The Thirteen Most Exasperated Comments from the Dallas Fed Business Survey

By Jacob Weindling | October 28, 2025 | 1:41pm

Photo by The White House

Big Story Economy

The Thirteen Most Exasperated Comments from the Dallas Fed Business Survey

I am not opposed to lists as a vehicle to deliver important news (as I have said many times in my career, if you don’t like the so-called clickbait, don’t click on it and incentivize this dying industry to write it), and I used to be a purveyor of them in my Paste Politics days when lists were a clever method to insert evergreen content into Google’s search results. They were a way of sustaining the rest of your operation amidst the swings of the news cycle, but all that has gone out the window now that Google is killing online media for good. Instead of giving people links to click, Google has a robot that steals our product then lies about it to people so they can put all of us websites out of business and be the only website anyone ever visits (I’m dead serious, all your faves in every industry and vertical are circling the drain to varying degrees because of Google’s AI summaries–and we’re all talking about it–this industry will look very different in five years). Welcome to an exciting new future driven by America’s existential crisis manifested into chatbots that encourage teenagers to commit suicide.

Also bringing us into an exciting new future is president deals, waging a trade war of choice that has decimated business activity. But don’t take it from some lefty shitposter on the internet, take it from those woke scolds at the…uh, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

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The Dallas Fed is one of the more important branches of the Federal Reserve system, in large part because of the diversity of businesses in its region. Its comments are always a notable temperature check to take on what business owners and operators on the ground are seeing, and this last month’s batch are largely not good! Here are the thirteen most distressing comments from the survey that touch on themes we’ve been writing about the last couple of years here at Splinter. My summaries are in bold headers below, and all hyperlinks go to relevant Splinter coverage, while everything in regular text between the line breaks was written by Dallas Fed survey participants telling us what their industries look like right now.

Trump Take Administrative and Support Services Job Market

It feels impossible to predict what the hiring and employment market will be in six months. This year has been the most challenging in 15 years of search and staffing. Candidates have failed background checks. Employers have delayed hiring, candidates have accepted counter offers, others have continued interviewing after accepting a new role. These events used to be uncommon and rare. Now they’re happening on a regular basis. Revenue swings month to month are drastic. We are trying to budget and forecast, but it is impossible, and I’m on the edge of laying off an employee now. Business has felt recessionary for over a year—no wonder we knew the jobs numbers were off and kept saying there was no way they were as good as reported, and we were correct. These are very tough times for small and midsized businesses.

RFK Jr. Is Harming Ambulatory Health Care Services With “Baseless Guidance”

There are numerous factors affecting our outlook and current performance. A general downturn in the economy and economic outlook coupled with increased layoffs and significant increases in prices for day-to-day commodities have reduced demand for those seeking our pediatric urgent care services. Healthcare fatigue is also a factor post-COVID. Couple that with the frankly baseless guidance that the Department of Health and Human Services is providing, there is also a lot of confusion among potential patients of ours of sound medical judgement.

Ambulatory Health Care Services Are Expressing This Madness through Poetry

With continued angst over secured overnight financing rate, federal funds rate and prime

Pundits are debating whether “it is different this time.”

Federal Reserve keeps tracking,

but economic data’s still lacking.

Historians will laugh or cry at this rhyme!

Credit Intermediation and Related Activities See a Lot of “Disruptions”

There are many moving parts to the economic environment, and the disruptions are resulting in an increase of destabilizing factors: the government shutdown, political instability, the anticipated impact of tariffs and the interest rate markets. Cybersecurity is still a priority, especially with the accelerating expansion of artificial intelligence. The cattle market is extremely elevated, and the price of beef over the counter and on the plate continues to be high. The race to expand the electrical grid is heating up. Nuclear-powered sources are back in the news as an alternative source of electrical power generation.

Bad News for Oil Companies Is Good News for the Climate At Least

We’re seeing significant uncertainty among our oil and gas service company clients. Commodity prices are down, and there is no real cause to anticipate an upturn in drilling activities.

Professional, Scientific and Technical Services’ Housing Clients Are Struggling

The residential market has continued its decline due to the uncertainty of the economy. Homebuilders are having a difficult time selling homes, even with the incentives they are offering, and existing homes are just sitting. The commercial market is a little better but is being held up by energy and data center transactions. We need a major adjustment in the pricing of homes or a significant reduction in the interest rate to get this market moving again.

I Wonder What Kind of Technology Spending!

All of our customers are scaling back on technology spending.

This Is What Bad Business and Consumer Confidence Surveys Look Like in Practice

I feel like our clients are more apprehensive. We are writing a lot of proposals, but they are just sitting. Projects are still being planned, but the execution is being delayed.

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Trump administration volatility causes clients to stall new purchases.

Publishing Industries (except Internet) Gave CNBC A Great Pull Quote about Republicans

We continue to be concerned about compounding effects of tariffs, government shutdown, reduced federal spending, wavering consumer confidence and the levels of credit card usage and delinquency (which we expect to increase), as well as the generally antibusiness policies being championed by Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration.

Securities, Commodity Contracts and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities Echoes the Fed

Big projects are boosting construction. Fear of ICE raids is hurting retail sales and employment reporting.

Truck Transportation Is Pretty Blunt

Our business has died.

Warehousing and Storage Business Describes Stagflation

General economic conditions appear to be worsening, though it’s hard to put a finger on exactly where or why. We’re working through 2026 budget and are expecting revenue to either stay flat or dip. We are eliminating a small number of heads, roughly 4 percent of our workforce. We expect inflation to continue to impact the cost to provide services and will be adjusting revenue in response.

This survey is not entirely negative, just mostly–but per usual, uncertainty is the word of the day this year. Many positive comments come with a hedge because of it. One utilities business respondent said, “I feel better about business activity, but the threatened tariffs do not help with the business situation,” which is a really great summary of the U.S. economy right now.

It’s very powerful, it’s jolted by all sorts of “technology investment” that companies like Amazon and Facebook are pulling back on (and apparently smaller businesses too), but tariffs hit everyone and Trump’s gestapo hit particular industries like construction and farming very hard, and we are beginning to see those impacts manifest in depressed economic activity. Some states have experienced economic contraction this year, like Iowa, entirely thanks to Trump’s trade war sapping them of their largest buyer of their largest export (and then betraying them for Argentina!).

The theme this year has been elite capitulation as Trump wrecks everything he comes into contact with, and while the economy has chugged along well enough along its longer timescale and has extra gas in the tank thanks to massive AI spending, it is still trending in the same direction everything else has.