After persevering through years of high interest rates and wild swings in economic policy, the labor market appears to be sputtering, in a slowdown that could build on itself as consumers lose confidence and pull back on spending.

Employers added only 22,000 jobs in August, well below the number that forecasters had expected. The unemployment rate rose very slightly to 4.3%, showing both that businesses’ appetite for new recruits and the number of available job-seekers have faded in the last several months.

The economy has been cooling since its red-hot pandemic peak as the Federal Reserve worked to tame inflation, and has more recently been buffeted by a barrage of tariffs and other disruptive actions by the Trump administration.

Employers haven’t been letting go of workers in large nu

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