Even a good jobs report is a bad thing for Trump and Wall Street

With all of the turmoil of the last month overall and the tanking of the stock market on Thursday, lots of people were looking to see if Friday's US jobs report for March was going to show a significant slowdown (if not outright decline) in job growth.

Wait, really? Apparently so, if you buy the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 228,000 in March, higher than the average monthly gain of 158,000 over the prior 12 months. In March, job gains occurred in health care, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment also increased in retail trade, partially reflecting the return of workers from a strike. Federal government employment declined.

Health care added 54,000 jobs in March, in line with the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment continued to trend up in ambulatory health care services (+20,000), hospitals (+17,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+17,000).

If our economy keeps adding jobs in health care, maybe we shouldn't be cutting back access to health care or stopping research on diseases, eh?

That said, the first two months of the year had their job numbers revised down.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for January was revised down by 14,000, from +125,000 to +111,000, and the change for February was revised down by 34,000, from +151,000 to +117,000. With these revisions, employment in January and February combined is 48,000 lower than previously reported.

Ok, that makes the March number make a bit more sense, as we're 180,000 above where we thought we were. But I did find it interesting that the BLS added this note in light of Elon Musk and other DOGE dweebs trying to impose large nunbers of layoffs in the federal government over the last couple of months.

Within government, federal government employment declined by 4,000 in March, following a loss of 11,000 jobs in February. (Employees on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance pay are counted as employed in the establishment survey.)

So if these former or furloughed employees are getting paid via buyouts or other severance packages, they still are part of the payroll, according to the BLS. It also makes me wonder if this is a big reason why unemployment claims have stayed so low despite all of the Trumpian economic vandalism going on.

Even the increase in unemployment to 4.2% was really a minor change from 4.13% to 4.15%, with solid increases in labor force (+232,000) and number of people working (+201,000). In addition, the U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers not in the work force and Americans forced into part-time work, retreated from its 40-month high of 8.0% in February down to 7.9% for March.

However, after President Trump announced massive, across-the-board tariffs on Wednesday and the DOW Jones falling by 1,680 points, a good jobs report is NOT what the stock market wanted to hear. And so the bleeding kept happening on Wall Street for Friday.

The reason I say that the good jobs report was bad news for Wall Street is that it showed there was no reason to lower interest rates at this time, no matter what debt-laden oligarchs like Trump and Musk want. We have costs and prices slated to rise with tariffs, and that report gives no indication of widespread job loss in America, despite what the headlines say about TrumpWorld’s efforts to wreck the operations of the federal government. Which is why I think the report is real and hasn't been messed with by the White House.

With the data coming in combined with recent events, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell admitted that he was going to have to wait to take any action when asked about where things stand on the economy and related monetary policy.

President Donald Trump's new tariffs are "larger than expected," and the economic fallout including higher inflation and slower growth likely will be as well, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Friday, while cautioning it was still too soon to know what the right response from the central bank ought to be.

"We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation," undermining both of the Fed's mandates of 2% inflation and maximum employment, Powell told a business journalists' conference in Arlington, Virginia, in remarks that pointed to difficult decisions ahead for the U.S. central bank and did nothing to staunch a global bloodletting in stock markets….

Powell said the Fed has time to wait for more data to decide how monetary policy should respond, but the central bank's focus will be on ensuring that inflation expectations remain anchored, particularly if Trump's import taxes touch off a more persistent jump in price pressures.

"While tariffs are highly likely to generate at least a temporary rise in inflation, it is also possible that the effects could be more persistent," Powell said.

In other words “HEY DONNIE, I CAN’T LOWER RATES WHEN YOU’RE DOING STUPID SHIT LIKE THIS!” You think Tariff Man will get the hint this weekend while he’s entertaining the Saudis at the LIV Golf tournament at Doral?

The good jobs report also indicates to me that the fall in the coming months is going to be even harder. We've seen how manufacturers boosted imports and orders in the first 2 months of 2025 to try to get ahead of the tariffs, and with the drop in the stock market and Trump/Musk Admin layoffs hitting Americans' pocketbooks, we are likely to see significant cutbacks sooner than later.