Most of the world is not visiting the US right now which means projects and planning that was made in anticipation for summer has probably been halted or heavily reduced.

Some of the main categories (page 8 of the pdf):

  - Construction:                          -11.0k
  - Manufacturing:                         -12.0k
  - Transportation and warehousing:        -11.3k
  - Private education and health services: -34.0k
  - Information                            -11.0k
  - Leisure and hospitality                -27.0k

Let's raise tariffs again.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (4.1 percent), teenagers (14.9 percent), and people who are White (3.7 percent), Black (7.7 percent), Asian (4.8 percent), or Hispanic (5.2 percent) showed little or no change in February. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) changed little at 1.9 million in February but is up from 1.5 million a year earlier. The long-term unemployed accounted for 25.3 percent of all unemployed people in February. (See table A-12.)

Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.0 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 59.3 percent, changed little in February. These measures showed little change over the year, after accounting for the annual adjustments to the population controls. (See table A-1. For additional information about the effects of the population adjustments, see the note at the end of this news release and table B.)

The number of people employed part time for economic reasons decreased by 477,000 to 4.4 million in February. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)

The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job changed little in February at 6.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job. (See table A-1.)

Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of people marginally attached to the labor force changed little at 1.6 million in February. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, decreased by 109,000 in February to 366,000. (See Summary table A.)

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

We’ve been digging ourselves a giant AI-inflated hole in the economy for months and folks have just been playing musical chairs to grab as much money as possible before the music stops.

Hard to believe it’s taken this long. I never wanted to live through the late 70s / early 80s economically but I guess I’ll have my chance!

I really wish people would realize that prolonging this farce is not in their best interests. The energy potential of the inevitable blowback just keeps building.

Unless it is stopped the job losses will be absolutely massive, and a tiny tiny footnote to the massive human suffering that the stated mass deportation is intended to cause.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...

It seems like a stretch to say anyone was pro-actively fired on the speculation that a war could break out in the middle east; so the war is probably unrelated. That said, if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for any length of time then something pretty drastic could happen to employment in the future tense.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.

And we have a lot of economic, political, and geopolitical uncertainty.

So, if anything, I would be surprised if we don’t see this level of job reduction consistently for at least the rest of the year.

What is less clear to me is whether it will accelerate or whether it will continue for a few years.

I used Anthropic to analyze the situation, it did halfway decent:

https://unratified.org/why/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263664

This is the new utopia.

Is the US producing more or fewer widgets? Are we generating and consuming more or less energy? How are imports and exports?

If inputs and outputs are staying the same then it would support the narrative of increased efficiency and elimination of BS jobs.

Apparently all 130k jobs came from the health care sector with everything else having no growth.

[0]: <https://adpemploymentreport.com/>

'normal part of the business cycle'

It is not a bad one. You can definitely argue it both ways.

I personally think there is a lot of self-inflicted pain ahead and position portfolio accordingly.

however due to the incompetent and corrupt powers that be - a lot of the news has been suppressed, and even the head of BLS fired.

everyone is struggling - but I guess the economy is doing well coz of the "stock market" as we're told

Really? Anyone here feel like the job market is thriving right now? Anyone surprised?

Bc I was like - yeah, totally, makes sense, not surprised at all.

If anything, I am waiting for that dreaded "business update" calendar invite from HR. I am already researching and taking notes on trade schools. Ready to punch that ticket any day now.

But seriously, antagonizing all of your trading partners and visitors so that tourism dies, your booze industry gets severely wounded, and making things expensive so the world's most efficient kleptocracy can keep feeding itself has some consequences, I guess.

The longstanding heuristic is that the most important metric of how bad things are is if ADP < BLS. If government employment is declining it will make the BLS estimates look poor no matter what the rest of the economy is doing. I expect ADP will be negative too but it remains to be seen if it is higher or lower than the BLS number.

Let them eat cake.

Right…

Add to that the people who don’t understand that they are being fleeced and who’ll continue to support theire heroes because of pride, hatred, nihilism or misinformed idealism.

There is a vocal minority in the last bracket, but I’m convinced they are being amplified by an army of bots.

In the recent Epstein releases, Epstein told Thiel that the best deals come from a system on the way to collapse. I think at this point it’s reasonable to consider that this is what Trump and his allies are trying to do. Crash the US economy so severely that they might use their ill-gotten wealth to buy an outsized portion of it.

BBC is really full style right wing propaganda machine now. This time propaganda by omission (like those articles about Brexit where they never gave "no Brexit" as an option).

Zero commentary on tariffs, zero commentary about tourism and ICE, nothing about other policies.