I haven't read anything comprehensive about how much damage the tarriffs have done to businesses, especially those that rely on procurement contracts that suffered compounded price increases.
But a sudden drop in jobs would be a pretty good indicator of the collapse of those businesses.
itsoktocry · 53m ago
As an avid half-pay-attention Bloomberg viewer, analysts figure Q4 is where it really starts to show up, partially because some importers were able to front run the tariffs.
Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?
InitialLastName · 49m ago
It's even worse than "what will this look like in a year?". If it takes 4-6 months from when you pay the money to build a product to when you have that product available to sell to a customer, and you don't know how much your parts are going to cost OR how much you're going to have to pay to the federal government when those products finally clear customs (or what legal hoops you're going to need to jump through to get that product clear), how can you operate?
jacquesm · 16m ago
To give you one idea of this: Christmas starts in January for consumer stuff. That's how long it takes and if there is any hick-up then you might miss the time slot. These tariffs are wreaking havoc with the planning of just about every major company because there are almost no players that are 100% vertically integrated that just use stuff made in the USA. Everybody is dependent on everybody else and some of those parties are abroad.
This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.
yibg · 11m ago
Or even if legal or not means anything. Lower court ruling so far is a lot of the tariffs are illegal. But the supreme court as so far ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the administration, so that is very likely to get overturned anyways. So many layers of uncertainty.
danans · 46m ago
> How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?
They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).
In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.
KoolKat23 · 29m ago
The high capex however needs to be paid, if tariffs are dropped, instantly imports become cheaper and they're less likely to compete. They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.
danans · 24m ago
> They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.
Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.
We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.
axiolite · 17m ago
> replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation
But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.
bryanlarsen · 41m ago
Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation.
danans · 37m ago
> Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation
Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.
The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).
Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.
Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.
qrios · 33m ago
> it's the uncertainty
Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.
A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.
jacquesm · 24m ago
> All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.
Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.
alephnerd · 11m ago
> from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms
IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.
Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.
The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.
Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.
jacquesm · 4m ago
Interesting. So, the largest serverless installation that I'm aware of is one that has a massive number of in the field sensors posting data every five minutes, think many millions of sensors. They're in a complete panic there. And they're not exactly small, rather the opposite.
Terr_ · 26m ago
> it's the uncertainty
Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.
Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.
For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to other companies and saying: "We'll give you $ now if you agree to give us any tariff refunds you might or might not get someday."
It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.
[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.
jacquesm · 14m ago
In a functioning society these people would be in jail. It is worse than the worst cases of insider trading and yet they are just sitting there gleefully counting their money. Utterly disgusting, traitors to their own country.
Aurornis · 52m ago
It's going to take a while. Most companies ordered as much inventory as they could before the tariffs hit. Companies have to work through that lower-cost inventory first, then deal with the tariffs, then have that data start to show up in later decisions.
There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.
lisbbb · 24m ago
The handwringing is so amazing here, as is the denial of what needs to be done to stabilize the US economy, which is to bring more manufacturing home, create jobs organically, and stop relying on China, who is not our friend.
yibg · 4m ago
"bring manufacturing back to America" keeps getting thrown around and I'm genuinely curious how that would work. Let's say we do bring the bulk of manufacturing jobs back to America, what does the country look like in 10 years?
- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?
- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?
- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.
Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?
axiolite · 11m ago
To reduce dependence on China, tariffs should ONLY be on China, and not the entire world including neighbors and close allies.
To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.
The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.
dragon-hn · 16m ago
That may or may not be true. But what is immediately clear is that Trump has no idea how to accomplish it. Americans are in I believe 6 months of contraction in manufacturing jobs.
HillRat · 48m ago
One thing is that a lot of economic activity was front-loaded to the first few quarters as businesses scrambled to get inventory on board ahead of tariffs; now we're seeing companies having burned through inventory, so inflationary impacts are going to start working their way through the supply chain now in earnest, and we're going to see a concomitant slowdown in economic activity as that acts as a persistent drag across multiple sectors. In practice you're looking at something equivalent to a 3-4% federal sales tax on all purchases, but keep an eye on where it falls on relatively inelastic goods, which will have an outsize effect on consumer finances.
Analemma_ · 56m ago
You haven't read anything comprehensive about it because we're in a Reign of Terror where if your business says anything about the effects of the tarriffs, you can expect death threats, baseless but expensive legal investigations at the Federal level, red state AGs threatening more baseless but expensive legal investigations at the state level, etc. Nobody is going to be open and honest about it, better to suffer in silence and hope enough people suffer all at once that we get improved policy out of it.
ToucanLoucan · 1h ago
From what I know from friends in a few different industries, it's fucking brutal right now. Raw materials/parts costs from China have all increased and not by a bit, but by huge amounts. Finished product prices all have to go up to compensate which means sales of... everything not completely essential are falling. All the lost jobs also means less money to go around for consumers, which of course means even fewer sales which means more layoffs. And that's not even going into sectors that are dependent on migrant labor and all the downstream industries from THEM.
Truly just masterstrokes of policy from the current administration. Well maybe people will finally start paying attention when what's left of American manufacturing eats shit. You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical though. Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.
cheema33 · 23m ago
We have create a massive cult at the national level. There is no reasoning with them. There is nothing that this administration can do to offend them or shake their confidence.
jacquesm · 11m ago
> Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.
They're right here on HN as well.
And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.
jacquesm · 33m ago
I have a strong feeling this is just the opening stages. The damage done to the US economy and to the trust image of the US abroad is still very hard to get a grip on. And with every passing day it is still getting worse.
KoolKat23 · 25m ago
It's scary the reported number could change so much with so much else depending on it.
Optimistically, the drop could be from temporary higher employment due to folks rushing to import additional goods before the tariffs came into effect. This might dissipate as excess stock levels reduce.
How much though remains to be seen, as tariffs generally will make things tougher, unless something else compensates (unlikely).
rwyinuse · 49m ago
"For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs than there are job seekers."
Americans still have it pretty good in that respect. Over here in EU my country gets to enjoy 9% unemployment rate and many times more job seekers than jobs.
Varelion · 21m ago
Key difference being the social safety nets in place around the jobless and under-employed.
jacquesm · 20m ago
The USA is a continent-sized-country it would be better to list states vs EU countries, which have a considerable spread. Or you could compare the whole of the Eurozone or the whole of the EU with the USA. That would be a better comparison.
KoolKat23 · 21m ago
I suspect if you had to only count decent jobs, the numbers might look a bit different.
Ericson2314 · 1h ago
Time for Americans to suffer as we deserve. (I am also American, living in America.)
deafpolygon · 40m ago
No Americans deserve to suffer for the greed of the few.
jacquesm · 19m ago
I am fractionally responsible for the government of the country that I live in, even if I did not vote for the parties that ended up in government.
gtowey · 29m ago
What if we didn't stop them because we were also benefitting from their greed?
dragon-hn · 24m ago
Maybe I am missing something but ~1/3 of voting age Americans voted for this. Trump was very clear that tariffs were coming, and even warned that Americans should be prepared for some tough times.
And another ~1/3 were comfortable enough with this to not bother voting.
I think people deserve what they vote for.
m00x · 14m ago
Can you attribute it directly to tariffs? There is more than one factor at play here.
Job numbers during Biden's presidency, and early in Trump's presidency were also wildly over-estimated.
Tariffs might be a factor, but there's also a wider economic downturn globally at the moment. Canada lost 66k jobs in august, UK unemployment rate rose to 4.7%, Europe as a whole has slowing growth, deflation is becoming crisis-level in China and unemployment is rising.
bilbo0s · 20m ago
Sorry guys.
Kinda have to agree with this.
It's a team sport.
Learned that in high school.
Fourth and one inside the two yard line? Sorry bud. Coach called a pass play, so you get to take that L with everyone else.
Shoulda had a better coach.
Benefit of democratic government is that you get exactly the government you deserve. We can recover. There will be more elections. But even then we'll get what we vote for, no more and no less.
jacquesm · 19m ago
> We can recover.
That's not a run race.
11101010001100 · 36m ago
How about just a few Americans then.
throwway120385 · 31m ago
But only the ones I disagree with.
jimt1234 · 1h ago
> Employment gains were so weak in the July jobs report that President Donald Trump fired the head of the bureau charged with collecting the data, baselessly claiming it was rigged.
That first sentence really sets the tone, not just of the article, but also of the current political climate.
itsoktocry · 58m ago
Well, it's not even true.
Trump did (baselessly?) fire the BLS head, but it was because of revisions that looked convenient for the last administration.
aDyslecticCrow · 34m ago
Statistics done by a statistics bureau was "revised to look bad"? There are thousands of people collecting billions of data-points all accumulated layer by layer into a summary, compared over different sources. But this year they just decided to make up the numbers instead?
US labor and economics statistics is famously most reliable in the world, going further back in time than any other statistics source. Its not only used by the government but by banks, companies, and international organisations to predict and analyze economic trends.
But surely this year when the numbers looked a bit bad, they made the numbers to intentionally look that way? Simply no. The administration firing the people collection statistics is the real concern. (and its not the first time the administration has removed historical statistics either)
(manual revisions are made in statistics to compensate for anomalies. Companies stocking up on product to escape tariffs created a false peak in GDP that does not correspond to real consumption for example. But that's how statistics work, and the US is the gold standard in proper statitics)
itsoktocry · 30m ago
Wow, you sound a bit off-kilter. What are you even taking about?
I pointed out that Trump did not fire the BLS head because "July was a bad month", he did it because of a series of negative revisions. I even posted the data. I didn't even make a judgement.
Then you went off the rails like left wingers tend to do when they have to think about anything outside their worldview.
bryanlarsen · 56m ago
Revisions which were regular standard practice. About ~50% of the revisions made the previous administration look good, and about 50% made them look bad.
itsoktocry · 45m ago
You are only half reading the news.
Yes, revisions are valid and happen. Yes, a look at historical revisions don't show any bias.
But where are you seeing that half made Trump look good?
For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:
1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous
2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.
axus · 42m ago
Biden was the previous administration.
rurp · 29m ago
This makes no sense. The initial jobs numbers usually get much more attention than the revised ones, so posted inflated numbers that eventually get revised down helps whoever the current administration is. The recent revisions have gotten unusual attention because of how bad the overall situation is, and from Trump drawing extra attention to them by firing the BLS head and essentially calling for the numbers to be cooked.
What does the last administration even have to do with this? Job growth plummeted under the current administration. I get that Trump blames Biden for everything because he always needs a scapegoat, but am shocked that anyone still gives that any weight given that Trump has very publicly and deliberately created the current economic trouble.
margalabargala · 7m ago
I mean, that's what's being complained about.
Trump fired a statistician because the numbers reported were politically inconvenient, not because they were incorrect.
lisbbb · 32m ago
Not baseless--when you're so bad at your job that those huge revisions come in year after year, someone's head should roll.
jauntywundrkind · 42m ago
The Financial Times coverage is particularly terrifying, pinning almost all economic growth to "a handful of states, artificial intelligence, healthcare and the wealthy".
It also notes that health care isnt productive. It's a measure of societal overhead, basically. Yet that was by far one of the largest sources for new jobs.
Yeah, reading the FT article, it claims “Healthcare, technology and real estate are expanding, while financial services, retail and hospitality are treading water”.
Much of real estate is also a net drag that isn't productive...
alephnerd · 20m ago
Most of the Real Estate capex over the last few years has been in manufacturing real estate such as factories, or infra spending such as data centers.
Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.
I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.
I posted that article yesterday on HN, but got no engagement [0].
It is absolutely worrisome, and does connect with my own personal experience visiting other states for work - there is a slowdown in most states aside from those with large diversified economies like CA, TX, NY, FL, and NC that also benefited from the IRA [1], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
Those states with moderate expansion like PA, OH, IN, AZ, and SC are also those that had manufacturing industries that benefited from the IRA [0], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
The states marked as "Treading Water" or "In Recession" didn't receive significant economic stimulus on a per capita basis (eg. Clean energy jobs created in GA vs IN were similar despite GA receiving double the amount of IRA funding and GA having almost 1.7x the population of Indiana) and lack diversified or semi-diversified economies
One thing I don't see much research into (maybe I'm wrong) is whether the US has major data quality issues with labor data.
Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.
It's no secret that companies put up job listings they either have no intention of filling or are simply H1B fraud (impossible listings used to justify an eventual H1B hire).
This would make the "true" number of open jobs within a sector far, far worse than reported.
Comparing jobseekers to job openings is also a very imprecise approach. For certain industries, the gap is bound to be far worse than for others. And the same is true when you look at it by level, experience, etc.
The US is thus in a weird position where equity markets look OK... largely boosted by gains in a small selection of companies (in what's perhaps an AI fueled bubble) and the economy looks a tad rough but not horrible. The real impact of tariffs + broader economic policy is being underrepresented in the data.
This can only last so long. Eventually, inventories will be depleted and tariff impacts will rear their head. Eventually, the true unemployment rate will result in increased eviction rates, lower savings rates, and lower median consumption.
alexpotato · 36m ago
> Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.
Agreed and on multiple fronts.
e.g. I can imagine that white collar workers may not claim unemployment due to a combination of embarrassment/"I don't need it as much as other folks" so the numbers are probably under-reported there.
I've also heard it's bad for recent grads but then a recent grad I know sent me the below:
"I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, and honestly, it’s pretty silly. Yes, tech majors are definitely over saturated, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t be able to go to school for four years, do the bare minimum the entire time, and get a great job after college. From my experience, everyone who worked really really hard and knew their stuff got to a place that they’re happy with"
The above could have been what I said back in 2002 right after the dotcom boom. In other words, it's unclear if companies are hiring fewer junior folks, junior folks were benefiting from ZIRP/boom market or a combination of both.
lisbbb · 27m ago
What you said is how the USA worked for my entire life until the H1B saturation finally reached a critical point! Young men and women would find jobs after college, it was NORMAL to have that be the case. What's going on right now is NOT normal. I got a job right out of college in 1995 with a CS degree--in fact, I had two offers, and I was nothing special. People with actual connections did really, really well back then. It was an optimistic time, and yes, Clinton was President, but he lucked out with the dot com era boom. It obviously imploded by 2001 or so.
commandlinefan · 19m ago
Before our time, it was even normal for people to find jobs without a college degree.
dotnet00 · 37m ago
I think the reasoning behind why you can mostly look past the fake listings is that the numbers are treated as meaningful relative to each other, and so, the ratio of false listings should be relatively similar.
francisofascii · 36m ago
I think publicly traded companies post employee headcounts in their public financial disclosures, so I would assume we would see a general rise in head counts starting in 2020, followed by a leveling off or decline starting in 2023. For example, Google. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
mikert89 · 25m ago
Instead of fresh college grads, companies are hiring h1bs.
TesterVetter · 2h ago
We are already in a recession. The S&P500 is propped up by a few companies, Gold is crushing stocks, job numbers are horrendous, and the private rate markets are telling us rates are going lower, fast.
Gold, a static commodity, outperforming stock indices is practically a shout from the top of a mountain that companies are doing terribly because they cannot produce returns greater than the inflation of commodity prices.
Look at how many treasuries the large banks are buying in anticipation of lower rates.
The corporate media and the Federal Reserve (of Public Relation) just want to paper over it long enough for the large players to get positioned before the rest of the market realizes it.
For the next 50 years or so, we have to accept that the US is a housing-anchored gerontocracy, with younger people expected to be the underclass serving the elderly. There are no checks and balances against the elderly in the US government, and of course there never will be.
lisbbb · 33m ago
I hate CNN--Trump didn't fire the BLS head because the numbers were bad, he fired them because the BLS has been cooking those numbers for 35 years or more! Such HORRIBLE reporting!
lisbbb · 23m ago
You guys are so predictable, but I lived it and it's the truth.
m00x · 6m ago
He's not wrong that the BLS is terrible at projecting these numbers, and the media is even worse and presents these guesses as facts.
Who knows if it'll end up improving with someone new. The BLS is using pretty outdated and poor data collection methods, but it hasn't changed in decades. My guess is that nothing will change with someone new, but who knows.
It's strange that CNBC here decided to use the unrevised numbers instead of the more accurate revised numbers, especially when leading into the election.
Sub-3% inflation [0] and 3% annualized GDP growth [1] sure doesn’t seem like stagflation to me. Not everything is sunshine and flowers but we shouldn’t throw around terms when they don’t apply.
> Not everything is sunshine and flowers but we shouldn’t throw around terms when they don’t apply.
It seems to apply, despite your dismissal. Inflation is an ongoing and pressing concern, as stated by the Federal Reserve. The tightening of monetary policy has contributed to unemployment. GDP is irrelevant, as stagflation is a paradox, not a goalpost.
> In economic theory, there are two main explanations for stagflation: supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly.
exabrial · 1h ago
* reduce liability to hire people to businesses
* eliminate taxes on employing people
* stop runaway inflation
mikert89 · 29m ago
Most of the biden job growth was:
1. From money printing
2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.
Any job growth numbers and conclusions about the economy need to take the above into account.
dragon-hn · 20m ago
But none of that really changed. The money printer is still going ant the same pace, and will only be going faster in the coming year.
And the Federal layoffs from the DOGE nonsense haven’t even started to hurt since so many are still getting paid.
Something else is the source of this…
bryanlarsen · 21m ago
Trump is printing money faster than Biden did. How come it's not helping him?
drooby · 19m ago
Reminder that Trump signed two (of three) Covid stimulus checks
But a sudden drop in jobs would be a pretty good indicator of the collapse of those businesses.
Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?
This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.
They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).
In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.
Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.
We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.
But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.
Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.
The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).
Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.
Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.
Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.
A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.
Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.
IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.
Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.
The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.
Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.
Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.
Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.
For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to other companies and saying: "We'll give you $ now if you agree to give us any tariff refunds you might or might not get someday."
It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.
[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.
There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.
- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?
- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?
- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.
Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?
To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.
The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.
Truly just masterstrokes of policy from the current administration. Well maybe people will finally start paying attention when what's left of American manufacturing eats shit. You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical though. Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.
They're right here on HN as well.
And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.
Optimistically, the drop could be from temporary higher employment due to folks rushing to import additional goods before the tariffs came into effect. This might dissipate as excess stock levels reduce.
How much though remains to be seen, as tariffs generally will make things tougher, unless something else compensates (unlikely).
Americans still have it pretty good in that respect. Over here in EU my country gets to enjoy 9% unemployment rate and many times more job seekers than jobs.
And another ~1/3 were comfortable enough with this to not bother voting.
I think people deserve what they vote for.
Job numbers during Biden's presidency, and early in Trump's presidency were also wildly over-estimated.
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
Tariffs might be a factor, but there's also a wider economic downturn globally at the moment. Canada lost 66k jobs in august, UK unemployment rate rose to 4.7%, Europe as a whole has slowing growth, deflation is becoming crisis-level in China and unemployment is rising.
Kinda have to agree with this.
It's a team sport.
Learned that in high school.
Fourth and one inside the two yard line? Sorry bud. Coach called a pass play, so you get to take that L with everyone else.
Shoulda had a better coach.
Benefit of democratic government is that you get exactly the government you deserve. We can recover. There will be more elections. But even then we'll get what we vote for, no more and no less.
That's not a run race.
That first sentence really sets the tone, not just of the article, but also of the current political climate.
Trump did (baselessly?) fire the BLS head, but it was because of revisions that looked convenient for the last administration.
US labor and economics statistics is famously most reliable in the world, going further back in time than any other statistics source. Its not only used by the government but by banks, companies, and international organisations to predict and analyze economic trends.
But surely this year when the numbers looked a bit bad, they made the numbers to intentionally look that way? Simply no. The administration firing the people collection statistics is the real concern. (and its not the first time the administration has removed historical statistics either)
(manual revisions are made in statistics to compensate for anomalies. Companies stocking up on product to escape tariffs created a false peak in GDP that does not correspond to real consumption for example. But that's how statistics work, and the US is the gold standard in proper statitics)
I pointed out that Trump did not fire the BLS head because "July was a bad month", he did it because of a series of negative revisions. I even posted the data. I didn't even make a judgement.
Then you went off the rails like left wingers tend to do when they have to think about anything outside their worldview.
Yes, revisions are valid and happen. Yes, a look at historical revisions don't show any bias.
But where are you seeing that half made Trump look good?
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:
1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous
2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.
What does the last administration even have to do with this? Job growth plummeted under the current administration. I get that Trump blames Biden for everything because he always needs a scapegoat, but am shocked that anyone still gives that any weight given that Trump has very publicly and deliberately created the current economic trouble.
Trump fired a statistician because the numbers reported were politically inconvenient, not because they were incorrect.
It also notes that health care isnt productive. It's a measure of societal overhead, basically. Yet that was by far one of the largest sources for new jobs.
https://archive.ph/2025.09.08-053701/https://www.ft.com/cont...
Much of real estate is also a net drag that isn't productive...
Both those have value at a macro-level, and are largely a result of IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS act era subsidies, though CHIPS act adjacent spend was "AI-washed" which helped extend adjacent industries capex.
I've previously called out this kind of AI-washing as well [0] - it reminds me of the Telecom Bubble during the 1990s-2000s.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069086
It is absolutely worrisome, and does connect with my own personal experience visiting other states for work - there is a slowdown in most states aside from those with large diversified economies like CA, TX, NY, FL, and NC that also benefited from the IRA [1], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
Those states with moderate expansion like PA, OH, IN, AZ, and SC are also those that had manufacturing industries that benefited from the IRA [0], IIJA, and CHIPS [2] act.
The states marked as "Treading Water" or "In Recession" didn't receive significant economic stimulus on a per capita basis (eg. Clean energy jobs created in GA vs IN were similar despite GA receiving double the amount of IRA funding and GA having almost 1.7x the population of Indiana) and lack diversified or semi-diversified economies
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160699
[1] - https://www.governing.com/infrastructure/map-which-states-ar...
[2] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...
Jobs reports just don't seem at all to square away with the vast anecdotal accounts from both employed and unemployed individuals across a swath of industries.
It's no secret that companies put up job listings they either have no intention of filling or are simply H1B fraud (impossible listings used to justify an eventual H1B hire).
This would make the "true" number of open jobs within a sector far, far worse than reported.
Comparing jobseekers to job openings is also a very imprecise approach. For certain industries, the gap is bound to be far worse than for others. And the same is true when you look at it by level, experience, etc.
The US is thus in a weird position where equity markets look OK... largely boosted by gains in a small selection of companies (in what's perhaps an AI fueled bubble) and the economy looks a tad rough but not horrible. The real impact of tariffs + broader economic policy is being underrepresented in the data.
This can only last so long. Eventually, inventories will be depleted and tariff impacts will rear their head. Eventually, the true unemployment rate will result in increased eviction rates, lower savings rates, and lower median consumption.
Agreed and on multiple fronts.
e.g. I can imagine that white collar workers may not claim unemployment due to a combination of embarrassment/"I don't need it as much as other folks" so the numbers are probably under-reported there.
I've also heard it's bad for recent grads but then a recent grad I know sent me the below:
"I’ve been hearing this a lot lately, and honestly, it’s pretty silly. Yes, tech majors are definitely over saturated, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t be able to go to school for four years, do the bare minimum the entire time, and get a great job after college. From my experience, everyone who worked really really hard and knew their stuff got to a place that they’re happy with"
The above could have been what I said back in 2002 right after the dotcom boom. In other words, it's unclear if companies are hiring fewer junior folks, junior folks were benefiting from ZIRP/boom market or a combination of both.
Gold, a static commodity, outperforming stock indices is practically a shout from the top of a mountain that companies are doing terribly because they cannot produce returns greater than the inflation of commodity prices.
Look at how many treasuries the large banks are buying in anticipation of lower rates.
The corporate media and the Federal Reserve (of Public Relation) just want to paper over it long enough for the large players to get positioned before the rest of the market realizes it.
For the next 50 years or so, we have to accept that the US is a housing-anchored gerontocracy, with younger people expected to be the underclass serving the elderly. There are no checks and balances against the elderly in the US government, and of course there never will be.
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
But he's wrong that it's new: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bls-jobs-report-revision-trump-...
Who knows if it'll end up improving with someone new. The BLS is using pretty outdated and poor data collection methods, but it hasn't changed in decades. My guess is that nothing will change with someone new, but who knows.
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/21/2024/us-job-growth-wea...
It's strange that CNBC here decided to use the unrevised numbers instead of the more accurate revised numbers, especially when leading into the election.
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[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
It seems to apply, despite your dismissal. Inflation is an ongoing and pressing concern, as stated by the Federal Reserve. The tightening of monetary policy has contributed to unemployment. GDP is irrelevant, as stagflation is a paradox, not a goalpost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
To whit:
> In economic theory, there are two main explanations for stagflation: supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly.
* eliminate taxes on employing people
* stop runaway inflation
1. From money printing
2. From the federal government employing some huge percentage of the usa population.
Any job growth numbers and conclusions about the economy need to take the above into account.
And the Federal layoffs from the DOGE nonsense haven’t even started to hurt since so many are still getting paid.
Something else is the source of this…