In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.
Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.
NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.
I’m curious whether it’s more the tariffs, or the uncertainty. No one knows what will happen on a day-to-day basis: the chaotic (and illegal) decision-making leaves everyone wondering what’s next.
The hiring slowdown predates tariffs. For various reasons CEOs either believe they can do more with less people, or that they can hire cheaper people in other geographies, or both. Businesses (tech or financials) don't seem to be telegraphing uncertainty, S&P 500 revenue is at all times high and trending up, earnings/profit all time highs and trending up, valuations all times high and trending up.
That was the entire point of hiking interest rates, to slow down the economy and stop inflation. Tariffs are universally acknowledged to cause inflation, and we would be in a recovery path if it weren't for the delays that tariffs are causing right now.
It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is not sure to their actions. Others are not responsible for poor economic performance even when taking actions universally agreed to harm the economy.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." -- LBJ
Before tariffs, in the post-pandemic recovery, we also didn't see hiring go back to pre-pandemic levels. There are other forces like AI adoption.
I don't have good intuition around the connection between tariffs and jobs. Yes, higher inflation may require cooling down the economy. But right now it looks like rates will be going down and anyways rates haven't really slowed down the economy that much. Inflation did come down. Inflation can have some benefits too for employers, it erodes the employee's salaries (and potentially other costs). If companies can raise prices and not pass that on to employees or to their suppliers (as they've seemingly done during this last inflation cycle) then it can be a win for them. A weaker dollar can also help US companies compete globally.
If companies are doing well and growing, and they seem to be, why aren't they hiring more? The largest US tech companies are sitting on piles of cash and making huge profits, for some time now. Is it just that they've become more productive and need less people? Maybe they don't have anywhere to put more people towards? Maybe they're hiring outside the US (this one is not a maybe- they are). Is the uncertainty related to progress in AI? to other macro factors?
But the change in hiring trends goes back to the beginning of the pandemic. This can't all be explained by tariffs. There is always uncertainty about the future but it seems there's been a shift in behavior across the board (CEOs copying each other is also a problem) that has been lasting many years. I guess you could blame it on Trump's first presidency if you really want to make this political.
How do you bid on a big project if you don't know what materials will cost next month, or 6 months, or a year from now? It's fucking impossible. And with inflation, labor cost is spiking. It's hard for people to get buy, so they're asking for more. It has investors and banks spooked to loan money for projects, because they could easily fail with so much volatility.
Looking at the 30 year chart YTD there is no indication that rates come down. The short side may be under control of Trump - who's bullying of the Fed raises the prospect of them coming down but the long end of the curve is under the control of market forces and it does not look like going down at all. Real estate market effectively frozen with sales down and for sale up in the realm of decade highs.
Nobody mentioned yet the drop of the dollar making every single import 10% more expensive since the start of the year. That is on top of every tariff and is inflationary.
Government spending went up by a surprising amount while tariff revenue rolls in. I suspect one reason there is no detailed budget is to create the space to move things around without much notice. If a large swath of the tariffs would be ruled illegal (already happened twice, one step to final) the situation could become interesting.
It will take years to make America an exporting nation. In the meantime many many businesses will go bankrupt. This administration doesn't care as they just see it as a cost of fulfilling their longer term plan to make America an exporting nation.
Nearly 10% of the s&p 500 value is one company- nvidia. The mag 7 make up a significant portion. Prosperity isn’t distributed, it’s concentrated and the stock market is not even close to the only measure of the health of the American economy.
That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.
The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
It also disrupts JIT supply chains. Companies make decisions with certain variables not being volatile.
You now have a situation where one week the cost of a commodity is X and the following week it could be 2X. The butterfly effect across industries also cannot be predicted.
Many industries also seem to be still recovering from the pandemic period with supply of spare parts still being de-prioritised over making parts available for new units. :/
I don't think there's that much surprise at the tariffs on China; it's the tariffs on the rest of the world, especially friendly countries like Canada that are the big surprises.
Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
>and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
This combined with the utter self-emasculation of the Republican Party to Trump's incoherent, or at best self-serving, garbage is the most worrisome thing of all.
She did, everyone just sort of... pretended she didn't. So they could have plausible deniability for voting for Trump.
See also: Harris is an elite! (Trump is more elite), Trump knows business (he's a pretty bad business man), Harris did nothing in office! (She was VP), Trump is the underdog! (He's literally already been president)
The second paragraph of your first link: “ However, she has not provided many details on her plans”
Edit: did you read these links?
“ The American people lacked any concrete policy positions from the presumptive, and then official, Democratic presidential candidate for seven weeks following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
Despite the absence of clarity on key issues, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly rose in the polls compared to Biden”
Speaking as someone who despises Ted Cruz to the bottom of my soul, I decided in 2016 that if Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, I would have voted for Cruz. At least he has some sincerely held beliefs that do not involve his own wallet and cruelty towards the entire world outside his inner circle.
My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
≥The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.
So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.
"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
That's slightly revisionist. He won the popular vote by almost 5 percentage points. That's a lot. He also got more electoral college votes than GWB (both times) and Trump in 2016. His victories in the battleground states were also by a higher margin than Trump's in 2016, though still close. "Barely won" is a shade of true.
I honestly don't blame the guy for believing it was his responsibility to the country to run for re-election and keep Trump out of office. His heart was in the right place, even if the rest of him wasn't up to the task anymore.
> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.
It didn't take informed people by surprise. We still see people denying that Trump had anything to do with Project 2025, whereas honest informed people knew that he very much did.
Nobody informed saw massive tariffs on India, Brazil, etc. If you were right the stock market wouldn’t have tanked because the smart money would have priced it in.
Maybe the smart money shorted on the tank. After all, if you know there's going to be a downturn in a known time period that's a smart move. I believe it's worth analyzing who sold what and when, if not for insider trading, then at least for historical knowledge.
Trump’s style of governing is patrimonialism. Mafia. It’s how he ran his businesses, and Trump 1.0. It’s entirely predictable that he’d go much further this time around as he claimed DOJ should act as his personal law firm.
Modi pissed Trump off by refusing to support a nomination for him to get the Nobel. And Trump hit India with tariffs. Unsurprising to anyone paying attention.
No one is so stupid they can’t follow this, and predict the aggregate consequence well in advance.
It’s only by willfully suspending rationality, that people convinced themselves the obvious wouldn’t happen. And one of those is an insistence that the only valid form of prediction is at an absurd level of prediction granularity, rather than the inevitable storyline as a consequence of Trump’s intrinsic corruption and ability to corrupt everyone around him (or else they discarded and flung far away).
Trump is famously a racist, a rapist, a felon, and a vile insurrectionist. Nothing good could possibly have followed his election. Indeed, we’re really lucky so far. It’s going to get much worse.
There are other options, it’s not that simple. They may foresee an economic slowdown (they certainly say they do at every opportunity), they feel they are currently overstaffed, the ETF and hedge fund managers who own most of their stock are pressuring them to save money because they don’t like what they’re reading in the tea leaves, etc.
If I had to guess - "political bubble (bursts)" is when an extremely incompetent and/or radical politician suddenly is elected to one of the top posts in a country. So it's like a closed off boiling pot - incompetent radical has 5% of the electoral base and nothing happens, then 10%, then 20%, 30%, 40%, still nothing, and then one day he "suddenly" crosses 50% threshold and bubble bursts, he is now in charge for real.
For example in France their own Le-Trump aka Marine Le Pen had 41% votes last election cycle, so nothing really happened and system centrists won again, politics remained moderate and predictable. But if she or her ideological successor even takes 50%... hooboy, EU will see some Orbanification just like USA does today.
I live in such country, local currency volatile, laws are changing. There is no long term planning, projects should span 1-2 years and if they bring income, then you are lucky. In long term the situation is no good
My guess is just, well, a guess, but the real impact of tariffs will take some time to hit. For now it is a turbulence of the uncertainty, but as people understand how to work on this situation we'll see numbers getting more stable.
My second guess is that inflation will grow as other markets will learn to deal with the situation.
It is taking some time, but other economic blocks might make strong moves altogether causing at least a bruise in the metrics.
Also we need to remember that the guy responsible for the numbers was fired for allegedly political reason and that could have been political and no one will ever be sure.
So how can one trust the numbers in that situation?
It has been... Weird
This is different -- the tariffs are being applied and changed chaotically, with no direction on actually serving the point of protecting native industry. The goal of the tariffs is to replace income tax, everything else is a smokescreen.
You can't write a business plans/proposals and get loans/management approval on these kinds of tariffs.
Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.
If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.
I would say more about general uncertainty than volatility but similar thought. Disagree on the reason though, tariffs like we are experiencing have not been in our existence for a couple generations. And especially not in the modern connected global market.
I don’t believe most if not all of us have experienced such an immature and erratic administration. We are taxing trade partners, flip flopping on rules and nobody knows what to make of it.
Would note that the data the New York Times cited are seasonally adjusted [1]. The assumptions of those adjustment models may not currently apply.
It’s going to be difficult to suss out a signal from employment data until October or November, by when we should have about half a year of post-tariff data [2] to compare with ‘24. (We may not know anything surely for a year.)
Whatever mayor they're 'under threat of' can't be much worse than the one who's currently in place who is under threat of indictment from the federal government over bribery, fraud, and illegal foreign finance contributions, who has has eight of his staff resign in the last year under federal investigations, and lost multiple other staff resigning on principle.
People are already acting like Mamdani is responsible for everything that happens in NYC; they should pay more attention to the guy who's been in charge the past 3 years.
Weren't the charges against Eric Adams dismissed with prejudice? [1] They shouldn't have been dismissed at all, but the judge didn't want the president to be able to directly control the major of NYC.
I personally think he should at least be impeached because I have the woke liberal opinion that people in power taking bribes is bad.
Mamdani advocating that the state gov tax millionaires 2% more is not the same as having the power to tax millionaires. You should look up what a mayor actually does (hint: balance budgets with city council and strike new initiatives and work with the police department).
Both the NYC Employment Data the New York Times cites [1] and these Fed data [2] are seasonally adjusted. Would take them with a shaker of salt given the assumptions in those adjustment models are likely currently under assault. (Hehe.)
I know that this is the result of summing a much larger gain + a slightly smaller loss, but it's weird reading this number in isolation and knowing that my company is responsible for roughly 5% of this gain.
Normally I'd be quippy about the plural of anecdote not being "data", but this isn't even plural. This is a single anecdote. The claim you have made is "I have encountered fraud, personally, so the system is a disaster."
Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)
It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.
But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.
I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.
Unemployment numbers will never work for counting the number of people actually unemployed. They do work for seeing unemployment trends. A ton of people suddenly applying for unemployment is a pretty clear signal.
Depends what if anything is being done to combat it.
One of the following is true:
- The numbers somewhat-accurately reflect the trend of employment
- Fraud levels were reduced 66x in one year
If it was the second one, that's a sufficiently massive reduction that news stories would be written about it. There would be stories about this great victory over fraud.
A quick search showed no particular anti-fraud measures or claims of effectiveness unique to that time period.
That has me shaking my head. He fired the BLS person claiming they were reporting inaccurate stats to make him look bad. A claim of partisan bias - could maybe be some truth to that. But to fire them and replace them? Then it will certainly be biased reporting. I suppose that makes sense if all you care about is image and not actually making things better.
I question the president’s cognitive state if he openly stated there would be some “pain” and then when the statistics show he was correct, he attacks the BLA director and claims the economy is booming.
The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.
She is presenting numbers. A bad job might be using black font on a black background not the numbers are not what I want or businesses are not answering surveys quick enough.
If you are looking at tarrifs to explain NY small business market collapse, you clearly have not followed Louis Rossmann's struggles to keep his business in NY over the years.
rental prices are driven by P/E redirecting funds to the purchase of housing stock, which they then use to jack up the rent. Fuedalism is returning by stealth.
that is also assuming the demand is atomic when that isn't necessarily the case. A lot of that pooled demand can come from singular sources. in other words, not all demand is created equal
New York is teeming with what appear to be newly arrived "immigrants" who do no speak a word of English (and frankly are rather aggressive about their refusal to do so) yet are employed in various crafts. We had fairly substantial renovation recently in our building. Every single worker was clearly a recent arrival. How do we know how many jobs were actually created if so many of them are not "officially recorded"?
(I am an immigrant myself (via the legal means) lest you take my observation as a xenophobic expression.)
The U.S. has no official language, and no one who moves here is required to learn English. Especially in NYC, where so many neighborhoods predominantly speak a language that is not English (Brighton Beach, Sunset Park, Flushing, Chinatown, etc.)
Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
There are and have been pockets in immigrant communities where e.g. older members would live their entire lives in US and never speak a word of English. But conversely, no one expected the rest of us to know Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, ..., etc. But somehow now we are supposed to accept a sizeable subset of our nation to only speak Spanish.
> Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.
I do not care if it is not a "good look" by some standard. What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.
Does the New York Times (which is a national paper) have a section in German language? Does it have one in any other non-English language besides Spanish?
Why is Spanish singled out? Why was "bilingualism" being promoted so heavily? Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch? So yeah, there are all sorts of little pockets here and there, and grandpas and grandmas of various flavor speaking the old country's tongue but only one was promoted.
The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
What’s the German-speaking population of the United States? What German-speaking lands in the Americas did the United States acquire through violent or financial means?
> Meaning no offense, wtf has the Spanish speaking community contributed to American history to get this special perch?
About half of the total land area of the US was formerly colonized by the Spanish. What “history” are you referring to?! And what “special perch”?
> The phenomena is obviously political in nature and to construe is as anything else, including "prejudice" or "xenophobia", is disengenuous.
This is innuendo. Say what you want to say, and don’t couch it behind a passive “political”. Who’s driving what outcome, and for what ends. Go on!
The historic arguemnt is lucidrous since NYTimes only recently published in a bilingual mode.
Special perch is clear: this is a nation of numerious ethnicities with an equal number of distinct 'mother tongues'. The special perch is the recent push to normalize having an entire subset of the society speak a langauge that many of us do not speak and have no desire to learn.
They’re not equal. There are more Spanish-speakers in the U.S. (and the world, for that matter) than there are German, Estonian, Russian, Croatian, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, … speakers. You’re ascribing some bizarre conspiracy to basic market dynamics.
And again, this is pretty localized. Salt Lake City has less Spanish than Los Angeles. Flushing, Queens has more Mandarin than Spanish or English.
It remains unclear who is being harmed here. And what solutions are you advocating for?
What "market"? Did this "market" exist 100 years ago or not? If yes (and it did) then why haven't we been bilingual English-Spanish since day 1? There is conspiracy theory here - just pretty straightforward observation of facts.
The market for reading the NYTimes in Spanish… There’s also a big enough market for reading it in Chinese! (https://cn.nytimes.com)
Since these are online-only versions of the NYTimes, and immigration sources change throughout history, no. This particular market did not exist 100 years ago.
However, the portion of non-English speakers has remained about the same since the 1910 census began asking about this. ~100 years ago, German was the most prominent non-English language spoken in the U.S., and there were over 500 German-language newspapers in circulation. Yiddish newspapers were common in New York. And Spanish newspapers were widely read in Texas. In Chicago, Polish newspapers were common. San Francisco had the Chinese World (世界日報) newspaper.
Your idea that, 100 years ago, everyone spoke English, and we didn’t support non-English speaking is just flatly wrong.
The people who are most xenophobic/against immigrant communities are recent immigrants who pull the latter up for their compatriots right after they ascend.
Latino voters swung 20 points towards trump from 2020-2024 after being told that Trump would deport all of their illegal family members. A majority of latino men straight up voted for Trump and Latino women was like 47-53.
Legal immigrants hate illegal immigrants. Most legal immigrants are wealthy and well connected and have never had to do the shit jobs that their illegal brothers do. It's pretty hard to legally immigrate without lots of money/skills or at minimum beauty (i.e. for green card marriage). Illegals are usually dirt poor and will do anything for a better life.
I'm getting far more willing to defend making English the official language of the USA for this reason. You want to pretend like you're a WASP legal immigrants? Act like one then!
BTW - Americans don't see the distinction between "european latino" and "Mestizo". You're all Latinos and are treated the same way by WASPs.
Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era.
You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.
[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.
It's true that NYC private sector employment is different from the US labor market as a whole, but NYC private sector employment is better representative of what readers of this site care about than overall US employment. Readers are much more likely to be affected by changes in the professional services and information sectors than, say, agriculture.
The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag:
> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”
It's part of the plan. Small farms will be the ones to go bankrupt. The large corporate, black rock et al owned, "farms" (read businesses) will be bailed out and allowed to scoop up the little ones for pennies onto the dollar.
Yes, a tariff can be a good measure. But for that the tariffed goods need to be selected carefully and rationally und not whatever the heck the Trump administration is doing.
For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.
Hawaii produces 6.3 million lbs per year of bananas which is a tiny fraction of the 8 million metric tons per year Ecuador produces. Labor and land cost is the primary reason Hawaii can't compete with Latin America, but long-standing tariffs could change that.
About 2m people are employed directly or indirectly in the Ecuadorean banana industry. The total population of Hawaii is only 1.5m. Also you could fit Hawaii in a corner of Ecuador.
Unless you turned over all the islands exclusively to bananas, and forget about tourism, pineapples or anything else, you’re not even going to get close.
Hawaii is already heavily agricultural. Most of the non-agricultural land is reserved for conservation. Banana production would likely replace other production, and then we've got less of that stuff.
Also, shipping to continental US is limited by the Jones Act and the lack of capacity in US built, owned, and crewed shipping lines. Assuming a desire to produce things in the US, I don't think it's sensible to tarrif bananas to grow them in Hawaii, and then relax the Jones act so they can be shipped to the continental US on foreign carriers.
Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.
NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html