Weak Jobs, Lowered Expectations
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Weak jobs numbers and moving goal posts. Yeah, actually saw, well, his White House trade guy. He used to scare the crap out of me last spring whenever he would appear on TV and he disappeared for some time there. Peter Navarro, he’s back. He’s back and he’s making the rounds. And he’s telling everyone along with Kevin Hassett that the jobs numbers, Wall Street,
and we the people of the United States of America have to completely rethink the way we view jobs numbers moving forward. Now, tomorrow, Wednesday the 11th, they’re gonna be releasing the January jobs number. I don’t know what it’s gonna say, but it seems like they’re prepping us for a very weak number. They’re telling us, they’re telling us that weak numbers,
are not really indicative of what’s really transpiring and taking place. That’s exactly what they’re saying. Kevin Asit, Peter Navarro, going out there saying that because of deportations, because of deportations, this is why the jobs number is going to show up weak, or we shouldn’t expect as much. He said that 50,000 jobs,
50,000 jobs a month moving forward is gonna be a fantastic number. Now, again, correct me if I’m wrong here. Now, just throwing this out there. If we’re having all these mass deportations and let’s, okay, we’ll go by the numbers. We’ll go by the actual numbers. Well, Obama was much, much higher as far as deportations were concerned.
than Trump, but let’s go along with the fact that saying that we had millions of people self-deport. Some are claiming that two and a half, three million people decided to self-deport. Okay, we’re gonna say, okay, that number is 110 % accurate.
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Wouldn’t that, if all those people decided that they weren’t working anymore, wouldn’t the job opening number, wouldn’t it go through the roof? One would think that, again, many of these people, they’re not even on the books, right? Those jobs still need to be filled. Man, you would think that massive amounts of jobs would be created. The inverse, I would think, would be true. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Wouldn’t you be bringing people off the sidelines to go out there and take those jobs? Yeah, so the whole goalpost maneuver and thing that they’re doing right now, I’m not buying it. I’m not. Several stories out right now when it comes to the jobs market, this is over the past several days, one of the Wall Street Journal.
This is why it’s so hard to find a job right now. Just saying a deep freeze has enveloped the US labor market and a bunch of factors are in play. know, again, some of them, things that we told you were going to happen. Tariffs, one of the things that they cite. Tariff policy has made it difficult for many companies to plan ahead. They do, especially when we’re still
maybe adding them, maybe not adding them, taking them on, taking them off, who knows what’s going to happen next. And again, these hurt small businesses. And small businesses, quite frankly, are the job engine for the country. That’s the reality. Again, tariffs have most certainly hit small businesses much, much harder than large businesses. Again, many workers, because of the job market, are not leaving jobs like they had in the past.
lot of not a lot as much mobility as there was. Now the story talking about why unemployment is rising among young college grads. And again, this is not surprising to me. Numbers are kind of interesting. You go back to 1992. Today, there’s twice as many kids graduating with bachelor’s degrees, but
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the skills don’t match the jobs that are available at this point in time, not to mention the fact that, you know, oftentimes kids just not ready for the real world as far as a job is concerned. you know, different way, guess, of learning, coddling phones, chat, GP, just, there’s just a lot of things.
lot of things that has kind of changed things to some degree. One of the things I try to teach young people, we have a lot of interns here, kids that I coach is talking about, you know what, you need to have traditional skills, personal skills. You have to be able to look people in the eye, you have to be able to talk to people. But again, I don’t think that this is gonna change. We have an enormous amount of, again, traditional jobs.
that are there, big mismatch between labor supply and demand. Government subsidies, public schools have funneled too many young people to credential mills, where churn out grads who lack skills at employers demand. Many would be better off training in skilled trades for which the demand is enormous. More than half of high school grads, more articulate college, even though only 35 %
of 12th graders score proficient in reading 22 % in math. Many college students aren’t academically prepared or even inclined. But again, everybody’s got to graduate, right? Doesn’t make any sense. There’s a mismatch there. Also,
its labor markets changed. This is an extraordinary statistic. You’re actually thinking about 1985. IBM was America’s most valuable company and one of the most profitable. Among its largest employers, payroll of 400,000 IBM 1985. Nvidia is nearly 20 times as valuable today.
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and five times as profitable, adjusted for inflation. Yet it employs a tenth of as many people. this, I get it, you’re gonna see cutbacks in certain industries, you’re gonna see technology, you’re gonna see productivity, and that’s kind of par for the course. And along with that, it goes ahead and creates jobs. But right now, as you can see, money is not going towards labor.
It’s going to capital. It’s going to capital. Companies are investing in capital. They’re investing in tech. That’s the way of the world at this point in time. I don’t know what the jobs number is going to say tomorrow. I really don’t. But I’m not subscribing at all, okay, to the ridiculous notion out there that the, if we have weak.
jobs numbers which we had throughout all of 2025. It a bad year. Bad year for job creation. I’m not blaming it on deportations. That’s for darn sure. Watchdog on wallstreet.com
