US hiring grows more faint in chaotic economic environment | AP News

[rcjordan]

https://apnews.com/article/jobs-unemployment-economy-trump-federal-reserve-68a15f89d68793a6cf88a522ff33246c

[rcjordan]

Nonfarm payrolls increased by just 22,000 for the month of August, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for payrolls to rise by 75,000.

Jobs report August 2025: Payrolls rose 22,000 in August in further sign of hiring slowdown
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/jobs-report-august-2025.html

[ergophobe]

Clearly more statisticians need to be fired until this is fixed.

[rcjordan]

#Jobs #Employment #usEconomy #WallSt

The U.S. created 911,000 fewer jobs than previously thought in the 12 months through March

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/911000-fewer-jobs-created-april-2024-march-2025-bls-says-rcna230065

Note that the slowdown started on Biden's watch.

[ergophobe]

>>  slowdown started on Biden's watch

That may be true, but I don't think the article says that. It simply says that the overall numbers for that period have been revised down and that that period has low job growth (i.e. it's a YOY number, not that the low growth started in April 2024, but simply that the overall number includes that period).

If you look at the pre-Covid jobs numbers, it's basically a linear curve. Then it plummets, then it rises extremely fast, then the curve starts to bend. Now it has almost gone flat (and as the article points out, current numbers show job loss, not growth, in June, so the curve is continuing to bend - not what we meant in 2020 when we said we needed to flatten the curve).

But note also that the current level is 7mm jobs above where it was just before the Covid collapse.

So while numbers for the last year have been revised down by 911,000, there has been 7mm in job growth since Feb 2020 and in the period in question, roughly 1.5 million jobs were added. That compares to 2.1 million jobs added for the same period in 2018-2019, but almost 5 million jobs for that period in 2021-2022

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

Set the graph to 10 years and edit graph to show % change.

Much as I would like to blame one administration more than another, if I knew nothing about who was president and what tariffs were in place and all that, I would look at that chart and say that something huge happened in Q1 2020 and the rebound resulted in unsustainable job growth that, now, is correcting in the other direction.

[rcjordan]

It was about the time that AI started to emerge as a corporate purging tool.

[ergophobe]

>>  I don't think the article says that.

I realized after I posted it that that statement was daft, but it took me this long to get back to my computer.

My initial reaction was based on the August to August numbers. I wasn't thinking clearly that April to March means there was little to no impact of actual Trump policies by then.

But even so, there's no step function or obvious inflection around the election or the inauguration.

>> AI

Maybe so. I suspect it's E, All of the Above. My guess is

 - overheated post-Covid hiring

 - some automation effects - I prefer that term, but even that one is bad, because when every Taco Bell in the country gets rid of cashiers and forces you to order at the kiosk, that's neither AI nor automation. It's like self-serve gas and ATMs - shifting labor from the business to the consumer.

I think Covid accelerated a lot of this. The part that I don't understand though, is why hiring would then have shot past pre-Covid levels? Is that a lingering effect of massive infusions of government money into the economy, much of which ended up in the equity markets which made companies feel flush? Most hiring is done by small companies that aren't even in the equity markets though, so that still baffles me.

- government policies

As far as I know, though, all of these are hard to prove and since employment numbers usually have such a lag, it's rare to see a step change like we did with Covid.

There is another big Covid effect that I don't see reported that often. The number of businesses responding to the BLS has dropped by 20% since Covid and the speed with which they report has also declined significantly. So the data is genuinely spottier and more open to bias and errors and more prone to needing big corrections and sources of data other than survey data comes in (e.g. tax returns).

[ergophobe]

Noah Smith has a long meander through jobs and inflation data

America is getting the economy we voted for
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-is-getting-the-economy-we