This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 6 episode of “Velshi.”
As Jay-Z put it, “Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t.” That adage is especially pertinent now in light of recent economic news. That’s because a month after Donald Trump claimed a lackluster July jobs report was “RIGGED” to make him look bad and fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, August’s jobs report was even worse.
According to Friday’s report, the labor market added just 22,000 jobs in August. Forecasters were expecting 75,000. The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.3%, the highest since 2021. Revisions to previous reports also indicated the labor market actually lost 13,000 jobs in June — the first time that’s happened since the pandemic.
Here’s the thing about the monthly job numbers compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Most people usually just see a few headline numbers, but if you look under the hood at where our now paltry and possibly negative job growth is coming from, it’s not pretty either.
The health care sector has consistently added the most jobs to the economy — as it almost always does — even when the market is losing jobs. But now, it’s doing even more of the heavy lifting: Without the added 31,000 health care jobs, this month’s report would, in fact, have been negative.
One of the president’s stated goals in his global trade war was to reshore manufacturing, but the industry has been shrinking all year. Last month, 12,000 manufacturing jobs were lost and 78,000 have been lost this year.
Another red flag: College graduates and young people at large are struggling to find their footing in the job market. The unemployment rate among recent college graduates is higher than the national average; the Federal Reserve says it averaged 5.3% this summer, versus the unemployment rate for all Americans of 4.3%.
Even higher: the unemployment rate for Black Americans. It hit 7.5%, up from 7.2% last month. African Americans also disproportionately work for the federal government, which has been slashed by DOGE.
And for the first time since April 2021, there are more unemployed people than there are available jobs in the country. The caveat here is that those workers and those jobs don’t meld together perfectly — job seekers don’t always have the right skills or live in the right place needed for the available jobs — but taken alongside Friday’s report, what you’ve got is an economy that could be teetering on the edge.
Following this report, the president is almost certain to get his long-requested interest rate cut from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Now, easing interest rates to stimulate the labor market makes sense in a vacuum, but we don’t live in one. Trump’s other policies, like his global tariffs, mean rising prices, and high inflation is often fought by increasing interest rates.
The Fed’s two priorities, by law, are maximizing employment and keeping inflation low, and right now those two goals are in conflict with one another.
As former Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair Janet Yellen told me on “Velshi” recently, we’ve seen this exact situation play out before. “We’ve seen this very recently in countries like Turkey, which just a year or so ago had around an 80% inflation rate, and a year or so ago also in Argentina with similarly high inflation,” Yellen said. “And of course, we can go back to Germany in the 1920s or Hungary after World War II.”
According to Yellen, the common thread connecting those situations was the absence of an independent central bank, which she referred to as a “recipe for runaway inflation.”
Yellen said the U.S. risked following a similar path. “Americans need to worry about that,” she added.
So, are you worried? Perhaps we all should be.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
