The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) first jobs report since President Donald Trump fired the head of the agency showed the U.S. labor market growing more slowly than economists expected, and actually losing jobs for the first time since the pandemic earlier in the summer.
The Friday report found that employers added just 22,000 jobs the month of August, continuing a slowdown in hiring. The unemployment rate also slightly increased to 4.3%, its highest level since 2021—though still low in historical terms.
00:00President Trump knows that we're super optimistic about the future of the jobs
00:04numbers because we're seeing a massive blowout in capital spending and new
00:09factory construction, something that happened because of the tax reforms that we had.
00:14So people are allowed to expense factories.
00:16Capital spending is growing at a rate, it was about 8% over the first half of the year.
00:21It's accelerating in the third quarter, which is why GDP now has the third quarter at about 3%.
00:27And so like all the indicators that we're seeing are that inflation is low and economic growth is solid.
00:33Income growth is solid as well.
00:34So that the only part of the data that's disappointing is that the jobs numbers have been a little bit lower over the last three or four months.
00:42That 232 investigation has been moving forward.
00:46I think that there'll be something to bring to the president within a few weeks, maybe even sooner than that.
00:51And then the president will judge on next steps.
00:54I'm looking forward to seeing what the benchmark provision is.
00:56But again, it highlights the fact that we've got to do a lot better job of collecting and fixing and seasonally adjusting the data because the revisions have been so huge.
01:08I think that the Fed will certainly want to consider what moves it would make.
01:14And I would imagine that when you set an agenda at the Fed, the chairman of the Fed sets the agenda, then they have options that they all consider and discuss.
01:22And I would guess that they'll be discussing the main market expectation is 25 basis points.
01:28But I would guess that there would be an expectation, a discussion of a higher cut.
01:32But I wouldn't expect it to happen.
01:34Again, like so all the job creation of the U.S. has come from native born workers, whereas in the Biden administration, it would be like maybe about half was foreign born.
01:44And so if the sort of supply of new illegal immigrants goes to zero, as it has, that there won't be non-native born workers taking a whole bunch of jobs from native born workers.
01:59And so that that is an issue that the supply of new labor has certainly gone down a lot because of the closed quarter.
02:05The unemployment rates have ticked up a little bit, but, you know, right now, we're highly confident with the trends that data board workers are replacing the illegal workers that are either now not new coming to the country or going back to their homes.
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