News and opinion articles require a short submission statement explaining its relevance to the subreddit. Articles without a submission statement will be removed.
Dems should worry about how to fix it only after MAGA has had this disaster tattooed on their foreheads and is completely destroyed as a political force.
To anyone who thinks politically harming MAGA this way isn't worth the very real human cost: if MAGA regains power again, they'll just do this same thing again. If idiotic economic policies are going to tank the economy, they need to be made to stick to whoever implemented them if the public is to understand that that party is the cause.
Those people are going to blame democrats anyways. The people in charge get blamed by the majority of people, and inflation is always 6 to 18 months delayed
No. This is going to be so much worse. This will be a true Depression. The US has no more borrowing power and has pissed off every other government in the world. There will be a run on the dollar and we will be essentially bankrupt. Saying "I told you so" will be our only solace as we scrounge for food.
my thought when Trump won November was that America probably needs to lose everything before people get real and stop living in fantasy. And it honestly looks like that's not far away.
Yep, growing GDP slightly higher then debt will not work anymore. (And we are far from that). We need the ability to borrow large sums in a black swan event and that capability is near exhausted, plus the damaged relationship with foreign buyers
Heavy trucks as defined here are transport trucks. This is an indicator of general economic activity by proxy of domestic shipping volumes, not consumer trends.
As much as I understand that domestic sales increases won't perfectly offset import decreases, the disparity shouldn't be enough to cause a drop on this scale.
I think it's fair to assume a genuine drop in demand for transportation services. Most industry forecasts recognize a structural capacity contraction in 2025 and expect it to intensify over the next year.
I think even our domestic heavy truck brands (which honestly I would bet make up more sales domestically than imports, because Freightliner/Peterbilt/Kenworth are huge names in the space and probably their biggest competitor is Volvo) are affected by tariffs on imported parts, even though the trucks are "Made in America."
Absolutely, and you're seeing those costs pushed to inflate the spot and contract prices of trucking in spite of decreasing volumes. I believe that when you look at this industry and see prices going up, transport service volumes going down, and capex falling off a cliff, we are looking at a gloomy forecast that goes far beyond just a delay in capex.
I didn't realize transport volumes were also falling, most of the articles I'd read seemed to imply that consumer purchasing was still pretty high (though credit card balances were increasing, which is also another interesting indicator).
Anecdotally, my BIL who is a trucker was telling me over Christmas that keeping steady work has been tough recently.
Yeah I suppose that context is very important given the tariffs uncertainty. Bear in mind that heavy truck sales is supposed to be a leading indicator based on internal forecasts from the trucking industry.
In terms of past/current indicators; Truck tonnage has been falling.
And Trump put huge tariffs on heavy trucks. Businesses are much more likely to delay a large expense and just get old trucks fixed rather than pay a huge tax that could go away in a few months.
In the Class 8 space, at least, the majority of trucks are domestic anyway. Not sure about the lower classes. Basically the only competitive import is Volvo. Though many of the parts for our domestic brands are imported, so those parts are subject to the tariffs.
Employers added 50,000 jobs in the last month of 2025 and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent, the data showed. For the full year, U.S. employment growth in 2025 was the weakest since the recession in 2020.
With revisions to previous months, employment gains in October and November were 76,000 lower than previously reported.
Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, noted that the rate of hiring is around the pace it was from 2010 to 2011, “when the unemployment rate was north of 9 percent.”
Jason Furman, who I trust pretty well to give measured analysis, seems to think mild job reports are just the new normal in a "world with low net migration". This of course is taking the jobs numbers at face value.
Co-sign Furman, he's really good and usually non-political with this stuff. For those who don't wanna click the link and read through his data/analysis:
"My conclusion: No reason at all for Fed to even think of cutting rates this month (and no evidence it is thinking about it).
More broadly, this lends a little weight to the positive story in the GDP data and a little less to the recessionary fears from earlier jobs data."
Which lends itself to the generally unbiased reading of the US economy for the last year, not great, not terrible, fairly stable with no real indications of it going in either direction.
Trump is pretty bad, ironically, at lying. Like, if these were cooked, they’d be “500,000 new jobs added to the economy and unemployment falls to -0.9%”
Cooking the books when you publish as much data as the US does is incredibly difficult. You can change one number of Easily, but when you have tens of thousands of datapoints, changing them in a way where they are still jive with each other (especially along with data published by groups you don’t control) is next to impossible for an extended period of time. That’s why countries that want to cook the books (China and Russia) just stop publishing most info, makes the top line numbers easier to fake.
Nah. There isn’t a 1:1 transfer of his lying to cooked numbers. He will say he wants that, then his minions do their best to fudge the numbers in that direction without causing an actual non-maga-proof scandal.
These numbers are generated by a wide array of non-partisan government employees who have been there for a long time. We might get partisan framing of the numbers, or the partisan leader trying to highlight certain statistics to put a spin on it. But we are not getting cooked numbers.
If they did try to fully fudge the numbers we would almost certainly get a significant number of BLS employees leaking to the press that the numbers are being cooked.
No, while there is justified suspicion Antoni didn't get into the BLS (he's a Twitter crackpot, thank God) and the BLS is still largely functioning. Most economists are still taking it as reliable.
And we need to fucking take away this myth that “a conservative term is generally good for the economy”. Keep hammering this point nonstop so the morons of a voting base get it through their heads.
I don't think it will be different. The median voter looks at Dems as "the people who have good soft feely policies like education and healthcare" and the GOP as "the people who make hard choices like cutting social services but these inevitably result in a better economy."
They think everything is a balancing act so if one party is better at one thing they must be worse at the other. Trump's policies are harsh but they are also stupid and make the economy worse.
The housing crisis was the result of long-term trends that predated Bush, and COVID was entirely beyond the control of any politician. Bush and Trump could have had more effective responses to each of those things, but neither one was really their fault.
If the economy crashes now, it will be much easier to draw a line from Trump's tariffs (and his other stupid nonsense) to the crash.
They never will. Vibes based politics says Republicans = daddies, go out and earn the big bucks to put food on the table and Democrats = mommies, spend daddy's money profligately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics
I have a $20k 3 week couples bucket list trip in May completely laid out and booked, including biz class via rewards. Fully realizing it could actually be a YOLO
We got 2 round trip biz class seats for about $5500. The unspoken truth about biz class is that they only cost about $800-$1500 tops if you get the fares via rewards, which is an insane discount.
Sign up for seats.aero and learn the platform.
Sign up for a few credit card bonuses to speedrun point accumulation, or just buy points on deep sales. You need about 70-80k points/miles per fare, so about 320k total. We did half and half, a few bonuses churned with household spending, and a big point purchase.
Work backwards to plan the trip by finding the main back and forth flights you can acquire via seats.aero hunting, then acquire pre-positioning flights with points or cash as needed.
Sticking to one ecosystem helps keep it simple, and each one has its own internal network of airline alliances. We went with United. One leg is Turkish biz class and the other is United Polaris biz class.
We ended up with biz class to Istanbul to get to Athens, then after a few more stops we head back to US from Zurich on biz class after wrapping up in Paris.
Are you saying you buy a regular fare with rewards and then pay $800-1500 for an upgrade? Or that you spend that much for rewards points promotions on new cards that give you enough points for biz class?
$800-$1500 is the equivalent value of the points. You can only get these super steep discounts buy purchasing with points/miles. Seats.aero is free for 60 day window so you could go look at actual award fares available right now, then look up the value of the points required to get any of them.
Due to FPTP voting, the opposition party will always regain power eventually, especially as a response to the current admin not fixing everything magically. I’ve lost faith in the median voter.
A great example of why the stock market and the economy are not necessarily the same thing, especially when much of the gains in the former have been increasingly propped up by a small number of very large, and often politically connected tech stocks. These are often growth stocks too, which can go up and down a lot.
Literally had a job fall through after getting hired but before my start date late last year due to a hiring freeze, caused by a slow business cycle. Something bad is a foot
Our only hope is the American people turning in this administration. The SC will save us if we become furious. If they can get away with enabling this administration, it's going to.
News and opinion articles require a short submission statement explaining its relevance to the subreddit. Articles without a submission statement will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
https://preview.redd.it/yof5i79b7ccg1.png?width=1079&format=png&auto=webp&s=f5483fc675f80021363d57a55485d7b2dcd7d2c0
Guys, it's OVER
MORE
What's with the huge drop in 2016?
That preceded the mid-cycle slowdown of 2017-18
Obama wore a tan suit.
I thought it was the Dijon mustard.
I'm guessing Hunter's laptop.
Trump being elected and cancelling TPP, but before the tax cuts.
Buckle up for yet another "once in a lifetime" economic disaster.
I’m begging dems not to go along with trying to print our way out of this again
Dems should worry about how to fix it only after MAGA has had this disaster tattooed on their foreheads and is completely destroyed as a political force.
To anyone who thinks politically harming MAGA this way isn't worth the very real human cost: if MAGA regains power again, they'll just do this same thing again. If idiotic economic policies are going to tank the economy, they need to be made to stick to whoever implemented them if the public is to understand that that party is the cause.
Yeah the median voter needs to not so much touch the stove as have their face held to it until it burns off, Terminator-style.
three more full years of Trump/Vance with foreign misadventures and ICE atrocities sprinkled on top should help.
So, they should never worry about it?
You're acting like stagflation it's a bad thing somehow.
I always missed the 70s.
Seems nice in paper until everyone blames Democrats for making the price of eggs go up (ie. Random economic bullshit that politically sticks).
Those people are going to blame democrats anyways. The people in charge get blamed by the majority of people, and inflation is always 6 to 18 months delayed
No. This is going to be so much worse. This will be a true Depression. The US has no more borrowing power and has pissed off every other government in the world. There will be a run on the dollar and we will be essentially bankrupt. Saying "I told you so" will be our only solace as we scrounge for food.
Wouldn’t that fuck over the entire world economy? Would anyone be insulated from that?
other countries have been steadily reducing their exposure to US treasuries. but yes, it will cause a global depression.
That's probably what needs to happen at this point for voters to feel any responsibility for their actions.
my thought when Trump won November was that America probably needs to lose everything before people get real and stop living in fantasy. And it honestly looks like that's not far away.
Yep, growing GDP slightly higher then debt will not work anymore. (And we are far from that). We need the ability to borrow large sums in a black swan event and that capability is near exhausted, plus the damaged relationship with foreign buyers
Are people buying smaller vehicles? That would be a nice change if so. Great transit would be best but you know
Heavy trucks as defined here are transport trucks. This is an indicator of general economic activity by proxy of domestic shipping volumes, not consumer trends.
Ah, i see. Thanks for the knowledge
Isn't it basically just a tariff indicator here though? I thought Trump put large tariffs on heavy truck imports.
As much as I understand that domestic sales increases won't perfectly offset import decreases, the disparity shouldn't be enough to cause a drop on this scale.
I think it's fair to assume a genuine drop in demand for transportation services. Most industry forecasts recognize a structural capacity contraction in 2025 and expect it to intensify over the next year.
I think even our domestic heavy truck brands (which honestly I would bet make up more sales domestically than imports, because Freightliner/Peterbilt/Kenworth are huge names in the space and probably their biggest competitor is Volvo) are affected by tariffs on imported parts, even though the trucks are "Made in America."
Absolutely, and you're seeing those costs pushed to inflate the spot and contract prices of trucking in spite of decreasing volumes. I believe that when you look at this industry and see prices going up, transport service volumes going down, and capex falling off a cliff, we are looking at a gloomy forecast that goes far beyond just a delay in capex.
I didn't realize transport volumes were also falling, most of the articles I'd read seemed to imply that consumer purchasing was still pretty high (though credit card balances were increasing, which is also another interesting indicator).
Anecdotally, my BIL who is a trucker was telling me over Christmas that keeping steady work has been tough recently.
Yeah I suppose that context is very important given the tariffs uncertainty. Bear in mind that heavy truck sales is supposed to be a leading indicator based on internal forecasts from the trucking industry.
In terms of past/current indicators; Truck tonnage has been falling.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TRUCKD11
The transportation services index as well was stagnating the past few years and has taken a nosedive since 2025Q3
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TSIFRGHT
and CASS looks particularly bad
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FRGSHPUSM649NCIS
Heavy trucks are for jobs. Think ambulances, cement mixers, freight trucks.
To be pedantic, it is concrete mixers.
Cement trucks are tanker trucks that carry cement powder to a concrete plant for mixing with rock, sand, and water to make concrete.
I have a 10 year-old small car and I love it. I dread the day I have to go back into the market.
I thought F-150s and the like were “light trucks.” Is this about tractor trailers and box trucks?
Yarp, it's a better proxy for economic activity rather than consumer health
Lots of cars were sold last year to beat tariffs and to buy before EV subsidies went away
I wonder if either is impacting this
This graph is about large trucks used for moving freight, not cars
And Trump put huge tariffs on heavy trucks. Businesses are much more likely to delay a large expense and just get old trucks fixed rather than pay a huge tax that could go away in a few months.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/adjusting-imports-of-medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicles-medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicle-parts-and-buses-into-the-united-states/
In the Class 8 space, at least, the majority of trucks are domestic anyway. Not sure about the lower classes. Basically the only competitive import is Volvo. Though many of the parts for our domestic brands are imported, so those parts are subject to the tariffs.
This is despite gas prices being so low as well. This is a terrible sign for the car market in general.
How much of this is the jobs data getting fucked during the shutdown?
I don't imagine it had much effect really. It's from a different BEA report (GDP)
Unemployment should be 30% so they feel the stove
Per NYT:
This is not looking good
Im sure the revisions is gonna boost that right back up
Finish the sentence, NYTimes bot.
Not looking good for Biden, how exactly?
After 1 year of Trump policy, jobs growth is hearkening back to the Great Recession, showing that Biden didn't do enough to strengthen US resilience.
[deleted]
"... months out, the impact of the Democratic-led government shutdown continue to reverbrate through the economy."
The outlook is rosy for hands touching stoves though.
Note that three of those were just my dad dodging his looming retirement.
MOAR! Or maybe I should say less,you get the point let them touch da stove
Yes because as we all know economic crisis leads to various levels of moderation among the populace!
They need to press their foreheads to the stove until the spiral marks them forever. 🌀
No. I need their money
Jason Furman, who I trust pretty well to give measured analysis, seems to think mild job reports are just the new normal in a "world with low net migration". This of course is taking the jobs numbers at face value.
https://xcancel.com/jasonfurman/status/2009642213068644788
Co-sign Furman, he's really good and usually non-political with this stuff. For those who don't wanna click the link and read through his data/analysis:
"My conclusion: No reason at all for Fed to even think of cutting rates this month (and no evidence it is thinking about it).
More broadly, this lends a little weight to the positive story in the GDP data and a little less to the recessionary fears from earlier jobs data."
Which lends itself to the generally unbiased reading of the US economy for the last year, not great, not terrible, fairly stable with no real indications of it going in either direction.
Agreed with Furman.
None of this is really showing a labor market that is deteriorating rapidly.
Meanwhile, nominal GDP grew 5.4% from 2024Q3 to 2025Q3 and inflation remains above target.
Immigration boosts economy evidence # I-lost-track.
But no, the idea that someone different than you is working in your own country means we have to torch the entire world to the ground to own the libs
And these are the cooked numbers??
I honestly don’t think so.
Trump is pretty bad, ironically, at lying. Like, if these were cooked, they’d be “500,000 new jobs added to the economy and unemployment falls to -0.9%”
Cooking the books when you publish as much data as the US does is incredibly difficult. You can change one number of Easily, but when you have tens of thousands of datapoints, changing them in a way where they are still jive with each other (especially along with data published by groups you don’t control) is next to impossible for an extended period of time. That’s why countries that want to cook the books (China and Russia) just stop publishing most info, makes the top line numbers easier to fake.
So stop publishing most info, got it.
Nah. There isn’t a 1:1 transfer of his lying to cooked numbers. He will say he wants that, then his minions do their best to fudge the numbers in that direction without causing an actual non-maga-proof scandal.
Yep. Why even bother making up numbers when he can just call the real numbers bullshit and all his supporters will believe him?
No.
These numbers are generated by a wide array of non-partisan government employees who have been there for a long time. We might get partisan framing of the numbers, or the partisan leader trying to highlight certain statistics to put a spin on it. But we are not getting cooked numbers.
If they did try to fully fudge the numbers we would almost certainly get a significant number of BLS employees leaking to the press that the numbers are being cooked.
No, while there is justified suspicion Antoni didn't get into the BLS (he's a Twitter crackpot, thank God) and the BLS is still largely functioning. Most economists are still taking it as reliable.
They’re also pretty bad. I don’t know why they cook and still not cover themselves. Trumpenomics aren’t working via their own numbers.
Yes, the real numbers are likely worse
Submission statement: US economic news.
I'm so glad this is here, or I wouldn't understand what was posted.
Seems like there were revisions downward as well from the previous 2 months...
Revisions are only bad when Biden does it... /s
The economy needs to crash and burn to rid us of MAGA. It's gonna be a painful 3 more years.
And we need to fucking take away this myth that “a conservative term is generally good for the economy”. Keep hammering this point nonstop so the morons of a voting base get it through their heads.
The economy crashed under Bush and america forgot about it 8 years later
The economy crashed again under Trump and americans forgot about it 4 years later
What makes you think this time will be different
I don't think it will be different. The median voter looks at Dems as "the people who have good soft feely policies like education and healthcare" and the GOP as "the people who make hard choices like cutting social services but these inevitably result in a better economy."
They think everything is a balancing act so if one party is better at one thing they must be worse at the other. Trump's policies are harsh but they are also stupid and make the economy worse.
Republicans embrace greed in a bloodthirsty way that simply can't be faked, and voters can pick up on that.
Which they think means good for the economy.
Because it's a direct result of Trump's policies?
The housing crisis was the result of long-term trends that predated Bush, and COVID was entirely beyond the control of any politician. Bush and Trump could have had more effective responses to each of those things, but neither one was really their fault.
If the economy crashes now, it will be much easier to draw a line from Trump's tariffs (and his other stupid nonsense) to the crash.
They never will. Vibes based politics says Republicans = daddies, go out and earn the big bucks to put food on the table and Democrats = mommies, spend daddy's money profligately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics
They pretended like the economy was in shambles during Biden, they will have no problem pretending like everything is great now.
More motivation to save lots of money and spend it in Europe this summer.
I have a $20k 3 week couples bucket list trip in May completely laid out and booked, including biz class via rewards. Fully realizing it could actually be a YOLO
Teach us your ways.
We got 2 round trip biz class seats for about $5500. The unspoken truth about biz class is that they only cost about $800-$1500 tops if you get the fares via rewards, which is an insane discount.
Sign up for seats.aero and learn the platform.
Sign up for a few credit card bonuses to speedrun point accumulation, or just buy points on deep sales. You need about 70-80k points/miles per fare, so about 320k total. We did half and half, a few bonuses churned with household spending, and a big point purchase.
Work backwards to plan the trip by finding the main back and forth flights you can acquire via seats.aero hunting, then acquire pre-positioning flights with points or cash as needed.
Sticking to one ecosystem helps keep it simple, and each one has its own internal network of airline alliances. We went with United. One leg is Turkish biz class and the other is United Polaris biz class.
We ended up with biz class to Istanbul to get to Athens, then after a few more stops we head back to US from Zurich on biz class after wrapping up in Paris.
Are you saying you buy a regular fare with rewards and then pay $800-1500 for an upgrade? Or that you spend that much for rewards points promotions on new cards that give you enough points for biz class?
$800-$1500 is the equivalent value of the points. You can only get these super steep discounts buy purchasing with points/miles. Seats.aero is free for 60 day window so you could go look at actual award fares available right now, then look up the value of the points required to get any of them.
Sorry due to the war with NATO over Greenland and then Iceland you cannot access the EU on a USA passport (unrealistic, but it's for the bit)
Nah Europeans will just squander it on useless stuff. Spend in Asia for peak utalitarianism.
[deleted]
I need to get out west, but Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto are all excellent cities.
Montreal is a beautiful city. Left a big impression on me after a work trip. That area around the St. Lawrence River is absolutely gorgeous.
My Catholicism is coming through. We need to suffer for our sins
Don't make the mistake of rescuing the "economic anxious" let them sink.
Lol at you being downvoted
Due to FPTP voting, the opposition party will always regain power eventually, especially as a response to the current admin not fixing everything magically. I’ve lost faith in the median voter.
Tell that to the Whigs!
Or the Federalists.
Per my stocks app CNBC is calling jobs data “stable” which is ridiculous.
And of course the stock market is going up because of rate cut expectations even as the signs of economic fragility mount.
A great example of why the stock market and the economy are not necessarily the same thing, especially when much of the gains in the former have been increasingly propped up by a small number of very large, and often politically connected tech stocks. These are often growth stocks too, which can go up and down a lot.
Waiter 5 trillion more to Nvidia via OpenAI via Oracle via Intel via Nvidia si vous plait.
Trump seems pretty bad at this whole smart business guy thing.
Keep touching the stove, median voter.
A future mess Dems will have to clean up again
Don’t worry the Supreme Court will rule on the tariffs soon and everything will go back to normal
They will also rule unemployment and inflation unconstitutional so we can pretend that neither exist.
MAGA 2028 after Supreme Court saves them from the stove:
https://preview.redd.it/pd1unxhuoccg1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=be75750b3db2375f50a472a1b4c4744ce105d94d
They'll also let Trump nuke the FOMC by getting rid of someone he doesn't have the authority to hire.
They've already said they'll just use something else to implement the tariffs, and so the process will begin anew.
!ping ECON
Pinged ECON (subscribe | unsubscribe | history)
About & Group List | Unsubscribe from all groups
Literally had a job fall through after getting hired but before my start date late last year due to a hiring freeze, caused by a slow business cycle. Something bad is a foot
95% of those were ICE hires
Question for MAGAs...Gas, electric, or induction: Which stove top do you find is superior for touching?
Save us Supreme Court, you're our only hope.
Our only hope is the American people turning in this administration. The SC will save us if we become furious. If they can get away with enabling this administration, it's going to.
Yeah, even if the SC does its job, the tariffs are illegal in implementation, not as a policy.
The republican controlled legislature have proven they’re the weakest humans in America, so they’ll say, “yes Daddy Trump” and pass them.
At least it would be less chaotic though and allow for long term planning*
Agreed. WE THE PEOPLE are the ultimate leaders and we ultimately have accountability to fix out government.
How exactly? Even upon the reversion of his tariffs the U.S economy isn't looking particularly hot. That's one of multiple facets driving this data.