As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released
The numbers are as good as they can get with hard manual work that goes into compiling them.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
Healthcare has consistently been one of the biggest drivers of US GDP and job growth numbers for years now.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
So perhaps we'll never get to a better healthcare+insurance market (nee "Free") through government, but eventually we will just all work in healthcare, and barter our nursing and dental skills in secret away from the insurance coders.
You can move to Singapore, if you want a better healthcare sector.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
Europe is also excellent in my experience, specifically Portugal and Spain. My health insurance cost for a family of four in Spain is ~$2k/year as someone on a visa. In the US on an employer plan, it was ~$20k/year (premiums, copays, etc).
I think the commenter you responded to filtered first for countries with outcomes better or exceeding the US? Though I’m not sure Portugal and Spain automatically fall into that category
This has been the case in several recent reports. It really ought to put to bed the idea that Trump was somehow going to be "good for business" and bring back manufacturing. At best all he's done is create a ton of uncertainty, at worst he's actively harmed massive swaths of American businesses with tariffs, war, and gutting the federal workforce and programs that indirectly supported a ton of businesses.
This isn’t surprising. The population overall is aging. Millenials are now the largest cohort and are approaching middle age. Until recently we’ve seen the number of insured individuals rise consistently and our medicine continues to advance. More older adults have access and need more healthcare
No, I mean on an age-corrected basis, throughout the spectrum of ages.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
Maybe we can finally reach communism by first getting together and all agreeing "the economy" isn't a science and if we all just believe really hard, numbers can go up forever, then we won't even need money!
It only works until people try to withdraw money that doesn't exist. The less people believe the earlier that happens, but it will happen sooner or later.
Yesterday they were expecting the report to show 80k+ jobs added. So, this is much, much worse than expected. The market is up because they expect this will keep the fed from raising interest rates, and also because the market is increasingly detached from reality.
The market is going up because the market (AI) thinks it means there will be a rate cut. Which is good for stocks.
But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.
They don’t. They aren’t faking the BLS numbers as an electoral strategy. No one at WH or NRCC or CLF are rubbing their hands together as if this is all according to plan.
> In yet another troubling sign for the labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it revised down the prior two months by a combined 103,000. May’s jobs total was cut by 66,000 to 129,000 total jobs added, while June’s total was lowered by 37,000 to a total gain of 57,000.
It looks to me like a failure of the American media landscape, that such constant revisal trends are not called out in the reporting of new numbers.
That just makes them a mouthpiece of the government.
One of the reaction threads I saw elsewhere on social media pointed out the response rates for the surveys that come up with these numbers is plummeting--about a decade ago, we had ~85% response rate, now we're done to ~65% response rate. So the initial quality of these numbers is probably getting a lot worse.
This is how bls data has always worked. And the reason is that they don’t always have the full picture every month and need to account for new data in the stats.
Honest ask because I’ve not generally paid attention…
Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?
> They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving
And for good reason! These are surveys. The easiest respondents are those saying “no change.” The latest responses, the ones who had the biggest change. In a booming economy, the biggest changes will be hires. In a troubled one, the biggest changes will be those doing lay-offs.
Add to that: the BLS tries to correct for this effect. Which means at the moment the economy turns, its corrections skew the wrong way. (On the whole, per the above chart, the figures are getting better over time.)
If you can do economics without revision, that is, find the real number of jobs lost or gained or workplace participation in real time, you could make a lot of money. Probably win some prizes, too.
It has nothing to do with economics being an imperfect science and all to do with the nature of collecting real time data. Anyone who can collect accurate real time data can make $$$.
These jobs lost/gained and unemployment statistics, especially on a monthly basis, and when the numbers are so small, are just noise. Seasonal adjustments alone (baseline assumptions on how many people should be employed) make them meaningless, as does the government definition of being unemployed or looking for work.
As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.
And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.
There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.
So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.
—
The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.
You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.
>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.
I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.
They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.
>As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
> ...
>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.
>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.
And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).
And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Meanwhile, Canada adds 75k jobs in the same month.
> Gains were focused on the private sector, with strength in wholesale and retail trade, finance and insurance, and professional and scientific services. Public sector jobs fell by 14,500 amid an official bid to cut government spending.
Yeah, our unemployment rate is still higher though with basically no productivity growth since 2015 (see link). Maybe 2 years straight of these job gains and then we can talk.
I suspect that even his proponents knew better, they just didn't care as much about the economy as they did culture wars nonsense and religious woo-woo.
It's not a "suspect" thing, it has been widely reported up and down the chain there is basically no support for tariffs, especially when the economic reality hit. The only supporter is trump, and he can do whatever he wants as king baby.
I have been very critical of the Federal gov (less so under Carney) and I will admit this job report actually was very good as it wasn't just majority public sector hirings which was very common under Trudeau:
Private-sector jobs: +58,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Government/public-sector jobs:-27,000 jobs (a decline) [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Self-employed: +44,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Part-time jobs: +36,600 jobs [money.usnews.com], [ca.finance.yahoo.com]
Canada has faced nearly a decade of weak per capita GDP growth and secular stagnation. Statistics Canada confirmed the country slipped into a technical recession after two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in late 2025 and early 2026.
Neither of those imply "collapse," just that the economy could be doing better than it is. There's a vast continuum between "collapse" and "red hot." Canada's economy is doing just fine despite a few weak points.
And preliminary Q2 GDP numbers look very good, it appears the technical recession is most likely over (TBC once the final Q2 release is firmed up at the end of the month). Just two negative growth quarters when your southern neighbour has threatened to annex you by "economic force" is pretty damn good.
Interesting, this article doesn't seem to mention the layoffs from the tech industry. Which, if you look at the numbers, sort of make up the bulk of it.
Tech sector is not the bulk of it, many sectors doing worse and that is why they got the headlines. "Financial Activities" supersector was terrible this month. Another reason is there is not an umbrella "tech" sector in the NAICS, so it's harder to report on.
I began rapidly recalling the hundreds of sources foreseeing this well in advance, citing it, raising alarm, and being ignored.
I guess we are supposed to take numbers at face value, disregard what generated them and why, accept what they imply as presented, and never question it.
Then we must patiently withhold intelligence, wait for sanctioned admission, then finally consider what we already knew.
Suddenly, Rome collapsed.
Edit: Don't take the flagging to heart. If you dig, you will find a thousand exceptions made where the single-word comment fit the narrative and endured. This comment will be flagged too.
As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released
The numbers are as good as they can get with hard manual work that goes into compiling them.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
I have recently started an experiment tracking a sample of 5000 employers in US and I see a bounce last week after a brief lull in july. I am not sure if there is a strong downward trend. https://corvi.careers/reports/usa-weekly-job-openings-report...
Who actually believes these numbers?
weird dejavu because this exact comment was on the last one of these job lost updates i saw
What is also interesting is that the only sector thad added jobs was health care.
Healthcare has consistently been one of the biggest drivers of US GDP and job growth numbers for years now.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
So perhaps we'll never get to a better healthcare+insurance market (nee "Free") through government, but eventually we will just all work in healthcare, and barter our nursing and dental skills in secret away from the insurance coders.
You can move to Singapore, if you want a better healthcare sector.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
Europe is also excellent in my experience, specifically Portugal and Spain. My health insurance cost for a family of four in Spain is ~$2k/year as someone on a visa. In the US on an employer plan, it was ~$20k/year (premiums, copays, etc).
I think the commenter you responded to filtered first for countries with outcomes better or exceeding the US? Though I’m not sure Portugal and Spain automatically fall into that category
Singapore has severe consequences for executives who violate the public trust. That makes it hard for sociopaths to rig the system for the elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Any sector that's resistant to productivity growth is liable to become bigger and bigger part of the economy.
yeah but the size of the us healthcare sector (like 18%) is a policy choice, other developed countries have theirs at 10-12%.
U.S. healthcare is a giant predatory clusterfuck and seems impossible to meaningfully reform.
Singapore has more like 5-7% or so.
I don't think many of the BBB healthcare cuts have hit yet.
i think population pyramids will basically guarantee growth of that sector in almost all first world countries for thenext few decades
This has been the case in several recent reports. It really ought to put to bed the idea that Trump was somehow going to be "good for business" and bring back manufacturing. At best all he's done is create a ton of uncertainty, at worst he's actively harmed massive swaths of American businesses with tariffs, war, and gutting the federal workforce and programs that indirectly supported a ton of businesses.
It was the same in June I think...
That has been the case for most of the year IIRC
Wealthy, aging boomers with increasing need for health care, makes sense.
It's not just boomers (though they are the biggest part of it).
Americans of all ages are spending more on healthcare, and seeking more healthcare interventions than in previous decades.
This isn’t surprising. The population overall is aging. Millenials are now the largest cohort and are approaching middle age. Until recently we’ve seen the number of insured individuals rise consistently and our medicine continues to advance. More older adults have access and need more healthcare
No, I mean on an age-corrected basis, throughout the spectrum of ages.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
I'm sure ADHD medications / antidepressants / GLP-1s are huge drivers.
And, as a result, the market is ... up?
Unemployment makes it more likely for the fed to lower interest rates, which makes the stock market more attractive, so, yes.
(Unemployment also generally causes lower inflation in general, at least according to the prevailing macroeconomic school of thought.)
Private sector gained jobs. Public sector lost more jobs than the private sector gained. News reports a negative number.
I wonder if this is the evidence of the labor market decoupling from "the economy" in terms of economic productivity?
Folks keep predicting it. Maybe it's starting?
Maybe we can finally reach communism by first getting together and all agreeing "the economy" isn't a science and if we all just believe really hard, numbers can go up forever, then we won't even need money!
It only works until people try to withdraw money that doesn't exist. The less people believe the earlier that happens, but it will happen sooner or later.
Never withdraw money, only take out loans! the survivors will sort it out, or not... we'll be dead so who cares.
I think we're there already?
If the market expected a worse job loss than 23,000 that would make sense.
I'm not actually suggesting there's a good reason for market swings, just that bad news shouldn't necessarily cause the market to go down.
Yesterday they were expecting the report to show 80k+ jobs added. So, this is much, much worse than expected. The market is up because they expect this will keep the fed from raising interest rates, and also because the market is increasingly detached from reality.
The market is going up because the market (AI) thinks it means there will be a rate cut. Which is good for stocks.
But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.
Yeah, I'll never understand the disconnect between Wall Street and the mudslide of diarrhetic bad news that has been rolling in constantly.
Bad news is good news, leading to possibly fewer rate hikes
There is no good news. This is stagflation. Worst case scenario.
Jobs down, threat of increased interest rates down
govt is resetting the baseline now, so we will see some good numbers in November.
it's all about optics for mid term.
No. Very bad economic numbers in August before a midterm is not a cunning political optics move.
I'm surprised by the conspiratorial comments here like this is some sort of 4D chess move. *It's not.*
This is chickens coming home to roost from US actions in Iran, with tariffs, and other things introducing economic uncertainty.
As you alluded to; this is terrible for Republicans in power. And quite useful for Democrats.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a good move; just whether they think it’s a good move.
They don’t. They aren’t faking the BLS numbers as an electoral strategy. No one at WH or NRCC or CLF are rubbing their hands together as if this is all according to plan.
Maybe. But I think the government could just lie about both quarters and then restate after the election.
The worse Q2 looks the bigger improvement a bogus Q3 will look.
Wish i had your optimism.
https://archive.is/bsnvr
I love how this is immediately used as an excuse to reinflate the AI bubble. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are just begging for backlash.
Note, also:
> In yet another troubling sign for the labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it revised down the prior two months by a combined 103,000. May’s jobs total was cut by 66,000 to 129,000 total jobs added, while June’s total was lowered by 37,000 to a total gain of 57,000.
I'm not an expert at quantifying the magnitude of how bad that is, but revision down is not something "exceptional". The numbers have been revised down consistently since ~2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/business/economy/economy-...
It does make you wonder if the July shedding of jobs could be lowered even further to ~100k+ jobs lost (since they revise down very consistently).
Yeah, that wouldn't be a surprise.
It looks to me like a failure of the American media landscape, that such constant revisal trends are not called out in the reporting of new numbers. That just makes them a mouthpiece of the government.
One of the reaction threads I saw elsewhere on social media pointed out the response rates for the surveys that come up with these numbers is plummeting--about a decade ago, we had ~85% response rate, now we're done to ~65% response rate. So the initial quality of these numbers is probably getting a lot worse.
https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573 indicates they've been getting better over time.
I'd suspect better computing helps a lot here.
Cut that graph to the last decade, and they don't look like they've been getting better.
The COVID era is likely to be an outlier in many things.
These guys are just nonstop liars. Print the headline, revise when no one is looking.
To be fair, revisions are very normal, because the more reliable data (tax filings, for example) comes in later.
https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573
Are they ever revised higher? I'll wait...
The jobs numbers are notoriously laggy. On the way up, lag means constant upwards revisions. On the way down, lag means constant downwards revisions.
ADP Payrolls are a lower latency indicator but not quite as broad.
This is how bls data has always worked. And the reason is that they don’t always have the full picture every month and need to account for new data in the stats.
Honest ask because I’ve not generally paid attention…
Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?
They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving at the time.
Chart: https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573
> They move in both directions regularly, typically in the direction the economic situation is moving
And for good reason! These are surveys. The easiest respondents are those saying “no change.” The latest responses, the ones who had the biggest change. In a booming economy, the biggest changes will be hires. In a troubled one, the biggest changes will be those doing lay-offs.
Add to that: the BLS tries to correct for this effect. Which means at the moment the economy turns, its corrections skew the wrong way. (On the whole, per the above chart, the figures are getting better over time.)
If you can do economics without revision, that is, find the real number of jobs lost or gained or workplace participation in real time, you could make a lot of money. Probably win some prizes, too.
Economics is an imperfect science.
It has nothing to do with economics being an imperfect science and all to do with the nature of collecting real time data. Anyone who can collect accurate real time data can make $$$.
These jobs lost/gained and unemployment statistics, especially on a monthly basis, and when the numbers are so small, are just noise. Seasonal adjustments alone (baseline assumptions on how many people should be employed) make them meaningless, as does the government definition of being unemployed or looking for work.
As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.
And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.
There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.
So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.
—
The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.
You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.
>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.
Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Also net population loss of working age adults via deportation and self deportation.
I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.
They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.
>As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.
> ...
>When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.
The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...
>And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.
You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?
At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.
"And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything…"
And I suspect, sometime in the future, we're going to discover that the numbers were even worse than we thought they were—were covered up.
Maybe, maybe not.
And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).
And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
> thus paying more in taxes
If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?
> Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.
Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.
Job numbers have always been reviewed down after being released every single time since 2022.
And this is even after Trump fired the previous Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for simply reporting poor jobs growth.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
Still has a long way to go to catch us up on the other side of the pond.
Sudden reversal? It’s been the apocalypse for several years with each year getting worse
Meanwhile, Canada adds 75k jobs in the same month.
> Gains were focused on the private sector, with strength in wholesale and retail trade, finance and insurance, and professional and scientific services. Public sector jobs fell by 14,500 amid an official bid to cut government spending.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-can...
Yeah, our unemployment rate is still higher though with basically no productivity growth since 2015 (see link). Maybe 2 years straight of these job gains and then we can talk.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=361007...
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260807/dq260...
Meanwhile Canada added 75,000 new jobs in July. Perhaps Trump's tariff scheme is not working so well after all.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7299225
No one with at least two brain cells to rub together thought the tariffs was going to make anything better.
I suspect that even his proponents knew better, they just didn't care as much about the economy as they did culture wars nonsense and religious woo-woo.
It's not a "suspect" thing, it has been widely reported up and down the chain there is basically no support for tariffs, especially when the economic reality hit. The only supporter is trump, and he can do whatever he wants as king baby.
I have been very critical of the Federal gov (less so under Carney) and I will admit this job report actually was very good as it wasn't just majority public sector hirings which was very common under Trudeau:
Private-sector jobs: +58,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Government/public-sector jobs:-27,000 jobs (a decline) [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Self-employed: +44,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Part-time jobs: +36,600 jobs [money.usnews.com], [ca.finance.yahoo.com]
Canada's economy is on the verge of collapse.
Perhaps that is what you are wishing for, but it’s not the reality.
Look at the M2 supply growth, it can't collapse with that growth but inflation will run quite high.
Citation needed. Canada's economic indicators are all extremely healthy, despite the trade war tantrum from its southern neighbour.
Canada has faced nearly a decade of weak per capita GDP growth and secular stagnation. Statistics Canada confirmed the country slipped into a technical recession after two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in late 2025 and early 2026.
Neither of those imply "collapse," just that the economy could be doing better than it is. There's a vast continuum between "collapse" and "red hot." Canada's economy is doing just fine despite a few weak points.
And preliminary Q2 GDP numbers look very good, it appears the technical recession is most likely over (TBC once the final Q2 release is firmed up at the end of the month). Just two negative growth quarters when your southern neighbour has threatened to annex you by "economic force" is pretty damn good.
You dropped the "/s".
Interesting, this article doesn't seem to mention the layoffs from the tech industry. Which, if you look at the numbers, sort of make up the bulk of it.
Tech sector is not the bulk of it, many sectors doing worse and that is why they got the headlines. "Financial Activities" supersector was terrible this month. Another reason is there is not an umbrella "tech" sector in the NAICS, so it's harder to report on.
firstly :: "economy" cannot lose jobs because it doesn't have any. Secondly :: there is absolutely no way for you to know it.
That’s just nitpicking words and yes you can tell from payroll
"sudden"
My thought exactly.
I began rapidly recalling the hundreds of sources foreseeing this well in advance, citing it, raising alarm, and being ignored.
I guess we are supposed to take numbers at face value, disregard what generated them and why, accept what they imply as presented, and never question it.
Then we must patiently withhold intelligence, wait for sanctioned admission, then finally consider what we already knew.
Suddenly, Rome collapsed.
Edit: Don't take the flagging to heart. If you dig, you will find a thousand exceptions made where the single-word comment fit the narrative and endured. This comment will be flagged too.
I predict the numbers will look good after November. Maybe not reality but the numbers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Guess it's time for Trump to fire another BLS director and find one who's better at cooking the books...
Vertical Thinkers: “Who could’ve seen this coming when all the data looks good?!”
Lateral Thinkers: quietly sipping tea, nursing our wounds from layoffs, lamenting another unheard Cassandra moment.
Basically sums up the mood, I find. Don’t worry, we’re always steeping a fresh pot for the new club members when stories like these hit the wire.
The great reversal is happening. It was about time to quell the bubble-sayers.