The latest S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing PMI, a survey-based monthly overview of factory activity in the United States, fell deeper into recession territory in September, data released on Sept. 23 shows. The manufacturing index slumped to 47.0 in September, down from August’s 47.9 and the lowest in 15 months. Readings below 50 represent a contraction in activity.

The decline signals continued deterioration in business conditions within the manufacturing sector, which has been plagued by weakening demand and falling new orders. In particular, new orders in September fell at their fastest pace since December 2022, as manufacturers struggled with declining export demand and reduced domestic sales.

Slumping employment also made a significant negative contribution to the downbeat manufacturing figures, with job losses accelerating at a pace not seen since June 2020.

“Excluding the pandemic, the decline in factory jobs was the steepest since January 2010 as an increasing number of firms reported the need to reduce operating capacity in line with weak sales,” the S&P Global report states.

Cracks in the labor market were behind the Federal Reserve’s decision last week to deliver a large, 50-basis point interest rate cut, with one Fed official saying on Sept. 23 that he was surprised by the pace of deterioration in employment conditions.

“Progress on inflation and the cooling of the labor market have emerged much more quickly than I imagined at the beginning of the summer,“ Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic, a voting member of the Fed’s interest-rate-setting council, said in comments to the European Economics and Financial Centre. ”In this moment, I envision normalizing monetary policy sooner than I thought would be appropriate even a few months ago.”

The central bank’s rate-setting body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of which Bostic is a voting member this year, decided last week to lower rates to within a range of 4.75–5.0 percent.

Markets are fully pricing in another rate cut when the policymaking panel meets again on Nov. 7, with the odds split roughly evenly between a smaller quarter-point cut or another jumbo half-point reduction.

But while central bank officials celebrate inflation falling closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target, Monday’s S&P Global data suggests it may be too soon to declare victory in the fight against high prices.

Inflationary pressures picked up across both goods and services, per the S&P Global report, with the increase driven mostly by rising input costs. Prices charged for goods and services rose at their fastest pace in six months, with service sector costs surging due to wage growth. Input costs in services grew at their highest rate in a year, reflecting increased labor expenses, while manufacturing input cost growth cooled slightly, aided by lower energy prices and fewer supply chain snags.

“The survey’s price gauges meanwhile serve as a warning that, despite the PMI indicating a further deterioration of the hiring trend in September, the FOMC may need to move cautiously in implementing further rate cuts,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global, said in a statement.

In contrast to a deepening slump in manufacturing, service sector activity grew at a solid pace in September, per the S&P Global report. The services business activity index came in at 55.4, a slight decline from August’s 55.7. Relatively robust growth in services helped lift the composite PMI measure—which combines both manufacturing and services—to 54.4 in September, a slight decline from the prior month.

“The early survey indicators for September point to an economy that continues to grow at a solid pace, albeit with a weakened manufacturing sector and intensifying political uncertainty acting as substantial headwinds,” Williamson wrote, while partly blaming election-related uncertainty for a sharp slump in optimism about business output in the year ahead.

The deterioration in output-related confidence sent the sentiment gauge to its lowest level since October 2022 and the second-lowest since the pandemic.

The number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. fell by 24,000 in August, with the industry down 14,000 jobs year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Altogether, manufacturing employment has grown just 0.3% since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Chips and Science Act were signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, despite the bills earmarking more than $400 billion in subsidies for the industry.

The August decline is in addition to a recent BLS jobs revision that showed the federal government had overestimated manufacturing employment by 115,000 between April 2023 and March 2024.

“Despite hundreds of billions in Inflation Reduction Act subsidies going to manufacturing and the mind-boggling U.S. deficit, we’ve only seen a less-than-1% increase in total employment,” Aaron Hedlund, director of research at the America First Policy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There is no manufacturing boom.”

The U.S. national debt currently sits at around $35.34 trillion as of Aug. 4, up from $27.75 trillion when Biden took office in January 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The increase of more than $7.5 trillion dollars is equivalent to over $57,000 for each of the 131,434,000 households that the Census Bureau estimates were in the U.S. in 2023.

Average weekly earnings in manufacturing rose from roughly $1,361 to approximately $1,370 in August, according to BLS data. Weekly earnings remain below their levels from when Biden first took office when adjusted for inflation, with manufacturing salaries rising 17.7% between January 2021 and August 2024, while inflation in that period was roughly 20%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the BLS.

In July 2023, the White House issued a press release claiming the U.S. was in the midst of a “manufacturing boom” driven largely by federal initiatives from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the IRA to boost domestic green technology and semiconductor production. $84 billion worth of the nearly $228 billion of manufacturing projects worth more than $100 million that the Biden administration subsidized via the IRA and the Chips and Science Act have been paused or delayed, according to an investigation from the Financial Times published in August.

“All of the Biden-Harris administration claims on job creation are essentially false,” Peter Earle, a senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Most of the rise in employment they are taking responsibility for are actually just jobs slowing returning after being destroyed by pandemic policies — most of all, lockdowns. A sizable number of the remainder of jobs that have appeared over the past three-and-a-half years are not jobs created via economic growth and commercial expansion, but rather a product of their massive debt and deficit policies.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

Nine months later, we are delighted to see that our relentless efforts to bring attention to this critical topic finally worked, and the relentless replacement of native-born workers with immigrants and illegal aliens was finally the biggest political and media talking point, as demonstrated by such articles as “How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force” by the WSJ and “Without Immigrants, US Working-Age Population Would Shrink” from Bloomberg, both of which are an extension of the latest and greatest narrative, first spawned by Fed chair Powell, and then picked up by Goldman, which came down to the following: you can have (record) illegal immigration, or you can have even more (breakneck) inflation. So don’t be bad and just accept the roving gangs of Venezuelan murderers in your neighborhood if you know what’s good for you.

There it is: You can have illegal immigration or you can have even more inflation https://t.co/4npStzH8ft pic.twitter.com/xYofvgPjXV

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 5, 2024

Which brings us to today’s jobs report… where the native vs foreign-born debate just exploded.

As we discussed earlier, superficially the August payrolls report was a mixed bag. On one hand, it was disappointing in that the payrolls print came in softer than expected, but was a big bounce from sharply downward revised June and July prints. On the other hand, the unemployment rate did drop from the Sahm Rule’s recession trigger level of 4.3% to 4.2%, and effectively eliminated the clear cut case for a 50bps rate cut, especially since the Household survey was not only far stronger than the Establishment survey, but indicated the biggest increase in employment since March.

That, at least, was the quantitative view. And while that was mixed, there was no confusion in the picture painted by the qualtitative aspect of the jobs report. Here, everything was a disaster.

Starting at the top, while the number of employed workers did rise by 168K, looking closer at the composition of this increase is disastrous: that’s because it consisted of an increase of 527K part-time jobs, offset by a 438K plunge in full-time jobs.

This means that since last June, the US has added just over 2 million part-time jobs, and lost over 1.5 million full-time jobs.

Needless to say, part-time jobs pay far less, don’t offer benefits, and generally lead to a suboptimal outcomes for the labor market, one of which is the need to get more than one job, and sure enough, the number of multiple jobholders – or people who for whatever reason have more than one job – jumped above 8.5 million, back to all time highs.

And while the quality of job gains in the past year has clearly been catastrophic – a necessary condition to give the impression that headline, or quantiative, job growth was strong –  there was a very clear reason for that, and it goes back to what we have been pounding the table on in the past: the reason is the continued replacement of native-born workers with immigrants (some legal but mostly illegal). And as the following chart shows, it is anything but a theory: it is cold hard fact.

Presenting exhibit A: the number of native-born vs foreign-born workers in August.

In an absolute shocker of a data point, in the past month, the US added 635K foreign-born workers, while losing 1.325 million native-born workers. This was tied for the biggest one-month drop in native-born workers since the covid crash!

But it’s not just the past month, or two, or three… As regular readers know, the reason why suddenly we are bombarded with media pitches for why illegal immigrants are actually great for you, is that the US has not created a single job for native-born workers since July 2018! And in that interval, it has created 4.7 million jobs for immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Finally for those wondering when the Great Job Replacement Fact (again, not theory) kicked in, the following chart showing the historical divergence between native and non-native born workers will make it clear: the gap first emerged at the start of the Biden administration and has exploded to a record size today!

Finally, for those who would push back that these are mostly legal immigrants, here is what Standard Chartered strategist Steven Englander wrote at the start of June to refute that claims and prove that most of these immigrant workers are virtually all illegal: echoing what we have said for the past two years, Englander wrote that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, “is a political flashpoint that has also become an important factor in assessing economic performance. Detailed data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) suggest that half of non-farm payroll (NFP) growth to date for FY24 (started 1 October 2023) has been from undocumented immigrants who have received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD)” (he defines undocumented immigrants as those who entered the US through non-traditional immigration pathways, such as asylum seekers, parolees, and refugees, i.e. illegals).

“The ability to track EAD issuance to undocumented workers is an advantage in estimating how much they have contributed to employment growth. NFP counts workers with an EAD just like any other. Using that data, it is easy to estimate that undocumented workers have added 109k jobs per month to NFP out of the average 231k increase so far in FY24.”

Which is a big problem because as the BLS now admitted with its revision two weeks ago, the monthly increase in jobs in the past years was not 230K as it had indicated previously, but rather 150K!

So if the true pace of job creation in the past year was 150K, and another 109K jobs per month are illegal aliens, that leaves just about 40K jobs for everyone else, i.e., law abiding Americans.

It also means that, great worker replacement scandal aside, the labor market in the US has – for the past year – been an absolute catastrophe and harbinger of economic disaster.

The latest figures, released by the ADP Research Institute in collaboration with Stanford Digital Economy Lab, reveal a stark reality. The previous month’s job gains were revised downward, further underscoring the troubling trend. Wage growth has stagnated, with no increase for workers who switched jobs or those who remained in their positions. What does this say about the state of the economy under the current leadership?

“The job market’s downward drift brought us to slower-than-normal hiring after two years of outsized growth,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP. This statement is a glaring indictment of the administration’s economic policies. Are we really to believe that this is just a natural shift in the labor market, or is it a symptom of deeper issues stemming from the White House’s mismanagement?

Now, after seemingly rushing to tout job growth in the past, the administration is faced with the reality of a cooling labor market. Companies, hesitant to let go of their workforce entirely, are scaling back hiring in the face of high costs and elevated interest rates. This latest data only adds to the evidence of moderating labor demand, which could further exacerbate the economic pressures that Americans are already feeling.

Federal Reserve officials are now expressing greater concern about the risks to the labor market than inflation. With price pressures easing from their pandemic highs, are we really prepared for the potential interest rate cuts that could follow? It seems the administration is more focused on optics than on the real economic challenges facing everyday Americans.

In a separate report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., hiring plans at US companies have plummeted by 41% this year through August compared to the same period in 2023. Announced job cuts have only decreased by 3.7%. What does this tell us about the confidence of businesses in the current economic climate?

“The next indicator to watch is wage growth, which is stabilizing after a dramatic post-pandemic slowdown,” Nela Richardson noted. But can we trust that this stabilization is a sign of recovery, or is it merely a façade masking the underlying issues?

As we approach the 2024 election, the implications of these economic indicators cannot be overstated. The Biden-Harris administration’s track record is under scrutiny, and the American people deserve transparency and accountability. It’s time to question the narrative being spun and demand real solutions to the economic challenges we face.

The panic that we witnessed on Friday was quite breathtaking, and many are concerned that it could bleed over into the new week.  Investors are desperate for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, but so far the Fed has not moved.

On Friday, many were surprised when the employment numbers were much worse than anticipated…

U.S. job growth cooled sharply in July while the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to the highest level in nearly three years.

The Labor Department on Friday reported that employers added 114,000 jobs in July, missing the 175,000 gain forecast by LSEG economists. The unemployment rate also unexpectedly inched higher to 4.3% against expectations that it would hold steady at 4.1%.

It marked the highest level for the jobless rate since October 2021.

Please keep in mind that the U.S. economy must produce at least 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. So even if we did add 114,000 jobs last month, we would still be losing ground.

But the only reason why the official figure showed an addition of 114,000 jobs last month is because the birth/death model added 246,000 jobs to the final number…

Of course, we can’t possibly forget that every jobs number is highly manipulated and rigged, and July was no difference with the Birth/Death model adding a ridiculous 246K “statistical” jobs to the unadjusted print. Which it does not translate apples to apples, one can confidently say that the actual adjusted payrolls number would be far, far smaller had it not been for this ongoing fabrication.

It isn’t difficult to get a positive employment report every month when you are “adjusting” the final number by about a quarter of a million jobs that you just “assume” are being created somehow.

In any event, even if we take the government’s report at face value, the Sahm Rule has still been officially triggered…

That’s because the rise in unemployment triggered the so-called Sahm Rule, an indicator that is used to provide an early recession signal. The rule stipulates that a recession is likely when the three-month moving average of the jobless rate is at least a half-percentage point higher than the 12-month low.

Over the past three months, the unemployment rate has averaged 4.13%, which is 0.63 percentage points higher than the 3.5% rate recorded in July 2023. The Sahm Rule has successfully predicted every recession since 1970.

Even though this indicator has successfully predicted every single recession since 1970, Fed Chair Jerome Powell insists that it may not be correct this time around…

Fed Chair Jerome Powell responded to a question about the rule at a news conference Wednesday following the Fed’s decision to keep the key interest rate unchanged. “It’s not like an economic rule where it’s telling you something must happen.” He continued, “what we think we’re seeing is a normalizing labor market and we’re watching carefully to see if it turns out to be more.”

Unfortunately, it appears to be inevitable that the unemployment rate will go even higher because large companies all over America continue to shed workers. In fact, last week Intel announced that it will be “cutting 15% of its workforce”…

Months after the federal government gave Intel $8.5 billion in grants to help bring back chipmaking to the U.S., the company said it is cutting 15% of its workforce, which translates to around 17,000 jobs.

The tech company announced the job cuts as part of a massive cost-cutting and restructuring plan.

Of course Intel is far from alone.

Businesses from coast to coast have fallen on hard times, and business bankruptcy filings have risen by more than 40 percent during the past 12 months…

Over the past year, business bankruptcy filings are up 40.3 percent, and have now reached a number not seen since the second quarter of 2020, at the peak of lockdowns. American households are following along, with total bankruptcy filings up 16.2 percent in the past year, including 132,710 new filings in the second quarter of 2024 alone.

The last time business bankruptcy filings were this high was during the lockdowns in the early days of the COVID pandemic.

But we don’t have any lockdowns to blame the current wave of bankruptcies on.

What we are witnessing now is really quite scary.

Hordes of businesses are failing, and commercial real estate values have been crashing hard…

Brookfield owned Gas Company Tower in Downtown LA has plummeted over $400M in value

The skyscraper was recently valued at $214.5M

It was appraised at $632M just 3 years ago

This is a commercial real estate apocalypse

Right now, our banks are sitting on gigantic mountains of commercial real estate loans that have gone bad. For many of those banks, it is just a matter of time before they go belly up.

But don’t just take my word for it.  Recently, a number of prominent experts have been warning that a tsunami of bank failures is on the way…

The echoes began in May.

Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group predicted a regional bank failure “every day or every week.”

Days later, Newmark Chair Howard Lutnick warned, “Every single weekend a regional bank is going to go bye-bye,” and predicted 500 to 1,000 failures in 2025 and 2026 — as did alternative lenders speaking at the same event. In June, PIMCO’s head of global private commercial real estate joined the chorus.

Yes, this is really happening.

A tremendous amount of financial chaos is in our future, and most people are going to be completely blindsided by it.

There is one thing that the Federal Reserve could do to mitigate the damage.

If the Fed started cutting interest rates immediately, that would certainly help.

But so far, the Fed has refused to budge.

We are being told that the Fed “might” give us a rate cut in September. That isn’t going to do the job.

We need help now, because major problems are already starting to erupt all around us.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

We first pointed this out more than a year ago, and since then we have routinely repeated – again, again, and again – yet even though we made it abundantly clear what was happening…

Stunning statistic: there has been ZERO INCREASE in jobs for native-born workers in over five years, since July 2018! pic.twitter.com/mxdpmPHIbO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 5, 2024

… going so far as to point out the specific immigration loophole illegals were using to work in the US for up to 5 years…

Why have all new jobs since 2018 gone to foreign-born workers (i.e. immigrants)? Because you can be an illegal immigrant in deportation proceedings (not to mention anyone seeking asylum) and get authorization to work in the US for up to 5 years, no questions asked. pic.twitter.com/VmhTBUM1I2

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 10, 2024

… and even fact-checking the senile, ballot-harvesting White House occupant on multiple occasions…

Fact-check:

1. Prices have never been higher and are starting to accelerate to the upside again
2. All the jobs created in the past year have been part time.
3. There has been zero job growth for native-born Americans since 2018; all jobs have gone to immigrants (mostly illegal… https://t.co/MeX7KhbaHl pic.twitter.com/OJI79p9oLp

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 29, 2024

… we were shocked that the topic of most if not all US jobs going to illegals was still not “the biggest political talking point” of all.

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

That’s about to change, however, because with just under 5 months left until the election, and with immigration by far the hottest political topic out there, others are finally starting to connect the dots we laid out more than a year ago.

The first Wall Street analyst daring to point out that the employment emperor is naked, is Standard Chartered’s global head of macro, Steve Englander who in a note titled simply enough “Immigration leading to labor-market surge” (and available to pro subscribers in the usualk place), writes that according to his estimates “undocumented immigrants account for half of job growth in FY24 so far” (the actual number is far higher but we understand his initial conservatism), and adds that “asylum seekers and humanitarian parolees explain the surge in undocumented immigrants” before concluding that the continued rise in EAD approvals likely will extend strong employment growth in 2024. In other words, “strong employment growth” for American citizens, always was and remains a fabulation, and the only job growth in the US is for illegals, who will work for below minimum wage, which also explains why inflation hasn’t spiked in the past year as millions of illegals were hired.

Below we excerpt from the Englander note because we hope that more economists, strategists and politicians will read it and grasp what we have been saying for over a year.

Echoing what we have said for months, Englander writes that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, “is a political flashpoint that has also become an important factor in assessing economic performance. Detailed data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) suggest that half of non-farm payroll (NFP) growth to date for FY24 (started 1 October 2023) has been from undocumented immigrants who have received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD)” (he defines undocumented immigrants as those who entered the US through non-traditional immigration pathways, such as asylum seekers, parolees, and refugees).

The ability to track EAD issuance to undocumented workers is an advantage in estimating how much they have contributed to employment growth. NFP counts workers with an EAD just like any other. Using that data, it is easy to estimate that undocumented workers have added 109k jobs per month to NFP out of the average 231k increase so far in FY24.

Which is staggering since last night we showed that about 100K monthly jobs are purely statistical distortions, and the real pace of job growth in the past year has been around 130K.

So if 100K jobs per month are fabricated birth/death artifacts (i.e., not real jobs but a statistically goalseeked fudge factor), and another 109K jobs per month are illegal aliens, that leaves just about 11K jobs for everyone else, i.e., law abiding Americans.

It also means that the labor market in the US has – for the past year – been an absolute catastrophe and harbinger of economic disaster (and is why last night we pointed out “The “Unexpected” Reason Why The Fed Will Rush To Cut Rates As Soon As Possible“).

But wait, as Englander himself admits, the 109K estimate of illegal aliens “may be an underestimate since undocumented immigrants often have limited access to benefits, so they may be heavily motivated to find employment. The GDP impact might be lower if these workers are less educated and face language barriers in the work force.”

Here, Englander – who did not do the Birth/Death analysis – writes that if one excludes these illegal immigrant workers, “NFP may be running at c.125k per month” and adds that “such a pace is not recession but is hardly boom time and represents a moderate underlying pace of labor demand. It should make the 231k FY24 pace of headline NFP less worrisome to the FOMC. FOMC participants might be less hawkish if the impact of undocumented immigrants on NFP was well estimated and understood.”

Of course, if the Std Chartered analyst were to factor for the true collapse in Birth-Death adjustments discussed yesterday by Bloomberg…

… the real number would be, well, zero!

While the political reason behind the propaganda misrepresentation of the US jobs market is simple: after all, in an election year it is imperative that the Biden economy be portrayed as glowingly as possible, even if it means lying about everything, the cascading consequences from this fabrication are staggering. As Englander concedes, “this added labor supply also may have shifted trend employment and GDP growth, making it hard to gauge whether a strong NFP or even GDP number reflects supply or demand. If supply is driving upside surprises, the takeaway is more optimism that inflation will slow. If demand, the opposite. Soft economic data should be seen through the lens of added labor supply, while strong data releases are ambiguous.”

Taking a closer look, such increased labor supply – from illegals – should put downward pressure on wage growth relative to a baseline with less immigration (documented or not). In measures such as average hourly earnings, the disinflationary impact would be two-fold:

1. lower wages overall from an increase of labour supply relative to labour demand and
2. a composition effect because the undocumented immigrants often work in low wage industries even with EADs.

However, this is likely to be a gradual process, so the low wage impact may not be immediately visible. In addition, insofar as these workers’ wages reflect relatively low productivity, the composition effect on wages will be offset by a composition effect on productivity – unit labour cost growth may be unchanged.

These observations notwithstanding, one can assume that the contribution of undocumented immigrants to employment is unlikely to change any time soon. Indeed, over the last 12 months an average of 280k undocumented immigrants per month have been encountered nationally, most whom can or will be eligible to work legally in coming months. The same methodology suggests that these workers contributed about one-third of FY23 employment growth.

It gets worse.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that in fiscal 2023 a further 860k individuals crossed the border without contact with US immigration authorities. While these people are not eligible for EADs they may still work off the books or with fake or borrowed documents. As such, their output and spending will show up in GDP, although it is unlikely that much if any of their “labor input” is captured. These, along with others (tourists who overstay visas, students whose visas have expired, etc.) are technically undocumented as well. But since few are eligible for EADs, it is unlikely that they are captured in any BLS survey.

In any event, Englander estimates that over 800k undocumented immigrants found jobs in FY23, and assumes that 64.2% of EAD recipients (the average for the foreign-born population) are working. However, the employment rate may well be higher since these are likely to be “very motivated” workers, since they are not generally eligible for unemployment insurance and other benefits, so work is a necessity for many.

Ssing this calculation, and since Nonfarm Payrolls grew 3.1 million in FY23, the 800k would represent more than 25% of NFP growth.

But what about those record numbers of multiple job-holders we have also discussed.

Ah yes, to address that Englander next calculates an augmented version of NFP that includes agricultural workers, self- and family-employed workers from the household survey (CPS), and subtracts multiple-job holders. By this measure employment grew 2.7 million (this is largely due to a rise in multiple-job holders, which are subtracted to avoid double counting). So far in FY24, on average over 170k undocumented immigrants have received EAD approvals every month and c.109k have found work based on employment rates. And since NFP has averaged 230k per month, these workers likely accounted for around half of job growth. Again, this number excludes the roughly 100k per month addition coming from birth/death calculation distortions which will soon be revised away as Bloomberg’s chief economist Anna Wong calculated, before concluding that “by the end of the year the printed level of nonfarm-payrolls for 2024 likely will overstate true employment by at least one million.”

Again, this means that when stripping away the 100K in statistical “jobs” from the 230K monthly payroll number, and then removing the 109K in illegal alien workers, the number of jobs added by ordinary, legal, native-born, Americans in the past year has been – more or less – zero.

We, for one, can’t wait for Joe Biden to explain how this was remotely possible during his upcoming debate with Trump in three weeks time.

Much more in the full must-read note – especially to those who will be prepping Donald Trump for his upcoming debate – from Englander available to pro subscribers in the usual place.

As you will see below, some people haven’t been hired even though they have literally applied for hundreds of jobs.  There seems to be an enormous disconnect between what is actually happening in the real economy and the economic narrative that they are constantly pushing.  By the time you are done reading this article, I think that you will agree with me.

Earlier this week, I received an email from a reader that has not been able to find work after seven months of searching.

He gave me permission to share part of that email with you, and it is certainly quite heartbreaking…

Hi Michael,

I am a long-time reader of theeconomiccollapseblog.com, and your recent article comparing the economy to the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s” really stood out to me.

I’m really trying to figure out WHY it is so hard to find a job.

I was laid off from my job as a Custodial Foreman in September 2023, and have had ZERO results for my countless hours spent searching for comparable work.

I don’t know if you want to use any of this for an article or not, but if you do, please just keep doing what you normally do: Praising Jesus Christ. Without my faith in him I don’t know what I’d do.

When I wake up, I make coffee and turn on the computer and go through the state’s unemployment job search sites they provided me when I was laid off. I have been looking and also applying for jobs DAILY since September 2023. And these are not “rocket science” positions; I’m simply looking for Maintenance or Custodial or Groundskeeper type jobs. You know, “normal working class” type jobs.

But after ~300 applications (And these are all just to the jobs that I not only have experience for but also would actually want to do), I have had 1 interview. One interview in 7 months of applying and sending tailored cover letters with, daily!

If the economy is doing so “great”, why can’t he find employment?

Some of you may be tempted to think that he is just an isolated case.

Well, here is another example of an experienced worker that has applied for approximately 300 jobs without any success…

Royal Siu, who lives in Seattle and is trained as a pharmacist, likes to make his friends guess how many jobs he’s applied to. They’ll often toss out some number around 40, he told BI. He’ll tell them to keep going. Most give up by the time they reach 100. That’s when Siu drops that he’s applied to about 300 jobs. “It’s usually a shock factor to them,” he said.

Siu, who’s trying to use his pharmacy degree to work in other parts of healthcare, is finding it harder to land interviews than in a prior job search. The 28-year-old was getting more phone screenings and first and second interviews in the past. This time, it’s been a couple of months since he had a screening call. So he continues to turn to his network but also doesn’t stop applying.

What in the world is going on here?

I thought that there were “millions” of good jobs just waiting for someone to step into them.

Something definitely does not add up.

Even Americans with advanced degrees from top schools are increasingly finding themselves out of work.

If you doubt this, just check out these numbers…

Even at some top business schools, the number of recently minted M.B.A.s without jobs has roughly doubled from a couple of years ago, when U.S. companies were rushing to hire as many workers as they could, according to data from the schools.

At Harvard Business School, 20% of job-seeking 2023 M.B.A. graduates didn’t have one three months after graduation, up from 8% in 2021. At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, 18% didn’t, compared with 9% in 2021. About 13% of those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management didn’t have a job within three months, up from about 5% in 2021.

How are those numbers possible if the unemployment rate is hovering near “historic lows”?

Of course the truth is that we have been sold a lie.

If you do not have a job, you are classified by the U.S. government as either “unemployed” or “not in the labor force”.

In 2008 and 2009, the combined total of those two categories never even reached 90 million. Today, the combined total of those two categories is over 106 million.

The Biden administration says that only 6,429,000 Americans are officially “unemployed”. The other 99,989,000 Americans without a job are considered to be “not in the labor force”.

And more will be lumped into those two categories soon, because large employers all over the nation continue to conduct mass layoffs.

For example, thousands of Tesla workers in California and Texas were just notified that they will be losing their jobs…

The notifications in California and Texas, where the electric vehicle (EV) maker has large presences, came in the form of WARN notices, according to reports.

In California, the planned Tesla headcount reductions will hit approximately 3,300 workers, The San Francisco Standard reported Tuesday.

They will apparently occur at locations in a total of four different cities in the Golden State.

Meanwhile, Texas will see almost 2,700 employees in Austin lose their jobs, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Sadly, the pace of layoffs is likely to increase during the months ahead, because business activity in the U.S. is declining…

The U.S. economy lost momentum in April, a pair of S&P surveys found, as businesses reported a decline in new orders and reduced employment for the first time since the pandemic.

The flash U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers index slipped to a four-month low of 49.9 in April from 51.9 in March.

The S&P flash U.S. services PMI fell to a five-month low of 50.9 this month from 51.7 in March.

The surveys are the first indicators of each month to give a sense of how the U.S. economy is performing.

Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis just continues to escalate. Shockingly, at one station in California gasoline now costs $7.29 per gallon…

Soaring gas prices have skyrocketed to a whopping $7.29 per gallon in some parts of California – which is above the current the national hourly minimum wage.

While the average price for a gallon of gas varies from state to state – drivers in a certain Silicon Valley town are facing particularly extortionate rates that set them back almost $150 for a full tank.

The Chevron gas station in Menlo Park was exposed on Sunday by a bewildered customer who posted on X that the price per gallon was four cents ‘above the federal hourly minimum wage.’

If you think that this is bad, just wait until the war in the Middle East transforms into the apocalyptic conflict that I believe it will become.

I am entirely convinced that inflation will continue to be a major problem even as economic activity in the U.S. slows down even more.

We are already experiencing “stagflation”. What is eventually coming will be so much worse than that.

Of course the economic pain that we are going through is just one of the factors that is systematically destroying our nation.

A Warning to America: 25 Ways the US is Being Destroyed | Explained in Under 2 Minutes pic.twitter.com/qwmBO8DmMt

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 22, 2024

Just about all of our major institutions are crumbling, just about every sector of our society is in the process of melting down, and conditions are rapidly getting worse all around us.

And now we are heading into the most chaotic election season in the entire history of our country.

This is a recipe for disaster, but there is no turning back now.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

It appears that the bureaucrats in Washington have gotten so lazy that they aren’t even bothering to change the fake numbers that they are giving us.  Even though large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over America, week after week we are given laughable numbers that indicate that everything is just fine.

At this point, the charade has become such a farce that even CNBC has published an article about this…

Calling the state of the U.S. jobs market these days stable seems like an understatement considering the latest data coming out of the Labor Department.

That’s because most of the past several weeks have shown that first-time claims for unemployment benefits haven’t fluctuated at all — as in zero.

For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown.

Jim Bianco, the head of Bianco Research, was the first one to call attention to the absurdity of getting the exact same number for five of the past six weeks…

“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X.

“Initial claims for unemployment insurance are state programs, with 50 state rules, hundreds of offices, and 50 websites to file. Weather, seasonality, holidays, and economic vibrations drive the number of people filing claims from week to week,” he added. “Yet this measure is so stable that it does not vary by even 1,000 applications a week.”

He is right. Something definitely does not smell right about all of this.

Below is the number of initial filings for unemployment insurance.

How is this statistically possible?

Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number.

Effectively the same number in the last 11 weeks, except for the holiday weeks (President's Day and Easter).
—
Consider… pic.twitter.com/vZbWWC7DRr

— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) April 18, 2024

Of course it isn’t just for the past few months that we have been given fishy numbers.

For a couple of years, jobless claims have stayed within a certain range no matter what has been happening in the real economy.

I simply do not have any faith in the official numbers that they give us any longer, and I don’t understand how anyone else can either.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of announced job cuts in the U.S. in March was 7 percent higher than the already elevated level that we witnessed in February…

Employers in the U.S. announced 90,309 job cuts in March — a 7% increase from February, according to data released Thursday from executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

That amount of planned layoffs mark the highest monthly total since January 2023, when employers announced 102,943 cuts. Companies are cutting jobs as a result of store closures, bankruptcies, organizational restructuring or general cost-cutting, Challenger said. The cuts suggest that “many companies appear to be reverting to a ‘do more with less’ approach,” Senior Vice President Andy Challenger said in a statement.

“While technology continues to lead all industries so far this year, several industries, including energy and industrial manufacturing, are cutting more jobs this year than last,” he said.

But all of these layoffs haven’t even made a blip in the initial jobless claims numbers.

How is that possible?

And the BLS says that the unemployment rate actually went down in February…

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday showed the labor market added 303,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in March, significantly more than the 214,000 expected by economists. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate decreased to 3.8% from 3.9% in February.

If the unemployment rate in the U.S. really was just 3.8 percent, I would certainly be celebrating. But that is another number that is so manipulated that it has essentially become meaningless.

If you are not working in America today, you are put into one of two categories. Either you are classified as “unemployed” or you are classified as “not in the labor force”.

According to the most recent BLS number, 6,429,000 Americans are considered to be officially “unemployed”. But another 99,989,000 Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”.

When you add those two numbers together, you get more than 106 million U.S. adults that do not have a job right now.

During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that combined figure never even reached 90 million. But we had a horrifying “unemployment crisis” in 2008 and 2009, and today everything is just fine.

Give me a break. They are gaslighting us really hard, and the vast majority of Americans are going right along with it.

After all, if the government is telling us something it must be true, right? Sadly, the truth is that we are in the terminal phase of the largest debt crisis in the history of the world.

When Barack Obama entered the White House, we were about 10 trillion dollars in debt.

Now we are 34 trillion dollars in debt…

The U.S. national debt is climbing at a rapid pace and has shown no signs of slowing down, despite the growing criticism of massive levels of government spending.

The national debt — which measures what the U.S. owes its creditors — increased to $34,576,488,508,928.92 as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the latest numbers published by the Treasury Department. That is down about $14.5 billion from the $34,591,001,330,876.91 figure reported the previous day.

By comparison, just four decades ago, the national debt hovered around $907 billion.

About every 100 days, we are adding another trillion dollars to the debt. We are stealing gigantic mountains of money from future generations of Americans in order to make the present more pleasant.

Our politicians are injecting trillions upon trillions of borrowed dollars into the economy, and so our economy should be going gangbusters. But it isn’t. So what would things look like if the borrowing stopped and we actually tried to live within our means?

You might want to think about that for a while. Because this debt cycle is coming to an end, and the crash that is ahead of us is going to be far more horrible than most people would dare to imagine.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Take, for instance, the latest jobs report. For the third month in a row, the American economy added significantly more jobs than most economists had been expecting—a total of 303,000 for March. On its face, that’s a good number.

But as Ryan McMaken laid out over the weekend, things don’t look as strong when you dig into the data. For instance, virtually all the jobs added are part-time jobs. Full-time jobs have actually been disappearing since December of last year. In fact, as McMaken highlighted, “The year-over-year measure of full-time jobs has fallen into recession territory.”

Also, most of these new part-time jobs are going to immigrants, many of whom are in the country illegally. There has been zero job creation for native-born Americans since mid-2018. While immigrants are not harming the economy by working, the scale of new foreign-born workers has papered over the employment struggles of the native-born population.

Further, government jobs accounted for almost a quarter of those added—way above the standard ten to twelve percent. Just like with government spending and economic growth, government hiring boosts the official jobs number while draining the actual, value-producing economy.

Some economists, like Daniel Lacalle, argue that the US economy is already experiencing a private-sector recession but that government spending and hiring are propping up the official data enough to hide it.

A recession is inevitable, thanks to the last decade of interest rate manipulation by the Federal Reserve—and especially to its dramatic actions during the pandemic. The recession-like conditions in full-time jobs is further evidence that Lacalle is right.

But jobs numbers are only part of the story. The stock market has been fluctuating a lot recently, not because of changing consumer needs or the adoption of some new technology, but based on what Federal Reserve officials are saying about what the central bank will do this year.

At the same time, prices are still high. And they continue to rise at a rate that frustrates even some of President Joe Biden’s biggest economic cheerleaders. Our dollars are worth about 20 percent less than they were four years ago, with no prospect of that trend reversing. That hurts.

But instead of addressing this economic pain, much less their role in creating it, members of the political class are still pretending everything is great. They’re even gearing up to make things worse by, for example, sending even more of our money to the Ukrainian government. All to prolong a war it’s losing, not because of a lack of money, but because of a lack of soldiers.

And at home, President Biden is scrambling to put the brakes on energy production and to transfer money from the working class to his base of college graduates, all before he’s up for reelection in November.

Predictably and appropriately, the establishment’s head-in-the-sand economic strategy is coinciding with a notable decrease in support for the Democrats—the establishment’s preferred party these days. President Biden is behind in the polls in six of the seven swing states and is losing support from working-class and nonwhite voters.

The political establishment and its preferred candidates deserve to lose support, not only for failing to acknowledge America’s economic problems but for causing them in the first place.

Sound off about this article on The Economic Collapse Substack.

So what can account for such incongruity?  Hopefully by the time you are done reading this article you will have a much clearer view of what is really going on out there.

On Friday, the BLS released the employment numbers for the month of February.  Zero Hedge is calling it “the most ridiculous jobs report in history”…

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the “most ridiculous in recent history” but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush.

We were told that the U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs last month. But if you dig deeper into the report, you will find that the number of native-born workers actually fell by 560,000 last month.

And over the past 3 months, the number of native-born workers has fallen by a whopping 2.4 million…

But wait there’s even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

So where is the “job growth” coming from?

If you can believe it, the BLS is claiming that 1.2 million foreign-born workers were added during the month of February alone…

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Are we actually supposed to believe such nonsense? I find it hard to believe that more than a million foreign-born workers were added to the system in a single month when layoffs are at such extremely high levels.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas we just witnessed the highest number of layoffs during the month of February since the Great Recession…

Layoff announcements in February hit their highest level for the month since the global financial crisis, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The total of 84,638 planned cuts showed an increase of 3% from January and 9% from the same month a year ago, with technology and finance companies at the forefront.

From a historical perspective, this was the worst February since 2009, which saw 186,350 announcements as the worst of the financial crisis was seemingly coming to an end.

We really do have an employment crisis in this country, but those in positions of power are trying to convince us that what we can see with our own two eyes isn’t actually real.

In other words, they are gaslighting us really hard. One of the ways they do this is by how they classify those that are not working.

When an adult is not working, they are classified as either “unemployed” or “not in the labor force”. In February, 6,458,000 Americans were considered to be officially “unemployed”. If that number was accurate, that would be good news.

But another 100,285,000 Americans were considered to be “not in the labor force” in February. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 106,743,000 Americans that are not working. In other words, nearly 107 million Americans do not have a job right now.

Let me try to put that number into proper perspective. During the Great Recession, that number never even reached 90 million.

So right now, the number of Americans not working is far higher than it was at any point during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Meanwhile, conditions continue to get even rougher for those that are actually working.

The cost of living has been rising much faster than our paychecks have, and that is putting enormous stress on households from coast to coast.

Recently, I was stunned to learn that a 160 square foot home in Las Vegas is renting for 950 dollars a month…

A tiny home in the Las Vegas Valley is creating a big stir.

Nestled between two apartment blocks, the 160 sq ft tiny home, listed for $950 a month, has received more than 113 inquiries from eager renters.

That is absurd.

But this is what years of reckless money printing have done to us.

Housing has become more unaffordable than ever before, and this isn’t just happening in our heavily populated metropolitan areas.

If you can believe it, an average home in Bozeman, Montana now sells for more than a million dollars…

Bozeman, Montana, a small city of about 56,000 people, has seen home prices soar on the back of increased migration to the area, catapulting demand for properties.

A single-family home in the area rose by nearly 40 percent to more than $1.16 million as of February, according to the Bozeman Real Estate Group.

At the same time, paychecks are stagnating or even falling in some cases.

In fact, it is being reported that “48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles” in 2023…

But some are finding an unwelcome surprise as they scan listings for open roles. A salary bump is all but impossible; in many cases, wages seem lower than their previous pay – even for the same jobs.

They aren’t imagining things. A 2023 report on pay trends from ZipRecruiter showed 48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles.

The middle class is being systematically ripped to shreds.

With each passing day, more Americans are joining the ranks of the poor, and homelessness and hunger are absolutely exploding all over the nation.

What we are experiencing is the direct result of years of very foolish policies.

Unfortunately, much worse is on the horizon.  The remainder of 2024 will be excruciating, and 2025 will be even more painful.

Sound off about this article on The Economic Collapse Substack.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.