The Second Reign of Bad King Don Has Only Just Begun
While soft data indicates growing anxiety, the hard data remains relatively benign at this point. But with the chaos and devastation taking place, there's little doubt the worst is yet to come
Between sporadic outages at Newark airport, historic Qatari jet graft, a proposal to reopen Alcatraz, presumably to lock up more immigrants and/or political opponents, another political appointment of an alcoholic Fox News host, more tariff tantrums, more appointments mocking science, more obliteration of government institutions and attacks on universities, and sustained pressure on U.S. markets, U.S. credit-worthiness, and the dollar, it’s been another few weeks of accelerating descent into the authoritarian, 3rd-world, mercantilist hellscape that now defines the United States (or Competitive Authoritarianism, as it were).
Fittingly, buried among all the recent dumbfounding events was the discovery of an original copy of the Magna Carta within Harvard’s archives - poetic coincidence given not just the administration’s attacks on the university, but the current relevance of the liberties and principals around the rule of law first enshrined in the medieval document during the reign of Bad King John, universally regarded as England’s worst, most loathed monarch.
And of course, amid all the chaos, volatility, and devastation, visibility into what lies ahead for the nation, the economy, and the markets could not be less clear. Leaving aside the future of our democracy and the country itself, both the economy and the markets are gripped in a torturous limbo with one horrific shoe having dropped on Liberation Incineration National Clown Day and the form, timing, and impact of the second (third, fourth, fifth….) shoe(s) completely uncertain, the present 90-day pause with China notwithstanding.
Like the Bitcoin deal managed by Cantor Equity Partners (an affiliate of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald) that was apparently codenamed ‘Project Mystery’ (as reported by Matt Levine), no one in the administration, including the President himself, can explain what the plan is here or how it’s the case that turning back the clock 100+ years (or maybe even 810) is going to be anything other than an epic disaster.
And the markets, economists, and pundits seem to be evenly divided on how this thing plays out with camps of equal measure predicting Eden, the Apocalypse, or something in the middle resembling 40 days of wandering in a moderate stagflation wilderness. Put us somewhere between the latter two, but we’re in Peak Uncertainty at the moment, and to top it all off, ‘Official’ data everywhere have been deteriorating at an accelerating rate (with declining survey response rates and chronic underfunding) even before DOGE took a blowtorch to the entire Federal apparatus.
Luckily, there is plenty of alternative data to keep delivering signal about the state of the economy. Some of that data, such as LinkUp’s high-quality labor demand data sourced daily directly from company and employer websites globally, is even forward looking - a particularly helpful attribute when estimates around the probability of a recession this year are evenly split at 50/50.
From the the start of the year through March, monthly job openings have risen 6% and new job openings in March were 30% above December. That growth in labor demand resulted in better than expected job growth in April (precisely as we expected).
But job openings dropped slightly in April (2%) with declines in all but 8 states…
…and declines in the vast majority of occupation categories.
Labor demand by industry was evenly divided between sectors that increased and decreased.
And labor demand declined in services but rose in manufacturing….
…and declined for both blue and white collar jobs.
So while the job market has held up through April with decent job growth, the decline in job openings during the month points to the increasing likelihood that the economy is starting to see growing signs of the upheaval heading our way. Between huge tariff increases (even after coming down from absurd levels), unprecedented chaos and uncertainty that is suppressing economic activity, huge cuts in the federal workforce and federal funding, rising deportations and persecution of immigrants, and alarming nativism, there is little doubt that things are going to get far more horrific.
The second reign of Bad King Don has just begun. No doubt, the worst is yet to come.
