非农就业骤降但失业率走低，劳动力市场信号混杂

Hey everyone and thanks for jumping back into the macroverse. Today we're going to talk about the most recent labor market report and many of the mixed signals that we got. We're going to try to decipher what's actually going on and why the market is having a hard time understanding what the Fed is going to do next. If you guys like the content, make sure you subscribe to the channel, give the video a thumbs up, and check out the sale on ITCremium at intothecryptoverse.com where you can get access to these charts as many as well as many of the dashboards that we're going to show if you would like to follow along.

I don't really talk about the macro as much, but we check in with it about once a month or so. Um, and then as a reminder, as always, we do have the ITC conference coming up here. uh in just a few months and ticket prices will be going up on September 1st. So, make sure you guys get your ticket if you would like to attend. Let's go ahead and jump in. So, we're going to start with the total non-farm payroll because expectations were completely missed.

I believe we were expecting like 80,000. We actually came in at 23,000. Now, historically, when this starts going down over a longer period of time, it can indicate a contraction. Now, sometimes you'll have down months, for instance, like you know, July to August of 1997, and it's not necessarily a contraction, right? So, that's why we said it needs to be a durable drop where non-fin payroll continues to drop. If you go zoom in over here, you can see that it's been generally trending up with some down months.

And so what I would encourage us to do is to first of all, we can go look at the month-over-month change. And what you'll notice is that there there, you know, back in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, there were really no negative month overmonth changes. It wasn't until 2025 where we first got one. And then you can see later in 2025, we started to get a few more and it's just been picking up, right? So clearly there is some weakening there.

Clearly because 2021, no negative months in terms of total non-farm payroll. Now we're getting them. Now, if you look at it quarter over quarter, it kind of cleans up some of that. And so when you're looking if you're looking month over month any given month and can be negative just because of some random event quarter over quarter now you're comparing you know to several months before you're going to have fewer sort of false flags.

And in this case you can see it didn't go negative until about late 2025. Now where it gets really interesting is when you look at the year-over-year change. When you look at the year overyear change of total non-farm payroll historically when it goes negative it's been a recession. It has not gone negative. Right? So if you're like well why are we not in a recession if it's negative? It's not negative. It was negative for the month not for the year.

Now, if you zoom in, it was pretty close to going negative earlier this year, back in February, but you can see that it bounced up a little bit. Now, if you look at a percentage change, just to kind of put this in terms to where we can really understand it. Back in 2022, the employment level was growing total non-farm growing 5% a year. So even though things felt bad and some people said it was a recession because we had two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, that wasn't really supported by what's actually going on in the labor market.

And furthermore, one of those quarters of negative GDP was eventually revised upwards, I believe. So it ended up not even being two negative quarters of GDP in a row. When you look at the labor market, you can see we're adding we were adding 5% to total non-fin payroll basically every month. Four to 5%. But you can see that that has changed. Look how we go through 2023, it weakened. You get into 2024, it then was at 1% less than 1%.

Now we're basically at 2%. So effectively, there's basically no net job creation going on right now. Very there's a little bit, but it's very, very small. And so what that means is that there's not a lot of margin for error. If the Fed were to misstep at any point in the coming months, coming year or two, it could easily turn this negative. Easily. Now again, a negative non-farm payroll print does not automatically mean the stock market has to drop 50%.

Just because the stock market dropped 50% in 2008 and 2001 doesn't mean that every recession has been like that. There's been plenty of recessions where you just had 20% drops, 30% drops, which can always happen. And if you're an investor here and you're constantly worried about that, you shouldn't be here is is is essentially what I'm trying to say, right? Any good investor that stays investing for a long enough period of time will experience those draw downs.

You just will like I've accepted it a long time ago for for years and years and years. I've just DCA low expense ratio index funds as as far as the stock market goes. I don't know what's going to happen but when I buy them I'm not buying them for tomorrow. I'm buying them for 20 years from now. Okay. So that's kind of how I think about it. In the short term, things can always be scary, but that's why they call it climbing the wall of worry.

This is not negative yet, but again, there's not a lot of margin for error. So then you would expect that we had a negative non-farm payroll print. Therefore, it would stand to reason that the unemployment rate would have gone up, right? would make sense. But no, the unemployment rate continued to drop and now it's actually dropped from 4.5% last November all the way down to 4.1%. So it's gone down4% basically over the last 7 8 9 months or so.

How can that be? How can you have fewer draw fewer jobs but yet the unemployment rate is going down? You would expect that to not really make a lot of sense. But one of the main reasons, not the only reason, but one of the main reasons that the unemployment rate went down despite the fact that we lost jobs is if you look at the labor force participation rate, you'll notice that that's also been falling off a cliff. So, it is true that you don't have as many jobs, but there's also not as many people looking for a job.

If you're unemployed and you're not looking for a job, you don't count as in the unemployed statistic. What the unemployed statistic is looking at is how many people are out of a job but want a job. If you don't want a job, it's not going to count you. So, the labor force participation rate since November has dropped from 62.5% down to 61.4%. So, more than a full percentage drop in the labor force participation rate, which kind of helps explain why the unemployment rate has been trending down despite there being some weakness in the labor market.

Now, the weakness in the labor market is not coming from layoffs. Now, you've probably seen some headlines about some pretty big layoffs, but there's always layoffs in every economy. Even when things are going incredibly, incredibly well, there are still layoffs. There's always layoffs because there's always businesses that are that are going bankrupt, there's always uh businesses that are um restructuring. There's also just people that get laid off for whatever reason.

There's always layoffs no matter what. And what you'll notice is that while layoffs have been trending up, we're basically just at pre- pandemic levels, right? Like this would not suggest recessionary territory right now. You can see what happens in a recession. It really goes up. We haven't had that, right? We've just gotten back to the prepandemic levels. Now, if you don't trust this, you can also go look at something like initial claims.

When you look at initial claims, initial claims a few weeks ago just printed the lowest level in in a long time, like 189,000. The last time it was that low was probably 50 years ago. So, a lot of companies aren't really laying people off right now. They're just no

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