The bad news in last Friday’s jobs report may have been overshadowed when President Donald Trump fired the commissioner in charge of producing it. But economists haven’t forgotten about America’s job market – and they’re growing concerned.
Some of the jobs report data has economists using a word they haven’t uttered in several months: recession.
Hiring over the past three months slowed dramatically, creating problems for the economists and statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics whose job is to make sense of the payroll data they get from thousands of businesses across the country. As new data came in about May and June’s employment, the BLS was forced to sharply lower those months’ job totals from their preliminary estimates.
The BLS revised May and June’s jobs totals l