That’s former CBO Director Doug Holtz-Eakin (seem minute 2 on this video) (h/t Philip Webre):
He was referring primarily to the labor market:
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment as reported by CES (bold black), Preliminary benchmark revision with monthly changed “wedged in” over the 2024M03-25M03 period (red), estimated preliminary benchmark using midpoint of Wells Fargo estimated revision (green), and GS estimate of final benchmark revision (tan), all in 000’s, s.a. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, author’s calculations.
Figure 1: Vacancies to Unemployed Ratio (blue line). Horizontal light blue line at 1.0 value. NBER defined peak to trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BLS, NBER, and author’s calculations.
And manufacturing employment:
Figure 3: Manufacturing employment, all employees, official (light blue), implied preliminary benchmark (bold black), QCEW seasonally adjusted by author using X-13 over 2021M03-2025M03 period (green), and ADP-Stanford Digital Laboratory (red), all in 000’s, s.a.
this is the true reason why trump is so desperate for the fed to cut rates. trump policies are tanking the economy, and trump needs to be bailed out. because you don’t cut rates in a strong economy.
This ia also the reason the right-wing echo chamber is full of “Grab your guns! The Libs are shooting back!” They’d probably do that anyway, but they can’t afford to draw attention to the economy.
The felon-in-chief has said right out loud that he wants the midterms to be about crime rather than the economy, even though crime is down. Anything to avoid the facts about the economy.
Manufacturing is being taken over by robots so don’t expect anything but a fall. We used to employ more than half the country in food production – now it’s less than 5%. China is ahead of us in manufacturing and they have so-called “dark factories” – so automated that they don’t need permanent lights or heat/AC. The original driver of off-shoring to China was their lower labor cost. If labor is not involved in manufacturing it may make sense to restore. But that will not bring any jobs back.
At costco yesterday, i was amazed watching the people work in the meat market. Cutting, packaging and cost stickers were all automated. One guy there simply verifying the packaging and price were correct. Amazing amount of automation probably replaced 3 full time workers just in the small area i was observing.