June Jobs Report: Not Sinking, But Not Surging. Just Treading Water. | Diving In
episodePreviously titled “June Jobs Report: We're Not Sinking, But Not Surging. We're Treading Water. | Diving In” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 5, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The latest jobs report just dropped. Let me start by telling you why it's important. This is the most timely and most accurate indicator of the state of the economy. And we just learned where we were in June. Of course, like any data, it's not going to be perfect. Look, here's today's big story. It's basically that the economy is not sinking. and it's not surging, we're treading water. Let me give you some numbers to help you make sense of all of that. So this jobs report tells us that employment grew by 57,000 over the month. If I told you a number like that a few years ago, you would have said 57,000, that's not very much. Most months, the economy grows much more, 150,000, 200,000, 300,000, numbers like that.
Yes, and this is a different economy. Let me explain why. The most important thing that determines the pace of jobs growth is actually the rate of population growth. More people both means more buyers and more workers. We've seen a sharp contraction in population growth under the Trump administration, mostly due to immigration crackdowns. Also, people aren't coming in even if they wanted to in a So what that means is there's this concept called break-even jobs growth. It's basically how many jobs do we need to create per month in order to just keep everything nice and steady. And a few years ago, you might have said 150,000 or even 200,000. Now, the truth is we don't know what it is. But we do know it's going to be a lot lower and a reasonable estimate might be round about 60,000 jobs.
And so this month we got about 60,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained roughly constant. And so maybe we really are just treading water. We're hitting break-even jobs growth. So that's the first thing. 60,000 jobs were created.
What does the June payroll number of 57,000 tell us about the overall jobs picture?
That's well below expectations. Markets were expecting round about 120,000 jobs to be created. So Don't think of this as double. Just think of it as they were expecting a few more. So they were disappointed by this. Second thing to understand is this comes on after a month ago. The last jobs report was unbelievably strong. It wasn't just that we got very strong jobs growth. We got positive revisions for the two previous months. And it looked like... You know, someone put the pedal to the metal. Well, we've subsequently learned that a lot of that jobs growth or some of that jobs growth was illusory. So the May jobs number was revised down by 43,000 to be growth of 129 and April was revised down by 31,000.
And so basically you put it all together and this is an economy that over the past three months has been creating round about 100,000 jobs a month. Maybe a little less, maybe a bit more. I'm trying to do math in my head right there. I'm not very good at it. So maybe that's enough actually to meet that break-even job growth. And so that might explain why the unemployment rate is It had been slowly drifting up and then maybe it flatlined, but it might be slowly drifting down right now with this recent surge in jobs growth. So what we have is positive jobs growth, not as much as we thought we had for previous months and not as much as we hoped we would have this month.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:39
2
What does the June payroll number of 57,000 tell us about the overall jobs picture?
2:39–5:59
3
Why might 57,000 new jobs be 'normal' now given slower population growth?
5:59–7:49
4
How is 'break-even' jobs growth calculated and why might it be ~60,000?
7:49–10:56
5
How should we interpret recent job revisions and the three‑month average?
10:56–17:28
Speakers
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