Financial FAQs
The number of job openings was little changed at 7.8 million in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the month, both hires and total separations were little changed at 5.5 million and 5.2 million, respectively. Within separations, quits (3.3 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.6 million) changed little.” BLS.GOV
The Labor Department’s monthly JOLTS report can be confusing. When the BLS uses the term “little changed”, they mean changes that barely move the needle of the approximately 5 million jobs created and lost each month in the U.S. economy.
But there were still 7.8 million vacant jobs in May seeking workers, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS report, whereas ADP, a U.S. private payrolls data collector, just reported companies eliminated 33,000 jobs last month, marking the first decline since March 2023.
We are now seeing a weakening in the jobs market that consumers are beginning to worry about in the various consumer confidence surveys and are already cutting back on their spending that drives most (70%) of economic growth.
The above graph shows job openings (black line), hires (dark blue), Layoff, Discharges and other (red column), and Quits (light blue column) from the JOLTS. The difference between hirings and separations approximates the monthly number of jobs created.
How do we square the conflicting payroll data with the official U.S, unemployment report that follows end of the month? Private employers reduced jobs in June for the first time in more than two years, as U.S. trade wars created a “hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers,” said ADP chief economist Dr. Nela Richardson.
The service industries that fill the leisure activity, dining, professional services and transportation sectors lost 66,000 jobs, while the goods producers, such as construction and manufacturing gained 32,000 jobs.
That shouldn’t be a surprise, because large parts of the service industries rely on lower paid immigrants, many of them undocumented, and suddenly many are no longer to be found. The Department of Homeland Security may have rounded up some 100,000 to date but want to deport 3 million a year.
This will devastate the U.S. economy, because the service industries employ most (80 percent) of American workers. Why are Republicans ignoring that fact in the big beautiful (or ugly) bill that was sent back to the House to finalize?
Instead of being employed and supporting the American economy, the undocumented (mostly from the other Americas) will be incarcerated in concentration camps while being processed for deportation, much like the Nazis did in World War Two.
It’s not surprising since it’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party now that includes many Neo-Nazis (remember the Charlottesville torch carriers) among his MAGA supporters.
And companies that depend on imports must reckon with whatever the final tariffs rates will be. Trump has only announced one agreement with the UK to date, and a tentative agreement with Vietnam. The tariffs on Vietnamese imports with be raised to 20 percent, which includes products that have been rerouted from China to avoid Chinese tariffs. So the Vietnamese tariff hike may have an outsize effect.
Trump can continue to postpone the inevitable by delaying the tariff hikes for as long as possible with his TACO negotiating style (Trump Always Chickens Out). But Americans are not so foolish and will restrain their spending until we know who will ultimately pay for the higher tariffs.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan on Twitter: https://twittter.com/HarlanGreen
