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U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession
- kurtis_reed 9mo ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago[flagged]
- verdverm 9mo agoThat's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results
- bonsai_spool 9mo ago> That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results I think this is usually true, but there hasn't really been a global shock of the sort we had in 2020 or 2008 or 2001. What would you say are the salient circumstances now?
- erxam 9mo agoIt's not a shock, it's a natural consequence of the rot continuing its course. The USA is an empire founded in bloodshed and hatred, and it is only becoming more so as it decays. Until you rewrite what the USA means, this will only continue.
- verdverm 9mo agonow is not 2024, when people felt the sting of inflation and the collective trauma of covid now is still largely the the same, top 2-3 issues are related to money, cultural or societal issues are on the rise and shifting in polls, a welcomed sign
- swagasaurus-rex 9mo agocan we also blame the DNC for not holding an election for who would run against trump? Or the DNC for throwing Bernie under the bus in 2016 (he would have beaten trump)? Maybe the two party system has grown rotten to the core
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoNo. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this. Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- enterprisetalk 9mo ago[flagged]
- verdverm 9mo ago1/3 are D and voted Harris 1/3 are R and voted Trump 1/3 are I and voted their wallet handwavy, but not inaccurate
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoIf you’re voting for your wallet, I don’t take offense, simply vote for someone with a plan grounded in reality, and at least some history of success. This is not what has happened. GM prepares for economic downturn: 'It's coming,' CFO says - https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2026/02/04/how-gm-is-preparing-for-an-economic-downturn/88513011007/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-mot... | https://archive.today/P8WUE https://archive.today/P8WUE - February 5th, 2026
- verdverm 9mo ago
- stevetron 9mo agoI hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters. Otherwise, if so many jobs have disappeared, does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?
- warkdarrior 9mo agoNo, but the garbage will need fewer pickups if consumption drops. Fewer pickups means fewer trucks means free drivers.
- sixothree 9mo agoIs that an argument of some sort? I can't quite identify the point.
- downboots 9mo agoI feel the same way about the article
- mcphage 9mo ago> does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck? Do… do you not want them to do this?
- mono442 9mo agoFor me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.
- jaybrendansmith 9mo agoYou are off by several years on the interest rates, which have an 18-24 month impact. Also we have this idiotic and unlawful tariff war the US administration is currently perpetrating. But I'm certain AI is having a huge impact as well.
- ghaff 9mo agoI'm unconvinced of the AI impact outside of the tech sector. But there's certainly a lot of uncertainty generally. Probably more senior people with reputations are in a better position but likely tougher for people with no records.
- lazyasciiart 9mo agoGraphic design and copywriting are possibly affected even worse than the tech sector, for one.
- ghaff 9mo agoI don't have much involvement with graphic design but I agree that the impact on journalism and adjacent is pretty awful. Not sure how much is AI per se but certainly the economics have been pretty unfavorable. I'm not convinced it's just AI slop but but quantity can displace quality.
- squibonpig 9mo agoThere's a lot of reason to think companies citing AI as the reason for their layoffs are just lying because it looks better to shareholders, and that AI kinda sucks and isn't used for much yet. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...
- Herring 9mo agoSince the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/ZXZLAMEEVJHZRDDY5LGDFZ3OEQ.png https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
- crims0n 9mo agoSurely some of that is lag time in economic policy.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> Surely some of that is lag time in economic policy Why? What if constantly launching foreign wars, leveraging up the financial system and running up deficits isn’t sound economic policy?
- lostlogin 9mo agoWW2 really got the US economy going, so maybe the issue it a lack of scale in the warring?
- crims0n 9mo agoWasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
- lazide 9mo agoI suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause. Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.
- frogperson 9mo agoThreatening all of our allies with war and tarrifs is a great way to tank confidence in the US and its businesses. Ask me how I know.
- esbranson 9mo agoChicken Little already told us. Armageddon is also coming, don't forget about that. JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.
- alephnerd 9mo ago[flagged]
- axpy906 9mo agoThe scariest party is the uniparty.
- seneca 9mo ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 9mo agoBarely a couple weeks ago resorting to H1B bashing was the norm on HN. Now that the chickens have come home to roost you want to ignore it.
- seneca 9mo agoI don't want to ignore anything. The H1B fee changes were a half-measure that didn't go nearly far enough.
- alephnerd 9mo agoAnd my point is those "half measures" have already incentivized us to offshore even more than before. Going with "full measures" will only further incentivize us to go ExAmerica.
- seneca 9mo agoThat assumes that policies can't be put in place to control the incentives such that they prioritize American companies hiring American employees.
- sunshowers 9mo ago[flagged]
- shrubble 9mo agoThe big question is “whose jobs”? If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
- whatshisface 9mo agoThese perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
- 5o1ecist 9mo ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 9mo agoIn the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number. However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate. In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.
- gpt5 9mo agoThe reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less. So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.
- crims0n 9mo agoImportant context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoPost WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away. Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class. What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
- downboots 9mo agoLabor supply and demand do not reliably reflect the productive or social value of labor.
- justonceokay 9mo agoAny system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
- verdverm 9mo agoIdeally our political systems act as a sigmoid filter over the growth, benefits, and harms
- themafia 9mo agoThe population grows exponentially. Why would you think the system would work against that?
- gordonhart 9mo agoPopulations grow logistically as they hit carrying capacity, it just looks exponential when it’s far from K
- themafia 9mo agoI'm dumb. I look at a chart of "world population" and I see an exponential curve that starts in the 1950s. K? Or are we going to work from the modern perspective that these peoples are somehow outside of our sphere of influence or concern?
- phendrenad2 9mo agoYet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.
- betaby 9mo agoI don't see any signs of that
- phendrenad2 9mo agoFurthermore, people are stuck thinking about the world in a worker/employer dynamic. But there are scenarios where everyone in New York state could be paid UBI. There are 20 million people in the state, let's say we pay each one $100k/year. That's $2 trillion. Conveniently, the current GDP of New York state is $2.3 trillion. If they can increase that to 5+, it should be no problem distributing 50% to the citizens. And how can they do that? By charging high taxes on any business that wants to do business in NY. By leveraging their strategic access to the NY harbors. By essentially turning the entire state into a business, everyone inside it an employee or shareholder, and everyone outside a customer.
- AtlasBarfed 9mo agoThe country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase. We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy
- throwaway132448 9mo agoYou’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- game_the0ry 9mo agoAnd yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH. That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth. Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.
- jeffbee 9mo agoIf you think of the DJIA as being denominated in dollars the ATH looks less impressive.
- hackyhacky 9mo ago> And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH. The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.
- game_the0ry 9mo agoTrue. It is actually doing poorly when priced in gold.
- hackyhacky 9mo agoWell, the gold market just collapsed, so this might not be the ideal point of comparison.
- offmycloud 9mo agoLink to report PDF: https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR126007123.pdf https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR...
- throwaway132448 9mo agoAllowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all. But who knew?
- verdverm 9mo agoapparently a lot of people knew based on the treasure trove of their communications
- marginalia_nu 9mo agoIt's not like the Soviets fared much better with regards to corruption and institutional decay, to the part where the rampant corruption of the Brezhnev-era was a major contributing cause to the eventual collapse of the union. Institutional longevity is largely an unsolved problem. Seems having checks and balances like the US does helps slow it down to some extent, but is far from a guarantee.
- throwaway132448 9mo agoNot sure I follow the link to the Soviets, but yes they certainly excelled at letting too few people accumulate too much power too. If only we were able to learn a little more from history.
- kiriberty 9mo agoSo much winning
- shomp 9mo agoIf you follow the American school of economics (Henry C. Carey), tariffs are actually a good thing, mainly because: 1) other nations all have tariffs (against the US and other nations) making free trade a delightful delusional idea 2) tariffs protect lesser industrialized nations from refining/enhancing raw materials into more expensive goods and selling them back to them. The systematic offshoring of industrial potential to cheaper labor places basically un-industrialized the US. I think it's very short-sighted to say tariffs are bad. What was bad was the de-industrialization of the leading superpower. The cure, if we may call it that, might be bitter medicine. Bitter, but necessary.
- kiriberty 9mo agoTariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
- colechristensen 9mo agoForeign adversaries are getting exactly what they wanted, their manipulation of US politics has been extremely successful.
- dj_gitmo 9mo agoWe did this to ourselves. Let’s not make excuses.
- verdverm 9mo agothose adversaries would not have been able to crank the volume if the conditions had not existed
- heresie-dabord 9mo agoAd slop and AI slop have served their purpose in destroying people's confidence in information. But if there were a healthy public discourse, there would be little acceptance of the slop economy, absurd lies, and repulsive rhetoric.
- epistasis 9mo agoIt's clear that we did this to ourselves towards the very ends of both foreign and domestic people that want to end the current order. From Russia to Peter Thiel in the Epstein files, they all want the US to undergo an even worse Brexit.
- a_ba 9mo agowould you care to clarify on this? are you saying the current administration has been corrupted by foreign adverseries? or has the administration been outsmarted by foreign adverseries?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nxm 9mo agoIt's more nuanced as usual. Trump had a booming economy right before Covid, and took the brunt of the jobs cuts in 2020. Biden next year "created" the jobs per the numbers there. Also, what's the breakdown between public & private sector jobs? Spending taxes on government jobs in not something to celebrate.
- nullocator 9mo agoRephrased: Trump inherited a strong economy, did not know how to govern or appropriately wield the power of his office (zero experience), did not have a good relationship with congress so made no progress there unlike most presidents, and was constrained from his worst impulses by his own staff. Finally when Covid occurred and he was actually required to lead it all came crashing down because he was and is incapable. A geriatric democrat had to come and right the ship again immediately after.
- TwoNineFive 9mo agoCOVID saved Trump. His policies, such as the section 174 tax change, were tanking the economy in 2019, and we would have likely seen a recession in 2020-2021 instead of 2022. His solution to COVID was to tell the public to inject themselves with bleach. Or just go get infected and let natural selection figure it out. It was no more a joke than the racist cartoon he posted the other day. You need consequences.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- cal_dent 9mo agoAn interesting addendum is the relatively weak new job creation through the 2nd half of 2025 (partly geopolitcs, partly ai; through the mechanism of diverting capital to tech capex rather than labour). The economy feels in a tricky position to me. The last couple of days have shown that there are many people/institutions primed to bail out of the stock market at the whiff of any negativity (or things perceived to be negative). I suspect there is likely more bad news before there's good news so the short term looks like it could be a bit of a roller-coaster.
- cjoelrun 9mo agoThey couldn't through a per capita somehwere...