I don’t think it was mentioned why Trump went ballistic on the bureau of labor statistics. Job reports from the previous months were revised down, to an astonishing degree.
“The stunning move came the same day that the BLS reported a gain of just 73,000 nonfarm jobsin July, below market expectations. In addition, the bureau revised the two previous months down sharply, cutting a combined 258,000 from the prior counts, putting the three-month growth rate at a paltry 35,000. It was the biggest two-month downward revision since April 2020, the early days of the Covid crisis.“
Those dives are happening suspiciously often on Fridays in recent months. Looks like somebody with a short attention span is hoping people forget by Monday what happened before Saturday.
Firings there are also on my bingo card. Just as soon as a lower than desired GDP is reported.
Anyone think the new Director won’t revise those numbers to be back up? And half the statisticians at the Bureau won’t quit or be fired for not going along with that?
Also as I heard someone say on NPR, even if you alter the path of the hurricane with a Sharpie it doesn’t change the weather. When people see prices of everything going up, businesses closing they aren’t going to be fooled by rosy numbers coming from the voice of Sauron.
The funny (in the sense that we’re all going to die someday) thing is a weakening employment report is exactly the data the Federal Reserve would use to justify lowering interest rates. Trump is so stupid he’s tripping over his own ego.
My initial impression of the report, before the firing, was that it was intentionally tanking the numbers to pressure the Fed. Trump is losing one-dimensional tic-tac-toe.
This being exactly what bit Biden in the nut sack. Team Biden kept telling everyone that the economy was good. And, as an economist, the economy was pretty good. That said, if you’re on a budget and one-time covid inflation shock hits the supermarket, then one really doesn’t want to hear the economy is 'great.’
This time around, it aint a black swan pandemic, rather it’s ye olde self-inflicted wound. Fact is, trade wars are not easy to win, and tariff prices more or less get passed on to the consumer.
Another point I should have made: The annual inflation adjustment in Social Security benefits comes from just one agency, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Replacement of nonpartisan leadership with a good news Trumper will impact how much seniors like myself receive.
On the plus side, this should lower the deficit a bit. Also on the plus side, the social security tie-in to Trump’s BLS director firing should be useful to Democratic Party messaging.
Remittances to Mexico (how much money is sent from the US-based people to Mexico-based people) appear to account for about 3.5% of the national GDP and up to 18% of the gross state product of some of the poorer regions.
As of yet, there doesn’t appear to be a notable decline in total remittances (there’s a large drop from the previous quarter but, if you zoom out, that appears to be true for Q1 in general):
During his first term, Trump converted asylum seekers into H-2B visa workers in order to launder them into the country without anyone catching that he was accepting dirty, nasty asylum seekers:
Plausibly, he’ll do something similar with all the people caught in blue regions and sent for deportation, delivering them instead to red zones to plow the fields.
Whether that happens under a legal work visa, or something more like chain gang labor, and whether that results in remittances remains to be seen.
Should remittances to Mexico shrink too much, too quickly, that could cause some issues and instability on the Southern border, and disruptions in supply chains. If nothing else, we’d expect that to drive up costs on goods that do make it through.
Today’s jobs reports speaks to the impending collapse of our economy. Notably, the revised numbers for June show a net job loss for that month.
Trump, of course, blames the feds for not lowering interest rates. But they can’t do that when there’s high inflation. Newsflash: inflation is growing.
Great…looks like Trump’s idiotic economic policies are taking an economy that was humming along fairly well under Biden and is instead now lurching toward high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and high unemployment—in other words, classic stagflation.
Which once you get into is very difficult to correct, because if you lower imterest rates to juice the economy and create jobs in a high inflation environment you run the risk of creating runaway inflation. Like what happened in the 1970s in the U.S. or even the hyperinflation seen in Germany in the 1920s.
And the only way to counter that is to raise interest rates to levels not seen in decades—which takes discipline and will be very painful.