“Resilience is what you call it before the revisions come in.”
The U.S. economy has been sold as unbreakable. Politicians point to jobs, economists nod sagely, and the media repeats the mantra: “The labor market is strong.”
But this week, that story collapsed like a stage prop kicked from behind.
Nearly a million jobs…wiped off the books in a single revision. Inflation reports that were supposed to reassure only raised more questions.
Consumers, who keep 70% of the economy alive with their spending, are acting like they’ve seen the script and don’t like the ending.
When jobs are the foundation of the economy, what happens when the foundation itself starts to crack?
The Vanishing Workforce
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did what it does every year: reconciled payroll reports with hard payroll tax filings. Normally, this “benchmark revision” is a sleepy affair. This time, it was an earthquake.
911,000 jobs erased.
Think about that. Every month for a year, officials told us jobs were being added.
Growth, resilience, strength. Only now do we learn that the books were cooked by the math itself.
Months once labeled “expansion” quietly flipped to contraction.
October? Negative.
August? Negative.
June? A cheerful +147,000 turned into a chilling –13,000.
This isn’t noise. Nonfarm payrolls are the economy’s pulse, the single most-watched number in the economic bloodstream. When they go negative, it’s not just a signal…it’s a flare gun.
And flares are rarely fired without reason.
Rare Sightings, Deadly Meaning
Negative payroll months aren’t supposed to happen often.
From the 1970s through the early 2000s, they appeared only in freak moments: a winter blizzard halting construction, a nationwide strike shutting down a major employer.
But here? No blizzard. No strike. Just weakness.
That makes the signal more ominous. Because when negatives come in clusters, history gives us one outcome: recession.
The trend line is unmistakable. A downward slope, steepening by the month. Imagine a skier barreling down a mountain with no skis and no brakes. Gravity does the rest.
And if the labor market is the skier, who’s watching from the bottom of the slope? Bond traders.
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