Hiring in America Slows Way Down

Hiring in America Slows Way Down

In three of the last four months of data, the monthly change in private sector employment has declined—significantly in the last two. After today’s figures came out, Trump freaked out at Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Truth Social, writing “ADP NUMBER OUT!!! ‘Too Late’ Powell must now LOWER THE RATE.” While Trump and every other noob buying meme coins and meme stocks on Wall Street thinks Jerome Powell runs the world, he does not, and Trump’s problem is the bond market pushing interest rates higher in the last couple of months. I wonder if anything significant happened to the economy over that period of time!

The ADP National Employment Report revealed that just 37,000 private sector jobs were created in May, falling well short of the 110,000 jobs expected by economists who were polled by the Wall Street Journal. It was the weakest monthly growth figure for the private sector in over two years.

Despite the modern phenomenon of noobs insisting on one man and not a $29 trillion market dictating the price of money, there were signs outside both bonds and the Fed that this was coming. Here’s the opening lede from a May 4th article in the Wall Street Journal: “Major U.S. employers are starting to take a new approach to jobs: Hire less—or not at all.” As much as Trump would like this WSJ report to be about businesses fearing the mighty Fed Chair’s overwhelming 4.33 percent Fed Funds Rate, companies-hiring-trends-tariffs in the URL gives you a pretty good idea of why these employers are innovating new ways to depress job reports.

“We have instituted our recessionary playbook” said Robert Mack, chief financial officer of Polaris, in an investor call last month. Walmart’s CEO said they would start raising prices in June due to the impact of the tariffs. These are just a couple examples of many large employers pulling back to some degree in the face of these tariffs. What we are seeing in America’s hiring slowdown is the direct effect of Trump adding a surcharge to every import that Americans pay for.

Ever since liberation day, more CEOs have been using that dreaded P-word: pausing. Trump’s own custom officials are having a hard time figuring out how exactly to impose this zigzagging effort to remake the global economy to a larger degree than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs which exacerbated the Great Depression, so it stands to reason that businesses will hold off on major decisions until they can figure out what the fuck is going on. Exacerbating this problem is that more and more data suggests the answer is that dreaded S-word which was once thought to be impossible.

#Stagflation 🇺🇸

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Trump can scream about Apple manufacturing iPhones here all he wants, but it won’t change the economics of our increased labor costs making iPhones made in America far more expensive, the same way that slapping a tariff on Apple for not making iPhones in America will just increase costs on Apple that will either impact the business or be passed down to the consumer. Trump simply does not understand the most basic concepts of economics taught well below a collegiate 101 class, and this trade war is proof.

No. Way. www.politico.com/news/2025/06…

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— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 10:15 AM

When you combine this weakened economic data with the haphazardness of Trump’s trade war where he can announce new surprise tariffs on the EU and Apple on Friday and delay the ones on the EU on Monday, that creates an economic environment that chills investment. Not to mention, the inherent offer made by Trump in this trade war is that this period should see decreased economic activity because these staggering costs Trump is imposing on the global economy will allegedly be lifted to varying degrees by July 8th, their new self-imposed deadline they’re definitely and totally going to meet this time. So if you are a business affected by tariffs, why would you do any real business before July 8th when the president is saying your costs will be lower?

The last two bad jobs reports are one thousand percent on Trump. He is attempting to impose 19th century economics on the world by brute force, and the 21st century economy is recoiling with uncertainty, trying to teach him a basic lesson about economics that in his 40-plus year wrongheaded crusade on this subject, he has been constitutionally unable to learn. Add in the fears over the already problematic US deficit, where our interest expense now accounts for more federal spending than on defense, getting further blown out by Trump and the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill,” and there is more uncertainty in the economy right now than at any point since COVID. In fact, the ISM manufacturing survey that came out this week had comments from manufacturers comparing the supply shocks Trump has created to COVID.

The ISM manufacturing survey comments are lit:

“.. supply chain disruptions rivaling that of COVID ..”

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) June 2, 2025 at 8:26 AM

The economic data is not great, especially consumer confidence hanging around 12-year lows, and it is deteriorating each month. Trump’s trade war is very clearly the drag on the global economy right now, and if he were to embrace his inner TACO to its fullest extent and call the tariffs off entirely, that would do more to boost the economy than Jerome Powell taking rates down to zero would. Everything they teach you in business school reinforces the fact that companies are not going to make many or any long-term investments like hiring new people in these conditions, and the data in the last two months has backed that fundamental notion up. The longer this trade war goes on, the more damage it will do, and economic chaos has a tendency to snowball, especially when there are new opaque threats that could “amplify” a crisis of Trump’s making.

 
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