Based on personal experience this job market is the worst i've experienced since I entered the work force 14 years ago.
If five of my web developer Chinese friends in Texas are saying that job market is bad, obviously there is significant bias in my personal annecdote. But when over 100 of them across 10 separate professions, four different ethnicities, both genders, three separate educational levels, 1-20 years of experience level, and eight different states are all saying that the market is bad, I think that it is more likely that some one has been fudging with the data.
Why are we trying to extrapolate struggles at the top of the payscale to the overall economy?
Higher interest rates, lower than projected profits, and an increasingly competitive environment has led to a more scrutinous hiring environment. This is not a bad thing. Moreover, this article really indicates a return to normal, and as the article's own data shows, white-collar hiring rates are almost always below blue-collar.
Or do you guys really think that what Intel and Boeing need are more executives? If we do suspect that the economy is on the edge, we should ask ourselves. Where is the tipping point? Which industry? Company? People like J.P. Morgan love to whine but his insituttion gives basically zero specifics.
Mind you this isn't the first time people have complained about the "bad economy". In hindsight, 2014-2019 were great economic times. Houses were more affordable and there was robust wage growth, but were people happy? Some economists, just like today, yes. Citing great economic figures, low unemployment, and solid economic growth (especially compared to Europe).
But others were whinging and writing doomer articles literally every day.
And you can see this in data. Real income increased consistently, peaking in 2019.
In 2024 real wages are still higher than in 2007, right before the Great Recession. Similarly, people love to bemoan about the Labor Force Participation Rate, but objectively
it has been recovering.
So yes, you can complain about how it's still below pre-pandemic levels, but logically speaking it's getting better relative to 2022, not worse. So really you should be talking about how United States is recovering rather than declining. Similarly, while hiring has cooled, CAPEX is up.
But let's look at the complaining about how BLS constantly "revises" figures. Frankly, that's a good thing. I don't really care about headlines.
Taking their latest report into consideration, a revision of -25,000 and -61,000 results in employment numbers going from over 300,000 down to just over 200,000. Is there anyone really who's gonna tell me that's a horrible number? But let's dig deeper. Are the gains outweighing the losses by industry?
Realistically speaking there are no huge losses, sectors are mostly stable with a slight decreases and slight increases depending on the industry, with big gains in some industries.
But again, I've heard these arguments before. "The jobs that are lost are high quality jobs, and the jobs that are gained are blue-collar jobs." That's literally all I've heard from the normal people in 2012-2019 as I went through college, started working professionally, and eventually settled down in government. Yet somehow we've ended up in a position where big companies, especially tech, have far more workers today than they did 5 years ago. Funny how that works.
Speaking more broadly and in a more general sense...
I think people need to be more objective about the numbers here. Unemployment is low, regardless of how fudged the numbers are, when there is a recession and unemployment is high you can actualy feel it. In a visceral way that impacts your bottom line besides feelings of pessimism. On the other hand, political and economic interests almost never acknowledge economic prosperity unless it is in their direct interest. After all, every 2 years the American electorate gets together to complain about everything wrong with the economy, foreign policy, their neighborhood, and how the other political party is responsible for it. Doesn't mean it's actually that way.
This does not mean that there aren't problems in United States. Every country has problems and United States is going through a particularly polarizing period of seeings its global influence decline while domestic issues have only gotten worse, but this isn't America's greatest challenge. Not even close. In the 1970s and 80s, United States was reeling from the triple whammy of the Vietnam War, end of the civil rights era, and crippling stagflation.
Guess who won the Cold War?
This explains to me why China is largely biding its time and not being confrontational in both the political and economic space. Which to me, suggests that the Chinese government is treating United States as an all powerful hegemon that took a stumble, not as a power that's about to collapse. Not even close. It is a clever and level-headed approach.
Now let's imagine for a second,
for the sake of argument that Kamal Harris is actually hyper competent and Democrats win all three major chambers of the US Government that they can win. Does United States have the capacity to rejuvenate its military, to makes it social services solvent, to start fixing its industrial base, to make significant progress on homelessness, border security, drug crisis, and housing affordability?
Does United States the economic potential to do so? Of course.
Now let's, again
as a thought exercise, imagine that Kamala Harris is just barely competent enough to
steer the ship in the right direction on all of those things even if no significant progress is made. Would this not be a significant accomplishment in a
mere 4 years? Just putting the ship on the right path would already make United States a much greater threat to China.
Now realistically, is that possibility realistic? To expect Kamala Harris to do just enough to put U.S. on the right trajectory? Of course it's realistic. After all, United States has healthy demographics, it has a huge economy and it has pretty decent economic growth.
Consider just how incompetent Trump was. That's how low the bar is.
Now consider the strengths of the US Economy. United States can literally buy and import whatever it needs if it can't make something. United States can access any number of engineers it needs, it can entice any number of companies to do business in United States, and it can print endless money to afford it. The lingua franca of the world is also English and many aspire to immigrate to United States.
