Harriet Torry

So the overall number of jobs added in 2025 was 584,000.

And that is a dramatic slowdown from 2024 when the economy added 2 million jobs.

So it's been a very unusual year in the sense that economic growth has actually been really strong.

And yet we've seen this real slowdown in hiring.

So what's going on?

You know, a lot of businesses seem to be very cautious because of the tariff environment that has increased costs for businesses.

And one way that businesses can try and save costs is by hiring fewer people.

And we've seen consumer sentiment really plunge.

We've seen the quits rate drop a lot, which is kind of a measure of how confident people feel about finding a new job.

So 2026 is going to be an interesting year because we could see people start to feel more confident about the outlook for tariffs and inflation.

But at the same time, there just seems to be this general hesitation and uncertainty.

It's taking job seekers longer to find work and a lot of people are struggling.

So the good news for the Fed is that the unemployment rate ticked down.

But at the same time, job growth is still pretty weak.

The general consensus is that they're likely to stay on hold in January.

They have said that if it lasts for six weeks, which is what it basically did, that is expected to reduce annualized growth in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter by 1.5 percentage points.

Let's say you're a government worker and you used to go out for dinner every week.

If you weren't going out for dinner in the shutdown, you're not suddenly going to go out for like five extra dinners in one week once you get your paycheck that you missed.

So there is definitely some spending that is lost and is not recouped.

We probably will get a jobs report talking about payrolls, but it won't include the unemployment rate, which is totally unprecedented.