alt Hacker NewsU.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession
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Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away.
Both these times were plausible ways of entering the middle class.
What does economic theory say should happen to labor when scarcity ends but capital is strong? Does the economy expand until there’s more labor demand? Or will structural and monopolistic problems cause capital to benefit while suppressing wages - making us all serfs?
Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all.
But who knew?
Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
Link to report PDF: https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CR...
So much winning
For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.
And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH.
That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.
Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.
The big question is “whose jobs”?
If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
The country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase.
We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy
Yet housing costs keep increasing. The working class is being squeezed between employers who are suffering lost revenue and can't pay US wages, and landlords and mega-corp shareholders who won't budge on price. I foresee a slow protracted "collapse" (or really renegotiation) that will bankrupt stuck-in-the-mud billionaires (like Elon) as their means of recourse - law enforcement and the military - come under such powerful social coercion that no amount of money will stop them from siding with working-class-friendly new leadership like Mamdani, as the workers (who, despite what Elon tells himself in his robot fantasies, are still needed en masse), use their REAL voting power - moving their home to jurisdictions that are working-class-friendly.
It's more nuanced as usual.
Trump had a booming economy right before Covid, and took the brunt of the jobs cuts in 2020. Biden next year "created" the jobs per the numbers there.
Also, what's the breakdown between public & private sector jobs? Spending taxes on government jobs in not something to celebrate.
Chicken Little already told us. Armageddon is also coming, don't forget about that.
JOLTS data for January 2026 has been delayed, but don't expect those tea leaves to change your opinion about what the future holds.
I hear that the Washington Post just fired 1/3 of all of it's reporters.
Otherwise, if so many jobs have disappeared, does that mean that my garbage company no longer needs to employ a staf on every truck to drive it and empty my trash recepticle into the truck?
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...