Even Fox Business is having a hard time putting a positive spin on the latest jobs report.
The panel on “Mornings With Maria” unpacked August’s jobs report Friday morning in real time, and when they learned that U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs last month — compared to the expectation of around 76,000 — the show took on a somber tone. The report also shows the unemployment rate has ticked up to 4.3%.
Getty/Screenshot Fox Business News
“So that would be higher than July’s 4.2%,” Lauren Simonetti said, who was reading the report just seconds after it was released. That rate, CNN reports, is the highest level since 2021, which was in the midst of the pandemic.
The report also included revised figures that showed that June’s job total was in the negative, and that the economy actually lost 13,000 jobs that month.
“That 22,000 number … it’s a weaker than expected number,” fill-in anchor Cheryl Casone admitted. “And these revisions are pretty brutal.”
“Yeah, extraordinarily,” Charles Payne agreed.
As the panel went on to discuss other aspects of the report, words and phrases like “surprising,” “disappointing” and “there’s a lot of concern” were used to describe the figures.
The report comes just a month after an enraged Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a bad jobs report by claiming, without any evidence, that she was goosing the numbers to make him look worse than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. The president then nominated a loyalist to replace her.
Yet August’s job report appears to be even worse. It seems that even Trump was aware of how ugly the numbers looked and, as per usual, decided to deflect.
“The real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is, but will be in a year from now,’’ Trump told reporters Thursday night at a dinner with wealthy tech executives, The Associated Press reported.