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>The U.S. shed 32,000 private-sector jobs in September, payroll-processing giant ADP said on Wednesday. > That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August.

>The U.S. shed 32,000 private-sector jobs in September, payroll-processing giant ADP said on Wednesday. > That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000. Yikes

sssilver 1y ago
How does this happen?
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Every single day at 2:30 in the morning the inebriated President radically reconfigures federal trade policy.
  - PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    It’d be okay ish if the president was just inebriated, but we are looking at dementia, an aged mind that seems to have trouble telling real from fake (as evident by the flurry of AI generated videos posted on his page).
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      It would be okay-ish if the president were just inebriated (Grant), or had dementia (Reagan). What we have is a president who is a narcissistic psychopath (closet parallel in American history is Joseph McCarthy, although if you want a real comparison you have to go to Europe or South America).
  - rocketpastsix 1y ago
    It's common knowledge he doesn't drink.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      Alcohol isn't the only way to get inebriated. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-white-house-drugs-speed-xanax-1234979503/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum... > If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes. > In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
    - orwin 1y ago
      I have no hindsight about the US president, but i know about what happened in France, and let me tell you, alcohol was never the issue. While it seems our president use less coke that he did in 2018-2019 (to be clear, the only instance where i have heard a direct testimony is during the filming of the presidential new year vows of 2019, but a lot of people speculated about his coke habits until 2021), he do use a lot of more legal stimulants, at least during international trips. Age does not mesh well with this kind of stimulants, that can accelerate mental fatigue. One of my pet theory is that Biden's "decline" was actually caused by drug overuse, and my guess is that he should be a bit more "here" now that he was a year ago. The fact that Trump don't seems to work a lot and goes rest/golf often is actually a good thing in my opinion, because it will limit his needs for stimulants.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    Even without that when you fire tens of thousands of civil servants and cancel billions in grants that’s a lot of money which was supposed to flow through the economy and does not.
  - emeril 1y ago
    for all his failings, I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it that said, he has no problem putting drunkards in charge of national security...
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
- downrightmike 1y ago
  Things are far worse then expected/ can be hidden. That's why they are firing the people who put statistics together and appointing yes men to make the numbers look good. Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
  - jerlam 1y ago
    Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? And what does it say about the Washington Post and their selection of economists?
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      > Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual? There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
    - jf22 1y ago
      A different way to think about this is asking why anybody thinks they can be correct about this? If records surrounding this topic are always correct and require revision maybe that's just how the data presents itself. You only know the true amount of rainfall that happens after the storm passes.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      > be so completely incorrect? Were they so completely incorrect? > That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000. Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
      - 1y ago
- mothballed 1y ago
  I think people way underestimate just how badly the US fucked themselves with the tariff regimes, amongst other reasons. The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade. People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
  - Freedom2 1y ago
    My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about. I think generally it's also a good thing that Americans are buying less - statistically, more stuff is made overseas than domestically. Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
    - 1121redblackgo 1y ago
      Big if on that last sentence.
      - Spartan-S63 1y ago
        Indeed. With the future of the tariffs in some question with the upcoming SCOTUS case, why would any business choose to invest in manufacturing here when the barriers might be gone in a few months (or mid-next year if SCOTUS slow rolls a decision until the end of their session)?
        isleyaardvark 1y ago
        Or tomorrow since Trump has gone back and forth on specific tariffs
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  Survey response times creating trend bias. If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators. Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
  - kasey_junk 1y ago
    Nit: the ADP numbers are not survey based. They come directly from adp’s payroll data set which is immense but biased. So you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor. The more murky part of their numbers is how they calibrate to the bls numbers.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > the ADP numbers are not survey based Correct, why I said “BLS surveys and payroll data.” > you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor True.
    - busterarm 1y ago
      Also biased by being only the customers of ADP. Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
  - cameldrv 1y ago
    If you're hiring and firing you'd better get the data into ADP ASAP or you're going to be paying people who no longer work for you or not paying people who do. This should be about as close to real-time (neither leading or lagging) as you're going to get.
- dcre 1y ago
  Assuming you mean: how do estimates and previous monthly turn out to be wrong and need correction? After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revisions https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revis... The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data. As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
- fzeroracer 1y ago
  The entire stock market and economy is being held up on the back of a massive AI bubble. Everywhere else you look, performance is down, people are struggling, jobs are vanishing and consumer confidence is disappearing. The most inept people you can imagine are in control of the only levers that can fix things and they've decided to instead strip it and sell it for parts after slamming the self-destruct button.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Our estimates are not keeping up with modern trends. for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting. In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently. If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Trump is threatening [and/or has tried to fire] people who report accurate numbers to the government? As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...
- classified 1y ago
  It's a Democrat conspiracy! /s
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sssilver 1y ago

How does this happen?

jeffbee 1y ago
Every single day at 2:30 in the morning the inebriated President radically reconfigures federal trade policy.
- PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  It’d be okay ish if the president was just inebriated, but we are looking at dementia, an aged mind that seems to have trouble telling real from fake (as evident by the flurry of AI generated videos posted on his page).
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    It would be okay-ish if the president were just inebriated (Grant), or had dementia (Reagan). What we have is a president who is a narcissistic psychopath (closet parallel in American history is Joseph McCarthy, although if you want a real comparison you have to go to Europe or South America).
- rocketpastsix 1y ago
  It's common knowledge he doesn't drink.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Alcohol isn't the only way to get inebriated. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-white-house-drugs-speed-xanax-1234979503/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum... > If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes. > In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
  - orwin 1y ago
    I have no hindsight about the US president, but i know about what happened in France, and let me tell you, alcohol was never the issue. While it seems our president use less coke that he did in 2018-2019 (to be clear, the only instance where i have heard a direct testimony is during the filming of the presidential new year vows of 2019, but a lot of people speculated about his coke habits until 2021), he do use a lot of more legal stimulants, at least during international trips. Age does not mesh well with this kind of stimulants, that can accelerate mental fatigue. One of my pet theory is that Biden's "decline" was actually caused by drug overuse, and my guess is that he should be a bit more "here" now that he was a year ago. The fact that Trump don't seems to work a lot and goes rest/golf often is actually a good thing in my opinion, because it will limit his needs for stimulants.
- masklinn 1y ago
  Even without that when you fire tens of thousands of civil servants and cancel billions in grants that’s a lot of money which was supposed to flow through the economy and does not.
- emeril 1y ago
  for all his failings, I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it that said, he has no problem putting drunkards in charge of national security...
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >I believe he swore off alcohol after his brother died from it I don't think his health really facilitates drinking even if he wanted to. He doesn't need to be drunk to struggle to walk straight or ramble off on some odd tangent.
downrightmike 1y ago
Things are far worse then expected/ can be hidden. That's why they are firing the people who put statistics together and appointing yes men to make the numbers look good. Expect ADP to catch heat for this/ have their corporate charter revoked.
- jerlam 1y ago
  Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? And what does it say about the Washington Post and their selection of economists?
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > Why would independent economists, who are not in government and not in charge of gathering or releasing statistics, be so completely incorrect? Because the situation we find ourselves in is highly unusual? There's not much precedence for a global pandemic, a demented president, and the US shooting itself in the balls to piss off every major trading partner.
  - jf22 1y ago
    A different way to think about this is asking why anybody thinks they can be correct about this? If records surrounding this topic are always correct and require revision maybe that's just how the data presents itself. You only know the true amount of rainfall that happens after the storm passes.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    > be so completely incorrect? Were they so completely incorrect? > That is down from a revised loss of 3,000 in August. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected an increase of 45,000. Sure, you might say "gosh, +45,000 is way off from -3000". But at the same time, you have to consider they are measuring the change in a population of millions of people. In that sense, the percent error is very tiny whether it's +45K or -3K.
    - 1y ago
mothballed 1y ago
I think people way underestimate just how badly the US fucked themselves with the tariff regimes, amongst other reasons. The way US workers survive in a high-skill economy is having complex, internationally supplied machines/services/trade. People think what will happen is more stuff made in US, but then that room sized CNC milling machine you ordered from Germany so you can actually operate a US company suddenly has a massive tariff bill and now you have to fire 3 guys to pay the bank for that. And people are buying less of your stuff because they're already spending more money on all their other goods, either because of tariffs or because it's now made by people with less comparative advantage.
- Freedom2 1y ago
  My friends in the midwest say that there's actually exemptions on tariffs when it comes to buying the manufacturing equipment itself, to avoid the issues you're talking about. I think generally it's also a good thing that Americans are buying less - statistically, more stuff is made overseas than domestically. Those same friends expect purchase amounts to increase once America starts producing more on its own.
  - 1121redblackgo 1y ago
    Big if on that last sentence.
    - Spartan-S63 1y ago
      Indeed. With the future of the tariffs in some question with the upcoming SCOTUS case, why would any business choose to invest in manufacturing here when the barriers might be gone in a few months (or mid-next year if SCOTUS slow rolls a decision until the end of their session)?
      - isleyaardvark 1y ago
        Or tomorrow since Trump has gone back and forth on specific tariffs
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Survey response times creating trend bias. If the economy has been growing at N% a quarter, that’s your baseline until evidenced otherwise. The evidence comes in the form of BLS surveys and payroll data, both of which are lagging indicators. Why lagging? If you’re hiring and firing, you’re going to be preoccupied with that before responding to a survey. So the folks who are doing the most change to their baselines tend to respond late. Similarly, if you’re hiring a firing a bunch, you may not get your numbers into ADP precisely correctly the first time around.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  Nit: the ADP numbers are not survey based. They come directly from adp’s payroll data set which is immense but biased. So you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor. The more murky part of their numbers is how they calibrate to the bls numbers.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > the ADP numbers are not survey based Correct, why I said “BLS surveys and payroll data.” > you don’t see hiring/firing delay in the birth/death data like you do with the bls stats, but actual dataset bias is a factor True.
  - busterarm 1y ago
    Also biased by being only the customers of ADP. Sure, that's 1/5 of US jobs, but it's also going to be concentrated in some industries more than others -- would be nice to see how that lines up with where job adds and losses landed.
- cameldrv 1y ago
  If you're hiring and firing you'd better get the data into ADP ASAP or you're going to be paying people who no longer work for you or not paying people who do. This should be about as close to real-time (neither leading or lagging) as you're going to get.
dcre 1y ago
Assuming you mean: how do estimates and previous monthly turn out to be wrong and need correction? After the president fired the head of the BLS for publishing numbers he didn't like, there were a number of articles explaining why there are revisions. https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revisions https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/jobs-report-july-2025-revis... The short answer is that there are various data sources and the most detailed ones are collected less than monthly, so the estimates based on the most recently monthly data are often corrected based on the other data. As for why estimates are off, the data used by the estimators are presumably themselves even lower quality than whatever BLS is using.
fzeroracer 1y ago
The entire stock market and economy is being held up on the back of a massive AI bubble. Everywhere else you look, performance is down, people are struggling, jobs are vanishing and consumer confidence is disappearing. The most inept people you can imagine are in control of the only levers that can fix things and they've decided to instead strip it and sell it for parts after slamming the self-destruct button.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
Our estimates are not keeping up with modern trends. for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting. In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently. If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.
queenkjuul 1y ago
Trump is threatening [and/or has tried to fire] people who report accurate numbers to the government? As to how the losses happen, well, let the current US regime be exhibit A of how to shed jobs lol. Like are we really to think Trump's personal insistence on ~100,000 federal layoffs doesn't affect the workforce numbers? Like things already weren't good in the last two administrations...
classified 1y ago
It's a Democrat conspiracy! /s

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]