Perhaps the only useful aspect of Fox Business is that sometimes it’s a really good economic translator into normal language that most people can understand. I studied political science and economics in college and then thought I was leaving the blogging world behind by getting my finance degree right as Paste Magazine bought Jezebel and Splinter in 2023, and many economic concepts still feel vague to me. Is 73,000 jobs added good or bad? What even are numbers anymore in this new world where Trump is waging a war on science? Can someone please tell me what is happening?
This is where Fox Business comes in, as they know they are always performing for an audience of one. This clip makes it very clear whether this was a good or bad jobs report, and also debunks any notion that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is cooking the books for Trump.
It was a very bad jobs report. Extremely not good. And the poor July figure that missed expectations isn’t really the headline, but the revisions to past reports. The weak ADP jobs report that Trump previously freaked out about is not the gold standard, the information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that made Maria Bartoromo sad today is, and this month’s revisions have essentially confirmed the mounting horror story being told in the private jobs data from ADP in recent months, pointing towards a world where small businesses are really starting to feel the pain of Trump’s trade war.
“Revisions for May and June were larger than normal,” wrote the BLS. “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000.”
Fucking yikes man. Those are absolutely “larger than normal” revisions. “The job market looks significantly worse today than it did before this report,” said Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, to the Wall Street Journal. Revisions are normal and they generally happen because larger firms have the resources to report first, while smaller businesses report later. This catastrophic downward revision is a serious shift in the economy, because it confirms a weakening trend in the labor market, and stocks are falling hard today. Bond yields are collapsing, especially on the short end, with the one, two and three-year treasury yields down over five percent as of this writing (the two-year is down over six percent). That is a big, big move for the largest, most liquid market in the world.
While Trump’s trade war is the primary drag on everything, this is also a result of Trump’s racist immigration agenda. A small business survey done by Clarify Capital found that 1 in 5 businesses have reported losing workers to immigration crackdowns. The recent Dallas Fed survey found that 18 percent of businesses said that they expect immigration policy to impact their ability to hire and retain workers. Trump and Stephen Miller are not primarily going after criminals with their secret police, ICE is mostly kidnapping everyday folks working at their jobs, and the quotas that Miller is demanding that ICE hit are coming right out of Trump’s jobs reports.
The economic ground shifted under our feet this morning. The downward revisions for May and June demonstrate that Trump’s trade war is having a real deleterious impact. Second quarter economic data revealed that business investment has shrunk dramatically, and we now live in a world where capital expenditures for AI contribute more to GDP than the engine of our economy, consumer spending. If the AI bubble were to pop and the literal handful of men controlling this AI capex spending spree were to pull back, the rest of the data suggests that the economy would be at risk of plunging into a recession.
Now here’s the rub: as job and economic growth are slowing, Trump has officially instituted a new suite of higher tariffs today, bringing inflationary fears back into this equation too. If inflation rises because of Trump’s tariffs while economic growth slows and this meek job growth crosses the line to mounting job losses, buddy you got yourself stagflation, the worst thing that could happen to an economy and something that was once thought impossible before the 1970s proved otherwise. The high-level traders who made those stagflationary bets after Joe Biden ended his presidency on live TV last year are much closer to realizing their profits today than they were yesterday, and the day before that, etc…
This is bad, and has the potential to get much, much worse. Fed Chair and Trump’s current least favorite person outside of everyone asking him about Jeffrey Epstein, Jerome Powell, said after this week’s Fed meeting where they held rates steady that “Increased tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories of goods. Near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up on balance over the course of this year on news about tariffs.” After the horrific jobs report, Trump ranted at Powell again to lower rates, while the bond market is strongly suggesting today that he will get his wish at next month’s meeting, but not for reasons that would make him happy. If Trump fires Powell and removes any question that the Fed has true independence, the market will implode. This is so obvious that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has told Trump this and Trump denied that he needed to be told this.
Trump’s trade war is very clearly slowing economic growth and hiring, so much so that Fox Business is willing to say that to his face at the end of the clip I embedded above. Elevated interest rates are not his main economic problem, a racist crackdown on the labor force and a new 35 percent surcharge on Canada with more uncertainty about delayed trade deals with Mexico and China are. Trump is the drag on global economic growth right now, and all this year’s data is proof.
