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U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

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Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#71
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

This post is right about some things, including the general solution to staglation, and wrong about others. Paul Volker was Fed Chair between 1979 and 1987, not 1973. The 1973 crash and recession were not caused by his actions, if you had to pick a single cause, I think Opec would be it.

You're right. Fixed!

I knew that, but my puny little brain somehow didn't catch it as I was writing my comment.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#72
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

The only people who care about that are the economists. You can also take a one time hit by getting back to the basics and forget the goddamn metrics.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#74

[flagged]

This is probably the culmination of every administration after Clinton. Unsustainable spending that keeps going until now we are feeling the pressure. This administration is definitely acting in ways I feel are significantly suboptimal but it's unlikely to show the deeper impacts so quickly.

If you just keep cutting taxes of the wealthy and the corporations … this is kind of what is going to happen.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#75
post #50

I think it's interesting that everyone's immediate reaction now-a-days is to assume incompetence or maliciousness, rather than curiosity at the root cause (very telling this attitude has even permeated a forum for supposed 'hackers'). A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example). What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volat…

Are 'hackers' allowed to have priors regarding incompetence or malice, or are we supposed to look at everything with a clean slate and no context?

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#76
post #26

What I really fail to understand - how can departments like BLS screw up to this extent. Either they are grossly incompetent or they are intentionally corrupt. The data covers the period from March 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,0…

One factor is that a part of their measurement is tracking how many new companies are founded and estimating how many employees a new company is likely to have. These numbers have been trending down and rapidly fell due to a lot of new companies being one person LLCs for gig economy work. It appears they haven't kept up with this trend so they overestimate how many jobs these companies will have.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#78
post #4

[flagged]

One can argue that we're only seeing the beginning of the destruction. The economic policies of this administration could take years to be fully realized. That also means that, unfortunately, it will take years to repair the damage.

[flagged]

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#79
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I don't think that part is meant to be controversial.

The department of labor has a methodology that gives an early number that tends to get revised. They have been doing it the same way for a long time and it would not be controversial, except the business press with too little news to report makes a big deal about it with very little context. So its, like jobs increased 200k (not saying +/- 200k is the error bar). It would be good for everyone if people who are not pr…

> It would be good for everyone if people who are not professional economists paid less attention to this.

It would be good for everyone if the BLS figures were trusted.

Even "not professional economists" might lose trust in figures which are regularly revised downwards ... months after being published.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#80
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

The only people who care about that are the economists. You can also take a one time hit by getting back to the basics and forget the goddamn metrics.

What is back to basics mean here? Forgetting metrics, for a national economy, seems not good.
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