US economy added 50,000 jobs in December, capping off one of the weakest years of job gains in decades

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨MicroWave@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨economics@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/09/economy/us-jobs-report-final-december

Hiring slowed more than expected in December, a sluggish end to what was one of the weakest years of job growth in decades, a dynamic that further amplified America’s affordability crisis.

The US economy added an estimated 50,000 jobs last month, slowing from a downwardly revised 56,000 jobs added in November, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday.

Still, the unemployment rate edged lower to 4.4% from a revised 4.5% in November.

Economists were expecting a net gain of 55,000 jobs in December and an unemployment rate of 4.5%, according to FactSet consensus estimates.

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Ghyste@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How do we trust those numbers, though?

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- timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Exactly. I wouldn’t doubt we lost jobs.
  
  It’s quite easy to imagine when the administration can be trusted with precisely nothing except greed, corruption, and fascist acts.
  
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  - pdxfed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The administration, if anything though, would want to pull the numbers down, to show weak hiring/job losses as that would compel the fed to more aggressively lower rates. This is because they want to lower rates to juice business profitability and maybe accidentally help a few Americans so they might get reelected. That paradigm is basically changed though because lower rates no longer leads to much job creation delta, businesses hire pretty much when they need to regardless. It’s not 1970.
    
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- IronBird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  shit, can’t trust em since atleast 2016
  
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Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Funny how GOP presidents are always bad for the economy, and in obvious ways. This one's just even more extreme, and so of course it's worse.

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- reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Dem administrations usually pay off huge chunks of the national debt as well. Republicans scream about balancing the budget, but then run up massive debt when they have the power.
  
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  - sj_zero ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    "usually"?
    
    Fact check: pants on fire.
    
    Until Reagan, both Democrats and Republicans were relatively fiscally responsible, not racking up too much debt relative to GDP. Part of the reason for that is the US economy was growing at a meteoric rate being one of the only industrialized countries not to be destroyed in World war II, and with a quickly growing economy it was a lot easier to keep spending under revenue because revenue was increasing every year. The debt number rarely dropped, but inflation saw the national debt relative to GDP shrink. Reagan tripled the national debt to get out of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s (among other things, he was also fighting the Cold war), bush 1 spent money at a high rate too. Clinton almost balanced the budget thanks in part to the huge economic boom from the dot com bubble. Bush 2 doubled the national debt due to increased military spending on two wars that were part of the war on terror, security spending, and since then there's been no winning move, with Obama doubling the national debt, trump almost increasing it as much in 4 years (which included the pandemic to be fair) as Obama did in 8, Biden ran it up a bunch, and Trump is keeping up the tradition with very little in sight in terms of an exit strategy for anyone at this point.
    
    Even the post-WWII fiscal restraint was a bit of a mirage. The Bretton woods system meet the US dollar the reserve currency of the world, would you allowed them to play some games when issuing currency that allowed the federal debt to State relatively small. If everything was kosher, the stagflation crisis of the 1970s never would have happened.
    
    While there have been times in the past that the United States has paid off its debts, such as after the revolutionary war and after the civil war, they would have been so long ago that even the definitions of parties would be fundamentally different. For the most part, other than immediately following World war II where demobilization allowed for the sale of a bunch of military hardware, nominal debt value almost never dropped, and even inflation adjusted would tend to stay around the same spot until stagflation broke everything.
    
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- LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Kamala would have been just as bad, she’s an ICE agent
  
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verdantbanana@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and not enough jobs paying living wages

doesn’t matter how many jobs are or aren’t added

economy is in the shitter either way

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aldfin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s incredible how the market is really not pricing in this weakness at all. The CAPE ratio is at an all time high which normally would really need an excellent growth outlook in order to be justifiable. Historically these valuations have lead to pretty poor investment returns in the next 10 year period.

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reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What kind of jobs were added? Were they lower paying than the jobs that were lost?

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