Name: WSJ Chief Economics Commentator Says Jobs Report Shows Economy ‘Treading Water’
Uploaded: 2025-08-01T23:15:00Z
Duration: 2 min 56 s
Description: President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the July jobs report showed little growth. WSJ’s Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip explains the data.

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President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the July jobs report showed little growth. WSJ’s Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip explains the data. Photo Illustration: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg; Annie Zhao

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President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the July jobs report showed little growth. WSJ’s Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip explains the data.

 WSJ Chief Economics Commentator Says Jobs Report Shows Economy ‘Treading Water’

Reporter: President Trump said he has directed his team to fire the Commissioner of Labor Statistics just hours after the agency issued a weak July Jobs Report. The report showed lower job growth than forecast, adding 73,000 jobs in July, a slight uptick in the unemployment rate to 4.2%. Hiring numbers for May and June were also significantly revised down, showing that just 106,000 jobs were added in the past three months.

Statisticians revised down how much growth we had in prior months by around a quarter of a million, which is a very large revision. Now, roughly half of that was due to public school teachers and probably doesn't tell us much about the underlying economy. But the other half was in private jobs. And what we see now, in light of these revisions and the latest data for July, is that job growth in the last few months is running at its weakest since 2020.

Reporter: Just two days before the reports release, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced interest rates would remain steady.

The majority of the committee was of the view that inflation's a bit above target, maximum employment is at target.

There wasn't any impetus to cut rates to help the economy, because as far as they could see, the labor market was very strong. That was based on data through June. When they made that decision, they didn't have the July data, which came out on Friday. It's quite possible that if they'd known how weak July was and how much weaker May in June were than they realized, that they might have seen a stronger case for lowering interest rates. It does look like they have a much stronger case to cut interest rates in September. This tells you that the broader economy is sort of treading water. We know that it's been through a lot in the last three or four months. We've had a imposition of widespread tariffs, kind of stop-start policy. We've had big cuts to federal government, employment, and spending. We've had big crack down on illegal immigration, and these are all like big tumultuous events for the economy to cope with. And perhaps in retrospect, it's not surprising that we've seen like this pothole emerge in the economy in the second quarter. And I think the question we wanna know is, is this just a pothole, or does it tell us that we have a very rough road for quite a while ahead of us? There are a few troubling signs in there. For example, the job creation that we had was overwhelmingly thanks to sectors like education and social services, and these tend to grow almost no matter what. They don't really tell you whether the private sector is in a hiring mood. If you look at sectors like construction and manufacturing, those ones were very weak with declining employment. The stock market only just hit a record high a few days ago, and the stock market tends to be very forward-looking. So investors at least are taking some comfort that the worst of the uncertainty with respect to trade is behind us. And if that's indicative of how overall private employers are feeling, maybe things are gonna be okay.

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WSJ Chief Economics Commentator Says Jobs Report Shows Economy ‘Treading Water’

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