe that Trump won the 2020 election, then. The guy who really won the 2020 election survived his one term, but may likely not have survived a second one.
Trump didn't have a recession in his first term.
(You called me a liar, among other things, last we met, so I will gladly correct the record.)
Fact check: Wrong!
The 2020 recession was the briefest and steepest (in unemployment and GDP drop) since the 1930s. Donald Trump was president.
You can look it up.
You're right. I'm wrong in this case.
Seems OK to me. But Our Dear President must immediately impose the tariffs he said he would about a thousand times. That will really help.
25-54 is hovering around the highest levels of the 90s but the total labor force participation rate hasn't even recovered to pre-COVID.
The population is older. Consider Fig. 1 in the following:
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/adjusted-aging-us-employment-rate-continued-rise-above-its-pre
Are you an idiot. The number of senior citizens, and the number of people over 80 is continuously and drastically increasing. Of course the total labor force participation rate is not increasing. The only relevant number is the working age labor force participation rate which is crushing what was achieved during Trump's first term and higher than at any time other than Bill Clinton's 2nd term. (It is unlikely to ever get back to what was achieved in Clinton's 2nd term because being a house husband has become socially acceptable and women understand the idea of working with 3 preschoolers with one under 6 months was really stupid.
Safe to assume the numbers are accurate in line with their historical norm. It's early still. I do wonder what happens if the numbers become inconvenient in the future. Would unemployment of, say, 6% be reported as 6%? Or 4%? Or (like health info) just not be available to report anymore?
This is something to keep an eye on. Where is Doge getting its numbers on federal spending? Is it through access to systems or just USASpending.gov?
https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lhkrgzkjnc2z
In the news...
Concern about protecting economic data under Trump...
https://bsky.app/profile/bloomberg.com/post/3lhmiexof7v2y
Naturally none of the cowed "journalists" in the White House Press Corps challenged her to justify such a stupid claim. I expect we'll be bombarded with this kind of gaslighting for at least the next two years, especially if the economy turns down.
Obviously a Trump press secretary would be immediately fired if anything that came out of their moths wasn't a bald faced lie.
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Defying fears of a pandemic-driven Great Depression and bucking Federal Reserve interest rate hikes as well, the U.S. job market closed out the Biden era at the cusp of full employment, if not beyond it, with steady job gains, growing wages, and enough momentum to possibly rekindle fears of overheating. With consumers spending and businesses confident, the baseline outlook among Fed officials and many economists is for job market strength to continue. The challenge for the new Trump administration, elected on a promise of better times to come, may be that there's little room left for improvement and plenty of risk to pushing too hard.
Uncertainty creeps in…
FFS... They couldn't bring themselves to state the obvious during the campaign, but now they just might start? It was always true that the economy was doing great, and it was going to be impossible to make it much better - even for a competent administration. It was also true that increasing energy production was pointless and nearly impossible. But, the media never bothered to tell people that Trump was simply full of shit. He's going to make a great economy better by sowing chaos everywhere? Sure, seems plausible.