Trump’s DEVASTATING MOVES Trigger RAPID COLLAPSE

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on the current state of U.S. job growth, highlighting 2025 as the weakest year since the pandemic despite a low unemployment rate of 4.4%. It examines the contradictory nature of these statistics while addressing concerns about government job cuts linked to spending reductions initiated by former President Trump and the implications of potential changes in Fed leadership amidst ongoing economic challenges.

Key takeaways

• Jobs data is a riddle wrapped in a mystery; 4.4% unemployment doesn't mean what you think it does.
• Trump's 'robust economy' claim relies on creative stats; laying off 250k workers isn't exactly a growth strategy.
• Discouraged workers aren't invisible; they erode the labor market's health, even if they don't show up in stats.
• In the world of job growth, 70k vs 140k is a pessimistic polling of optimism—who set that bar, anyway?
• GDP growth is a mirage without deeper economic stability; a healthy economy needs more than flashy numbers.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Max (Guest) · 20 min speaking
• Kevin Hasset (Guest) · 2 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Donald Trump
2. 15:00 – 20:00: Donald Trump
3. 20:00 – 22:21: Donald Trump

Notable quotes from "Trump’s DEVASTATING MOVES Trigger RAPID COLLAPSE"

• Of this gets any push back from these hosts. Then Hasset goes on to say that Trump's policies have led to onshoring and an increase in manufacturing despite all the evidence…

  about Donald Trump · at 6:45

• Almost there. We'll get them next quarter. Actually, that's a perfect place for us to dig into the data. Let's look at those job openings by taking a look at the Jolts data from the beverage curve.

  about Jolts · at 7:46

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Donald Trump — Person · Central political figure referenced/criticized · 3 mentions · first at 1:54
  Presented as the driver of current labor-market conditions and as pressuring institutions (Fed/DOJ) while pursuing policies like layoffs, deportations, tariffs, and ad-hoc relief.

Concepts & topics

• Jolts — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions
  Jolts data is used to analyze job openings and labor market demand, central to the episode's economic discussion.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Hey, it's Max from UNFR reporting for the Midas Touch Network. You know, when it comes to reporting on economic data, there's really one metric that matters above all others. Jobs. And when it comes to jobs, we're being asked to hold several thoughts in our minds at once.

0:16 2025 now the weakest year of jobs growth since the pandemic. Now, on the other hand, the unemployment rate dipped to 4.4%. worst job growth year since the pandemic. You know, if memory serves, that was a pretty bad year. But the unemployment rate actually dipped and it's holding steady at acceptable levels to this administration. With 2025 in the rear view, level setting on the US employment picture is the task at hand today because the view ahead is pretty murky. So, let's get to it. All right, we're going to do a deep dive into the data today, but to set things up, I want to play a clip from the man who would be the head of the Fed, Kevin Hasset. Now, I say would because he's actually dropped in the polyarket odds as the lead candidate to replace Jerome Powell. And two things to note about that. First off, I give you polymarket odds as a tongue planted firmly in cheek reference because the whole political

1:20 odds game is disgusting. And second, who would want this job? working for a president considering that the DOJ is contemplating bogus criminal charges against the sitting Fed chair. I mean, we are truly living in the worst timeline. Anyway, here's Hasset with a stunning torrent of lies. See if you can pick him out.

1:40 Do you consider 4.4% pretty close to full employment at this point? Is is right. Well, well, it's changing for two reasons. It's changing because we've got government employees that have been laid off because uh President Trump is reducing government spending. That's about 250,000 workers this year. That's a lot. Uh and we also have people who are being uh you know deported and rediciled uh because they were here illegally and working. And I think if you add those two things, then a good healthy labor report is probably closer to 70,000 than 140 150,000 which is what it was back in the day. And and so bottom line right now I'm looking at the output numbers and we got GDP now north of 5% in the fourth quarter after two 4%s the previous quarter. So I think you got to say that Trump policies are really working. They're really working and they're working because they're onshoring production. They're causing

2:39 factories to build and in the fullest of time I expect that to cause a job blowout in the second half of next year especially.

2:47 This goober is such a good professional liar that he deserves the Trump nomination. So let's go through this statement before we look at the actual data from the real world. So the prompt here is whether Hasset considers 4.4% close to full employment. There is no precise statistical measure for full employment from the Federal Reserve standpoint except as defined as the best labor market relative to its 2% inflation target. This is a very modern construct that's been adopted by central banks that I personally take issue with, but that's for another day. So the real question in this context is is this the best that our modern economy is going to be able to produce? So right away, Hasset starts with nonsense answers by running defense for the federal worker layoffs. He claims that this is to reduce federal spending, which is only half true because the other side of it is that if these workers are now filing

3:43 for unemployment, that's an expense. Also, if the private sector was so robust, it would be theoretically filling the gap by employing laid-off workers, would it not? Same holds true for the mass deportation of immigrants which Hasset calls redomiciling which is disgusting. Now this is going to make more sense when we go through the data releases but let's think through this for a second. If you sent a quarter of a million federal workers to the unemployment line and the absolute employment level of the country hasn't increased then it means that there are people not being counted in the unemployment number anymore. These are called discouraged workers. people who want to work but have been out of the game for so long that they're no longer counted. So this is not a flex. The same holds true for the immigrant workforce.

4:30 If we still have the same number of people looking for work even after deporting half a million people, then it means that the labor market is even softer than reported. But he uses these two examples to suggest that a good report in the Trump economy would be around 70,000 rather than the 140,000 or so back in the day. So to be clear, he's talking about new hires here. This doesn't make any sense. One has nothing to do with the other. The number of job openings in the country is flat at 7.1 million, but there are 6.2 million people counted in the numbers who are actively looking for work. millions more who have dropped out and theoretically still want work but aren't looking for it and still even more that are working part-time who would like to be full-time. Limiting the workforce by deporting people shouldn't impact the number of absolute new hires unless you're willing to admit that the balance

5:28 of hires were only filled by immigrants and can only be filled by immigrant labor. Otherwise, it's a stupid metric to settle on. So Hasset's basically saying that we used to do 140 to 250,000, but now under a Trump economy, we can expect 70,000 even though we only did 50,000 and that's probably going to be revised down like every other month in the past. Yay for us. Then he makes a pretty bold claim saying that we've had two quarters of GDP growth over 4% and the fourth quarter was over 5%. Now the first quarter of 2025 was negative. The second quarter was under 4%. The third quarter was admittedly 4.3% but the fourth quarter isn't even out yet. Also, multiple studies have shown that without the stock market growth and capex spending on data centers, GDP growth this year is flat and maybe negative.

6:27 Also, we did a piece on this at the end of the year showing how third quarter GDP growth was the result of increased spending on health care, reduction of imports because of prior quarter tariff front running, higher exports due to dollar deflation, and a massive increase in defense spending. But I love how none of this gets any push back from these hosts. Then Hasset goes on to say that Trump's policies have led to onshoring and an increase in manufacturing despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary as evidenced by the loss of 70,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025. The reason exports have increased is because the US dollar is off 10% from its peak in 2025, not because we're opening new plants and bringing production home. And then he delivers the coupe gr saying that real job growth is going to happen in the back half of this year. If you go back and listen to every Trump economic adviser from the beginning of this

7:25 second term, and I don't care which one you choose, it could be Steven Meyer, Peter Navaro, Howard Nutlick, my favorite Scott Bessant, you know, the worst hedge fund manager in the world turned Treasury Secretary, or this smiling and lying fruitc cake. They all say that the back half of last year was going to be gang busters. This is Trump economics 101. It's always coming. We're almost there. We'll get them next quarter. Actually, that's a perfect place for us to dig into the data. Let's look at those job openings by taking a look at the Jolts data from the beverage curve.

7:57 The beverage curve is one of the most relied upon metrics among labor economists because it measures the level of demand in the labor market. So, this chart visualizes the same information in two ways. When the blue line is above the red line on the top of the chart, there are more people looking for work than there are jobs. And this is a recessionary trend and vice versa. Personally, I don't put a lot of stock in the predictive power of the curve because there's a host of other factors that influence recessions and boom times, but it does provide a snapshot of demand. So, we can see in the post-pandemic recovery period when demand was higher. Likewise, we can see that figure leveling toward the end of Biden's term and slumping further now under Trump. What I want you to hold in your thoughts is this idea that there are just as many people looking for work as there are jobs available because it

8:52 seems like a pretty solvable equation if we had a discernable labor policy. But it's not that simple. So, let's take a look at a few of the other data points in the trend lines now that the information is flowing again. Private and public information tell a pretty similar story. Let's start with ADP private payroll. Whenever you're looking at numbers in the vicinity of the pandemic, it's always skewed. But if we look just past the immediate recovery period and in the back half of Biden's term, you can see that the job additions are stabilizing in the 180 to 230,000 range. After inheriting this trend, Trump has managed to reverse it completely to where we lost private jobs in three months last year and only reported an anemic gain in December when holiday hiring typically boosts the whole picture. The same thing holds true for BLS figures, which were illustrated really well here by the New York Times.

9:46 The trend line is simply undeniable. We're not adding jobs in this economy anymore. More than that, take a look at the losses in October. This includes the recent revision which took losses down 68,000 to negative 173,000. Now much of this is due to federal job losses and Doge cuts finally coming off the rolls, but it's an absolutely stunning turn considering no major economist has us in a recession right now. Now, something that I've often disputed, but the point is that this is highly erratic and unusual activity. Now, for the record, November was also revised down by 8,000 jobs. So, let's start adding some things up and then we'll talk about policy and what happens next. So, back to where we started the episode. The headline at the end of the year was that the unemployment rate ticked back down to 4.4%. an acceptable level to this administration apparently, but a highly dubious figure when you consider how

10:44 many job seekers have fallen off or the level of gig work and the total participation. So, dig this. The number of part-time workers increased by 980,000 in 2025. These are people who wanted to be working full-time but listed as part-time workers, increasing by almost a million. In fact, as we've said before, in public surveys, if you respond that you were paid for one hour of work in the past four weeks, you're considered fully employed. Now, the number of people who are not in the workforce, but say that they want to be is also up by 684,000 year-over-year.

11:21 So, I think it's important to drill down like this because the headline noise is such a distraction. And the big takeaway of Trump's second first year is that if you have a job, try to keep it. And if you need a job, good luck. And if you really zoom out, that's what you see. Private employment has literally flatlined since Trump took office. So here's a metric with no Doge cuts or federal workers, the private sector has stalled. And even though the financial news channels greeted last week's initial jobless claims as good news,

11:55 initial jobless claims for the week ending December 27th under one under 200,000 199,000. If you take a long view on the data, there's no material difference in the figures. In fact, 199,000 claims is pretty well on par for the second report in January going back a decade. What's amazing to me is that these financial pundits will celebrate the most marginal drop in something like initial claims while moving the goalpost on new hires, saying things like, "Well, with our new immigration policy, we just have to uh adjust expectations on hiring."

12:35 Were these so-called illegal employees part of the equation or not? Does that really explain away the erosion of new hires when we still have millions of job openings and millions of unemployed people? What about the part-time and gig workers that are growing as a percentage of the total employed population? See, we keep twisting ourselves in knots to make sense of the labor market and what it pretends for the overall economy without looking at the nature of employment relative to the whole population. So, let's do just that and take a look at the most important chart before we break down the meaning of all of this and what comes next. The participation rate. Now there are two participation rates. One that matters to economists and policy makers and the one that really matters. Now the one that economists and policy makers pay attention to is the prime age participation rate which is workers

13:27 between the ages of 25 and 54. The normal participation rate is all workers above the age of 18 who aren't enrolled in the military or higher education. Now this is something that we've covered before on Midas, but it bears updating because we can add some flavor to it. now. Okay. So, the employment rate of workers between 25 and 54 is up around 83%. That's near an all-time high. That's why economists aren't completely freaking out about the monthly numbers. So long as the prime demographic in the US is working, they think that everything is in balance. Now, the blue line, whose percentage is tracked along the left axis, shows that total participation is still down below 63%.

14:12 Now, on the bottom of the chart, the yellow line measures the total workforce. The red one in the middle is the so-called inactive workforce. And the most useless measure of all, the unemployment rate is at the bottom. So, again, we've covered this before, but it's so important. Only 62% of Americans above the age of 18 and not enrolled in college or the military are considered employed. And the bulk of employment within that sliver are of prime age. So if we include kids under the age of 18 or those enrolled in college or the military, what the data really show is that less than half of the total population has a job of any kind, gig work, full-time work, whatever. And as the population ages, the more economic output is required to care for them. So that's why you see breakdowns like this in private payrolls.

15:04 We're losing jobs in manufacturing, but we're gaining in areas like healthcare. So, you can ignore leisure and hospitality for a couple of reasons. The first is that we have a weak dollar, so it's advantageous to actually travel to the United States right now. Plus, these are December numbers, so there's always a boost. But more importantly, it's a reflection of the fact that the top line of the K-shaped economy is still spending robustly. As for the rest of the economy, not so much. So, we know that inflation is stuck around 3% overall, maybe sliding a bit to under 3%, which is still above the Fed target and still on top of years of persistent inflation. And in the basket that matters most to consumers, which is food, it's up way above that. Now, administration officials and pundits will point to how wages of salaried employees increased by a little over 4% and hourly employees increased by 3.8%.

16:00 Great. But that doesn't account for the erosion in savings that occurred post pandemic and for something even more important. Wage increases captain obvious time only affect less than half of the total population. But price increases impact everyone. Okay. So where does this leave us? And what does the labor market tell us about what comes next? So this is where we can get a little philosophical and air things out. Look at the policies of this administration to the extent that you can even call them policies. Energy prices are rising.

16:37 So now Trump is saying that tech companies have to pay for it. Great, right? Credit cards are destroying savings and plunging consumers into unmanageable debt. So he's partnering with Elizabeth Warren of all people to propose a cap on interest rates. Great, right? Farmers were crushed by tariffs. So he proposed a bailout for farmers. Great, right? Military spending is historically high. So contractors are making historic profits, but the rank and file can't pay their bills. So he gave military members a stimulus check at the end of the year. Great, right?

17:14 This is the Trump whack-a-ole seat of the pants strategy, the lottery economy, where hopefully you're lucky enough to be reimbursed for the bad policy decisions that put you in a hole in the first place. These are the actions of a command economy, better known as 20th century style communist central planning. Nothing the administration is doing is working. So they're papering over their mistakes by writing checks or threatening to. In the end, it's a reflection of the fact that we have no industrial labor policy in this country.

17:47 Tariffs were designed to spur investment into manufacturing, but we lost 70,000 manufacturing jobs. They were supposed to make US agricultural exports more attractive, but our buyers just found different suppliers. Capping credit card interest rates is an admission that unsustainable consumer debt fuels this economy rather than wage gains and true full employment. This isn't about AI. It's not even about immigration. It's not about the federal funds rate or Fed policy at all. It's about the 70-year neoliberal plan to hoard gains at the top of the economic spectrum and to suppress the working class. It's about crushing upward mobility and equal access to prosperity. And Democrats and Republicans, by the way, have been equal co-conspirators in this endeavor until this administration, which is the part that neither side really wants to admit.

18:41 But now we're dealing with something altogether different. a toxic combination of antipathy toward the working class with the desire to be popular. And in this way, Trump is wholly misaligned with his own administration's policies. See, the architects of project 2025, in many ways, the final chapter of the neoliberal experiment designed to snuff out the aspirations of the American working class, are succeeding beyond anyone's expectations. The labor market that we have now will not and cannot get any better. And the only person in the administration that has yet to wrap his head around this is Donald Trump. Cuz he truly views himself as a benevolent emperor who gives scraps to the peasants in the lump and proletariat. And he sees when they are not fully appreciated. And his retribution against the American people has only just begun. because the more he falls out of favor, the more brutal his recrimination will be. The

19:41 anger of the masses will be matched only by the wrath of this supposed populist dictator who holds them in such disdain. And as we've witnessed on multiple occasions now, his domestic jack boot militia is not only willing to murder our own, but seemingly to do so with impunity and the administration's approval. The desperate has the levers of power and the working class is no longer tied together by like-minded ideology or purpose because it is so far removed from the revolutionary ties that bind. And the labor market that we have is the one that will just be there eroding steadily with fewer participating in meaningful ways and pressure building on that prime age demographic who exist to support the aging population and the younger generations who now hold no illusions about upward mobility, homeownership, or any of the trappings of the so-called American dream. And if we manage to even

20:39 have elections in the future, we have a choice to make. either ride this wave until it crashes to the shore or turn back the tide toward the working class with a largecale wartimelike effort to rebuild it. Now, to be clear, Donald Trump didn't create this situation. He's the accelerant. Donald Trump is the arsonist who doesn't even know there's TNT in the building that he's lighting on fire. See, he thinks he's just starting a fire so that he can call the fire department to look like a hero. That's been his entire mo. Start a new problem, look like you're fixing it, claim victory, and move on. But we have structural and systemic issues that have to be addressed. Now, some people believe that this looks like universal basic income. Personally, I've argued for the creation of a civilian labor core. Either way, we got to have these discussions. It is imperative that the left actively engages in this kind of

21:36 dialogue and promotes a radical vision to uplift the working class in a non-performative way. Otherwise, we'll just be riding the wave to shore. For the Midas Touch Network, I'm Max from UNFR. Make sure to like this video and subscribe to the Midas Touch if you're not already. And you can follow more of my work on YouTube at UNFR. You can also sign up for our free weekly newsletter at unfr.com. Thanks as always to the Midas Mighty for having me here and I'll catch you online. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our Substack at midasplus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Philipowski, ad free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at midasplus.com.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Trump’s DEVASTATING MOVES Trigger RAPID COLLAPSE"?

Max (Guest), Kevin Hasset (Guest).

What is "Trump’s DEVASTATING MOVES Trigger RAPID COLLAPSE" about?

The discussion focuses on the current state of U.S. job growth, highlighting 2025 as the weakest year since the pandemic despite a low unemployment rate of 4.4%. It examines the contradictory nature of these statistics while addressing concerns about government job cuts linked to spending reductions initiated by former President Trump and the implications of potential changes in Fed leadership…

What is mentioned in this MeidasTouch episode?

2 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Donald Trump, Jolts. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Trump’s DEVASTATING MOVES Trigger RAPID COLLAPSE"?

The episode runs 22 min; the transcript is about 3,742 words in 29 timestamped sections.

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