And I quote."They said Mr. President. We are tired if winning. But I will say no no there is more winning." So send it to 20% I want that good winning interest.
I think it's fair to say at this point that almost every single thing Trump promised to do he either lied and did the opposite or tried to do it but half assed his way into making it do the opposite.
Ultimately whether you think this was intentional or just incompetence either way the result is the same.
Occam’s razor. It was both. On some things (Iran) he was lying, but successfully manipulated people to think he wouldn’t do that thing. On others (tariffs), he told everyone for decades he would do it.
He’s a film-flam man who says what he knows people wants to hear AND who can’t run anything for real to save his life. His one trick is to get people to believe in him, but he doesn’t actually DO anything productive.
his target audience/cult members are so fucking dumb to believe that a man who's married 2/3 immigrants, has employed a shit ton of "undocumented" workers at his properties, and has likely paid for his (and a lot of others) fair share of abortions - gives a shit about his cult members. much less their core moral beliefs.
He's been laundering money for Russia since the late 80s.
It's been pretty much universally agreed - ESPECIALLY - in conservative circles that tariffs are terrible economic policy since the great depression when tariffs took what was the recession and made it the worst in modern history.
Trump goes to Russia in 1987. The Soviet Union is falling at that point.
The late '80s was also when Trump suddenly started to be very pro tariff.
It's pretty weird to go to Russia and then come back and start advocating for what is universally agreed to be terrible economic policy through tariffs.
It's so stupid, in fact, that you have to start to ask yourself why someone would aggressively start beating this drum of protectionism at a time when the United States was about to become a unipolar Force in the world that was aggressively supporting global free trade.
Maybe Trump is just so insanely stupid that he's just loved tariffs and Russia since the late 80s.
Maybe it's just a coincidence that Trump has been pushing for America to adopt suicidal economic policies since the late 80s.
It's also possible that Trump knew full well that tariffs were stupid when he started beating that drum in the late '80s. However, if he was working against the United States...that stance makes tons of sense.
I think the simplest explanation for a lot of these Trump related is that at the heart of it corrupt conspiracy is the core of his being and orbit and worldview, really.
Yes you are right. I was indeed talking about donald j trump the mass child rapist mentioned at least several dozens of times in the trump-epstein files
Trump is entirely owned by his israeli and jewish donors. I’m uncertain if it’s due to promises of money for himself or his children or if it is due to blackmail or perhaps both - but whatever the reason, US interests are taking a far distant rear priority to israeli interests and the surveillance state.
The actions in Iran, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon show that. And the build out of data centers - which while there is commercial use, it’s primarily for surveillance and data gathering/storage of US citizens and the rest of the world.
He’s owned by anyone that promises him something that will benefit him. Look at the way he is with China, everything is benefiting them, he talks about how amazing Xi is while he doesn’t put that weapons deal for Taiwan through, he says he loves China buying US farmland, he loves Chinese students. Like I’m sorry what the fuck? That’s counter to EVERYTHING you’ve been allegedly standing for. Then of course he sold those chips to the UAE which other Presidents wouldn’t do in fear China would get them and he took a PERSONAL payment. You know he’s getting something behind the scenes for all this stuff, dropping Vietnam tariffs when they promise him a Trump resort, dropping Swiss tariffs when they give him some gold.
Trump isn't stupid or incompetent. He is getting exactly what he wants out of his presidency. His goals just aren't aligned with those of the average American.
I'm sure you're well aware of this, but the debt problem has existed far longer than Trump's been in office. Not to say he hasn't worsened it significantly, because he has.
25% of the national debt is attributed to Trump's presidency and he hasn't even finished a full two terms yet. Comparatively, the amount he's added to the total is astonishing.
Bond market is basically forcing everyone to rethink the entire 2026 narrative.A few months ago, markets were confident about rate cuts. Now with inflation staying sticky, oil above $100 because of the Iran situation, and Treasury yields pushing toward multi-year highs, traders are starting to price in higher for longer again.
What’s interesting is that stocks are still holding up relatively well while bonds are screaming caution.To me, that disconnect matters. Rising yields don’t just affect borrowing costs they eventually pressure valuations, housing, consumer spending, and even government debt financing. Feels like the real risk now isn’t a sudden crash it’s slow financial tightening happening through the bond market while equities still act optimistic.
The unemployment data has been a fascinating disconnect. I work in tech and more people are out of work in my social circle than I’ve ever known before. Maybe there are certain industries that are just way worse off than the average, but it feels out of sync with the reporting.
EDIT: I’m not saying the numbers are wrong. Just that it’s personally disorienting to be in an industry that’s apparently very out of sync with the reported headline numbers.
I’m also in tech and my spouse who is an OR nurse has been unemployed for three months now. This has never happened in her 12~ years nursing. She’s experiencing many of the same behaviors we’re seeing in tech. Applying to jobs only to be insta-denied. Recruiter ghosting, etc. Tech is bad but healthcare is supposedly thriving (relatively speaking) but it doesn’t seem to align with our reality.
Might be regional and also specific to the specialty. Maybe with all the unemployment and loss of medical care coverage, less people are opting for surgical procedures or getting them done in another country like Mexico or Thailand. So then possibly less demand for OR nurses.
Yep. Specialty and experience. Most systems don’t want to retrain so the demand inside of some specialties is a lot higher than others. Hard out there ya’ll
It might indeed be a demand-side problem. i can tell you about at least one person who makes slightly above the maximum to qualify for govt. healthcare, while barely being able to afford the rising costs of rent and cat food. That person has been told that there are financing options available through the clinic, but it would be a crime to enter into a debt with the knowledge that you'll never be able to pay it back. So there are at least a few nurses who won't have a patient along the chain from the clinic to the OR right there.
Trump’s obnoxiously named BBB cut Medicare funding with the expected result of rural hospitals shutting down. But who cares if people live hours away from a hospital during a medical emergency
You have to understand that in their minds, it's the hospital's fault, and the people who run hospitals are usually in cities. Or is it that the hospital is the government? Either way, it's the fault of the cities and everyone that lives in them. And the fault of the people they vote for.
depopulating those rural areas means less pushback when land speculators/developers come to feast and when the resulting environmental damage occurs as resources in those places are eventually extracted.
9 times out of 10 when a group complains about a “shortage of workers” they really mean “a shortage of workers willing to work for below a fair market wage”
I have a family member who is a hospital administrator and is constantly saying they can’t find enough nurses. I don’t believe the person you’re responding to is telling the whole story
I know a nurse with 20 years of experience who kept getting denied at a certain clinic when they would apply. Turns out the automatic filter the health region was using was rejecting their application due to some pedantic reason. They were hired instantly when they were finally able to reach out directly to someone in management.
While I understand employers don’t want to be swamped by resumes, I believe some of the automated methods used to filter out applicants is really having an affect on who is getting certain jobs.
It's a pretty shit situation across the board. With the advent of online job postings it's super easy to apply for anything - so each opening is met with literal thousands of applicants.
Similar but different - we had an entry level analyst role open earlier this year, it received 13k applications. It requires a degree in something finance related, prefers internship experience in the industry (as in we're looking for top candidates here), and requires in office.
Of the 13k, something like 15% didn't even have a high school diploma, half had no degree at all. None. Only around 13% had field relevant degrees (I don't think this is a dealbreaker, but for sorting resumes it is). Tons were out of state, tons were just pisspoor candidates (you're not getting a top demand analyst job if you had a 2.3 GPA at a commuter school buddy), etc.
So if you translate that to someone needing to manually screen what you'd have gotten is someone going through resumes in some order until they got ~10 people to interview, then throwing the rest of the stack in the trash.
The process is going to be unfair no matter what is done, it just depends on what flavor of unfair you'd like. The "bot misread my resume" unfair sucks, but so does the "I was 3,251 out of 13,752 in a stack of paper and the hiring rep got tired" version of unfair.
I had one today like that. I'm looking for a software administrator, so why is someone with purely retail and construction experience applying? "Sir, this is a Wendy's"
Yeah the whole ability to apply online has meant many people's unemployment tactic is literally to just sit at their computer and spam resumes.
We actually hired a kid for billing support that somehow got in the room with a group of college seniors I was talking to, they asked if I had advice around finding a position and he chimed in saying "just sit at your desk and apply to everything you see, all day until something hits, I applied to over a thousand jobs"
I was like no, please don't do that. This is fine if you just need "a job" but very poor advice if you want to build "a career".
I'm helping interview candidates for a (non-HC) job and got to get access to Paylocity, an HR interview portal. I realized fairly late in the process that the way applicants submit their resumes and information makes a HUGE difference in what the hiring managers see.
I felt like crap once I realized that I probably rejected some candidates that looked like they had submitted no information, but they had instead put everything into an uploaded PDF resume... which was on a different tab, so I didn't see that page initially.
Reminds me of someone years back bitching about how the unemployment figures were bullshit because they couldn't find a job in tech anywhere. Come to find out they live in some rural ass midwest town and refuse to leave but expect to step in to a remote six figure position out of school lol.
On Reddit, it's worth taking the default approach that the narrator is unreliable.
My relative is in a major metro area on the east coast, but that’s irrelevant. Nursing is probably the single most in demand profession throughout the country. Healthcare is consistently the biggest contributor to the jobs report numbers. If you can’t find a nursing job because you’re unwilling to leave Nowheresville, population 150, your unemployment is a choice.
It's highly dependent on area. Rural areas in particular, are scaling back significantly. In other locations they struggle to find nurses who either want to work endless over time or they struggle to find people who only want to work part time.
If rural areas are scaling back hiring, fine, that’s valid , but it’s 2026. If you’re not willing to relocate for your career you’re not trying. I’m 40 and have relocated 4 times. The second half of your comment describes people who could have a job if they wanted it but are choosing not to.
Heaven forbid someone not want to uproot their entire family for a job that they spoils be able to find nearby without needing to do that.
For instance, I own my home. With the market and economy the way it is right now, it would be the stupidest decision ever to move because it likely wouldn’t sell and now I’m either paying rent and a mortgage or two mortgages.
Not to mention, many (most?) households are dual income. Relocating for a job doesn't make a lot of sense if your spouse or partner has to lose their job to follow you.
Remember that there’s a huge difference between low level nursing in the Midwest or Southeast and OR or other specialized nursing in a major university hospital on the west coast or eastern seaboard.
For many nurses the goal is to get into one of these unionized hospitals where pay and total comp can easily be 3-4x that of someone working as a nurse in a care home in Florida.
It’s a diverse field with wildly different pay depending on geography and local politics
Honestly, Nursing is really the only profession where the person who went to a 12 month technical school and spends their days cleaning bed pans and setting IVs for 35k/yr shares a title with the six figure professionals who attained a four year or higher degree and serves as a direct physician support role.
Sure, there's LPN vs RN vs BSN vs NP vs DNP, but man everyone just calls themselves Nurse especially among the vocational/undergrad world - and those are very very different jobs.
It's almost like companies will actively try to underpay what the labor is worth. Traveling nurses during covid basically ripped the veil off of that.
But in all honesty, do keep in mind that traveling nurses have a good chance of getting paid due to the sheer fact that the employer doesn't have to pay for benefits, so their take home pay being 25-35% more just on that factor alone would mean equal pay (napkin math for a standard business puts benefits of an employee at 33% of the overall cost).
So...anything over that, and the hospital just has a hiring issue.
Always remember when you're reading these comments on reddit around how impossible it is for someone to find a job - you never know who's on the other end of that keyboard.
Even during the tightest labor markets we've observed in generations there were people online saying finding a job in their field was impossible and everything must be a lie. More often than not this boils down to a skill gap issue that the poster is either unaware of or won't acknowledge.
Tell her to apply to the VA. My mom is a VA OR nurse and she's mentioned how they're constantly looking for more people. Lots of older nurses are starting to retire; my mom included.
The unemployment data has basically shown everything stagnant or tanking, except healthcare. Healthcare is hiring enough people to keep the overall numbers steady.
Marginally worse than that, healthcare has mostly been adding enough jobs to create breakeven - absent healthcare we're net negative jobs across the year. Even with healthcare we're likely net negative once birth/death adjustments are done.
My company has been on a hiring freeze for two years and reducing force through attrition rather than layoffs. This is why the tech market is so shit right now and young people don’t have a shot.
Market has been frozen since 2024, and it’s getting worse. The lay offs are in addition to the attrition.
There are metrics for part time due to economic reasons, which is where much of this may show up. You'd also see it show up in the earnings reports - as in if this is happening to a large degree that means aggregate earnings must go down. You've not really seen that yet.
Think of it in simple terms, let's say I have 10 people that all are programmers making 100k. Let's say one loses their job and stays unemployed, one loses their job and goes to work for doordash part time making 25k, and one loses their job but works full time for doordash making 50k/yr. and the other 7 are fine.
What I'd expect to see would be 10% unemployment, 20% u6, if this happens sufficiently I'd expect a drop in median wages as well.
To be fair, that data is in the same place it has always been, Trump sucks but this isn't a Trump thing. Before Trump people complained that it was being hidden for other reasons, they said Obama was hiding it to make the economy seem better than it was, blah blah blah.
The reality is that people just don't look, and they presume something that doesn't make the top of a bolded headline is being hidden from them.
Some people do, yes. But that dude has no idea what he's talking about. The BLS birth death model has absolutely nothing to do with people forming LLCs or whatever to do rideshare or gig work.
The birth/death model works through statistical inference based on business deaths. Statistically speaking you can pretty easily infer new business formation/jobs from old business closings. There's a lag effect here, that's built in to the model (ARIMA for any stats nerds).
Basically, when a business disappears from the establishment survey (IE closes) the BLS does not treat those jobs as 100% lost. It uses historic instance and modeling to infer a given percentage of new jobs that arose after that closure, it then applies the ARIMA to ensure the appropriate lag and smoothing of jobs fluctuation is applied.
TLDR is it uses business closures to predict openings.
This has been historically very very accurate, but post covid business openings didn't quite behave the way that they had been over time, so the model began to over-shoot. The model was adjusted beginning this year, so presumably the current figures are more reflective of near term trends.
But that's significantly more robust and entirely different than the user above's suggestion that forming a business entity means the BLS starts recording you as an employer with employees lmfao.
Even worse: if you take on two part time jobs that counts as doubling your employment level. And if you just give up searching for long enough you don't count as unemployed anymore!
Tech is one of those things that tons of people on reddit use as some sort of benchmark because it's over-represented here, but it's not that big in terms of overall employment.
Core tech work has a bit under 10MM total employees, or about 5.8% of the population. 10% unemployment in tech, IE 1 in every 10 of your friends being fully unemployed, would result in a 0.6% shift in unemployment.
But yet every thread on unemployment has top comments from people in tech saying a guy they know got laid off so these numbers must be bullshit lol.
Yeah thats why social media is awful for mental health. These people just get upvoted to the top since it stands out, when it doesnt actually reflect reality.
Also reporting bias. How many people would bother reporting that they and everyone they know remains employed? Well, that's true for me, but I don't really feel the need to say so all the time. There's one friend who did get laid off, but he ended up finding another job at the same company.
It's a bit of a mixed bag, unemployment rates for an average across the year can be compiled for a given job - see here: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat25b.htm
But because someone can lose a job as programmer then immediately get one tomorrow as a QA tester, higher frequency data is difficult.
The best thing to look at is raw jobs growth by industry: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
Here you can see the computer systems category is shrinking, as in there's less jobs there today than a year ago. So that's pretty noteworthy.
It's not really worth pushing back on the above comments, people gonna confirmation bias no matter what, but almost all of that is attributed to someone's very local experience being one thing and them not being able to comprehend that their friends in tech seeing layoffs does not automatically mean the entire 170MM people in the labor pool are experiencing the same.
Well that and poor management choices post covid. If you trace out tech firm workforce growth most of theones doing large layoffs are simply resetting back to the staffing levels they'd be at if they experienced normalized growth from 2019-2026.
Most of these firms grossly overhired in 2021-2022, and are now realizing the AI + significant excess employees is forcing a reckoning.
Also of note - almost none of these firms are doing layoffs for economic reasons, they're all profitable and FCF positive. It's not "let's save the company because the economy is failing" layoffs, it's "we have a more efficient tool and too many people, let's juice profits" layoffs.
I agree, and I also suspect that few if any of the layoffs are genuinely prompted by AI. The markets just eat it up if you claim that your AI is so efficient that you can lay off thousands of employees, instead of admitting that you just overhired during Covid and need the money for datacenters.
> The unemployment data has been a fascinating disconnect.
I feel like there is a book, long form journalism, or some manner of deep level study that needs to be applied to the bigger cultural trend that is at work here: the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world. It's not just with government data. It's social media posts, product reviews, commodity & stock prices, media reports, and on and on. And obviously, AI is only exacerbating this trend.
Of course this disconnect has always existed, but digital platforms, and AI are now taking it to whole new levels in terms of fidelity and reach. You could just call it propaganda, to some extent, but the ubiquity of this trend, in terms of it touching so many things now, genuinely seems like something not seen before.
This trend seems to be especially good at thwarting our collective intelligence in working towards the truth. The truth that is often discovered by way of coordinated and uncoordinated collective action. And there's a name for it. At least for the social psychology aspect of it; it's called pluralistic ignorance (from Wikipedia):
> In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (also known as a collective illusion) is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. In this phenomenon, most people in a group may go along with a view they do not hold because they think, incorrectly, that most other people in the group hold it. Pluralistic ignorance encompasses situations in which a minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position, or the majority position is wrongly perceived to be a minority position.
> the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world. It's not just with government data.
I mean, every economist in the field today will tell you that government data is very accurate, even the most liberal ones who spend hours a day ranting about Trump.
The issue isn't that you're being lied to, it's that you're lying to yourself.
Yeah government buddy, I think I'm going to go with I.F. Stone on this one:
> "All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed."
>
> Stone, who famously published his own independent investigative newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly from 1953 to 1971, dedicated his career to digging through official government documents to expose contradictions and falsehoods, particularly regarding foreign policy, civil liberties, and the Vietnam War. His core philosophy was that a journalist's default stance toward official state pronouncements should always be skeptical.
Edit: Damn, bond market unrest really brings out the perception management warriors. It says a lot about what they're really worried about. I haven't seen a comment section like this on Reddit since the Nord Stream pipeline got blown up.
Ahhh yes, well you can go with a guy who wrote about vietnam and just nonsensically extract that to economics because it fits your worldview - I'll go with economists who use this data every day. Whos to really say here, amirite?
Here's a good few quotes, if ya like quotes and all that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1s9o101/private_employers_added_62000_jobs_in_march/odskf92/
>His core philosophy was that a journalist's default stance toward official state pronouncements should always be skeptical.
Skepticism is fine, but you're not being skeptical. You're dismissing verified information that you don't like under the guise of skepticism. This is the same thing climate denialists do.
> the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world.
It's actually pretty easy: people are terrible at recognizing that their anecdotal experience doesn't extrapolate to everyone. People are also terrible at looking at anecdotal experiences collectively, instead just focusing on that which reinforces their internal conceptions (you might know five people out of work, but you're ignoring the 95 people that are fully employed). This is exacerbated by how siloed "news" sources have become. Know a few people out of work, and see on TikTok that others are out of work? Then aggregate statistics be damned, the economy must be awful, right?
> Maybe there are certain industries that are just way worse off than the average, but it feels out of sync with the reporting.
For a lot of 2025, most sectors were cutting jobs (with tech as the biggest by percentage cut in this group) while healthcare was hiring at a clip that covered all the losses in other sectors.
It was crazy to watch happen, I can't find enough people to hire while friends in other industries are looking for work left and right.
I mean the headline numbers for unemployment have always been detached from reality at some level, but now we've got Uber, Doordash, Lyft, etc. the number of people driving for those gig jobs has dramatically increased over the past few years. If you're unemployed and looking for a job but do some doordashing in the meantime you are considered fully employed.
"If you have a job they count you as having a job"
yes, this is true.
>considered fully employed.
No.
U6 exists, and is within the same relation to all other employment metrics that it always has been. The narrative that unemployment figures are wrong because of gig work is easily dismissed the second one learns how unemployment figures work.
BTW - this is CPS based data - people would mark if they were doing gig work for economic reasons. They're not.
So your gripe is that because you're not knowledgeable enough then the numbers are misleading? Surely personal responsibility couldn't be a factor here?
If you dig into the numbers, the “good” jobs are in deep recession and being replaced largely by shit jobs in warehouses, elder care, retail, etc. the overall numbers remain steady, but the types of employment tell a different story.
Yea healthcare is growing everything else is shitting the bed. But what counts as healthcare is not just doctors and nurses so there’s a lot of low level administrative jobs on that list too that don’t really pay well.
That's because people no longer qualify as "unemployed" after a year.
Anyone who's been jobless and looking for a full-time position since the layoffs starting in 2024, including those who only get irregular or regular contract work, do not factor into the percentage. Only the last 12mo.
It’s not that it’s inaccurate, it’s that the top line number is a blend of healthcare and AI capex hiring and every other sector either treading water or shedding jobs. And so an individual’s perspective is very different depending on their line of work.
Real wage rate dropped by .5% in March but real weekly earnings only dropped by .2% because people worked more hours. Yearly decrease was .02%. So people are working more for roughly the same amount of money while debt is skyrocketing and now interest rates on that debt are going up, which matches what I think most average people think about the economy. The financial markets are only catching up with this reality now.
You shouldn't be in this sub if you think that. Trump would mess with the data but he can't without 100,000 economists knowing it. I can't believe this conspiracy theory is still around. Go to Ask Economists if you don't believe me or google.
I can't get over why reddit feels the need to make up provably wrong conspiray theories. Do you not think Trump is doing enough heinous things we can just stick to facts?
Is howmoneyworks a good YouTube channel for learning? I keep seeing their videos pop up in my feed like this one https://youtu.be/3UO-gl-N6rY?si=BaIOOmWWMlkVkzi8
Ok, pill me on this one. I can google it, but my googling shows that gig workers are counted as employed by the BLS. So if I'm unemployed but making $200 a week delivering takeout to supplement my unemployment, how would that impact the stats?
> Ok, pill me on this one. I can google it, but my googling shows that gig workers are counted as employed by the BLS.
Unemployment rates are based on the current population survey - so it's actual responses from actual people talking about their employment situation.
Gig work fits squarely in to the "I'm part time for economic reasons" category (there's actually a lot of questions that get you here, it's very accurate)
This is what forms the U6 unemployment rate, which is no more elevated relative to U3 than it ever has been.
Basically, the idea that gig work is what's masking the reality of job losses from the public is entirely coming from people who either don't understand how these reports work, or people who are deliberately lying to you. Sometimes hard to tell the difference.
I apologize if this came off as a conspiracy. Like @memphisjones said, it’s misleading. I don’t think the data is showing all of the colors on the color wheel if that makes sense.
I’m sure A LOT of people are doing gig style work to make ends meet. Many people are comparing today’s economy with the GR and .com era’s, which is interesting because back then, we didn’t have Amazon, Uber, Uber Eats, Door Dash, OF, Draft Kings, crypto, etc. Not to mention the people with more than one job.
It appears the career positions have evaporated and are continuing to do so. The positions that can support a household, benefits package, etc.
Isn’t unemployment data based on who’s collecting unemployment? I think so many people have run their course on benefits and have dropped off the rolls.
No, it's based on the current population survey. It has nothing to do with administered benefits, there's tons of situations where one can be unemployed and not qualify for unemployment benefits.
the short version is that they're measuring the wrong thing with a bad instrument. The data they have, for how and what they measure it hasn't been tampered with.
Unemployment data has never been accurate in the US. It's always been "are you unemployed and actively looking for work?" and that's it. If you're underemployed or you've given up finding anything then you don't count.
Unemployment data is effectively worthless today when anyone with a car or even a bicycle can get a “job” as a rideshare or delivery driver. When thousands of people with college degrees are “working” driving for DoorDash, that probably shouldn’t be counted as an indicator of a healthy economy.
The problem with the stock market is earnings reports keep showing revenue growth. It doesn't matter what inflation rates look like if revenues and profits keep going up.
So so many people here get all twisted up because the market isn't reacting to things they think are bad. Markets are here for one thing - to provide a present value on the discounted down future expected cashflows of corporate america. So long as those cashflows look good, so do markets.
And they look good because a few companies are just passing a trillion dollars between themselves to make it look like cash flow. The AI bubble will pop eventually.
This is very well supported in actual research on market efficiency, Cochrane's research for instance attributes almost all volatility to shifts in the discounted rate, as observed via proxy mechanisms, and observes a very constant set of cashflow expectations built in to asset values across time. But IDK if he knows what he's talking about, he was just the head of asset pricing for NBER or whatever.
It's interesting how often people reject learning something with just the laziest of remarks.
Of course, inflation means that price that goods are sold at increase, which would naturally mean revenue for companies would increase as well. That’s why they say hold equities when there is inflation, since stocks always go up (in nominal terms) during periods of high inflation.
there's really no way Warsh can do what Trump wants him to do without destroying the economy. The guy got he wanted, which is the job from hell. Good luck, asshole.
Warsh doesn't want to do what Trump wants him to do, people gotta listen to that hearing and read his WSJ opeds. Dude is a hawk that's wearing like a fingerpainted dove mask lol.
Honestly, who knows; taking them on their word doesn't really mean much in Trump circles.
On one hand, Warsh has been a hawk, and then on the other hand, people often connected to Trump do things that benefit themselves or their in-group, and lately that has been at detriment of the US.
Personally, Warsh's connection to the Lauder family and their dealings with the Epstein crowd via MegaGroup is grounds enough for skepticism. Birds-of-a-feather and all that. There are plenty of hawks to choose from, but Warsh was specifically chosen.
I mean, it's not just his word as of late - you can go back decades looking at his writing and stances. He's remarkably consistent, if perhaps a bit deliberate in how he frames things and what words he excludes.
Glad to see someone else can read between the lines.
However while I do think Warsh is committed to offloading the entire balance sheet and genuinely reversing the debt trends, I do think it's possible he will also pursue the "inflate the debt away" strategy. Obviously those are somewhat in tension or one will have to come first.
Ultimately, he's going to fail because all of this requires Congress to do their job and not approve $1T deifcits annually. But I suppose genuine regime change at Fed could even alter that landscape.
Yeah, which is in itself another form of tightening. But yeah Warsh has been a critic of the balance sheet from day 1, which is honestly far more concerning to me than rate policy. Pull liquidity out of the system and you might start seeing all sorts of credit crunch issues.
It doesn't matter what he personally believes; there's zero chance he'd have been nominated without agreeing to kiss the ring. He will push for lower rates despite knowing how stupid that would be, because he's a craven opportunist who will be unimaginably wealthy regardless of how badly his actions affect others.
Fortunately, there are plenty of other governors who will bail him out by refusing to do something patently idiotic.
He doesn’t have the power as Fed chair to do this. He’s one of 12 votes on the FOMC. And the other Trump sycophant on the FOMC actually had to resign to make room for Warsh, since Powell chose to stay on. Warsh can make a lot of noise but his ability to actually set policy unilaterally is basically zero.
Re: Stock market - I think the markets being at ATH's is because inflation is ginning up most company's numbers. If prices go up a company's revenues and income also go up. For now it seems that demand is absorbing the price increases but that may not last for long. If consumers get tapped out or increasingly lose their jobs eventually sales will drop.
2021-2022 saw really rapid inflation as well but it corresponded with a vast labor shortage and some of the fastest wage increases ever seen. So while prices shot up so did the amount of money in people's pockets. 2026 however doesn't appear to have that advantage.
So the bear market is likely going to lag an inflation spike as consumers are likely begrudgingly absorbing price increases for now but long term spending habits will change.
> A few months ago, markets were confident about rate cuts. Now with inflation staying sticky, oil above $100 because of the Iran situation, and Treasury yields pushing toward multi-year highs, traders are starting to price in higher for longer again.
I mean, this happens all the time.
You can set yourself a reminder to come back to this comment in 6 months and see it again - conditions change, new data comes out, markets adjust pricing based on those things.
The Iran war has created a major inflation catalyst that wasn't forseen at the beginning of the year, furthermore tariff driven inflation has started to creep in to core measures.
The labor market deterioration has actually slowed, which is generally a good thing but is bad for inflation as it means waning demand won't offset price pressures elsewhere.
No offense to you, but I hate that people use phrases like "the Iran situation". It's because of an unprovoked and unnecessary aggressive war started by an impulsive idiot.
Inflation during Biden was global and had a lot of intractable causes. Inflation right now is because of the irrational actions of one man.
I say it a lot because I'm used to using neutral language to avoid having people in professional settings begin dismissing the information being conveyed due to some perception of political bias.
That person may be a bot, they look like one, but the use of neutral language just as often denotes a person who's used to speaking in professional settings rather than just writing comments on reddit.
A massive global supply shock at the end of a record setting boom has accelerated the inevitable turning of the boom-bust cycle.
Mounting inflationary pressures at the end of a boom cycle has preceded all but one US economic recessions. Central banks will raise interest rates until demand subsides.
I keep hearing the term markets are pricing in X rate cuts. My impression is this is similar to implied move in options. Since spy kept going up at a high rate, the movement seemed to imply some number of rate cuts, not that participants actually expect a rate cut. Clearly if you look at the index there's no market that needs rescuing via rate cut. And yes, I understand the lower part of the K economy is getting bashed in. But from an index perspective, everything is "fine".
> I keep hearing the term markets are pricing in X rate cuts. My impression is this is similar to implied move in options.
I'm presuming you're unfamiliar here but no that's not the case.
Markets pricing in a given rate movement is directly referring to how fed funds futures are priced, those futures are hedging tools used by banks, insurers, etc to appropriately navigate shifting rate landscapes and their impact on the institutional portfolios.
FFR futures are very efficient, to the point where the Fed uses them as a benchmark to determine if it's communication policy is accurate.
CME actually publishes a mathematical representation of the current FFR futures pricing showing the exact implied probabilities of a given rate level at a given point in time.
For instance, if you navigate to the tab for Dec 26 you'll see that currently futures are priced with the current expectation that there is approximately a 39% chance rates remain the same, a 42% chance we have a 25bps rate hike, and the remaining probability being two hikes or more.
Thing is, Housing prices will still go higher despite higher interest rates and valuations as well due to corporations still killing earnings. Our financial system is almost un breakable at this point
And yet my HYSA just did another rate cut. Waiting for life situations to slow down so I can see what’s available and roll it into a better account. I’m sure the banks are giggling and rubbing their hands together about it as we speak.
Man even in peak covid 2022 I predicted our entire country is doomed. Mainly because I saw the numbers and knew cutting or raising rates wont work anymore we dug our debt hole so deep we cant get out and we will get buried and dissolve as a nation. Im ready for it though. We used to be able to raise rates to get out but back when Volker raised it to 20% we had 176% more debt to annual taxes which was bad enough now we have over 780% debt over annual tax revenue. So back then we were pretty much almost 2 years of taxes in debt now we are almost 8 years behind in debt.
Thank you for giving me something useful, and non-political, to scroll to. Really tired of every thread, where I could learn something and hear what other people are thinking, be hijacked.
I'll be interested to find out where all of this is heading. Last year, gold was up as faith in the dollar weakened, and national banks bought gold. Then Warsh's name was floated and metals got scared. Then Iran started, oil crept up, and the world fled back to the dollar. Now rates are heading up worryingly, and metals have downward pressure. Meanwhile, everything is expensive, even for middle class, let alone broke people.
Stocks are up because people are rightly assuming we’re going to have a prolonged period of high inflation and the only way to protect yourself from that is to be in assets.
I’d love to hear an argument for how the government is going to deal with $40 trillion in debt other than inflating it away.
Yield percentages don’t matter when the domestic purchasing power of the US Dollar takes a backseat to the integrity of the bond market. Inflation and debasement are preferable to the US missing an interest payment. Ask yourself what President Trump and his oligarch friends would rather advocate for: 4-8% YoY inflation due to the war or a temporary freeze in the Treasury markets due to panic and fear of the US’ ability not to make a payment?
We’re going to monetize the fuck out of the debt, and Kevin Warsh will do everything in his power to assist.
If Trump's presidential history has taught us anything, it is that there is some card(s) they have that no armchair expert online is even aware of because it hasn't trended in the news for the past 15 years for them to even know that they needed to be experts on it. There will be some strategy they employ that hasn't been used in x years that only actual economists are aware of existing. I assure you, reddit will be the very last to find out it's a thing that's already available. People who follow politics on social media try their best to make it a story of cliffhangers when it's really not, it's just performed that way to the ignorant.
Not at all. The market can barely stomach the idea of a 100 BPS hike now. Even so, Kevin Warsh isn’t going to be the guy that’s going to do it or vote in favor of it. The good thing is idiots like Stephen Miran get flushed out out of the board. That’s one less noisome political hack speaking.
Normal investors, meaning an American that works 40 hours a week and has no care in the world about what the Fed or the Treasury are doing, is not playing individual stocks or options in the market. They are DCA’ing automatically with every paycheck and throwing them into retirement investment vehicles like 401ks, ROTH IRAs, etc. Money Markets and CDs too.
Your best play? Build up a 5-6 month emergency savings, utilize all of your benefits and company/government match, and let the professionals worry about it. You can’t outmaneuver and outmatch a market where a tweet can plunge it at any moment. Playing this to the downside? Forget about it. Bears get murdered without a fair degree of luck.
Gold isn’t a bad idea, but I mean, gold isn’t something you buy to speculate for YoY gains. You buy gold to retain value against inflation and the American markets’ status quo of “up and to the right.” If you’re a worker I described above, just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t listen to gold bugs who swear it’s going to 15k in the next 5-10 years. It’ll move at a very boring pace in my humble opinion.
That's what people said was "guaranteed" in 2022, because "interest rates are way too low and should be doubt digit normally". Nobody knows shit and everybody tries to "manifest" the reality of the market that will somehow benefit their position. If it didn't happen then or during COVID, it is very unlikely to happen unless there is a full super power total war scenario. A lot of people conveniently don't like to consider that every recession a nation goes through is learned from, which is why the world has not seen a first world depression in nearly 100 years.
I don't think you can. If you increase rates, you're increasing the interest the government is paying out. That's already a huge amount of the budget.
And there's probably nowhere to actually cut in the current political situation that won't just make the problem worse. Because even if you go into a recession, you're going to see outlays increase and receipts dry up.
So if you can't cut to balance, and you raise rates, you're just printing money by another path.
Were you not following what happened two years ago right after "Liberation Day"? You don't remember the bond yield rising was the singular thing that had him call back a bunch of tariffs, especially on China once they squeezed?
Bond yields rising weren’t the singular thing that made President Trump tone down the rhetoric on the trade war. There were a wide variety of other factors. Even still, our bond yields now are higher than they were on Liberation Day, and the macro looks considerably messier now. You’re acting like the US would rather throw up their hands and say “nah it’s over” as opposed to minting the cash they need in order to pay bond holders. The US would rather have entrenched, elevated inflation than let the bond market grind to a halt.
Because there are more macroeconomic and political factors to take into consideration over bond yields. Bond yields are not the sole contributor for why President Trump toned down the trade war. I’m telling you that people who are flush with cash, assets, and real estate do not give a singular fuck about how high bond yields get because at the end of the day, up and to the right is the American financial system’s status quo/default. They will pay. There is no scenario where yields aren’t paid out to bond holders. If there is no money, then money will be created to fulfill the status quo.
Ask yourself this question. Do we unironically believe that people aren’t going to shovel their cash and back up the truck into bonds when they pay out higher than what they pay now? Domestic bondholders don’t mind laying in the cut and buying a 30 year Treasury to collect 5%. How about 7%? The same deal. The Haves are not concerned with any of this because they know the Fed and the US Treasury have their back and will pay out. Defaulting is simply not an option lest it opens up a huge political can of worms, which is something you cannot print your way out of.
It's a lot harder to end the Iran war than it was to roll back tarrifs. All he had to do wend the tarrifs was write a tweet. The strait of Hormuz isn't going to reopen until Iran gets what it wants. And Trump can't give them it without looking like a fool, even to his base.
They are based on objectively insane demand for the us sovereign debt.
It is a direct result of the reserve currency status if us dollar. If everyone wants to hold dollar reserves, how else do you satisfy the demand other than by issuing more debt?
But how desirable is that dollar if it's heading for a fiscal crisis due to inadequate tax policy?
The assumption is that none of the US budgetary habits or political problems (antidemocratic remarks from Trump, Federal reserve demands, broken budget system mechanics in Congress etc.) will actually impact ability to pay bills when it comes down to it. People don't necessarily have to continue to believe this, and like most heavy debt that can become self-fulfilling quickly.
Truthfully, we have a lot of rope left on the debt. This can go on for decades more, which is just a bit farther out than anyone powerful in the world is thinking about.
A key factor is that most US sovereign debt is held by citizens who are very happy with it as a financial asset.
>But how desirable is that dollar if it's heading for a fiscal crisis due to inadequate tax policy?
The problem for the rest of the world is that this applies to... pretty much every other major currency in circulation.
So while it's great to point out risks to the position of the USD, the reserve status isn't going to change so long as it's the healthiest horse at the glue factory.
I don't see a huge amount of debt as apocalyptic. The British empire ran up a colossal amounts of debts prior to and then during the time when pound sterling was a global reserve currency. They lost that status in the xx century and while the loss was painful it wasn't mad max-like. They got over it. And so will the Americans if the dollar is to lose global reserve currency status.
My point was that the reserve currency status, while nice in the sense that it entitles the country in question to hoover up everyone else's production surplus in a form of a lot of cheap imported goods is at the same a sort of a curse. The curse being, no matter how fiscally conservative you want to be, you'll end up racking huge amounts of sovereign debt to offset the money you print for others to buy and hold.
But then again, if the Brits managed to wean off the curse without so much turmoil as to lose the monarchy, I'm sure the yanks have a chance to cushion the impact as well.
> The British empire ran up a colossal amounts of debts prior to and then during the time when pound sterling was a global reserve currency. They lost that status in the xx century and while the loss was painful it wasn't mad max-like. They got over it
Maybe from the perspective of 60 years hence it doesn't feel like a big deal, but it sure as hell was for a time.
The UK was so heavily indebted after WW2, we had to introduce bread rationing. Our economy took a full 20 years to recover. And that was a time when our demographics were far better. A larger proportion of the population was of working age, and each generation was larger than the last. Paying down debt in those circumstances is relatively straightforward.
And of course, we did it by having 95% tax rates. The American oligarchy has an epileptic seizure when you suggest a 1% wealth tax.
The US debt pile is a huge problem, and it's not going through be dealt with until there's a crisis.
The UK ended chocolate and sweets rationing on February 5th 1953.
Almost 8 years. And that was with the Anglo-American loan made to the United Kingdom by the United States on 15 July 1946. The loan helped keep the British economy afloat after the Second World War and amounted to some $62 billion in 2025 dollars at a 2% interest rate, plus about $20Bil from Canada.
Through the Marshall plan (some $137bil in 2025 dollars), that and much more was provided by the US without repayment.
Which nation will bail out the US using the next reserve currency?
They lost that status and took 10 years post WW2 to escape rationing, after their empire collapsed.
The US is headed toward a generational recession (again) brought to you by the GOP (again). This time, China is poised to take over soft power roles and continue on like nothing happened across the pacific.
The Potsdam Conference set the stage for US manufacturing to power us into the rest of the 20th century backed by high taxes and investment in science, education, infrastructure, and more. Today a shell of that remains.
I think this is the bond market pointing out that the equity market, through things like buybacks, circular investment, reliance on wartime economy, and ultimately the valuation of companies on things that don't correlate to fundamentals is becoming untenable.
I also think the powers that be know this and that's why you're seeing a big push in washington to do away with quarterly reporting.
The Trump admin is plundering everything they can before it falls apart. This is also why companies are laying everyone off because of “AI”. If they believed in future growth they’d see AI as a productivity tool.
But they don’t believe in future growth. They want to lay off the masses and use AI to keep the lights on while they get their parachutes ready.
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't that lower yields? If there is concern the stock market is nonsense, wouldn't investors pivot towards bonds, and thereby lower yields? I'm certainly thinking of pivoting towards a more bond heavy portfolio.
Bond yields have an inverse relationship with bond prices. If bond yields are going up it's because people are selling them thereby driving bond prices down. My hypothesis is that this selling of long term treasuries is because investors, the main purchasers of long term treasuries, have no confidence in the long term economic progress of the US, thereby highlighting the disconnect between the bond market, which is going down on a long term time horizon, and the equities markets, which seem to have been going up, regardless of the large amount of financial data that says we should have had a substantial correction in the equity markets for some time now.
Also, don't pardon your ignorance, this is reddit, we're all ignorant. Just don't defend or support it.
I assume higher bond yields like this indicate lack of confidence in short term investing - like investors know the market is bad so they park their cash long term instead? Is that correct? It's driving up mortgage rates which are already too high with the bloated housing prices.
How can the Fed cool inflation by raising rates yet aim to decrease long term bond yields to then encourage economic investment in the present?
Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions. So when yeilds are going up, it means people are avoiding those bonds. So all things being equal (which they never are), demand for 30 year US treasuries is the lowest it's been since the 2007 financial crisis.
More bond buying would drive the yield down. This reflects a breakdown in the rock-solid faith in U.S. government debt that has basically underpinned the American way of life for 75 years. Normally, this would indicate a movement to equities and a low-risk market outlook but there’s a risk of a fundamental break in How Everything Works. If we’re watching the beginning of that, then all the assumptions that underpin American life are about to be wiped out and the world going forward is going to be something your grandparents, parents, and you have never experienced.
The Fed needs to raise rates to cool inflation but they won’t do that. They’ll change the way they measure inflation to justify a cut. That won’t affect your lived reality though. They can tame bond yields to some degree by putting adults back in charge but that won’t happen until November at the earliest and possibly not even then. Some of this is now just locked in forever because the premise of ultra-low U.S. borrowing was that we don’t elect these sort of people or have coups and such. We’ve permanently damaged the full faith and credit of the United States in the eyes of the world and we’ll never recover our perfect record. Everything going forward will be irreversibly more expensive.
I’m drinking buddies with a bunch of IMF/World Bank economists and they have been horrified at the scale of what we’re doing, the effects of which will reverberate for the rest of our lives. They are in full defensive mode, anticipate a Great Depression type event that is maybe worse than that. Going to cash, keeping jobs where they were slated to retire, reducing debt.
The long term 30 year rate is telling us what long term inflation expectations are. So it's saying: oil shortage is going to lead to inflation. If bonds start paying higher returns, investors have a tendency to start moving money away from stocks and into bonds as they are a guaranteed return vs. stocks that are highly speculative. So eventually you should see a drop in the stock market.
The fed is only able to set short term rates. However this decreases the money available right now and that has an impact to reduce spending and decrease interest rates long term. This will then signal lower inflation long term which should then bring down the long term rates.
Right now the market has two viewpoints. The disruption is temporary and everything will reset to normal by end of summer versus the disruption is going to bleed into next year and this is a long-term squeeze on dollar value. If the long term view is correct we could end up having 6 percent or higher rates unless the Fed increases interest rates and tried to dampen spending now to reduce expected inflation long term. This will definitely cause the market to loose greater than 10 percent from current value.
It’s less of a lack of confidence in short term and more of the market pricing in several fed rate increases in the future (implicitly assuming stickier inflation levels).
If anything, bond yields rising indicates the opposite as investors are selling off longer duration bonds.
The fed isn’t solving for bond interest rates, the bond market is trying to solve for where the fed will price interest rates.
Yields are inversely related to price. Higher yield means prices are dropping.
Yields can increase because of inflation concerns, change in perceived risk, or even like you mention economic environment.
It is certainly going to drive up interest rates, though the 15 year is usually a better gauge.
As for the fed, if yields are increasing due to expected inflation, the fed raising rates may give investors confidence that inflation wont be as bad.
I don’t think current investment should be the concern. The US is constantly rolling over debt, as debt becomes due for old bonds, they issue new bonds to replace them. Then there’s just the massive debt the Trump budgets are causing. That additional debt is being added to 10’s of trillions in debt being rolled over.
We spend like a trillion a year in just servicing our debt. Slight fluctuations can have a huge impact over time.
Theverybest92 | 7 hours ago
And I quote."They said Mr. President. We are tired if winning. But I will say no no there is more winning." So send it to 20% I want that good winning interest.
OK_x86 | 6 hours ago
I think it's fair to say at this point that almost every single thing Trump promised to do he either lied and did the opposite or tried to do it but half assed his way into making it do the opposite.
Ultimately whether you think this was intentional or just incompetence either way the result is the same.
Ok-Entrepreneur4247 | 6 hours ago
Occam’s razor. It was both. On some things (Iran) he was lying, but successfully manipulated people to think he wouldn’t do that thing. On others (tariffs), he told everyone for decades he would do it.
He’s a film-flam man who says what he knows people wants to hear AND who can’t run anything for real to save his life. His one trick is to get people to believe in him, but he doesn’t actually DO anything productive.
yelloworld1947 | 6 hours ago
For his target audience, just doing anti-immigrant stuff is the only feature they care about, maybe some abortion bans too.
greenroom628 | 4 hours ago
his target audience/cult members are so fucking dumb to believe that a man who's married 2/3 immigrants, has employed a shit ton of "undocumented" workers at his properties, and has likely paid for his (and a lot of others) fair share of abortions - gives a shit about his cult members. much less their core moral beliefs.
alilhillbilly | an hour ago
He's been laundering money for Russia since the late 80s.
It's been pretty much universally agreed - ESPECIALLY - in conservative circles that tariffs are terrible economic policy since the great depression when tariffs took what was the recession and made it the worst in modern history.
Trump goes to Russia in 1987. The Soviet Union is falling at that point.
The late '80s was also when Trump suddenly started to be very pro tariff.
It's pretty weird to go to Russia and then come back and start advocating for what is universally agreed to be terrible economic policy through tariffs.
It's so stupid, in fact, that you have to start to ask yourself why someone would aggressively start beating this drum of protectionism at a time when the United States was about to become a unipolar Force in the world that was aggressively supporting global free trade.
Maybe Trump is just so insanely stupid that he's just loved tariffs and Russia since the late 80s.
Maybe it's just a coincidence that Trump has been pushing for America to adopt suicidal economic policies since the late 80s.
It's also possible that Trump knew full well that tariffs were stupid when he started beating that drum in the late '80s. However, if he was working against the United States...that stance makes tons of sense.
I think the simplest explanation for a lot of these Trump related is that at the heart of it corrupt conspiracy is the core of his being and orbit and worldview, really.
alilhillbilly | 4 hours ago
What's weird is that in every instance the thing he did benefited himself or his handlers in Russia and Israel.
And that tells you that it's not he lied or screwed up.
He's just not working for the US.
Bill_Brasky_SOB | 4 hours ago
Just the other day he said he didn’t care about the American people.
He tells the truth once in a while.
OK_x86 | 4 hours ago
Smart people don't like him after all...
Bill_Brasky_SOB | 4 hours ago
He loves the uneducated
Slumunistmanifisto | an hour ago
We are sparrows reading the farmers newspaper and complaining to the horses
Fartsnorkle84 | 5 hours ago
Not to mention he rapes children.
raging-peanuts | 4 hours ago
You mean the same Donald J. Trump who was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious child rapist? That Donald J. Trump?
Fartsnorkle84 | 3 hours ago
Yes you are right. I was indeed talking about donald j trump the mass child rapist mentioned at least several dozens of times in the trump-epstein files
oldsmoBuick67 | 5 hours ago
The purpose of the system is what it does.
Famous_Owl_840 | 2 hours ago
I think that the Massie primary is the litmus.
Trump is entirely owned by his israeli and jewish donors. I’m uncertain if it’s due to promises of money for himself or his children or if it is due to blackmail or perhaps both - but whatever the reason, US interests are taking a far distant rear priority to israeli interests and the surveillance state.
The actions in Iran, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon show that. And the build out of data centers - which while there is commercial use, it’s primarily for surveillance and data gathering/storage of US citizens and the rest of the world.
RaindropsInMyMind | 34 minutes ago
He’s owned by anyone that promises him something that will benefit him. Look at the way he is with China, everything is benefiting them, he talks about how amazing Xi is while he doesn’t put that weapons deal for Taiwan through, he says he loves China buying US farmland, he loves Chinese students. Like I’m sorry what the fuck? That’s counter to EVERYTHING you’ve been allegedly standing for. Then of course he sold those chips to the UAE which other Presidents wouldn’t do in fear China would get them and he took a PERSONAL payment. You know he’s getting something behind the scenes for all this stuff, dropping Vietnam tariffs when they promise him a Trump resort, dropping Swiss tariffs when they give him some gold.
He’s for sale and he’s selling the country too.
adidasbdd | an hour ago
He succeeded in the racism and that's all that really matters to his voters
Lanky-Post-8020 | 45 minutes ago
Trump isn't stupid or incompetent. He is getting exactly what he wants out of his presidency. His goals just aren't aligned with those of the average American.
IcySuggestion2545 | 29 minutes ago
But his core purpose was to destroy the US
And on that mission, he is winning
lopix | 2 hours ago
> this was intentional or just incompetence
Why not a bit of both?
timpham | 5 hours ago
Oh there are winnings, plenty of winnings, but it’s just not for You and me
GuelphEastEndGhetto | 4 hours ago
Just replace ‘America’ with ‘my bank account’ and you will get the gist.
Make My Bank Account Great Again
My Bank Account First
Because with money you can get away with anything.
defaultedebt | 5 hours ago
I'm sure you're well aware of this, but the debt problem has existed far longer than Trump's been in office. Not to say he hasn't worsened it significantly, because he has.
fyshstix | 5 hours ago
25% of the national debt is attributed to Trump's presidency and he hasn't even finished a full two terms yet. Comparatively, the amount he's added to the total is astonishing.
Gamer_Grease | 4 hours ago
The more context you add to the debt discussion, the more alarming the Trump presidency becomes, though.
[OP] Illustrious_Lie_954 | 7 hours ago
Bond market is basically forcing everyone to rethink the entire 2026 narrative.A few months ago, markets were confident about rate cuts. Now with inflation staying sticky, oil above $100 because of the Iran situation, and Treasury yields pushing toward multi-year highs, traders are starting to price in higher for longer again. What’s interesting is that stocks are still holding up relatively well while bonds are screaming caution.To me, that disconnect matters. Rising yields don’t just affect borrowing costs they eventually pressure valuations, housing, consumer spending, and even government debt financing. Feels like the real risk now isn’t a sudden crash it’s slow financial tightening happening through the bond market while equities still act optimistic.
beefcake105 | 7 hours ago
Not to sound like a doomer but I think the unemployment data isn’t entirely accurate either.
Jerome_Eugene_Morrow | 7 hours ago
The unemployment data has been a fascinating disconnect. I work in tech and more people are out of work in my social circle than I’ve ever known before. Maybe there are certain industries that are just way worse off than the average, but it feels out of sync with the reporting.
EDIT: I’m not saying the numbers are wrong. Just that it’s personally disorienting to be in an industry that’s apparently very out of sync with the reported headline numbers.
coffeecakewaffles | 7 hours ago
I’m also in tech and my spouse who is an OR nurse has been unemployed for three months now. This has never happened in her 12~ years nursing. She’s experiencing many of the same behaviors we’re seeing in tech. Applying to jobs only to be insta-denied. Recruiter ghosting, etc. Tech is bad but healthcare is supposedly thriving (relatively speaking) but it doesn’t seem to align with our reality.
misterno123 | 7 hours ago
how can a nurse be unemployed? Media always screams about nurse shortage all the time, I guess they are lying?
Dazzling-Rub-8550 | 7 hours ago
Might be regional and also specific to the specialty. Maybe with all the unemployment and loss of medical care coverage, less people are opting for surgical procedures or getting them done in another country like Mexico or Thailand. So then possibly less demand for OR nurses.
sierrackh | 6 hours ago
Yep. Specialty and experience. Most systems don’t want to retrain so the demand inside of some specialties is a lot higher than others. Hard out there ya’ll
Scary_Outside2374 | 6 hours ago
It might indeed be a demand-side problem. i can tell you about at least one person who makes slightly above the maximum to qualify for govt. healthcare, while barely being able to afford the rising costs of rent and cat food. That person has been told that there are financing options available through the clinic, but it would be a crime to enter into a debt with the knowledge that you'll never be able to pay it back. So there are at least a few nurses who won't have a patient along the chain from the clinic to the OR right there.
GayGeekInLeather | 6 hours ago
Trump’s obnoxiously named BBB cut Medicare funding with the expected result of rural hospitals shutting down. But who cares if people live hours away from a hospital during a medical emergency
Time_Increase_7897 | 5 hours ago
Not rural voters, apparently.
CFLuke | 4 hours ago
You have to understand that in their minds, it's the hospital's fault, and the people who run hospitals are usually in cities. Or is it that the hospital is the government? Either way, it's the fault of the cities and everyone that lives in them. And the fault of the people they vote for.
N0b0me | an hour ago
Nothing of value to be lost
zerg1980 | 4 hours ago
Trump’s voters are getting what they deserve.
sly-3 | 2 hours ago
depopulating those rural areas means less pushback when land speculators/developers come to feast and when the resulting environmental damage occurs as resources in those places are eventually extracted.
Swoly_Deadlift | 3 hours ago
9 times out of 10 when a group complains about a “shortage of workers” they really mean “a shortage of workers willing to work for below a fair market wage”
trossi | 6 hours ago
I have a family member who is a hospital administrator and is constantly saying they can’t find enough nurses. I don’t believe the person you’re responding to is telling the whole story
TheForks | 6 hours ago
I know a nurse with 20 years of experience who kept getting denied at a certain clinic when they would apply. Turns out the automatic filter the health region was using was rejecting their application due to some pedantic reason. They were hired instantly when they were finally able to reach out directly to someone in management.
While I understand employers don’t want to be swamped by resumes, I believe some of the automated methods used to filter out applicants is really having an affect on who is getting certain jobs.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 4 hours ago
It's a pretty shit situation across the board. With the advent of online job postings it's super easy to apply for anything - so each opening is met with literal thousands of applicants.
Similar but different - we had an entry level analyst role open earlier this year, it received 13k applications. It requires a degree in something finance related, prefers internship experience in the industry (as in we're looking for top candidates here), and requires in office.
Of the 13k, something like 15% didn't even have a high school diploma, half had no degree at all. None. Only around 13% had field relevant degrees (I don't think this is a dealbreaker, but for sorting resumes it is). Tons were out of state, tons were just pisspoor candidates (you're not getting a top demand analyst job if you had a 2.3 GPA at a commuter school buddy), etc.
So if you translate that to someone needing to manually screen what you'd have gotten is someone going through resumes in some order until they got ~10 people to interview, then throwing the rest of the stack in the trash.
The process is going to be unfair no matter what is done, it just depends on what flavor of unfair you'd like. The "bot misread my resume" unfair sucks, but so does the "I was 3,251 out of 13,752 in a stack of paper and the hiring rep got tired" version of unfair.
faelanae | 2 hours ago
I had one today like that. I'm looking for a software administrator, so why is someone with purely retail and construction experience applying? "Sir, this is a Wendy's"
RIP_Soulja_Slim | an hour ago
Yeah the whole ability to apply online has meant many people's unemployment tactic is literally to just sit at their computer and spam resumes.
We actually hired a kid for billing support that somehow got in the room with a group of college seniors I was talking to, they asked if I had advice around finding a position and he chimed in saying "just sit at your desk and apply to everything you see, all day until something hits, I applied to over a thousand jobs"
I was like no, please don't do that. This is fine if you just need "a job" but very poor advice if you want to build "a career".
xole | 3 hours ago
So the real AI apocalypse will start with incompetent HR people...
faelanae | 2 hours ago
I'm helping interview candidates for a (non-HC) job and got to get access to Paylocity, an HR interview portal. I realized fairly late in the process that the way applicants submit their resumes and information makes a HUGE difference in what the hiring managers see.
I felt like crap once I realized that I probably rejected some candidates that looked like they had submitted no information, but they had instead put everything into an uploaded PDF resume... which was on a different tab, so I didn't see that page initially.
FourScoreAndSept | 6 hours ago
Location? Because some locations just suck and even the unemployed won’t go to them until/unless desperate “Grapes of Wrath” times come
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Reminds me of someone years back bitching about how the unemployment figures were bullshit because they couldn't find a job in tech anywhere. Come to find out they live in some rural ass midwest town and refuse to leave but expect to step in to a remote six figure position out of school lol.
On Reddit, it's worth taking the default approach that the narrator is unreliable.
trossi | 6 hours ago
My relative is in a major metro area on the east coast, but that’s irrelevant. Nursing is probably the single most in demand profession throughout the country. Healthcare is consistently the biggest contributor to the jobs report numbers. If you can’t find a nursing job because you’re unwilling to leave Nowheresville, population 150, your unemployment is a choice.
FourScoreAndSept | 5 hours ago
It’s not irrelevant. I know PA markets that can’t find nurses (East Coast, but with a lot of real Appalachian type towns).
trossi | an hour ago
Sounds like you’re agreeing with me that nurses who “can’t find jobs” aren’t trying. They’re in demand everywhere.
Twisted_Cabbage | 6 hours ago
It's highly dependent on area. Rural areas in particular, are scaling back significantly. In other locations they struggle to find nurses who either want to work endless over time or they struggle to find people who only want to work part time.
Both things can be true.
trossi | 5 hours ago
If rural areas are scaling back hiring, fine, that’s valid , but it’s 2026. If you’re not willing to relocate for your career you’re not trying. I’m 40 and have relocated 4 times. The second half of your comment describes people who could have a job if they wanted it but are choosing not to.
aw-un | 5 hours ago
Heaven forbid someone not want to uproot their entire family for a job that they spoils be able to find nearby without needing to do that.
For instance, I own my home. With the market and economy the way it is right now, it would be the stupidest decision ever to move because it likely wouldn’t sell and now I’m either paying rent and a mortgage or two mortgages.
Cdub7791 | 3 hours ago
Not to mention, many (most?) households are dual income. Relocating for a job doesn't make a lot of sense if your spouse or partner has to lose their job to follow you.
IPissExcellentThrows | 5 hours ago
Same I'm very skeptical. I'm curious how wide of a net they're casting in their job search.
Jets237 | 6 hours ago
really surprised to hear that in nursing. Just went to a pinning ceremony last week and everyone seemed optimistic or already set
Swoly_Deadlift | 3 hours ago
Healthcare is only “thriving” if you’re a CNA or EMT willing to work for $17/hour.
Yendo124 | 3 hours ago
I work at walmart .making $20.23 and hour you are better off working here and that's very wrong
samwise141 | 7 hours ago
This cant be true. My cousins wife is a nurse and gets job offers around the country weekly. Or nurses are in high demand everywhere.
How_Do_You_Crash | 6 hours ago
Remember that there’s a huge difference between low level nursing in the Midwest or Southeast and OR or other specialized nursing in a major university hospital on the west coast or eastern seaboard.
For many nurses the goal is to get into one of these unionized hospitals where pay and total comp can easily be 3-4x that of someone working as a nurse in a care home in Florida.
It’s a diverse field with wildly different pay depending on geography and local politics
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
Honestly, Nursing is really the only profession where the person who went to a 12 month technical school and spends their days cleaning bed pans and setting IVs for 35k/yr shares a title with the six figure professionals who attained a four year or higher degree and serves as a direct physician support role.
Sure, there's LPN vs RN vs BSN vs NP vs DNP, but man everyone just calls themselves Nurse especially among the vocational/undergrad world - and those are very very different jobs.
Yo-Yo-Ha | 6 hours ago
I see the travel nurse deal being ABUSED. Since COVID they are working slightly away from ahome base to collect extra pay.
wubwubwubwubbins | 5 hours ago
It's almost like companies will actively try to underpay what the labor is worth. Traveling nurses during covid basically ripped the veil off of that.
But in all honesty, do keep in mind that traveling nurses have a good chance of getting paid due to the sheer fact that the employer doesn't have to pay for benefits, so their take home pay being 25-35% more just on that factor alone would mean equal pay (napkin math for a standard business puts benefits of an employee at 33% of the overall cost).
So...anything over that, and the hospital just has a hiring issue.
Yo-Yo-Ha | 54 minutes ago
Gotcha.
half_regard | 6 hours ago
How is working for agreed upon pay "abuse" ?
Yo-Yo-Ha | 6 hours ago
The end user. My payment to that institution.
IM_A_MUFFIN | 5 hours ago
Ah so your issue is with insurance and how that’s handled, not with someone being employed.
half_regard | 6 hours ago
very "muh taxes" rah rah energy
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Always remember when you're reading these comments on reddit around how impossible it is for someone to find a job - you never know who's on the other end of that keyboard.
Even during the tightest labor markets we've observed in generations there were people online saying finding a job in their field was impossible and everything must be a lie. More often than not this boils down to a skill gap issue that the poster is either unaware of or won't acknowledge.
gioraffe32 | 3 hours ago
Tell her to apply to the VA. My mom is a VA OR nurse and she's mentioned how they're constantly looking for more people. Lots of older nurses are starting to retire; my mom included.
DeliciousPangolin | 7 hours ago
The unemployment data has basically shown everything stagnant or tanking, except healthcare. Healthcare is hiring enough people to keep the overall numbers steady.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Marginally worse than that, healthcare has mostly been adding enough jobs to create breakeven - absent healthcare we're net negative jobs across the year. Even with healthcare we're likely net negative once birth/death adjustments are done.
4look4rd | 6 hours ago
My company has been on a hiring freeze for two years and reducing force through attrition rather than layoffs. This is why the tech market is so shit right now and young people don’t have a shot.
Market has been frozen since 2024, and it’s getting worse. The lay offs are in addition to the attrition.
IcyMaybe7594 | 2 hours ago
Same experience I have, yet you have people like RIP Soulja Slim saying how things are fine and this can't be true
Bucephalus970 | 50 minutes ago
And they post incessantly in every thread
USSMarauder | 7 hours ago
If you lose your 100K tech job and you start ubering or doordashing while you're searching for work, you're not unemployed anymore
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
There are metrics for part time due to economic reasons, which is where much of this may show up. You'd also see it show up in the earnings reports - as in if this is happening to a large degree that means aggregate earnings must go down. You've not really seen that yet.
Think of it in simple terms, let's say I have 10 people that all are programmers making 100k. Let's say one loses their job and stays unemployed, one loses their job and goes to work for doordash part time making 25k, and one loses their job but works full time for doordash making 50k/yr. and the other 7 are fine.
What I'd expect to see would be 10% unemployment, 20% u6, if this happens sufficiently I'd expect a drop in median wages as well.
Here's those current data sets:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
dyslexda | 5 hours ago
We have a stat for that: U6 unemployment. The trend over time hasn't diverged significantly from standard U3. It's comforting to pin economic woes to the part-time gig economy, but that's not backed up in the data.
bemenaker | 6 hours ago
You're underemployed and there is a stat to track that. But dipshit donnies cronies have been trying to hide all the real data.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
To be fair, that data is in the same place it has always been, Trump sucks but this isn't a Trump thing. Before Trump people complained that it was being hidden for other reasons, they said Obama was hiding it to make the economy seem better than it was, blah blah blah.
The reality is that people just don't look, and they presume something that doesn't make the top of a bolded headline is being hidden from them.
Deleted0S | 7 hours ago
Not only that, but since you usually create a business entity to do this the BLS sees you as an employer with employees.
psychohistorian8 | 6 hours ago
people are creating businesses to drive for doordash?
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
Some people do, yes. But that dude has no idea what he's talking about. The BLS birth death model has absolutely nothing to do with people forming LLCs or whatever to do rideshare or gig work.
The birth/death model works through statistical inference based on business deaths. Statistically speaking you can pretty easily infer new business formation/jobs from old business closings. There's a lag effect here, that's built in to the model (ARIMA for any stats nerds).
Basically, when a business disappears from the establishment survey (IE closes) the BLS does not treat those jobs as 100% lost. It uses historic instance and modeling to infer a given percentage of new jobs that arose after that closure, it then applies the ARIMA to ensure the appropriate lag and smoothing of jobs fluctuation is applied.
TLDR is it uses business closures to predict openings.
This has been historically very very accurate, but post covid business openings didn't quite behave the way that they had been over time, so the model began to over-shoot. The model was adjusted beginning this year, so presumably the current figures are more reflective of near term trends.
But that's significantly more robust and entirely different than the user above's suggestion that forming a business entity means the BLS starts recording you as an employer with employees lmfao.
Deleted0S | 6 hours ago
Yes. It separates personal assets from business ones. I've done taxes for quite a few people that do this.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
> but since you usually create a business entity to do this the BLS sees you as an employer with employees.
?????
Where on earth do you people get these ideas? That does not happen.
Deleted0S | 6 hours ago
It absolutely does. It's due to Birth-Death model errors.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
That is in no way how the birth/death model works or why it has had some inherent post covid inaccuracies lol.
Brother are you just making things up??
The birth/death model is a statistical model around business formation based on failure rates within small businesses.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ces/calculation.htm#business-births-and-deaths
Deleted0S | 6 hours ago
You're wrong and I'm not your brother.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
I just linked the page on methods, so your position is that the BLS is wrong about how the BLS' model works?
Come on my man, just once I wish a few people on this sub might choose trying to learn over trying to debate shit they don't understand lol.
thepopdog | 6 hours ago
Even worse: if you take on two part time jobs that counts as doubling your employment level. And if you just give up searching for long enough you don't count as unemployed anymore!
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
This is not how employment reports work lmaoooo
People in this thread just wholesale making things up
Dry-Interaction-1246 | 5 hours ago
GOP loves this one simple trick
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Tech is one of those things that tons of people on reddit use as some sort of benchmark because it's over-represented here, but it's not that big in terms of overall employment.
Core tech work has a bit under 10MM total employees, or about 5.8% of the population. 10% unemployment in tech, IE 1 in every 10 of your friends being fully unemployed, would result in a 0.6% shift in unemployment.
But yet every thread on unemployment has top comments from people in tech saying a guy they know got laid off so these numbers must be bullshit lol.
mottledmussel | 6 hours ago
Reddit is really wonky like that. It seems like everybody is earning more than $400,000 or less than $25,000, with hardly anyone in-between.
Tilt_2Live | 3 hours ago
Yeah thats why social media is awful for mental health. These people just get upvoted to the top since it stands out, when it doesnt actually reflect reality.
pigvwu | an hour ago
Also reporting bias. How many people would bother reporting that they and everyone they know remains employed? Well, that's true for me, but I don't really feel the need to say so all the time. There's one friend who did get laid off, but he ended up finding another job at the same company.
gmr548 | 6 hours ago
There are certain industries worse off and tech is one of them
Jerome_Eugene_Morrow | 6 hours ago
Is there specific reporting that shows this? Just curious for more information, not refuting at all.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
It's a bit of a mixed bag, unemployment rates for an average across the year can be compiled for a given job - see here: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat25b.htm
But because someone can lose a job as programmer then immediately get one tomorrow as a QA tester, higher frequency data is difficult.
The best thing to look at is raw jobs growth by industry: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
Here you can see the computer systems category is shrinking, as in there's less jobs there today than a year ago. So that's pretty noteworthy.
It's not really worth pushing back on the above comments, people gonna confirmation bias no matter what, but almost all of that is attributed to someone's very local experience being one thing and them not being able to comprehend that their friends in tech seeing layoffs does not automatically mean the entire 170MM people in the labor pool are experiencing the same.
weristjonsnow | 6 hours ago
Tech has been hit uniquely hard with ai
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
Well that and poor management choices post covid. If you trace out tech firm workforce growth most of theones doing large layoffs are simply resetting back to the staffing levels they'd be at if they experienced normalized growth from 2019-2026.
Most of these firms grossly overhired in 2021-2022, and are now realizing the AI + significant excess employees is forcing a reckoning.
Also of note - almost none of these firms are doing layoffs for economic reasons, they're all profitable and FCF positive. It's not "let's save the company because the economy is failing" layoffs, it's "we have a more efficient tool and too many people, let's juice profits" layoffs.
DeliciousPangolin | 13 minutes ago
I agree, and I also suspect that few if any of the layoffs are genuinely prompted by AI. The markets just eat it up if you claim that your AI is so efficient that you can lay off thousands of employees, instead of admitting that you just overhired during Covid and need the money for datacenters.
IPissExcellentThrows | 5 hours ago
The data clearly say layoffs are happening largely in the tech sector though. This isn't a disconnect from the data.
Wurm42 | 6 hours ago
Agreed, the unemployment I see out in the world feels substantially higher than the numbers that are being reported.
You have to wonder how reliable the numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics are these days.
Cav_vaC | 4 hours ago
Or you don’t know a statistically representative sample of people
DarkExecutor | 6 hours ago
That's because you work in tech though
AllenIll | 5 hours ago
> The unemployment data has been a fascinating disconnect.
I feel like there is a book, long form journalism, or some manner of deep level study that needs to be applied to the bigger cultural trend that is at work here: the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world. It's not just with government data. It's social media posts, product reviews, commodity & stock prices, media reports, and on and on. And obviously, AI is only exacerbating this trend.
Of course this disconnect has always existed, but digital platforms, and AI are now taking it to whole new levels in terms of fidelity and reach. You could just call it propaganda, to some extent, but the ubiquity of this trend, in terms of it touching so many things now, genuinely seems like something not seen before.
This trend seems to be especially good at thwarting our collective intelligence in working towards the truth. The truth that is often discovered by way of coordinated and uncoordinated collective action. And there's a name for it. At least for the social psychology aspect of it; it's called pluralistic ignorance (from Wikipedia):
> In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (also known as a collective illusion) is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. In this phenomenon, most people in a group may go along with a view they do not hold because they think, incorrectly, that most other people in the group hold it. Pluralistic ignorance encompasses situations in which a minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position, or the majority position is wrongly perceived to be a minority position.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
> the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world. It's not just with government data.
I mean, every economist in the field today will tell you that government data is very accurate, even the most liberal ones who spend hours a day ranting about Trump.
The issue isn't that you're being lied to, it's that you're lying to yourself.
AllenIll | 5 hours ago
Yeah government buddy, I think I'm going to go with I.F. Stone on this one:
> "All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed." > > Stone, who famously published his own independent investigative newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly from 1953 to 1971, dedicated his career to digging through official government documents to expose contradictions and falsehoods, particularly regarding foreign policy, civil liberties, and the Vietnam War. His core philosophy was that a journalist's default stance toward official state pronouncements should always be skeptical.
Edit: Damn, bond market unrest really brings out the perception management warriors. It says a lot about what they're really worried about. I haven't seen a comment section like this on Reddit since the Nord Stream pipeline got blown up.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
> I.F. Stone
Ahhh yes, well you can go with a guy who wrote about vietnam and just nonsensically extract that to economics because it fits your worldview - I'll go with economists who use this data every day. Whos to really say here, amirite?
Here's a good few quotes, if ya like quotes and all that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1s9o101/private_employers_added_62000_jobs_in_march/odskf92/
>His core philosophy was that a journalist's default stance toward official state pronouncements should always be skeptical.
Skepticism is fine, but you're not being skeptical. You're dismissing verified information that you don't like under the guise of skepticism. This is the same thing climate denialists do.
dyslexda | 5 hours ago
> the increasing disconnect between the real world and what we are shown/told about the world.
It's actually pretty easy: people are terrible at recognizing that their anecdotal experience doesn't extrapolate to everyone. People are also terrible at looking at anecdotal experiences collectively, instead just focusing on that which reinforces their internal conceptions (you might know five people out of work, but you're ignoring the 95 people that are fully employed). This is exacerbated by how siloed "news" sources have become. Know a few people out of work, and see on TikTok that others are out of work? Then aggregate statistics be damned, the economy must be awful, right?
htopconspiracytheory | 4 hours ago
> Maybe there are certain industries that are just way worse off than the average, but it feels out of sync with the reporting.
For a lot of 2025, most sectors were cutting jobs (with tech as the biggest by percentage cut in this group) while healthcare was hiring at a clip that covered all the losses in other sectors.
It was crazy to watch happen, I can't find enough people to hire while friends in other industries are looking for work left and right.
tracenator03 | 3 hours ago
I mean the headline numbers for unemployment have always been detached from reality at some level, but now we've got Uber, Doordash, Lyft, etc. the number of people driving for those gig jobs has dramatically increased over the past few years. If you're unemployed and looking for a job but do some doordashing in the meantime you are considered fully employed.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
"If you have a job they count you as having a job"
yes, this is true.
>considered fully employed.
No.
U6 exists, and is within the same relation to all other employment metrics that it always has been. The narrative that unemployment figures are wrong because of gig work is easily dismissed the second one learns how unemployment figures work.
BTW - this is CPS based data - people would mark if they were doing gig work for economic reasons. They're not.
tracenator03 | 2 hours ago
I know U6 exists, but U6 isn't used for headlines. Only people knowledgeable enough to understand that and look it up will ever see the U6 number.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 2 hours ago
So your gripe is that because you're not knowledgeable enough then the numbers are misleading? Surely personal responsibility couldn't be a factor here?
Lightoscope | 3 hours ago
The numbers aren’t wrong, that implies an error. They’re a complete fabrication.
faelanae | 2 hours ago
my theory is that a number of tech workers are still living off of savings/stock options/investments. The pain isn't fully-realized yet.
guachi01 | an hour ago
>I work in tech
There's your answer. Tech employment has been poor. Health care is where the job growth is.
ParadoxicallyZeno | 4 hours ago
don't worry, i'll say it: the numbers are wrong
colcardaki | 7 hours ago
If you dig into the numbers, the “good” jobs are in deep recession and being replaced largely by shit jobs in warehouses, elder care, retail, etc. the overall numbers remain steady, but the types of employment tell a different story.
polar_nopposite | 7 hours ago
Don't forget hundreds of thousands of new "ghost workers" doing gig contracts for AI training and RLHF.
Playingwithmyrod | 6 hours ago
Yea healthcare is growing everything else is shitting the bed. But what counts as healthcare is not just doctors and nurses so there’s a lot of low level administrative jobs on that list too that don’t really pay well.
Straight_Document_89 | 7 hours ago
Let’s not forget about white collar jobs being killed for shitty blue collar jobs that pay quite a bit less and the working environment is horrible.
TheAmorphous | 7 hours ago
But we NEED those 50k coal mining jobs in one remote state!
DoubleJumps | 4 hours ago
I've been seeing White collar jobs in my industry ship the last year to become just utterly terrible themselves.
Jobs that we're hiring at $100,000 last year might be hiring at $75-80k this year, with either less benefits or on contract.
memphisjones | 6 hours ago
I would say at the most, the data is misleading. If you break down which industry is hiring and not hiring, it shows how lopsided the job market is.
FeelingPixely | 7 hours ago
That's because people no longer qualify as "unemployed" after a year.
Anyone who's been jobless and looking for a full-time position since the layoffs starting in 2024, including those who only get irregular or regular contract work, do not factor into the percentage. Only the last 12mo.
Cav_vaC | 4 hours ago
There are many unemployment rates, some account for all those things, and the trends are similar to the usual given number
gmr548 | 6 hours ago
It’s not that it’s inaccurate, it’s that the top line number is a blend of healthcare and AI capex hiring and every other sector either treading water or shedding jobs. And so an individual’s perspective is very different depending on their line of work.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
Also, the labor force has shrunk a bit with considerable deportations, this is allowing for more job losses with a maintained unemployment rate.
coweatyou | 5 hours ago
Real wage rate dropped by .5% in March but real weekly earnings only dropped by .2% because people worked more hours. Yearly decrease was .02%. So people are working more for roughly the same amount of money while debt is skyrocketing and now interest rates on that debt are going up, which matches what I think most average people think about the economy. The financial markets are only catching up with this reality now.
ReallyTeddyRoosevelt | 6 hours ago
You shouldn't be in this sub if you think that. Trump would mess with the data but he can't without 100,000 economists knowing it. I can't believe this conspiracy theory is still around. Go to Ask Economists if you don't believe me or google.
I can't get over why reddit feels the need to make up provably wrong conspiray theories. Do you not think Trump is doing enough heinous things we can just stick to facts?
terminallyonlineweeb | 3 hours ago
Is howmoneyworks a good YouTube channel for learning? I keep seeing their videos pop up in my feed like this one https://youtu.be/3UO-gl-N6rY?si=BaIOOmWWMlkVkzi8
carI_marks | 6 hours ago
Ok, pill me on this one. I can google it, but my googling shows that gig workers are counted as employed by the BLS. So if I'm unemployed but making $200 a week delivering takeout to supplement my unemployment, how would that impact the stats?
dyslexda | 5 hours ago
U6 unemployment, which doesn't diverge basically at all from U3 headline unemployment.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
> Ok, pill me on this one. I can google it, but my googling shows that gig workers are counted as employed by the BLS.
Unemployment rates are based on the current population survey - so it's actual responses from actual people talking about their employment situation.
Gig work fits squarely in to the "I'm part time for economic reasons" category (there's actually a lot of questions that get you here, it's very accurate)
This is what forms the U6 unemployment rate, which is no more elevated relative to U3 than it ever has been.
Basically, the idea that gig work is what's masking the reality of job losses from the public is entirely coming from people who either don't understand how these reports work, or people who are deliberately lying to you. Sometimes hard to tell the difference.
beefcake105 | 6 hours ago
I apologize if this came off as a conspiracy. Like @memphisjones said, it’s misleading. I don’t think the data is showing all of the colors on the color wheel if that makes sense.
I’m sure A LOT of people are doing gig style work to make ends meet. Many people are comparing today’s economy with the GR and .com era’s, which is interesting because back then, we didn’t have Amazon, Uber, Uber Eats, Door Dash, OF, Draft Kings, crypto, etc. Not to mention the people with more than one job.
It appears the career positions have evaporated and are continuing to do so. The positions that can support a household, benefits package, etc.
dyslexda | 5 hours ago
U6 unemployment counts part time that seeks full time, and it hasn't diverged significantly from U3 headline rate. Like, overlay those two lines and tell me if you can see a difference today vs the late 90s and early 2000s before the gig economy.
Fun_Magician72 | 6 hours ago
"Oh you door dash? EMPLOYED"
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
U6 exists, don't be ridiculous.
filmguy36 | 6 hours ago
Isn’t unemployment data based on who’s collecting unemployment? I think so many people have run their course on benefits and have dropped off the rolls.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
No, it's based on the current population survey. It has nothing to do with administered benefits, there's tons of situations where one can be unemployed and not qualify for unemployment benefits.
filmguy36 | 3 hours ago
Thanks for the correction👍
an_agreeing_dothraki | 2 hours ago
the short version is that they're measuring the wrong thing with a bad instrument. The data they have, for how and what they measure it hasn't been tampered with.
it's just useless.
Beneficial_Link_8083 | 6 hours ago
Unemployment data has never been accurate in the US. It's always been "are you unemployed and actively looking for work?" and that's it. If you're underemployed or you've given up finding anything then you don't count.
dyslexda | 5 hours ago
U6 unemployment is what you're claiming doesn't exist
Cav_vaC | 4 hours ago
That’s not true
Swoly_Deadlift | 3 hours ago
Unemployment data is effectively worthless today when anyone with a car or even a bicycle can get a “job” as a rideshare or delivery driver. When thousands of people with college degrees are “working” driving for DoorDash, that probably shouldn’t be counted as an indicator of a healthy economy.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
It's not, please learn how these reports work lmfao
Cmd_WillRiker | 6 hours ago
The problem with the stock market is earnings reports keep showing revenue growth. It doesn't matter what inflation rates look like if revenues and profits keep going up.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
ding ding ding ding ding
So so many people here get all twisted up because the market isn't reacting to things they think are bad. Markets are here for one thing - to provide a present value on the discounted down future expected cashflows of corporate america. So long as those cashflows look good, so do markets.
Several-Action-4043 | 4 hours ago
> So long as those cashflows look good
And they look good because a few companies are just passing a trillion dollars between themselves to make it look like cash flow. The AI bubble will pop eventually.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
Ehhh, underlying cashflows are very strong basically across the board. Rather than reading headlines on reddit, look at S&P earnings reports.
Sightline | 3 hours ago
>provide a present value on the discounted down future expected cashflows of corporate america
That's hilarious, you actually believe that's what the market is for?
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
This is very well supported in actual research on market efficiency, Cochrane's research for instance attributes almost all volatility to shifts in the discounted rate, as observed via proxy mechanisms, and observes a very constant set of cashflow expectations built in to asset values across time. But IDK if he knows what he's talking about, he was just the head of asset pricing for NBER or whatever.
It's interesting how often people reject learning something with just the laziest of remarks.
Technical_Ladder_618 | 6 hours ago
Of course, inflation means that price that goods are sold at increase, which would naturally mean revenue for companies would increase as well. That’s why they say hold equities when there is inflation, since stocks always go up (in nominal terms) during periods of high inflation.
FUSe | 7 hours ago
If Warsh comes in and reduces the fed balance sheet, that’s just going to make the yields even higher I think.
turb0_encapsulator | 6 hours ago
there's really no way Warsh can do what Trump wants him to do without destroying the economy. The guy got he wanted, which is the job from hell. Good luck, asshole.
ETsUncle | 6 hours ago
>There's really no way Warsh can do what Trump wants him to do
>without destroying the economy.
Buddy, do I have some news for you
FUSe | 6 hours ago
That’s by design.
When the economy is garbage, the fed will lower rates. (Campaign promise kept)
When everyone is foreclosing their homes, the home prices will lower (another campaign promise kept)
All the hedge funds and billionaires can buy assets for cheap and get wealthier. (Probably another campaign promise to the private donors kept)
It’s basically monkey’s paw politics :)
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 6 hours ago
Warsh doesn't want to do what Trump wants him to do, people gotta listen to that hearing and read his WSJ opeds. Dude is a hawk that's wearing like a fingerpainted dove mask lol.
Were_all_dead_anyhow | 5 hours ago
Honestly, who knows; taking them on their word doesn't really mean much in Trump circles.
On one hand, Warsh has been a hawk, and then on the other hand, people often connected to Trump do things that benefit themselves or their in-group, and lately that has been at detriment of the US.
Personally, Warsh's connection to the Lauder family and their dealings with the Epstein crowd via MegaGroup is grounds enough for skepticism. Birds-of-a-feather and all that. There are plenty of hawks to choose from, but Warsh was specifically chosen.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
I mean, it's not just his word as of late - you can go back decades looking at his writing and stances. He's remarkably consistent, if perhaps a bit deliberate in how he frames things and what words he excludes.
huangsede69 | 5 hours ago
Glad to see someone else can read between the lines.
However while I do think Warsh is committed to offloading the entire balance sheet and genuinely reversing the debt trends, I do think it's possible he will also pursue the "inflate the debt away" strategy. Obviously those are somewhat in tension or one will have to come first.
Ultimately, he's going to fail because all of this requires Congress to do their job and not approve $1T deifcits annually. But I suppose genuine regime change at Fed could even alter that landscape.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 4 hours ago
Yeah, which is in itself another form of tightening. But yeah Warsh has been a critic of the balance sheet from day 1, which is honestly far more concerning to me than rate policy. Pull liquidity out of the system and you might start seeing all sorts of credit crunch issues.
DeliciousPangolin | 8 minutes ago
It doesn't matter what he personally believes; there's zero chance he'd have been nominated without agreeing to kiss the ring. He will push for lower rates despite knowing how stupid that would be, because he's a craven opportunist who will be unimaginably wealthy regardless of how badly his actions affect others.
Fortunately, there are plenty of other governors who will bail him out by refusing to do something patently idiotic.
whiskey_bud | 5 hours ago
He doesn’t have the power as Fed chair to do this. He’s one of 12 votes on the FOMC. And the other Trump sycophant on the FOMC actually had to resign to make room for Warsh, since Powell chose to stay on. Warsh can make a lot of noise but his ability to actually set policy unilaterally is basically zero.
ClassIINav | 7 hours ago
Re: Stock market - I think the markets being at ATH's is because inflation is ginning up most company's numbers. If prices go up a company's revenues and income also go up. For now it seems that demand is absorbing the price increases but that may not last for long. If consumers get tapped out or increasingly lose their jobs eventually sales will drop.
2021-2022 saw really rapid inflation as well but it corresponded with a vast labor shortage and some of the fastest wage increases ever seen. So while prices shot up so did the amount of money in people's pockets. 2026 however doesn't appear to have that advantage.
So the bear market is likely going to lag an inflation spike as consumers are likely begrudgingly absorbing price increases for now but long term spending habits will change.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 7 hours ago
> A few months ago, markets were confident about rate cuts. Now with inflation staying sticky, oil above $100 because of the Iran situation, and Treasury yields pushing toward multi-year highs, traders are starting to price in higher for longer again.
I mean, this happens all the time.
You can set yourself a reminder to come back to this comment in 6 months and see it again - conditions change, new data comes out, markets adjust pricing based on those things.
The Iran war has created a major inflation catalyst that wasn't forseen at the beginning of the year, furthermore tariff driven inflation has started to creep in to core measures.
The labor market deterioration has actually slowed, which is generally a good thing but is bad for inflation as it means waning demand won't offset price pressures elsewhere.
weluckyfew | 6 hours ago
No offense to you, but I hate that people use phrases like "the Iran situation". It's because of an unprovoked and unnecessary aggressive war started by an impulsive idiot.
Inflation during Biden was global and had a lot of intractable causes. Inflation right now is because of the irrational actions of one man.
apeksiao | 6 hours ago
He says that because he is a bot with comments generated by ChatGPT.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
I say it a lot because I'm used to using neutral language to avoid having people in professional settings begin dismissing the information being conveyed due to some perception of political bias.
That person may be a bot, they look like one, but the use of neutral language just as often denotes a person who's used to speaking in professional settings rather than just writing comments on reddit.
OddlyFactual1512 | 6 hours ago
>Bond market is basically forcing everyone to rethink the entire 2026 narrative
It's the other war around. Yields are up due to current expectations.
iyamwhatiyam8000 | 6 hours ago
A massive global supply shock at the end of a record setting boom has accelerated the inevitable turning of the boom-bust cycle.
Mounting inflationary pressures at the end of a boom cycle has preceded all but one US economic recessions. Central banks will raise interest rates until demand subsides.
hasuchobe | 6 hours ago
I keep hearing the term markets are pricing in X rate cuts. My impression is this is similar to implied move in options. Since spy kept going up at a high rate, the movement seemed to imply some number of rate cuts, not that participants actually expect a rate cut. Clearly if you look at the index there's no market that needs rescuing via rate cut. And yes, I understand the lower part of the K economy is getting bashed in. But from an index perspective, everything is "fine".
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 5 hours ago
> I keep hearing the term markets are pricing in X rate cuts. My impression is this is similar to implied move in options.
I'm presuming you're unfamiliar here but no that's not the case.
Markets pricing in a given rate movement is directly referring to how fed funds futures are priced, those futures are hedging tools used by banks, insurers, etc to appropriately navigate shifting rate landscapes and their impact on the institutional portfolios.
FFR futures are very efficient, to the point where the Fed uses them as a benchmark to determine if it's communication policy is accurate.
CME actually publishes a mathematical representation of the current FFR futures pricing showing the exact implied probabilities of a given rate level at a given point in time.
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch-tool.html?redirect=/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to-fomc.html
For instance, if you navigate to the tab for Dec 26 you'll see that currently futures are priced with the current expectation that there is approximately a 39% chance rates remain the same, a 42% chance we have a 25bps rate hike, and the remaining probability being two hikes or more.
hasuchobe | 2 hours ago
Thanks for the clarification! Yes I was merely guessing.
LevelKaleidoscope739 | 5 hours ago
Thing is, Housing prices will still go higher despite higher interest rates and valuations as well due to corporations still killing earnings. Our financial system is almost un breakable at this point
scuddlebud | 4 hours ago
As long as billionaires and algos can provide the liquidity the market won't fall. It will remain inflated and overvalued.
sleeplessinreno | 3 hours ago
And yet my HYSA just did another rate cut. Waiting for life situations to slow down so I can see what’s available and roll it into a better account. I’m sure the banks are giggling and rubbing their hands together about it as we speak.
Yendo124 | 3 hours ago
Man even in peak covid 2022 I predicted our entire country is doomed. Mainly because I saw the numbers and knew cutting or raising rates wont work anymore we dug our debt hole so deep we cant get out and we will get buried and dissolve as a nation. Im ready for it though. We used to be able to raise rates to get out but back when Volker raised it to 20% we had 176% more debt to annual taxes which was bad enough now we have over 780% debt over annual tax revenue. So back then we were pretty much almost 2 years of taxes in debt now we are almost 8 years behind in debt.
NavyDean | 3 hours ago
US FED Chair Warsh believes in Trimmed Median PCE.
For April, this means an inflation of 2.8% instead of 8.2% due to CPI items trimmed out of the report.
He has indicated that he wants rate cuts to happen as they've achieved their inflation goal of "below 3%".
They are cutting rates whether its a good thing or a bad thing (mostly bad).
spaculoso | an hour ago
Thank you for giving me something useful, and non-political, to scroll to. Really tired of every thread, where I could learn something and hear what other people are thinking, be hijacked.
I'll be interested to find out where all of this is heading. Last year, gold was up as faith in the dollar weakened, and national banks bought gold. Then Warsh's name was floated and metals got scared. Then Iran started, oil crept up, and the world fled back to the dollar. Now rates are heading up worryingly, and metals have downward pressure. Meanwhile, everything is expensive, even for middle class, let alone broke people.
Basic_Butterscotch | 10 minutes ago
Stocks are up because people are rightly assuming we’re going to have a prolonged period of high inflation and the only way to protect yourself from that is to be in assets.
I’d love to hear an argument for how the government is going to deal with $40 trillion in debt other than inflating it away.
falafalful | 5 hours ago
👋 Hi Claude! Fancy running into you here.
RIP_Soulja_Slim | 3 hours ago
IDK why this is downvoted, that's 100% an AI bot lol.
wormtheology | 7 hours ago
Yield percentages don’t matter when the domestic purchasing power of the US Dollar takes a backseat to the integrity of the bond market. Inflation and debasement are preferable to the US missing an interest payment. Ask yourself what President Trump and his oligarch friends would rather advocate for: 4-8% YoY inflation due to the war or a temporary freeze in the Treasury markets due to panic and fear of the US’ ability not to make a payment?
We’re going to monetize the fuck out of the debt, and Kevin Warsh will do everything in his power to assist.
CheetahDry8318 | 6 hours ago
Do you believe we would see mega hike in interest rates like the 90's, like 10%+?
Mirageswirl | 6 hours ago
I suspect the Trump Fed won’t try to fight inflation. They will eventually repress high interest rates with rate cuts and QE and tank the currency.
Foolgazi | 5 hours ago
Yep, people in Trump’s orbit have said since day 1 they plan to devalue the USD.
lemonylol | 4 hours ago
If Trump's presidential history has taught us anything, it is that there is some card(s) they have that no armchair expert online is even aware of because it hasn't trended in the news for the past 15 years for them to even know that they needed to be experts on it. There will be some strategy they employ that hasn't been used in x years that only actual economists are aware of existing. I assure you, reddit will be the very last to find out it's a thing that's already available. People who follow politics on social media try their best to make it a story of cliffhangers when it's really not, it's just performed that way to the ignorant.
jjwhitaker | 20 minutes ago
The convicted fraud and con man will make stuff up and fail again? I think that's what this paragraph of faith based nonsense is trying to say.
wormtheology | 6 hours ago
Not at all. The market can barely stomach the idea of a 100 BPS hike now. Even so, Kevin Warsh isn’t going to be the guy that’s going to do it or vote in favor of it. The good thing is idiots like Stephen Miran get flushed out out of the board. That’s one less noisome political hack speaking.
Consistent_Laziness | 3 hours ago
Bet money warsh becomes a hawk when Trump is gone
CheetahDry8318 | 5 hours ago
I appreciate your input. I am just learning this stuff, how are normal investors mitigating for this? Park cash, buy gold?
wormtheology | 5 hours ago
Normal investors, meaning an American that works 40 hours a week and has no care in the world about what the Fed or the Treasury are doing, is not playing individual stocks or options in the market. They are DCA’ing automatically with every paycheck and throwing them into retirement investment vehicles like 401ks, ROTH IRAs, etc. Money Markets and CDs too.
Your best play? Build up a 5-6 month emergency savings, utilize all of your benefits and company/government match, and let the professionals worry about it. You can’t outmaneuver and outmatch a market where a tweet can plunge it at any moment. Playing this to the downside? Forget about it. Bears get murdered without a fair degree of luck.
Gold isn’t a bad idea, but I mean, gold isn’t something you buy to speculate for YoY gains. You buy gold to retain value against inflation and the American markets’ status quo of “up and to the right.” If you’re a worker I described above, just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t listen to gold bugs who swear it’s going to 15k in the next 5-10 years. It’ll move at a very boring pace in my humble opinion.
lemonylol | 4 hours ago
They just wait.
lemonylol | 4 hours ago
That's what people said was "guaranteed" in 2022, because "interest rates are way too low and should be doubt digit normally". Nobody knows shit and everybody tries to "manifest" the reality of the market that will somehow benefit their position. If it didn't happen then or during COVID, it is very unlikely to happen unless there is a full super power total war scenario. A lot of people conveniently don't like to consider that every recession a nation goes through is learned from, which is why the world has not seen a first world depression in nearly 100 years.
a_library_socialist | 3 hours ago
I don't think you can. If you increase rates, you're increasing the interest the government is paying out. That's already a huge amount of the budget.
And there's probably nowhere to actually cut in the current political situation that won't just make the problem worse. Because even if you go into a recession, you're going to see outlays increase and receipts dry up.
So if you can't cut to balance, and you raise rates, you're just printing money by another path.
lemonylol | 4 hours ago
Were you not following what happened two years ago right after "Liberation Day"? You don't remember the bond yield rising was the singular thing that had him call back a bunch of tariffs, especially on China once they squeezed?
s48L55 | 4 hours ago
One year ago.
wormtheology | 4 hours ago
Bond yields rising weren’t the singular thing that made President Trump tone down the rhetoric on the trade war. There were a wide variety of other factors. Even still, our bond yields now are higher than they were on Liberation Day, and the macro looks considerably messier now. You’re acting like the US would rather throw up their hands and say “nah it’s over” as opposed to minting the cash they need in order to pay bond holders. The US would rather have entrenched, elevated inflation than let the bond market grind to a halt.
lemonylol | 3 hours ago
Look at the timing, the minute bond yields began to rise he lowered the tariffs on China.
Also why would you look at the bond yields on Liberation Day before they even affected anyone?
wormtheology | 3 hours ago
Because there are more macroeconomic and political factors to take into consideration over bond yields. Bond yields are not the sole contributor for why President Trump toned down the trade war. I’m telling you that people who are flush with cash, assets, and real estate do not give a singular fuck about how high bond yields get because at the end of the day, up and to the right is the American financial system’s status quo/default. They will pay. There is no scenario where yields aren’t paid out to bond holders. If there is no money, then money will be created to fulfill the status quo.
Ask yourself this question. Do we unironically believe that people aren’t going to shovel their cash and back up the truck into bonds when they pay out higher than what they pay now? Domestic bondholders don’t mind laying in the cut and buying a 30 year Treasury to collect 5%. How about 7%? The same deal. The Haves are not concerned with any of this because they know the Fed and the US Treasury have their back and will pay out. Defaulting is simply not an option lest it opens up a huge political can of worms, which is something you cannot print your way out of.
entered_bubble_50 | an hour ago
It's a lot harder to end the Iran war than it was to roll back tarrifs. All he had to do wend the tarrifs was write a tweet. The strait of Hormuz isn't going to reopen until Iran gets what it wants. And Trump can't give them it without looking like a fool, even to his base.
a_library_socialist | 3 hours ago
Was gonna say, this can't really work with rolling over the massive debt.
NotAnotherEmpire | 6 hours ago
If the US yields were priced based on objective factors like debt load and budget seriousness, they would be much higher.
This is a risky situation.
theykilledken | 6 hours ago
They are based on objectively insane demand for the us sovereign debt.
It is a direct result of the reserve currency status if us dollar. If everyone wants to hold dollar reserves, how else do you satisfy the demand other than by issuing more debt?
NotAnotherEmpire | 5 hours ago
But how desirable is that dollar if it's heading for a fiscal crisis due to inadequate tax policy?
The assumption is that none of the US budgetary habits or political problems (antidemocratic remarks from Trump, Federal reserve demands, broken budget system mechanics in Congress etc.) will actually impact ability to pay bills when it comes down to it. People don't necessarily have to continue to believe this, and like most heavy debt that can become self-fulfilling quickly.
Gamer_Grease | 4 hours ago
Truthfully, we have a lot of rope left on the debt. This can go on for decades more, which is just a bit farther out than anyone powerful in the world is thinking about.
A key factor is that most US sovereign debt is held by citizens who are very happy with it as a financial asset.
FulgoresFolly | 4 hours ago
>But how desirable is that dollar if it's heading for a fiscal crisis due to inadequate tax policy?
The problem for the rest of the world is that this applies to... pretty much every other major currency in circulation.
So while it's great to point out risks to the position of the USD, the reserve status isn't going to change so long as it's the healthiest horse at the glue factory.
theykilledken | 4 hours ago
I don't see a huge amount of debt as apocalyptic. The British empire ran up a colossal amounts of debts prior to and then during the time when pound sterling was a global reserve currency. They lost that status in the xx century and while the loss was painful it wasn't mad max-like. They got over it. And so will the Americans if the dollar is to lose global reserve currency status.
My point was that the reserve currency status, while nice in the sense that it entitles the country in question to hoover up everyone else's production surplus in a form of a lot of cheap imported goods is at the same a sort of a curse. The curse being, no matter how fiscally conservative you want to be, you'll end up racking huge amounts of sovereign debt to offset the money you print for others to buy and hold.
But then again, if the Brits managed to wean off the curse without so much turmoil as to lose the monarchy, I'm sure the yanks have a chance to cushion the impact as well.
entered_bubble_50 | an hour ago
> The British empire ran up a colossal amounts of debts prior to and then during the time when pound sterling was a global reserve currency. They lost that status in the xx century and while the loss was painful it wasn't mad max-like. They got over it
Maybe from the perspective of 60 years hence it doesn't feel like a big deal, but it sure as hell was for a time.
The UK was so heavily indebted after WW2, we had to introduce bread rationing. Our economy took a full 20 years to recover. And that was a time when our demographics were far better. A larger proportion of the population was of working age, and each generation was larger than the last. Paying down debt in those circumstances is relatively straightforward.
And of course, we did it by having 95% tax rates. The American oligarchy has an epileptic seizure when you suggest a 1% wealth tax.
The US debt pile is a huge problem, and it's not going through be dealt with until there's a crisis.
jjwhitaker | 10 minutes ago
VE day was May 8th 1945.
The UK ended chocolate and sweets rationing on February 5th 1953.
Almost 8 years. And that was with the Anglo-American loan made to the United Kingdom by the United States on 15 July 1946. The loan helped keep the British economy afloat after the Second World War and amounted to some $62 billion in 2025 dollars at a 2% interest rate, plus about $20Bil from Canada.
Through the Marshall plan (some $137bil in 2025 dollars), that and much more was provided by the US without repayment.
Which nation will bail out the US using the next reserve currency?
jjwhitaker | 17 minutes ago
They lost that status and took 10 years post WW2 to escape rationing, after their empire collapsed.
The US is headed toward a generational recession (again) brought to you by the GOP (again). This time, China is poised to take over soft power roles and continue on like nothing happened across the pacific.
The Potsdam Conference set the stage for US manufacturing to power us into the rest of the 20th century backed by high taxes and investment in science, education, infrastructure, and more. Today a shell of that remains.
Own_Pop_9711 | 2 hours ago
Why don't you cite some first world sovereign debt with similar characteristics and higher yield? Or is that actually kind of tough?
LiminalSapien | 6 hours ago
I think this is the bond market pointing out that the equity market, through things like buybacks, circular investment, reliance on wartime economy, and ultimately the valuation of companies on things that don't correlate to fundamentals is becoming untenable.
I also think the powers that be know this and that's why you're seeing a big push in washington to do away with quarterly reporting.
Upstairs_Baby8424 | 5 hours ago
The Trump admin is plundering everything they can before it falls apart. This is also why companies are laying everyone off because of “AI”. If they believed in future growth they’d see AI as a productivity tool.
But they don’t believe in future growth. They want to lay off the masses and use AI to keep the lights on while they get their parachutes ready.
a_library_socialist | 3 hours ago
yeah, we're well past stripping copper wire, and now they're just pulling out the zinc pipes of the US
entered_bubble_50 | an hour ago
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't that lower yields? If there is concern the stock market is nonsense, wouldn't investors pivot towards bonds, and thereby lower yields? I'm certainly thinking of pivoting towards a more bond heavy portfolio.
LiminalSapien | an hour ago
Bond yields have an inverse relationship with bond prices. If bond yields are going up it's because people are selling them thereby driving bond prices down. My hypothesis is that this selling of long term treasuries is because investors, the main purchasers of long term treasuries, have no confidence in the long term economic progress of the US, thereby highlighting the disconnect between the bond market, which is going down on a long term time horizon, and the equities markets, which seem to have been going up, regardless of the large amount of financial data that says we should have had a substantial correction in the equity markets for some time now.
Also, don't pardon your ignorance, this is reddit, we're all ignorant. Just don't defend or support it.
Status_Unknowable8 | 7 hours ago
I assume higher bond yields like this indicate lack of confidence in short term investing - like investors know the market is bad so they park their cash long term instead? Is that correct? It's driving up mortgage rates which are already too high with the bloated housing prices.
How can the Fed cool inflation by raising rates yet aim to decrease long term bond yields to then encourage economic investment in the present?
datums | 6 hours ago
You've got it backwards.
Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions. So when yeilds are going up, it means people are avoiding those bonds. So all things being equal (which they never are), demand for 30 year US treasuries is the lowest it's been since the 2007 financial crisis.
CornerOne238 | 6 hours ago
Exactly. Nobody wants to buy fixed income when expected inflation is going to erode all that.
audacesfortunajuvat | 6 hours ago
More bond buying would drive the yield down. This reflects a breakdown in the rock-solid faith in U.S. government debt that has basically underpinned the American way of life for 75 years. Normally, this would indicate a movement to equities and a low-risk market outlook but there’s a risk of a fundamental break in How Everything Works. If we’re watching the beginning of that, then all the assumptions that underpin American life are about to be wiped out and the world going forward is going to be something your grandparents, parents, and you have never experienced.
The Fed needs to raise rates to cool inflation but they won’t do that. They’ll change the way they measure inflation to justify a cut. That won’t affect your lived reality though. They can tame bond yields to some degree by putting adults back in charge but that won’t happen until November at the earliest and possibly not even then. Some of this is now just locked in forever because the premise of ultra-low U.S. borrowing was that we don’t elect these sort of people or have coups and such. We’ve permanently damaged the full faith and credit of the United States in the eyes of the world and we’ll never recover our perfect record. Everything going forward will be irreversibly more expensive.
I’m drinking buddies with a bunch of IMF/World Bank economists and they have been horrified at the scale of what we’re doing, the effects of which will reverberate for the rest of our lives. They are in full defensive mode, anticipate a Great Depression type event that is maybe worse than that. Going to cash, keeping jobs where they were slated to retire, reducing debt.
matjoeman | 6 hours ago
Higher bond yields mean less demand for that bond.
altonbrushgatherer | 6 hours ago
sort of... I think it would be more correct to say that it means that a higher yield is need to find a buyer for that bond.
insightful_pancake | 6 hours ago
Less demand = higher yield needed for more demand
wow343 | 6 hours ago
The long term 30 year rate is telling us what long term inflation expectations are. So it's saying: oil shortage is going to lead to inflation. If bonds start paying higher returns, investors have a tendency to start moving money away from stocks and into bonds as they are a guaranteed return vs. stocks that are highly speculative. So eventually you should see a drop in the stock market.
The fed is only able to set short term rates. However this decreases the money available right now and that has an impact to reduce spending and decrease interest rates long term. This will then signal lower inflation long term which should then bring down the long term rates.
Right now the market has two viewpoints. The disruption is temporary and everything will reset to normal by end of summer versus the disruption is going to bleed into next year and this is a long-term squeeze on dollar value. If the long term view is correct we could end up having 6 percent or higher rates unless the Fed increases interest rates and tried to dampen spending now to reduce expected inflation long term. This will definitely cause the market to loose greater than 10 percent from current value.
insightful_pancake | 6 hours ago
It’s less of a lack of confidence in short term and more of the market pricing in several fed rate increases in the future (implicitly assuming stickier inflation levels).
If anything, bond yields rising indicates the opposite as investors are selling off longer duration bonds.
The fed isn’t solving for bond interest rates, the bond market is trying to solve for where the fed will price interest rates.
iliveonramen | 6 hours ago
You’ve got it backwards.
Yields are inversely related to price. Higher yield means prices are dropping.
Yields can increase because of inflation concerns, change in perceived risk, or even like you mention economic environment.
It is certainly going to drive up interest rates, though the 15 year is usually a better gauge.
As for the fed, if yields are increasing due to expected inflation, the fed raising rates may give investors confidence that inflation wont be as bad.
I don’t think current investment should be the concern. The US is constantly rolling over debt, as debt becomes due for old bonds, they issue new bonds to replace them. Then there’s just the massive debt the Trump budgets are causing. That additional debt is being added to 10’s of trillions in debt being rolled over.
We spend like a trillion a year in just servicing our debt. Slight fluctuations can have a huge impact over time.