The boom in manufacturing is so quiet it's showing up as -0.11% change from a year ago in July 2026 for manufacturing employment

 😂😂😂

The Quiet Manufacturing Boom

Steve Cortes, The Daily Signal

 

This is the ten year chart, from July 2016, a few months before Trump was elected the first time.

 

The trend for manufacturing employment growth since then is negative.

 

Be careful about what politicians promise.

 

You often get the exact opposite ("mission accomplished", affordable healthcare, Mexico will pay for the wall, "we're going to cure cancer", energy bills cut in half, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera).

 

Meanwhile the trend for industrial production in manufacturing remains . . . not good. 

 

 

 

Yes, but it's been all downhill for six years already

 ... There are already a record 11.6 million Americans aged 65 and older still punching the clock. ... today’s elderly may actually be the last generation capable of working until they die on this scale. ...

More.

The percentage of older Americans working peaked in 2019-2020, as Peak Baby Boom 1957 turned 62. It's been all downhill from there.

The phenomenon has been a function of the size of the cohort relative to the overall population. The Baby Boom is like a dead bunny passing through the body of the snake.

Meanwhile the author fears the jobs these older people do are vulnerable to replacement by AI because they are supposedly overwhelmingly cognitive, so that younger workers will never be able to work until age 67 like many older Americans currently do.

But older workers are a diverse lot, performing a variety of work that can't be dismissed as simply cognitive.

Currently, the top 20 jobs by headcount of workers 55 and over according to the BLS are quite diverse, and categories where growth is expected to one degree or another in green outnumber those where stagnation and decline are expected in red by 3.5:1:

Truck, delivery, tractor trailer drivers 1.3m

Secretaries/admins 1.05m

Registered nurses 1m

Dirty rotten CEOs/senior management 0.95m

Retail supervisors 0.85m

Janitors/cleaners 0.8m

Teachers through grade eight 0.75m

Bean counters/financial managers 0.7m

Retail clerks 0.65m

Personal care aides 0.6m

Farmers/ranchers 0.55m (more than 54% of the industry)

Post-secondary educators 0.5m

Real estate agents 0.45m

Lawyers 0.4m

Property managers 0.35m

Home health aides 0.35m

Bus drivers 0.32m

Maids/housekeepers 0.3m

Billing/posting clerks 0.25m

Religious workers 0.22m.

  

 

Peak Baby Boom 1957 reaching full retirement age in 2023 is driving a new exodus from the labor force making 2023 the biggest single year rate spike in new Social Security enrollments since 2009

 New Social Security retirement enrollments experienced a significant +5.01% spike in 2023, marking the largest single-year growth rate since the conclusion of the recession wave in 2009. 

Peak Baby Boom started in 1957 and ended in 1961, with an average of 4.3 million births in each of the five years.

If you were born in January 1957, you reached full retirement age in July 2023 and were eligible for your first payment in August 2023. A person born in December 1961 is eligible for their first payment in December 2028. 

This means the new exodus out of the labor force and into retirement and into the not-in-labor-force category will last from mid-2023 into 2029, a tsunami crashing out of the economy as these individuals become 66+ and 67 years old in their turn. Full retirement age is 66+6 months for 1957 (2023+), 66+8 months for 1958 (2024+), 66+10 months for 1959 (2025+), and 67 years for 1960 and 1961 (2027, 2028).

This exodus will combine with AI to incentivize reductions in force in corporate America, and we're already witnessing it.

For 2024-26 to date, layoffs have been running ~766k/yr on average annualized ahead of the average 20 million layoffs per year. Announced corporate job cuts late 2024-25 were ~720k, the highest in 15 years.

Trump reductions in force for the federal government at ~250k net contribute but are a sideshow by comparison.

Perhaps fortunately, the Baby Bust of 1973-1976, when annual births crashed to multi-decade lows of 3.1 million per year, means fewer people in their fifties exist to be victimized by AI like Baby Boomers were victimized by the Great Recession in 2009.

But the shrinking talent pool snaking its way through the economy may also be a reason driving AI in the first place.

The problem of unintended consequences is inescapable.

One thing we could fix though is "disabled workers". The Dot Com Bust and The Great Recession didn't suddenly disable anybody, but that's what the data shows.

They exploited a chink in the armor of the Social Security system, and are one big reason the system is teetering.

The Bush and Obama administrations both let it happen because they wouldn't, or couldn't, address the consequences of job loss in a straightforward manner, so they burdened the system instead with a wink, a nod, and an averting of the gaze.

Well, just look at the damn thing. ↓ 

  

Rush Limbaugh's 106.189 million eating, but not working, a new high, in Trump's America!

The collapse in full time jobs continues in July 2026

 Full time employment as a percentage of civilian noninstitutional population has collapsed from 54.67% working full time in July 2000 to 48.97% in July 2026.

Just adding one full percentage point working full time in July 2026, effectively getting us to 50%, would mean 2.75 million more people working full time.

Where are they? At the movies making Christopher Nolan rich? 

When it comes to all employment, both full and part time, as a percentage of population, July 2026 might as well be the summer of 1969, with just 59.13% working at any job.

And don't @me with the multiple jobholding bs.

5.4% of the employed worked multiple jobs in July 2026, 8.69 million.

2.16 million had two part time jobs.

4.77 million full timers also worked a part time job.

Just 0.473 million full time go-getters took away a second full time job from someone else. 

It is just staggering how much this country is not working up to its potential.

 

Private payrolls: The trend for additions has been flat to only slightly down since the November 2024 election

 

The four week moving average of initial claims for unemployment hasn't been lower since October 2022

198,750 August 1, 2026

197,500 October 1, 2022

See previous post.

 😏 

 

Initial claims for unemployment are the lowest since October 2022 at 171,246

But go off about how bad everything is.

Slow news day: Twenty days after the figure was updated the New York Post finally does a story on it

 Shocking 105 million Americans are not working – more than during COVID or the Great Recession

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, whose wealth is his wife's, peddles the myth that the Fed is in control

This country eats, drinks, and sleeps inflation in the post-war . . . at 3.4% since 1948.

It's the cover for the haves to rob the have-nots. The Fed's job is to keep it going, just at a lower level than the 4.4% of the last six years, while telling you that they work for you when they actually work for the banks and the corporations.

From 1871 to 1948 the inflation rate was 0.8%, for most of which time we had sound money . . . until they confiscated it in 1934.

The only true words below are "We don't know". 

 

 Warsh promises inflation will be a ‘thing of the past,’ cites benefits of AI investment boom

... "if we get policy right — and we will — the inflation surge of the last five years will be a thing of the past."

... "While monthly price fluctuations are inevitable — especially in an unsettled world — underlying inflation over longer time horizons is determined largely by monetary policy," he said. 

... "We don’t know the extent to which the economy will benefit from the AI buildout," he added. "Yet it seems inevitable that what is now called ‘AI investment’ will soon be called just ‘investment.’"

Warsh previously has said he expects an AI productivity boom will prove disinflationary — a premise challenged by some economists as well as his fellow Fed policymakers. ...                          

 

Gee, I hope it's not this disinflationary:

 

 

The first half of 2026 is falling far short of a new golden age for workers, and isn't even as good as 2019

The worst indicator is full time employment, which is running more than 2 points behind Trump's best showing in the second half of 2019. Just 48.65% had a full time job in 1H2026, and the high pre-Great Recession levels look more unachievable than ever. It is summer time and this is when we should be feeling the purported boom most acutely and we are not.

On a similar semiannual average basis, nearly 400k more workers than at the lows in 2019 want to work but are so discouraged they have dropped out. The spread between June 2026 and October 2019 is nearly 600k.

The overall number of unemployed in the first half of 2026 is 1.633 million higher than it was in the second half of 2019, 7.413 million vs. 5.780 million. The level averaged 7.6 million when Trump was elected in 2016.

The broadest measure of unemployment, the U6RATE, is 8%. In the second half of 2019 it was 6.9%, the lowest on record to the time, but Biden beat that in 2022/2023. Are we really not ever going to break Biden's two-time record low of 6.7%?

Was that the golden age?

The thing I worry about most is initial and continuing claims for unemployment. They are both on a run at historic lows.

How much longer can they keep it going like this?

First time claims for unemployment on an average semiannual basis have been below 250k for 79% of the time since 2016 through 1H2026

 7.5 years vs. 3.0 years in the late 1960s and the first half of 1973.

Unprecedented in the history of the metric.

 

It's not job seekers giving up, it's Baby Boomers exiting the stage

 Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation rate falls to lowest in 50 years, outside of Covid era

... in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as “prime age” workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023.

“Looking at the statistics now, that argument doesn’t hold up so well,” North said of the retirement and immigration rationale. “I hate to use the word ‘alarming,’” he added, but said the numbers are cause for concern. ...

 

Alarmed? Really now. This misses the forest for a single tree.

Percent change for the labor participation rate for 25-54s is UP .1 and .2 for 1H2026 and 2H2025 respectively.

For 55s+ it's DOWN 0.8 and .2 respectively.

The 55s+ metric has had NINE semiannual declines since 2019 vs. only three for 25-54s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The former is bleeding participation, while the latter is holding its own.

You can't really appreciate this unless you measure the employment of each group as a percentage of its own population level, from which you can determine how many of them are not working now vs. then.

The number of 55s+ working in 1H2026 and 2H2019 is nearly the same, 37.8 million and 37.6 million respectively, but the former represents only 36% of the group, while the latter represents 39.3%. 

That means that the net additions to the no-longer-working side of the total population of the group since 2019 for 55s+ is now 9.193 million, but doing the same exercise for 25-54s yields a statistically insignificant 215k.

Meanwhile employment as a percentage of its own population for 25-54s, unlike for 55s+, has been and remains stronger now than at any point since the dotcom bubble, averaging 80.64% for forty-two consecutive months.  

The peak year individuals of the Baby Boom, 1957, turned 62 in 2019, when employment of 55s+ naturally peaked too, while the individuals of the final year of the Baby Boom, 1964, turn 62 now in 2026.

We are witnessing the Baby Boom roll over and disappear from the labor statistics. 

The foreign born population works at a rate of 63.26% in June 2026, the native born at only 58.25%

Foreign born workers numbered 30.725 million, native born 131.997 million.

To get native born employment to 63.26% of their own population in June 2026 would require an extra 11.351 million native born suddenly to get jobs.

The best estimates of current illegal alien presence in the United States range between 11 million and 13.7 million.

The percentage of the native born population working continues to fall because it is aging. The share of the 55s and over who work continues to fall, now down to 35.77% of their cohort. 

There are just 26 million people aged 25-54 in the United States who are currently not working. That's where they'd have to come from, a tall order.

 

The Golden Age of eating but not working: A record 105.808 million not-in-labor-force in Donald Trump's America in June 2026, Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate still higher than at any point in his first term when Limbaugh stopped talking about it

 The Donald Trump-Rush Limbaugh Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate in June 2026 is 38.14%.

 

Just 48.97% had a full time job in June 2026

I thought this was the Golden Age?

 

Four consecutive years with jobless claims averaging below 250k is unprecedented in the data

 

The homeownership rate soared to 68.8% in 2006 after nearly twenty years of Alan Greenspan at the Fed

 The rate when he began as Fed chairman was 64% in 1987, and again in 1990 and 1994, before taking off during the Clinton-Gingrich era.

Supporting the high homeownership rate was full time employment on an average annual basis north of 50% of population for twenty-three consecutive years 1986-2008. 

We call it The Lost World. 

 

As a percentage of population, the long term unemployed ticked up to 0.72% in May 2026 from 0.66% in April

Everything sold off today

Stocks were down across the board, with the NASD 100 notably down 4.77%. The equal weight S&P 500 is down 0.52% month to date.

The Tech sector was down the most on the day, 5.78%.

The Consumer Staples sector was up the most on the day, 1.64%, which looks defensive against a possible coming recession. The Utilities sector was up half that.

The U.S. 10Y yield rose to 4.55%, and the 20Y and 30Y yields rose above 5.00. YTD return for VUSUX is now down 0.85%.

Oil retreated 3%.

Metals were down across the board, silver down over 8%.

Crypto was down across the board, too, with Bitcoin falling below $60k.

But DXY climbed! +0.658 to 100.071.

The theory is investors are upset that today's "strong" jobs numbers (the 70k hospitality hires is probably World Cup related, a one off, so forget that) indicate easy money from the Fed is now absolutely out of the question, and maybe even a rate increase is coming because the economy is running too hot, which is silly with 1Q GDP at 1.6% annualized. CNBC called that "solid" lol.

Jokers say everyone's just raising cash to buy overpriced SpaceX in its IPO next week.

Investors are taking profits ahead of SpaceX IPO, says Capital Wealth’s Kevin Simpson

SpaceX is worth less than half of its $1.75 trillion IPO target, Morningstar says

Just 48.82% had a full-time job in May 2026

 Trump I averaged 49.23% full-time, even with 2020 thrown in there.

For 2017, 2018, 2019 the average was 49.87%.

2019 averaged 50.38% full-time, Trump's best year.

Trump's best month was July 2019 at 50.98%, which Biden did not beat. 

Trump is making America 2017 again, not great.

Full-time peaks in the summers, so we'll see what happens, but the set-up doesn't look promising.