The job market, inflation and tariffs

Early to mid Trump 1 looks to me like a continuation of Obama.

I'm not saying he is without bias, but I think you can't derive much from that graph if you know what happened at the big dips. Well, aside that he reverts back to his hawkish position as soon as possible.

 

Walk me through his decisionmaking in 2007 and 2008. Not an attack, but why the whiplash.

 

How could I explain his decisionmaking? I don't know him nor do I know/remember the GFC well enough to do that, I can only speculate.

But through most of 2007 bad news and slivers of hope by government interventions were alternating each other until things crashed through 2008 bottoming out at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 with Congress passing the bank bailout in Oct 2008. The S&P reached its then all time high at the beginning of 2008 at 21'000 points before crashing down to 8'000 in October.

Seeing Warsh's propensity to revert to a hawkish position, I can easily see him changing his position/interpretation wildly due to current circumstances in this time period.

Brought to you by wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis

 

Looking just at the wikipedia page, Greenspan warned about a recession at the beginning of 2007, then in September was the bankruptcy of Northern Rock in the UK and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the US, before everyone seemed to rally for Christmas. 2008 was then basically straight downwards.

 

I'd say same is true for early Trump 2. Which therefore makes the entire graph telling. Going along with what made sense given the economic situation most of the time, except when it could be beneficial to him personally to have a different take.

 

So the numbers are gonna suck ass quite bigly



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I sense some flaws in this deport-all-illegals scheme

 

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/em...grants counted in,the legal status of workers.

"2. Are undocumented immigrants counted in the surveys?

It is likely that both surveys include at least some undocumented immigrants. However,
neither the establishment nor the household survey is designed to identify the legal
status of workers. Therefore, it is not possible to determine how many are counted in
either survey. The establishment survey does not collect data on the legal status of
workers. The household survey does include questions which identify the foreign and
native born, but it does not include questions about the legal status of the foreign
born. Data on the foreign and native born are published each month in table A-7 of
The Employment Situation news release."

Not that this is news, but I'm not sure Navarro knows what he's talking about. Me thinks if I was undocumented and got a call from the government and someone asked me about my employment status, I might hang up. But that's just me.

 

The jobs president!!!

US employment growth through March revised down by 862,000 jobs

The U.S. economy created 862,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March 2025 than previously estimated, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said on Wednesday.

The final nonfarm payrolls benchmark revision was less than the reduction of 911,000 jobs the BLS estimated in August. The numbers are not seasonally adjusted. Economists had expected the level of employment over the 12-month period would be reduced by between 750,000 and 900,000 jobs following updates to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for the first quarter on which the BLS based the payrolls benchmark revision.

The change in total nonfarm employment for 2025 was revised down to a seasonally-adjusted 181,000 from the previously reported 584,000.

 

Meaning this adjustment is worse (e.g. larger) than the one by the previous/incompetent guy, right?

 

O ya, i forgot to put the [Trump] [/Trump] tags on "incompetent."

Guess that makes ME incompetent.

 

My guess is that there are still competent people around in many agencies, but they are overworked, stressed and probably have to take a lot of shortcuts and make generous adjustments to please leadership.

 

I suspect most/all of the departmental heads are very Trumpy at this point. I meant the staff, and since a lot of the suporting cast was fired or quit, those that stayed are probably under a lot of pressure to deliver and to produce flattering numbers.

 

You know, for a country obsessed by inflation (well ok the administration is ignoring it), we sure don't seem to have a problem rounding up and deporting all the people that do the crappy dangerous low-pay jobs for under-the-table wages.

Oh well, I guess we're just idiots.

 

Thank you for not adding “are willing to,” because a lot of the people who do those jobs do so under duress.

 

I assume, too, that loyalist mouth breathers he’s placed in these roles don’t really have a clue where these numbers come from, how complex and technical the process is, and the expertise required to generate actual data. They could announce that the economy added a bazillion jobs last month, but the numbers would lack kind of underpinning. To cook the data, you need to cook the surveys that the data are based upon. Or create some elaborate system that generates fake data in parallel that kinda looks legit. But they’re a bunch of stupid stormtrooper goons. And they’re lazy as hell.

 

The January numbers were not terrible, but let's check again in a few months when they get revised down.

 

Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy. The quote does include a dramatic downward revision of 2025 jobs numbers, too, so that’s on Trump’s watch. I would argue that the insanity on display from the moment he arrived in the WH certainly has had a negative effect on those numbers in a way that just doesn’t happen with presidents. Attacks on higher ed funding, the nonstop craziness re: tariffs, gutting parts of the federal workforce, deporting irreplaceable, productive employees, invading several major American cities, destroying relations with longstanding allies, in general raping, pillaging and stealing as much as he could. The jobs market may have been soft going into 2025, but he seems dead set on suffocating it.

 

I posted this in another thread already, but since this one is about tariffs, I think it makes sense also to discuss it here:

A few days ago a company called Express Fasteners filed a lawsuit against US customs for overreaching section 232 tariffs, which are defined as 50% of the value of the steel content of the products they are importing. Apparently US customs demanded not only the duty on the value of the steel content itself, as in the raw material cost, but also on the added value, such as labor, machining, galvanizing/coating and even packaging - which of course increases the import duty exponentially. US customs then referred to an unpublished internal guideline, that would need to be followed. So importers need to follow unpublished guidelines now?!

More on this court case in this article:
https://www.cato.org/blog/tariffs-u...ue-enforcement-compounds-us-tariff-complexity

 

Even if you took some 100 level Econ classes, you know that this is malarkey



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