As such, I’ll resort to taking just a single paragraph from a NYT Opinion piece yesterday entitled “Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today” by Ian Buruma, author of Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, Buruma writes:

Since [November 2024] one red line after another has been crossed: Undocumented immigrants are called animals; civilian boats are blown out of the water; American citizens are gunned down in the streets and then accused of being domestic terrorists; universities, news organizations and law firms are being bullied and blackmailed; and refugees are deported to countries whose languages they probably don’t even speak. And that is aside from the blatant corruption of family and cronies.

To that list, we could, of course, add endlessly but just to start, we’d include a new war in the Middle East, a weaponized judiciary, efforts to build a massive network of prison camps across the country, endless attacks on Fed independence, rising imperialism, a decimated NATO, and threats to federalize elections or cancel them altogether, to name just a few.

All of that contrasts sharply, to a grotesquely absurd degree, with last week’s State of the Union speech. Leaving aside approximately 100 minutes of that debacle, we’ll focus solely on the economy, to which Trump awarded himself an A+++++.

And here again, we’ll leave aside accelerating inequality, worsening affordability, persistent inflation, tariff chaos, extreme uncertainty, rising cronyism, alarming state capitalism, horrifically low consumer confidence, slowing GDP growth, and slowing consumer spending and focus specifically on the job market which, by all measures, is failing miserably.

Even the WSJ gives the job market a grade of ‘Needs Improvement’ noting that “It is rough out there for job seekers, unless they are looking for work in healthcare. U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, down sharply from the prior year to the lowest figure outside of a recession in more than two decades.”

Unemployment has remained low, but as we noted on January 5th and then again in late January, with the administration’s nativist policies and mass deportations, labor supply has plummeted and unemployment has essentially become a useless indicator of what’s actually going on in the job market.

As far as income is concerned, wage growth is anemic and real wage growth after adjusting for inflation is effectively zero.

So ‘Needs Improvement’ is being overly generous, to put it mildly. As we titled our post on January 19th, the U.S. economy as a jobs creating machine has been shut off. As the chart below illustrates, average monthly job gains in 2025 dropped 75% from 2024 and January’s initial release notwithstanding, the downward trend continues.

And as horrific as the ‘Official’ data is, it might actually be worse. As the Financial Times recently noted:

Fed governor Christopher Waller said at a conference in Washington on Monday that official data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which shows job creation fell to an average of 15,000 new positions a month last year — contained an “upward bias”. Waller said, accounting for the likely further revision in those figures next year, it seemed “clear that payroll employment in the United States probably fell in 2025”. Declines in payrolls have rarely occurred outside of recessions, according to data stretching back to 1939. Waller said in the speech it was “only the third year that has happened since 1945”.

The Fed governor warned that the BLS report for January might have contained “more noise than signal” about the future health of the US labour market. Job gains were, he said, concentrated in healthcare and construction — sectors that constitute only about 20 per cent of total employment. “Many other sectors lost jobs, more consistent with what happened in 2025,” the Fed governor said. “All this does not suggest the whole labour market is heading for a more robust footing.”

In the same speech, Waller remarked that “the job market over 2025 was “weak” and “fragile.” We’d call it defunct.

So returning back to the initial jobs release for January (+130,000 jobs), the other thing the chart above highlights is that the average revision between the BLS initial release and its final release was -53%. Taking into account the Annual QCEW Adjustment, the average initial release was reduced by 85%. Using those averages, January’s jobs report will, by April, likely be reduced to a net gain of somewhere between 20,000 to 65,000 jobs.

Shockingly, everyone took January’s report at face value as it reinforced the widely-held consensus view that the job market is fine. So in addition to a math problem, the nation also suffers from an attention deficit problem, an epidemic that has apparently spread overseas.

As Michael Strain wrote in a February 16th Financial Times piece entitled “Everything you thought you knew about the US labour market is wrong”:

Markets, economists and Federal Reserve officials seem to believe that the US labour market spent most of last year weakening. On [that] point, the conventional view is probably wrong.

The holes in the consensus narrative were clear before last week’s jobs report, which surprised many analysts on the upside. In January, the economy added 130,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate declined by 10 basis points to 4.28 per cent.

But December’s 4.38 per cent unemployment rate was already very low. And the jobless rate — which was 4.3 per cent or higher for six months last year — had not been displaying a worrying upward trend. In addition, the rate at which employers are laying off workers has been flat since 2023. And according to my calculations, aggregate labour supply and demand are roughly in balance and have been relatively stable over the past year. Monthly headline payroll gains — which trended down throughout 2025 — ostensibly tell a different story.

But this reduction is mostly due to large declines in net migration. The conventional view of labour market weakening has struggled to contend with robust economic growth.

Needless to say, we couldn’t possibly disagree more and of course, we’ll see how this all plays out. To be certain, our crystal ball is no better than anyone else’s; But we do have an alethiometer in the form of a very powerful and forward-looking dataset of job openings sourced every day directly from company and employer websites around the world that we’ve leveraged effectively to, among other things, forecast non-farm payrolls since 2010.

Looking at our U.S. data for February, total job vacancies indexed from employers globally dropped 1.7% while new job vacancies fell 5.6%. Job Openings in the U.S. are now precisely where they stood at the end of December - well below the normal hiring patterns in a functioning economy when labor demand typically rises in the first quarter of the year.

Total and new openings dropped in nearly every state.

Labor demand rose again in Manufacturing but fell in services declined in both blue and white collar occupations.

Drilling into the detail, both industries and occupations were pretty evenly split between those that saw an increase in labor demand versus those that saw a decline.

Based on LinkUp’s January data, combined with our expectation that January’s Initial Release for January will be revised down, we are forecasting a net gain of 70,000 jobs in February - slightly above consensus estimates of 60,000 jobs.

And with February’s decline in labor demand, our preliminary view is that job gains in March will be even weaker. As noted above, the U.S. job-making machine is beyond broken. It might even be beyond repair.

It’s been yet another horrific week in Minneapolis heading into month two of the siege and occupation and despite what were always blatantly hollow promises of de-escalation, things have actually gotten worse. Luckily federal agents haven’t murdered any more U.S. citizens over the past 9 days.

With the images above and below providing some sense of what’s transpired over the past week or so, I’ll keep the commentary to a minimum and jump straight into the U.S. job market, our data for January, and our non-farm payroll forecast for January.

To begin, and quite fittingly given the chaos, dysfunction and complete meltdown of the country, it’s worth noting that we are, yet again, heading into another BLS data blackout with the delay in January’s Employment Situation Report.

These rolling data blackouts are clearly becoming a thing.

Fortunately, we have an alternative source of accurate, reliable data that provides insight into what’s going on in the U.S. labor market. Unfortunately, however, what we’ve been seeing in our labor demand data - millions and millions of job openings that we index globally every day directly from company websites - continues to be grim.

Based on our data from December, when new job openings in the U.S. dropped 5.6% and total job openings dropped 3.7%, we are forecasting that the economy lost 25,000 jobs in January.

And while labor demand picked up a bit in January, with total job openings rising 1.4%, that is well below what normally occurs in January every year when employers have typically increased job openings nationwide by an average of over 5% over the past 17 years.

Most states showed a gain in labor demand…

…as did nearly every state in terms of new job openings.

Labor demand rose in manufacturing but was flat in services.

Openings increased in all but 4 industries…

…and rose in white collar jobs but were flat in blue collar jobs.

And by occupation, labor demand rose in all but 4 occupation categories.

We’ll see what the data looks like if and when we get it at some point in the future, maybe, but regardless, as we stated a few weeks ago, the U.S. economy, as a job creating machine, has been completely shut off and we don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

Lastly, a few more images from and a poem for Minnesota…

I’ve been trying to write poems for Minnesota

have been watching through my screen

the floods of people in the streets

hands to my throat, I’ve been hoping

I’ve been angry with language

and the twist of it

the men who spit ‘terrorists’

but Minnesota, you’re still stronghold of our winter

you know ice and can run without slipping

listen, it’s a rare thing

that I am proud to be American

but Minnesota, you’re an open sky

I’d fly a flag in you and maybe

for the first time I’d mean it

I mean a look at you

whistle-mouthed with signs

your signal threads the memory of five summers back

we can last by the light of you

can catch fire from your heat

Minnesota, show us quick now toward freedom

Zoe Branch

As I think everybody knows by now (or should at any rate), things are horrific in Minneapolis as we approach month two of the paramilitary siege and attempted occupation. I cannot begin to describe the extent of the daily horror, nor will I even attempt to do so - the reporting by local, national, and international media has been phenomenal, and the headlines and images above and below hopefully provide some sense of the terror, the resistance, and the outpouring of support globally.

As we stated at the beginning of 2025 and emphatically repeated throughout the year, as awful as anyone thought things would get under this administration, we were willing, always, to take the over.

I think it’s pretty safe to say, not even a month into year two, that things are already far, far worse than most imagined possible in year one - not just in Minneapolis but everywhere, all the time. The relentless onslaught of horrors is beyond comprehension.

Bovino being yanked out of Minneapolis and put out to pasture is a positive development, to be sure, but “it’s not a celebration until they’re all the way gone,” as an ICE Watcher in Minneapolis stated to Chris Hayes during a ride-along through Minneapolis this week.

The fierce resistance in Minneapolis continues to gather strength and galvanize people throughout the country and the tide seems to be turning in a palpable way on many levels and on multiple fronts as a result of the scenes, both positive and negative, in Minneapolis, but things are most assuredly going to get much, much worse for the nation in the months to come.

Leaving aside, simply because it’s just too much, Davos, Greenland, the end of NATO and the obliteration of the world order that has successfully kept world peace for 80 years - the longest such stretch without major powers being at war with one another since the 5th century (Dexter Filkins), Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Venezuela, the Board of Peace, unceasing tariff mayhem, and everything else on the world stage, what’s become clear through the lens of Minneapolis is how far the administration will go to actualize fascist regime change by imposing state terror through the deployment of masked, secret police (and we’ll undoubtedly see an even broader array of authoritarian means to achieve their desired end before the year is out).

But again, as terrifying as things are and as much as people are starting to finally come to grips with the severity of the risk the country and the world are facing, we’ll still take the over on how brutal this gets. There’s endless evidence to choose from to prove our point, but we’ll highlight just one, a NYT story from yesterday - Administration Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging - both because of how chilling it is as well as the fact that it’s connected, in part, to the Department of Labor and recruitment ads from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

I highly recommend reading the entire article, but as the sub-headline and opening paragraph note, “A flurry of posts from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security have included images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right. The posts have referred to neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies, mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.”

Pertaining to recruitment advertising for the Department of Homeland Security, the article notes:

This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.

Pertaining to the Department of Labor, the article notes:

This month, the Labor Department posted a noir-style image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN.” That’s also a central catchphrase of QAnon, an internet conspiracy theory that falsely claims the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and that Mr. Trump has been chosen to sunder it.

Also this month, the Labor Department posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” That phrase resembled a German slogan used by Nazis during World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

The intention of the posts by senior officials in the administration could not be more obvious:

Part of the draw of the posts could be their potentially secret codes and numerological clues, especially in the recruitment images. They appear to be an appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans, young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life, said Peter Simi, a Chapman University sociologist who studies extremist groups.

Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford law professor who studies the legal treatment of political violence, said “they are plainly trying to recruit a segment of the population that’s moved by this rhetoric.”

This shit is real, it’s happening right now in the United States of America, and Minnesota has shown, as Rachel Maddow stated Monday night, that “principled, peaceful, relentless protest” not only works, it might just save the country and perhaps even the world.

The madness is nearly beyond comprehension but a handful of front pages from just the past week capture well the horror of where we are these days.

As Dexter Filkins from The New Yorker summarized the state of things talking to Chris Hayes, “It feels like we’re standing outside of a very expensive jewelry store just watching a bunch of children have a party smashing everything.”

Hyperbole long since dead, we truly stand at the precipice of the abyss just a few weeks into an election year with things certain to continue degrading at an accelerating clip between now and November. And as truly fucked up as everything is everywhere, it may still be the economy that largely determines the outcome in November (assuming, of course, that we have one). And on that front, our dumpster fire of an economy just might end up saving the free world.

To be clear - in no way, shape, or form does GDP growth, corporate earnings, the market (no matter how big the bubble gets), the balance of trade, PMI, productivity, or any other esoteric or intangible measure of the economy have any relevant bearing here. Nor does consumer spending which is wildly skewed by sustained spending (for the time being) by the most affluent; the only thing that matters is kitchen table economics for average Americans - affordability (not a hoax) and employment.

And on those fronts, it’s also not the traditional measures of inflation and unemployment that matter but rather how frustrated people are about the cost of living and how worried they are about their job. The Vibecession has never been so real and the natives are beyond restless.

As the WSJ notes in a January 16th article entitled “It’s Trump’s Economy & Voters Are Unhappy With It:

By 15 percentage points, more voters rate the economy as weak rather than strong, a deterioration from July, when negative views predominated by 4 points. About half of voters say the economy has gotten worse in the past year, compared with 35% who see improvement. That finding continues a yearslong disconnect between traditional measures of inflation and economic growth, which are relatively positive, and a negative public outlook.

On the jobs front, things couldn’t be uglier. Excluding the pandemic, the 584,000 jobs gained to date in Trump’s economy were the worst since 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis.

Not counting healthcare and social assistance jobs, private sector job growth was effectively zero this past year. And even those miserable numbers will likely get revised downward in future BLS releases.

As we said earlier this month when we forecasted weaker than consensus job gains in December, “the U.S. economy, as a job creating machine, has literally been shut off.”

As abysmal as ‘official’ job growth was in 2025, it was likely much worse in actuality. As the Fed Chair indicated late last year looking ahead to the revision that is calculated every year based on state-level data, monthly job gains have likely been overstated by at least 60,000 per month since April and most estimates are closer to a downward revision of 900,000 jobs.

Keep in mind, too, that we are literally in the very earliest stages of what AI is going to do to annihilate employment. While labor demand and hiring have dropped off a cliff, companies have yet to start laying off people en masse. But make no mistake, those days are coming and not only does everybody know it, they also know (or soon will) that no one in this kakistocracy is going to do a thing about it.

Tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill will do nothing to douse the firestorm enflaming households, nor will the imminent rebate checks, as pathetically inept as they are brazenly transparent. In fact, with the recent, rapid escalation of tariff chaos and ICE terror, this kleptocracy’s sole priority, aside from plundering the nation, appears to be pouring more and more gasoline on the inferno ravaging the nation.

So as horrific as things are these days, we’ve seen nothing compared to what’s coming. There’s a reason behind the growing prevalence of serious discussion around (and a corresponding proliferation in popular media about) revolution, civil war, and the end of basically everything - i.e., capitalism, democracy, and the world as we know it.

Happy MLK Day.

For the week ended January 3rd, job vacancies in the U.S. indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally dropped 3.4%.

The number of job openings in the U.S. has not been this low since the week ending October 10th, 2020.

Labor demand dropped in every state, and new job openings dropped in all but 3 states.

Labor demand fell in both manufacturing and services and for both blue and white collar jobs.

Drilling into the detail, labor demand dropped in every industry except Arts, Entertainment & Recreation and in every Occupation except Farm/Forest/Fish/Hunting.

Also noteworthy, and certainly echoing what we’ve been saying for months about the job market being far weaker than anyone seems to recognize or appreciate, November JOLTS data came in far weaker than consensus estimates which rattled the markets.

As we wrote earlier this week, with our forecast of -25,000 jobs, we expect another downside surprise (at least relative to consensus of +60,000) with tomorrow’s initial jobs report for December.

We’ll hold off on our annual predictions until after we get December’s jobs report later this week, but the following post provides our final NFP forecast for 2025 as well as a broad overview of our take on where the job market has been, where we think it’s headed, and what that’s likely to mean for the broader economy.

We’ll start with a perfect synopsis of the prevailing consensus view found in one of the countless New Year commentaries - in this case a recap of the most recent episode of Bloomberg’s Everybody’s Business podcast. Bloomberg summarizes the hosts’ forecast for 2026 as follows:

The chances of a recession in the new year are significantly higher than normal, according to most forecasting agencies, but the chances of it actually happening are lower than was predicted for 2022 and 2023. If the economy continues to grow, if the job market doesn’t crater, if food prices don’t spiral out of reach, and if the promise of AI can deliver sufficiently for investors, 2026 could shape up to be good year for the US economy.

Factually accurate for certain, but replete with plenty of conditionals and equivocations. But in addition to adding dozens more ‘ifs’ to the list (as I have ad nauseam for the past year) which most everyone underestimates, ignores, misses altogether, or worse, welcomes, I’d note that the fundamental premise is built around the flawed assessments of 2022 and 2023 (and we’d add 2024 as well).

We’ll refrain (somewhat) from yet another exhaustive revisit of how badly everyone was misreading the fundamentals of the U.S. job market coming out of the pandemic and how that played out across the economy and the markets, but suffice it to say that the job market was far stronger than everyone believed it to be as the underlying mechanics of the labor market operated precisely as expected throughout the period.

From our standpoint (and we’re clearly biased), the collective misread of the post-covid economy was due, in large measure, to fundamentally flawed JOLTS data. Our view, on the other hand, was shaped by our accurate job openings data indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally that list organic (i.e., non-sponsored or paid) job vacancies that are accurate, diligently maintained, complete, real, and timely. Of course, we also applied 20+ years of experience in and around the human capital management, talent acquisition, and recruitment advertising spaces, but the point is that accurate data provided (and continues to provide) an incredible window into what was/is actually happening in the job market, arguably the most significant driver of the broader economy.

In looking at LinkUp’s labor demand data relative to JOLTS data (see chart below), it’s clear that the two generally correlate with one another - at least they did until early 2022 - and they generally get to the same place over a long enough period of time (sort of).

But looking more closely at the two time series, it’s also very clear that in each of the past 4 years (as numbered below), there were material deviations between LinkUp and JOLTS data.

Again, we wrote endless blog posts in real time during these years, but the quick synopsis is as follows (from our vantage point and focusing on LinkUp data):

In 2022 (1), as companies raised wages and attracted people back to work, jobs were filled, new openings steadily decreased, and equilibrium in the job market was achieved as labor supply and demand gradually came into balance.

In 2023 (2), with the massive labor supply shock subsiding and the economy opening up fully, demand for everything (especially services) surged which led to a whole new wave of job openings and sustained hiring at levels higher than most expected.

The same phenomena occurred again in 2024 (3), aided by (or perhaps driven largely by) stimulative policy coming out of Washington and the early stages of AI investment. Again, sustained demand for everything drove companies to keep hiring, posting more and more openings to fill the jobs required to meet that demand, and again and again, the resilient job market surprised almost everyone as the dark recession storm clouds on the horizon proved, again and again, to be a mirage.

But then came 2025 (4).

Hiring kicked off in Q1 2025 very much in line with typical seasonality patterns, but after the clown show in the Rose Garden in April and the acceleration of insanity spewing out of Washington (see dotted lines above), businesses reduced hiring dramatically not only due to the unprecedented levels of chaos and uncertainty, but also as AI truly started to materially impact business investment and hiring decisions. Since April, labor demand in the U.S. has dropped 16%.

So that’s the basic narrative around the post-covid job market and, to a large degree, the economy in general. If someone can walk me through the narrative behind JOLTS data, the perfect inverse of LinkUp’s data, through Q3 2025 (or any of the past 4 years, for that matter), I’d love to hear it. As noted above, JOLTS data eventually gets to our same endpoint, but the meandering path along the way defies logic and as an ‘official’ data source, it’s been delivering a really wonky, highly questionable signal for a long time.

JOLTS wonkiness this year has been particularly stark. Since the beginning of the year, according to ‘official’ data, labor demand in the U.S. has risen 2% and since April, JOLTS data would indicate that labor demand has risen 7%. In the past 7 months, however, the U.S. economy has added a total net gain of 119,000 jobs - an average of just 17,000 jobs per month. Last year, the economy added an average of 195,000 jobs per month - 11x the rate of monthly job creation since April 2025.

The fact is that the U.S. economy, as a job creating machine, has literally been shut off.

This is not a job market that is softening or cooling or decelerating; this is a job market that has smashed into a concrete wall.

The number of job openings at year-end is precisely where it stood 6 years ago in December, 2019. And even if December’s jobs numbers are positive (which we highly doubt), total job gains in 2025 will be under 650,000. In 2010, in the depths of the Jobless Recovery immediately following the financial crisis that completely froze the U.S. economy, the U.S. generated a net gain of 1.1 million jobs - almost double the number of jobs created this past year.

We can (and must) debate endlessly about what mix of factors has shut the U.S. jobs machine off (e.g., tariffs, policy, D.C. chaos & insanity, AI, immigration & deportations, waning democracy, geopolitics, or whatever else anyone wants to throw into the blender), but the machine has clearly been shut off (or bludgeoned with a sledgehammer) and it seems as if almost no one is noticing.

And by the way, because of the administration’s nativist policies, labor supply has shrunk significantly which has kept the job market as a whole significantly more balanced than it otherwise would have been (see dotted line in chart below).

As a result, and leaving aside the accelerating deterioration of the household survey in any event, the unemployment rate is not only seriously muted these days, it’s become, at least for the time being, a woefully inadequate measure of the overall health of the job market. It will spike up at some point, to be certain, but by then it will far too late and irreparable damage will have already been done.

All that matters at the moment is what’s actually happening with labor demand and what that means for job growth, and by our estimate, the year will end on a sour note with a net loss of 25,000 jobs in December.

So that’s where 2025’s story ends which then, of course, begs the question as to what’s in store for 2026. Not surprisingly given all of the above, our view is that this thing does not end well with the only questions being around timing and severity of the downturn. We’ll obviously be writing extensively on those two questions in the months to come, but similar to our view on the general state of the country relative to consensus, we’ll take the under on timing and the over on severity.

As a preview of what’s to come in future posts, we’ll end by echoing Joe Weisenthal’s recent comments on AI disruption, the market bubble, and the likelihood of a recession in the near future.

On the most recent Ezra Klein podcast with guests Tracy Alloway and Joe Wesienthal from Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Joe notes in response to whether or not the AI phenomena is a bubble or not:

If the AI bet fails, then we’re going to have a recession and a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs and if the AI bet succeeds, then a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs because AI will be able to replace labor. So either way, fail or succeed, it feels like this ends with a bunch of people losing their jobs.

2026 is going to be one for the books.

Happy New Year.

In December, U.S. job openings indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally declined by 4%, while new job openings dropped 6% and removed job openings rose 4%.

For the year, U.S. labor demand declined about 11%. We’ll see what JOLTS data looks like when it eventually gets released, but through October, JOLTS data was up about 2% for the year.

As an aside, LinkUP’s vacancy data has deviated materially from JOLTS data in each of the past 3 years. Given the resiliency of the U.S. economy over that period and how consistently that strength surprised markets and consensus forecasts, we’d put more stock in our data than the JOLTS data.

Total job vacancies declined in every state except Hawaii….

…but new job openings rose in 4 states.

And vacancies dropped in both manufacturing and services…

…and in all but 3 sectors.

Job openings also fell sharply in both blue and white collar jobs…

…and in all but 2 occupation categories.

Closed Duration rose again in December and the 6-month moving average continued to indicate a slowdown in hiring velocity.

As noted at the top, we’ll provide more extensive commentary and our NFP forecast for December in the next day or two but suffice it to say that the year will be ending on a sour note and our data points to an equally ugly start to 2026.

Last week, U.S. job openings indexed daily from company and employer websites globally dropped another 2.6% from the prior week and ended the year down 11.1%.

As background, LinkUp only indexes jobs directly from company and employer websites around the world. We do not scrape job board data or job openings from any 3rd parties - we only index jobs directly, every single day, from each employer’s corporate career portal on their company website. As a result, our data does NOT include expired listings, duplicate listings, incomplete or partial data, sponsored or paid jobs, syndicated job content, programmatic job ads, phishing jobs, fraud, lead-gen, resume bait, scams, ghost jobs that are only found on job boards, or other job board pollution. Because our data is sourced entirely from company websites, LinkUp data is the most comprehensive and accurate job openings dataset in the world.

Total and new job openings feel in most states…

…and in both manufacturing and services as well as for blue and white collar jobs.

Job openings declined in most industries and occupations. As an aside, the 32% jump in jobs in 'Management of Companies’ was driven by an increase of 142 jobs from 448 openings at the start of the week.

As we said at the outset, we’ll publish our December data at the end of the week so for now, Happy New Year and good riddance to a miserable year for the U.S. job market.

Since the election, labor demand has dropped 19% and and since April 1st, it’s dropped 16%.

Total job openings fell in every state last week while only 2 states saw an increase in new openings.

Labor demand dropped in both manufacturing and services as well as in both blue and white collar jobs.

Drilling into both, every single industry and every single occupation group saw declines last week.

And drilling into our daily data, the anomalous divergence between new and removed job postings, with new postings dropping sharply and removed jobs spiking, portends continued misery in the labor market and a rough start to 2026.

Over the next week or so we’ll be posting some additional commentary on the job market along with a review of 2025 and predictions for 2026, but in the meantime, I hope everyone has a fantastic holidays and a happy new year.

But more importantly, and with the assumption that the numbers coming out later this morning will come in approximately as we expect, not only are we forecasting further job losses in December, we believe that the job market is significantly weaker than most people believe. As a result, we continue to assign a higher probability of a recession, of any kind, in 2026 along with a higher probability of a severe recession.

Last week’s rate cut wasn’t much of a surprise given that we’ve pretty much been sounding the alarm on the moribund labor market and deteriorating economy for most of the year. It did nothing, however, to resolve the insane levels of uncertainty and bitter division surrounding the state of the economy, the balance of risks around inflation and unemployment, and what’s in store for the coming year. In fact, the fractured vote, with dissents and shadow dissents arising for different reasons including hawkishness, curiosity, and sycophancy, exacerbated tensions even further.

As the WSJ noted, ”Recent divisions reflect a dilemma the Fed hasn’t faced in more than 15 years: stubborn inflation that calls for higher rates paired with a softening job market that suggests a need for lower rates. “So what do you do?” Powell said Wednesday. “You’ve got one tool. You can’t do two things at once.”

Not only that, the WSJ also noted that the “division reflects a committee split over a fundamental question: not whether it could be on the brink of a policy error, but which one. Doves see a softening labor market despite 1.5 percentage points of rate cuts over the past 15 months—now 1.75 with Wednesday’s move. They worry that waiting for proof of weakness will mean acting too late to prevent it. Hawks see a central bank cutting into an economy stronger than it looks, risking a repeat of the “stop and go” mistakes of the 1970s.”

As always, data holds the key and the central bank indicated as much by amending its policy statement to say that it would assess the incoming economic data, evolving outlook and the balance of risks “in considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments.” But Powell also “warned that even when the flow of official data fully resumes, it should be looked at with a “skeptical eye.” The government shutdown disrupted data collection, which could make the initial reports confusing for what Mr. Powell called “very technical reasons.”

Add to those technical issues declining survey response rates, persistent underfunding of the BLS, the risks of endless government shutdowns as far forward as anyone can see, and material risks around the politicization of the BLS and it’s clear that the efficacy of official data is, at best, under attack and at worst, in serious peril.

So debates are raging around essentially every single aspect of the economy these days. And while that is nearly always the case, particularly in the covid era, the present battles feel especially intractable and center around where inflation and unemployment are heading, which of the two presents a greater risk to the economy, and what the neutral rate is.

On that last point, and despite the most dissents in 15 years, Powell indicated that with last week’s cut, “we are now in neutral territory,” a contention refuted by others on the committee and to which the WSJ immediately retorted, “That’s debatable. When the rate cuts began more than a year ago, officials predicted they’d get inflation back to the Fed’s 2% target by 2026. That deadline keeps getting pushed back, and in the Summary of Economic Projections released with Wednesday’s policy decisions, the 2% arrival date is now 2028.”

And before we even get to arguments around the dual mandate, it’s worth noting that debates rage around the Fed, Fed Capture/Takeover, the appointment of a new Chair, the Fed’s reaction function to ever-changing conditions, and even the fundamental efficacy of the Fed’s single/primary tool in their arsenal in today’s economy.

But leaving all of that aside and unpacking inflation first, sub-debates center around the impact, severity, timing, and reversals of tariffs, fiscal policy and all things emanating from D.C., immigration and deportations, consumer resilience, the inflationary/deflationary impact of AI, the wealth effect of the markets, geo-politics, and the Chair selection saga, to name just a few.

And layered not too far below the surface is growing skepticism around the 2% target itself and increasing calls for either a target range or a higher target altogether. Along those lines, even the Fed tripped over contradictions last week in expressing its commitment to a 2% target even while cutting rates in the face of persistently elevated inflation closer to 3%.

As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote:

The committee says it remains focused on the 2% inflation target. But of course the committee is going to say that. The [FOMC Statement], though, says that inflation is not only elevated but rising, and here they are cutting rates anyway. So I don’t think it’s crazy when people say that implicitly the Fed has already abandoned its target.”

Although I freely admit that I am infinitely less qualified to weigh in on inflation than I am on employment, I’m sticking with our consistently-held view that inflation is going to remain in a +/- range of 0.5% around 3% and all of the issues listed above will net out such that inflation remains higher forever.

Turning to employment and here again, before we even get into the actual conditions themselves, I’d note that endless battles rage around how we frame the job market and determine the measures by which we assess its condition (e.g., unemployment, job gains, vacancies, layoffs, wage growth, real income, supply/demand balance, sentiment, seasonal adjustments, alternative data, etc.).

Digging into the condition of the job market, then, sub-debates include BLS credibility, data quality, market fragility, market liquidity, the impact of AI/Robotics/Technology, productivity, immigration/deportation, sentiment, tipping points and reinforcing cycles (e.g. the Sahm and Perkins Rules), The Phillips Curve, The Beveridge Curve, globalization, tariffs and trade, and on/off-shoring, to name a few.

The overwhelming consensus view, at the moment, is that while the job market is ‘softening’ or ‘cooling’ with flat labor demand and a modest decline in monthly job gains, it remains balanced with retiring baby boomers, low firing, low initial claims, and no meaningful uptick in unemployment and will, furthermore, be perpetually buoyed by resilient consumers whose credit limits and spending know no end, corporate earnings that will remain perpetually above trend, markets that never go down, and AI that will solve all of civilization’s ills.

We couldn’t possible disagree more with that overly sanguine, pollyannish read.

By nearly every measure, the job market is deteriorating at a rapid and accelerating clip. Labor demand is plummeting, job gains have turned negative and will continue to drop, unemployment will shoot up rapidly and may already have, layoffs continue to tick up every week, sentiment is abysmal, Washington has taken a flame torch to nearly every cylinder in the engine that drives the economy, and the risk factors around the economy are growing everywhere all the time.

For the time being, with more to come in subsequent posts, we’ll focus on job growth and labor demand as the two primary indicators of the horrendous shape of the job market.

So far this year, quarterly job growth has dropped by over 65% and if the Fed Chair is correct that job growth has been overstated by 60,000 jobs per month since April of 2025, job growth has actually disappeared altogether since then.

As the WSJ noted regarding the potential overstatement of job growth…

Fed Chair Jerome Powell pointed on Wednesday to a job-market risk that economists have been worried about for months: Official statistics [related to the BLS birth-death model] could be drastically overstating recent hiring.

Powell said that Fed staffers believe that federal data could be overestimating job creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month. Given that figures published so far show that the economy has added about 40,000 jobs a month since April, the real number could be something more like a loss of 20,000 jobs a month, Powell said.

“We think there’s an overstatement in these numbers,” Powell said in a press conference following the central bank’s two-day policy meeting.

Subtracting 60,000 jobs each month shows just how ugly the job market might actually be.

We’ll see later today what things look like through November but because there will be subsequent revisions and continued questions around the technical details of job growth, combined with the fact that we aren’t going to get October unemployment data, the release today may not provide sufficient clarity to resolve any of the debates around the job market.

What is very clear (and backed by actual data), on the other hand, is that labor demand has plummeted since March of 2025. Looking at LinkUp’s U.S. job vacancies data indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally, labor demand has dropped roughly 15% since the beginning of April. In stark contrast, JOLTS data from the BLS indicates that labor demand has risen 7% through October.

This is not the first time our data has deviated materially from JOLTS data. While the two data series generally track one another over time, there have been regular periods in the covid era where the two have diverged significantly, most notably in 2023 and 2024. In both of those years, our data showed large, persistent increases in labor demand while JOLTS data indicated large, steady declines in labor demand.

Given the fact that during those years the job market repeatedly surprised everyone (except us), again and again and again, to the upside relative to consensus, there’s no doubt which data provides a better, more accurate, and timely indicator about the present and future state of the job market and, therefore, the broader economy.

Given the sharp decline in job vacancies in the U.S. in November, we’re also forecasting more grim news for December job growth.

So clearly the job market is in much worse shape than consensus and there are no indications in the data that things are going to turn around anytime soon. In fact, the rapidly deteriorating job market most assuredly sits atop the list of known risk factors that could spiral the economy into a recession.

And beyond the decrepit labor market, the list of additional risk factors, seemingly endless already, is growing by the day and includes, among others:

• Endless tariff uncertainty

• A market bubble pop

• Fed independence (or imminent lack thereof)

• Rising debt everywhere

• Rising inflation & painful stagflation

• Private credit and shadow banking

• Crypto mania

• Consumers running out of gas

• Tectonic shifts in the world order and global geopolitics

• Wars on every continent

• AI decimation

• Climate chaos

• Epically insane (and rising) income inequality

• Immigration & Deportations

Not surprisingly, then, the probability we’d assign to a recession in 2026 is far higher than the present consensus estimate of 25%.

And as exhaustive and terrifying as the list above is, we’ve left off the list the insanity spewing out of Washington, OBBB, corruption, lawlessness, the decimation of democratic institutions, weaponizing the federal government, and the growing rumblings and increasingly mainstream attention being paid to rising authoritarianism and, literally, the risk of a civil war and/or a revolution of some sort. As we’ve said all year, whatever anyone’s view is regarding how bad things will get, especially heading into an election year, we’ll take the over.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Not surprisingly given that Thanksgiving was last week, U.S. job openings posted globally by companies and employers on their websites around the world dropped last week by 145,877 or 5.0% from the week before last. Over the past 3 previous Thanksgiving weeks since 2022, the average decline was 3.7%, so this year’s drop, while expected, is nonetheless quite a bit larger than history would suggest.

Over those same previous 3 years, vacancies rose by an average of 2% the week following Thanksgiving but then dropped steadily thereafter through the end of the year, with an average decline of 4.8% between Thanksgiving and New Years.

Based on where the job market and the economy sit at the moment, what we’ve seen so far this year to get us to this point, and the accelerating rate of destruction going on, we’ll take the over on that average decline all day long - especially given how seriously labor demand is plummeting across the country.

In November, U.S. job openings indexed daily directly from company and employer websites globally declined by 8%, while new job openings plummeted 20% and removed job openings fell 9%.

Job vacancies declined in every single state….

…in both manufacturing and services…

…and in every single industry except Retail-General Merchandise which rose a paltry 1% (so much for holiday hiring).

Job openings fell sharply in both blue and white collar jobs…

…and in every single occupation category.

We’ll provide more extensive commentary in our next post (hopefully in the next day or two) but the short version, not surprisingly, is that the deterioration we’ve highlighted for the past few months is accelerating rapidly. As we noted on Halloween, the job market has moved well beyond ‘softening’ or ‘cooling’ and is now crumbling quite rapidly.

Based on the slightest of upticks in October openings data, we’re forecasting anemic job growth of just 45,000 jobs in November.

But based on the huge drop in job vacancies in November, December job gains will certainly be negative, perhaps materially so.

The bottom line is that labor market is in far worse shape than people realize and when the lights come back on in this horror show, the carnage is going to be quite grim.

Last week, active U.S. job vacancies posted on company and employer websites globally dropped 1.2%, the 6th consecutive weekly decline. Since Labor Day, labor demand in the U.S. has declined 7%.

To put that into broader context, labor demand now sits 2.3% below where it was the week before the country went into Covid lockdown in March, 2020.

Since the Fed started hiking rates in March 2022, labor demand has dropped 35%.

Since the election, it’s dropped 15%.

And since April Fools Day, it’s dropped 12%.

As a share of total U.S. labor demand, job vacancies for openings in the U.S. listed on individual corporate career portals of companies headquartered outside of the U.S. has stayed perfectly flat at 89% since the clown show in the Rose Garden.

In the last week, labor demand dropped again in nearly every single state in the country.

New job openings by state fell in all but 6 states last week.

Since April, labor demand has dropped significantly in both manufacturing and services.

And last week, labor demand fell in all but 5 sectors.

Over the past month or so, labor demand has also dropped significantly in both blue and white collar jobs, although last week, the rate of decline in white collar jobs did taper off.

And last week, all but 5 occupation groups showed a decline in labor demand.

Since April, daily job vacancies in the U.S. posted by employers worldwide has dropped from 2.95M to 2.55M yesterday, a decline of 13%

Again, we’ll provide our commentary on the U.S. job market soon but the short version, not surprisingly, is that the crumbling job market is going to lead to some nasty surprises when the lights come back on in this horror show.

Last week, active U.S. job vacancies posted on company and employer websites globally dropped 1.1%, the 5th consecutive weekly decline. Since the election, labor demand in the U.S. has declined 15%.

Since April 1st, labor demand has dropped 12%.

Since April, labor demand has dropped in every single state in the country.

Since mid-September, labor demand has dropped significantly in both manufacturing and services.

And last week, labor demand fell in most sectors.

Over the past month or so, labor demand has also dropped significantly in both blue and white collar jobs.

And last week, nearly every single occupation group showed a decline in labor demand. And the only jobs that saw an increase are the ones that typically are the hardest to fill.

Since October 1st, daily job vacancies in the U.S. posted by employers worldwide has dropped from 2.72M to 2.51M yesterday, a decline of 7.7%

Again, we’ll provide our commentary on the U.S. job market early next week, but the short version for now is that the job market continues to deteriorate and, as we noted on Halloween, it’s moved well beyond softening or cooling to something closer to crumbling. More to come next week.

With that in mind, we are going to start regularly publishing our weekly job market data for the U.S. here. As background for those that might be new to LinkUp and our data, we index millions of job openings around the world every single day, all of them sourced directly from the corporate career portals on company and employer websites themselves.

We do NOT source any of our data from job boards or LinkedIn or other 3rd party aggregators as those sources of openings are plagued by expired listings, insane levels of duplication (roughly about 80% - and de-duping, by the way, is not a real thing), and job board pollution (fraud, scams, sponsored/paid job ads, phishing, etc.).

Because we go directly to an employer’s or company’s corporate career portal, our data is always accurate, complete, and current. It’s a daily dataset that goes back to 2007 but for our Macro Compass SaaS applications for the US, UK, EU and Canada (which is where we pulled all the U.S. charts below), we use weekly and monthly aggregates (except for the last chart which includes total daily active job openings and a rolling 7-day average for new and removed jobs). The weekly data below runs from Sunday to Saturday and is available to clients on Sunday mornings, 24 hours before U.S. markets open Monday morning.

So to start, even though it’s nearly identical to the monthly data, it’s useful to look at weekly job openings in the U.S. since January 2019.

To drill into the detail a bit more closely, below is weekly total, new and removed jobs since March 2022 when the Fed began hiking interest rates.

Since the election, labor demand has dropped 15% and since April 1st, it’s dropped 12%. Last week, labor demand dropped 1.3%, the 4th consecutive weekly decline.

Since mid-September, labor demand has dropped significantly in both manufacturing and services.

And last week, labor demand fell in most sectors.

Over the past month or so, labor demand has also dropped significantly in both blue and white collar jobs.

And last week, every single occupation group showed a decline in labor demand.

Since October 1st, daily job vacancies in the U.S. posted by employers worldwide has dropped from 2.71M to 2.55M yesterday, a decline of 5.9%

As we wrote on Halloween in our post forecasting a decline of 5,000 jobs for the October NFP report, the labor market has moved well beyond softening or cooling to something more like crumbling. And given October’s data, we expect more of the same for at least the remainder of the year.

Lastly, as we mentioned at the outset, we’ll be publishing our weekly job vacancy data here on Mondays going forward, and if anyone is interested in our raw data or our web-based Macro Compass applications, contact me at toby.dayton@linkup.com.

In October, labor demand in the U.S. was flat relative to September as LinkUp’s total job openings indexed daily directly from employer websites rose 0.1% from September and new job openings rose 4%.

In October, states with gains or losses in job vacancies were pretty evenly split across the country.

In regard to new job listings, all but 8 states showed an increase.

Gains and losses in job openings by industry were pretty evenly split across the economy.

Labor demand rose in Manufacturing but was flat in Services.

Looking at labor demand by occupation paints a similar story with gains and losses pretty evenly split across the economy.

Labor demand for blue collar jobs decreased and increased for white collar jobs.

Looking at our mid-month time series which maps more closely to the survey period for BLS data, total U.S. job openings fell 3% between the 20th of September to the 19th of October, while new job openings fell 7%.

So based on our September data, we are forecasting that the U.S. lost 5,000 jobs in October.

Based on our October data, we expect little to no job growth for the remainder of the year.

So here we are, entering month two of the government shutdown, and everyone is stumbling around in the dark trying desperately to make sense of what the hell is going on as we attempt to navigate our way out of the carnage. And just like every cliché-ridden slasher flick, the protagonists are evenly divided as to how to best proceed, arguing vehemently among themselves as doom approaches.

In a great piece this week entitled ‘Three Theories About the Economy,” TS Lombard’s Dario Perkins writes:

The US cyclical outlook seems murkier than ever, and now there are three competing views about what is going on:

1. The Bears: We’re close to a major cyclical turning point

2. The Bulls: It’s just the “K-shaped economy” (stupid...)

3. The er….Reality: It’s the Trump policy storm, which will eventually pass.

While there is truth to the K-shaped economy (see my Macro Picture on Wall Street vs Main Street) and we cannot totally rule out the bears’ recession, TS Lombard belongs to the camp of those who subscribe to Theory 3 and blame Storm Liberation Day. 2025 has been all about two things: massive uncertainty (from all the chaos and flipflops) and big negative supply shocks from tariffs and immigration.

TSL’s house view is that uncertainty in the first half of the year forced companies to stop hiring and stop investing and that as the most acute phase of the chaos subsides in the second half of the year and into 2026, pent-up demand and the Fed cuts will reaccelerate the economy, potentially spurring wage growth and an uptick in broader inflation.

Perhaps the economy will deteriorate more in the short term; but since there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it and even more policy stimulus will be forthcoming, that just means a stronger revival in 2026.

TS Lombard’s long-held view was most certainly vindicated this week with Powell’s more than cautious tone about the certainty of a December rate cut that’s been baked into the markets. And while we have generally shared a similar view about the persistently strong fundamentals of the economy, reaffirming, albeit with deteriorating confidence levels, our ‘muddle-through’ outlook less than a month ago, we’ve tended to be, and still remain, a solid notch (or two) more negative in our assessment of the situation, especially over the past 6 months, and more pessimistic in our medium and long-term outlook.

Our base case all year has been grounded firmly in the stagflationary camp, but as we’ve noted repeatedly, that’s always been our best case scenario, with a recession being the next most probable scenario and a complete meltdown being the least likely, but still alarmingly high relative to where it would normally be.

From our perspective, not only is it getting increasingly difficult to see how this thing ends well, the downside risk to employment seems to be growing appreciably by the day, as does the probability of the crumbling labor market cratering altogether and igniting a full-blown recession.

As we wrote earlier this month, labor demand has dropped 8% since April 1st and 13% since the election. Not surprisingly, hiring has come to a grinding halt, with average monthly job gains dropping from 120,000 in the first 4 months of the year to 25,000 in the subsequent 4 months.

Given the 3% decline in our weekly job vacancy data in October and what that portends for job growth (or lack thereof) for the remainder of the year, we’ve moved well beyond a “softening” or “cooling” labor market. It truly is beginning to crumble.

Notably, weekly job openings in the U.S. now sit at 2.95M, precisely where they stood the week of March 14, 2020 just as the country went into quarantine.

What a ride.

And by no means is it over.

This ‘No hiring/No firing/No quitting’ labor market is rapidly shedding the ‘No Firing’ component of its moniker as layoff announcements are now becoming a daily phenomena with the most recent batch including Amazon, Meta, UPS, Target, Paramount, Rivian, Molson Coors, Chegg, Applied Materials, Booz Allen, and GM, among others. And let’s not forget the thousands of Federal workers that are being fired during the shutdown (or the DOGE casualties who were fired earlier this year).

Yes, the economy has held up remarkably well through the storm, thanks to the soft landing ballast, but it’s beginning to feel like we need to upgrade things to a category 5 hurricane.

Real income growth is falling, particularly among workers 25-54, AI is beginning to surpass robots in the race to see which tech phenomena annihilates more jobs faster, consumer sentiment continues to slide, and the only reason unemployment hasn’t shot up is because of the massive labor supply shock from the immigration/deportation regime and a plummeting labor force participation rate.

Beyond the labor market, the government shutdown continues to drag on, Bad King Don’s never-ending tariff tantrums are starting to inflict real pain on businesses, farmers, and consumers, inflation is never coming down (just like we said), the Big Beautiful Bill is a ticking time-bomb across multiple vectors, and this bubble of a market is most assuredly going to pop one way or another, sooner or later. Imagine what happens when the top of the K crashes into the soup lines.

And if all of that isn’t enough, I’d note that we haven’t even touched on what we expect things to look like next year in the run-up to the election with brown shirts on every city block. As we’ve said in the past, whatever anyone’s doomsday scenario looks like, I’ll take the over. But we’ll save that for later - our October NFP forecast is depressing enough.

Based on our forecast of a net gain of 80,000 jobs in September, combined with the decline in new and total job vacancies in September (-4% and -2% respectively), our October non-farm payrolls forecast is -5,000 jobs.

Who knows what will happen to unemployment, but we have to imagine it’s going to jump up one of these months.

Were the BLS to have issued its October report next Friday, it would have been a sight to behold to witness the simultaneous triggering of both the Perkins and Sahm rules in a single report. What a shame. But in the absence of the BLS report, we’d offer the Dayton Rule, one that needs no official data: When the East Wing is reduced to rubble, it’s time to head for the hills.

How’s that for a spooky Halloween?

In December, 2023, we published an article here entitled”$7 Mayonnaise Might End Democracy.”

It did - at least in part and insofar as democracy in America has been defined for the past 250 years. And as the inferno we first described in January continues to incinerate everything in its path and the likelihood of the meltdown scenario continues to rise every week, democracy by anyone’s definition may be coming to an end here in America.

Putting aside, in the ultimate form of dissociation, Federal agents invading neighborhoods in Chicago, the military apparently preparing for training exercises in Portland, and the interminable obliteration of the constitution every hour of every day, we’ll focus here on attempting to fill the shutdown-induced, cratered void that was (or wasn’t) last Friday’s jobs report for September that was to have been issued by the BLS - an agency already in tatters thanks to the arsonists in D.C.

In last Wednesday’s post, we forecasted that the economy added a net gain of 80,000 jobs based on the increase in August in the number of U.S. job openings indexed daily from company and employer websites globally. Our forecast was a bit higher than the consensus estimate of a gain of roughly 50,000 jobs and hopefully we’ll get the BLS data in the near future.

But in the interim and given the multitude of significant factors impacting the job market and the economy and how unprecedented and complex the macro backdrop is these days, we thought it would be worth diving a bit more deeply into our data and providing a read on how we’re seeing things these days.

As everyone knows, regarding the macro backdrop, the complexity and opacity of what’s going on centers around if, when, and to what extent policy is going to negatively impact unemployment, inflation, earnings, and GDP.

On the job and employment front, the conflagration has clearly annihilated the job market. Labor demand has dropped precipitously (13%) since October…

…and job growth, not surprisingly given the decline in vacancies, has plummeted with average monthly net job gains dropping from roughly 120,000 in the first 4 months of the year to roughly 25,000 since May.

The job market has effectively come to a grinding halt in unprecedented fashion as the chart and commentary posted by Dario Perkins at TS Lombard notes.

Hiring, firing, and quits have all essentially dropped to zero but because of the material drop in the labor force participation rate and the employment population ratio, combined with what’s going in with immigration and deportations and the massive curtailment of labor supply, unemployment has barely budged, rising from 4% in January to 4.3% in August.

Without question, the alarm bells set off around the job market right now by the Fed, economists, businesses, consumers, and job seekers (especially GenZ where unemployment sits at about 13%) are entirely justified. The job market has weakened substantially and sits at a very precarious position at the moment - right at the elbow of the Beveridge Curve.

Obviously then, the operative question is where things are headed from here and on that score, the Fed, arguably the most important respondent, has given its answer in the form of a 25bp rate cut and a signal of more to come. Lifting another chart from TS Lombard, that decision would seem to be entirely justified.

But as Dario, Freya Beamish (Chief Economist), and the team at TS Lombard have made clear through their research and commentary, it is not necessarily the case that the economy is on an inevitable downward trajectory. In fact, the U.S. economy remains quite strong with a somewhat surprising resilience stemming from the long-term after-effects of the soft landing.

While the significant decline in labor demand and supply and the anemic job growth of late have been dismaying and, in large measure, unnecessarily self-inflicted, they are, to some extent, also reflective of the soft landing, the sustained equilibrium between supply and demand, and the fact that we are still in a full employment job market, even if it’s at a lower level of monthly job growth.

As we’ve noted throughout the covid era and as the chart below clearly highlights, equilibrium was gradually restored in the labor market as employers raised wages to overcome the supply shock. As jobs were filled and the job market came into balance, wage inflation began to moderate and, with assistance from the Fed beginning in 2022, the soft landing was realized.

Inevitably, hiring was going to taper off to its more sustainable, long-term trend and that is precisely what happened up until roughly Q1 of this year at which point both labor demand and supply were reduced materially in equal measure.

But even as we bounce along at a sub-optimal level of job growth, the job market remains in balance, unemployment remains low, and, as our mid-month job openings data for August and September indicates, job openings have started to pick back up even before the Fed cuts had an impact.

To be clear, however, we remain extremely cautious in our outlook as everything everywhere could (and undoubtedly will) change all at once, perpetually. There is plenty to be terrified about these days and a plethora of massive forces are wreaking havoc on the country and the economy and laying waste to stability and predictability.

But given the resilience of the economy and the Fed cut(s) that have started on one hand, and the inferno raging throughout the country on the other hand, our base case at the moment remains a chaotic, highly volatile, and fragile ‘Muddle Through.’

As always, we’ll rely on our highly accurate, real-time dataset of forward-looking job openings indexed straight from employer websites around the world to help navigate through the fog.

In September, all but 4 states showed a decrease in job vacancies.

Similarly, all but 7 states showed a decline in new job vacancies.

Gains and losses in job openings by industry were pretty evenly split across the economy…

…with the largest gains in Professional Services and the largest losses in Retail and Public Administration.

Labor demand rose in Manufacturing but declined in Services.

Looking at labor demand by occupation paints a similar story with gains and losses pretty evenly split across the economy…

….with the largest gains in Business & Financial Operations and Architecture/Engineering and the largest declines in Personal Care and Education.

Labor demand for both blue and white collar jobs dropped in September.

Looking at our mid-month time series which maps more closely to the survey period for BLS data, total U.S. job openings rose 3% between the 20th of August to the 19th of September, while new job openings rose 8%.

Based on our data, we are forecasting that the U.S. added a net gain of 80,000 jobs in September. And although we likely won’t get an initial release Friday (and maybe never given the shutdown), we are forecasting that we would have seen an initial release of 68,000 jobs had Friday’s initial release actually been released.

Of course, with the government shuttered at the moment, we’ll have to wait to see what the final numbers will be, but regardless, we’re forecasting that job gains, both the initial and final revised numbers, will be slightly higher than the consensus estimate of 50,000 jobs.

In August, labor demand in the U.S. rose for the first time in 5 months and only the third month this year as LinkUp’s total job openings indexed daily directly from employer websites rose 1% from July and new job openings rose 3% from July.

In August, gains in labor demand by state were widespread across the country with only 7 states showing a decrease in job openings.

Similarly, new job openings increased in every state but 7.

Gains and losses in job openings by industry were pretty evenly split across the economy…

…with the largest gains in Wholesale Trade and Retail and the largest losses in Arts/Entertainment/Recreation and Education.

Labor demand rose slightly in both Manufacturing and Services.

Looking at labor demand by occupation paints a similar story with gains and losses evenly split across the economy…

….with the largest gains in Protective Services, Sales, and Architecture/Engineering and the largest declines in Education, Arts/Design/Entertainment/Media, and Social Services.

Labor demand was essentially rose for blue collar jobs and fell yet again for white collar jobs.

Looking at our mid-month time series (the input into our forecasting model for the NFP initial release), total U.S. job openings rose 0.3% between the 20th of July to the 19th of August, while new job openings rose 5.7%.

Based on our mid-month data, we are forecasting that Friday’s initial release for August job gains will be 113,000 while we’re forecasting final revised job gains of 125,000 for the month.

As we said at the outset, we’ll publish our commentary on the U.S. job market following Friday’s jobs numbers.

And what a report it was that marks the end of reliable BLS data. More worrisome than the underwhelming job gains last month, gains that we expect will be (or at least should be) revised downward further in subsequent months, were the gigantic downward revision by a combined 258,000 jobs for May and June.

As everyone knows, the difference between initial BLS data and the revised data has been growing for years, but with the July jobs report, the 2025 delta jumped from 21% to 47%, rendering the initial BLS release, once and for all, as completely worthless as a gauge of what is actually happening in the U.S. labor market.

With those revisions, average monthly job gains have dropped to 85,000 for the year and 35,000 since the gong show in the Rose Garden in April.

And therein lies the crux of the catastrophic report that led to the Commissioner’s firing. What had appeared to be, on July 31st, a surprisingly resilient economy motoring steadily along, largely immune to the chaos being inflicted upon it, slammed into the wall of reality on August 1st.

With the report, the weakness of the job market has, at long last, become too glaring for anyone to miss - anemic job growth trending toward the first negative print in 5 years, gains concentrated in a single sector (healthcare), unemployment rising to 4.2%, declining labor supply and falling labor force participation rate that masks even higher unemployment, a white collar recession, especially for recent college grads, massive job losses in Federal government with federal funding cuts still rippling out to state and local governments, long-term unemployment rising, etc., etc.

As TS Lombard’s Chief Economist Freya Beamish writes:

Just 73K were added to non-farm payrolls in July, while June was revised done to a mere 14K, below consensus of 110K and bringing last month's print down below the consensus for that time too. This follows the pattern of downward revisions that we should all be accustomed to by now.

Thematically, this is an economy understandably on pause. Last month's print pre-revision was around 50% government. The revised data show that nobody was hiring across public and private sector. The private sector, however, has at least begun hiring again in July, with private payrolls rising 83K, though that could be revised down, and the government in modest contraction, with uncertainty compounding direct DOGE effects.

We expect employment growth to remain below trend, with more close shaves, but this is broadly an economy on pause rather than in recession at this stage.

While we might replace the phrase ‘an economy on pause’ with ‘an economy that has slammed headfirst into the windshield,’ we share the sentiment that the U.S. economy has, very suddenly and quite obviously, come to grinding halt. But as we’ve made very clear all year, none of this is surprising in the least.

Stagflation was our baseline forecast from the start of the year, and even before but especially after our high quality, real-time labor demand data sourced daily directly from employer websites globally started plummeting in April, our conviction around where all this is headed has grown stronger and stronger.

With the most recent CPI report showing that core inflation has risen to 3.1% and this week’s PPI report showing that wholesale inflation has jumped to 3.3%, not only are we firmly in stagflation territory, things are undoubtedly going to get worse and worse as the the impact of tariffs continue rippling through the economy and the Trump tsunami decimates everything in its path.

And like a tsunami whose delusory slow motion belies its catastrophic force, the destruction here is similarly taking time to roll through the economy and into the data. As Neel Kashkari said on CNBC, “These tariff shocks are unlike anything that we’ve seen in 100 years and it’s taken a while for businesses to try to process it.” They clearly have and, adding to tariffs the ‘Hell of Blunders, Madness, and Deception,’ with no end in sight, it’s about time the impact has finally started showing up in the data.

As the Washington Post noted, “Together, the economic data paints a picture of an economy edging into stagflation territory — slowing growth coupled with stubborn inflation.”

Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings were, appropriately, far less equivocal in a recent NYT op-ed:

Mr. Trump’s tariffs are now clearly fueling inflation, particularly in goods such as home appliances, cars and food. In the first six months of the year, real (that is, inflation-adjusted) consumer spending, the main driver behind business cycles and robust economic expansion, barely grew, after rising 3 percent last year. G.D.P. growth slowed by about half, to 1.2 percent this year from 2.5 percent last year. When overall growth falls that sharply, the labor market tends to follow, which is precisely what happened: Job growth, at 35,000 per month on average between May and July, is dangerously close to stall speed.

Stall speed is the perfect description, one that Jan Hatzius, the now even more infamous Chief Economist for Goldman Sachs, used to describe the broader economy in an earlier note published immediately following July’s jobs report:

Friday’s payrolls report reinforced our view that US growth is running below potential and near stall speed—a pace below which the labor market weakens in a self-reinforcing fashion.

Given the declines we’ve seen in labor demand over the past 4 months and the forward-looking nature of accurate, real-time job openings data, we’d dispense with phrases such as ‘near’ or ‘dangerously close.’ We have reached stall speed.

As we wrote last week, with the decline in the millions and millions of job openings we source daily directly from tens and tens of thousands of corporate and employer career portals around the world, labor demand has dropped 8% since March and 13% since the election.

Of special note is the fact that since April 2nd, LinkUp data indicates that labor demand has dropped 7.9% while JOLTS data indicates that labor demand has increased 3.3%. We’ll see if that deviation persists when the BLS releases its July data in September, but if it does, that would mark the 4th consecutive year with material and persistent deviations between LinkUp and BLS data.

Given the very strong correlation between our data and what is actually happening in the job market - always the key driver underpinning the entire economy (see blue line in the chart above in 2023 and again in 2024 and our early and vocal calls (ad nauseam) for the soft landing), we’ll take our data as the better indicator of where the job market is heading and what this economy is going to look like in the coming months.

Since 2022 when the Fed began hiking rates, our job forecasting tracking error against final revised BLS data is just -5%, while consensus estimates is -15%, ADP is -26%, and BLS initial release is +11%. (As an aside, even with our Initial Release Forecast miss for July, our new initial release forecasting model that we launched this year has been correct in 4 of 7 months through July).

So on that note, dusting off our old model to forecast final BLS revised numbers, we are forecasting that June job gains will be revised down to -25,000 and that July job gains will be revised down to 50,000.

If we’re correct, the critical question will then be whether or not the Perkins Rule applies to BLS revisions or just an initial release. We suspect we’ll never know given that the question, in turn, raises another around whether or not we’ll ever again even see a negative job growth number from the BLS. We’re assuming, with good reason, that everything from here on out will be BIG AND BEAUTIFUL.