The signs of a downturn are appearing. This news from the New York Times, just out, is particularly relevant:
Employers continued to create jobs but pulled back on hiring, a sign that more businesses are putting expansion plans on hold as they deal with economic uncertainty created by President Trump.
The economy added 73,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, lower than economists' expectations. The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2 percent, up from 4.1 percent the month before.
They added:
In a sign that the labor market may not have been as robust as it seemed earlier this year, job gains from the previous two months were also revised down by a total of 258,000, an unusually high number.
It is customary for the USA to add jobs to its economy every month: this is still a growing country, and such jobs are needed to meet demand and to provide economic activity to all those living in the country. 73,000 is a very low number of additions, and the fact that earlier figures are also downgraded suggests that the downturn is already happening in the US economy. Employers are fighting back against tariff pressure on them and general economic uncertainty by not employing new people, and unemployment is edging upward, albeit slowly, as a result.
This would not matter, except that tariff impacts really do not hit until today, assuming Trump can make them stick, which I suspect Trump will succeed in doing, although I draw attention to Ivan Horrock's comment on this made earlier today.
The German Dax index is also down because of tariffs. US markets are closed.
These things by themselves prove nothing. They do, however, provide the signs that all is very far from right in the world.
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It is obvious that an exclusive, elitist and profit driven socioeconomic society with its fatuous and pathological fixation on growth or whatever distraction is churned out, is not working for society in general. It may be making extremely wealthy even more wealthy but it’s not them who need it, it’s the rest of us particularly those struggling financially.
I voted for a Labour Party that said it would tax the wealthy. Instead they are punching down again at the poorest, the disabled, the vulnerable and the broken. The present economic system is the elite writ large.
I hesitate often to use the term class war but more and more I think it is a class war. Perhaps we can talk to Patriotic Millionaires and other groups too? I personally am tired of financial struggle and all of that sh*t and I do want to see change for myself and many others. Change For the Better.
During the recent stock market highs the news frequently showed footage all those trader types gathered under the big screen in Wall Street, sporting idiotic grins and saluting the big numbers with their smartphones.
I bet they’re not grinning now 🙂
Unless they “invested” in the stock market “taking a hit”
I’m sure I saw somewhere that an economist had won an award because they found that robust legal systems, fairness and governments with lower corruption tend to do better economically.
I do wonder how far we are from a meltdown?
Mind you what happened the last time, the government bailed them out and if I remember correctly didn’t even get back anything close to what it put in, considering the scale of wrong doing.
Must be true.
“US President Donald Trump has ordered the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after job numbers were lower than expected in July – figures showed that 73,000 jobs were created last month” — BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cpqvdxzwv22t
Hot news just in from one of my US OSINT’s, Richard. Trump just fired the head of the organisation that produces the US labour statistic, accusing her a releasing bad figures for political purposes. He’s now going to appoint someone ‘more qualified’ (probably from Fox News). Wherever they come from we can now be sure that ANY economic related data from the Federal government will be completely unreliable as it’ll have been doctored to make Trump look better.
As I’ve said this evening in a couple of comments to the OSINT’s I follow, these actions are straight out of Putin’s authoritarian playbook – in which Trump has been well schooled during many of the ‘friendly’ phone conversations they’ve had in the past six months or so. Forget the faux outrage and ‘falling out’ with Putin of recent weeks. All deliberately manufactured (as Putin did with Chechen terrorism with Russia) to deflect from the real project – which is the destruction of US democracy. The sooner people wake up to this reality the better the free world might be able to do something to stop Trump and his cronies turning the US into an equivalent of Putin’s Russia.
With apologies for delay…