Navarro: The Jobs Report Reveals Federal Reserve Election Interference

Authored by Peter Navarro via RealClearMarkets,

CNBC and Yahoo Finance called the jobs report a miss. Fox said it was lower than expected. More bad analysis from a Keynesian financial press that has shown extraordinary supply-side ignorance throughout the Trump 47 term.

The deeper story is indeed more complicated – and considerably more reassuring.

Start with the unemployment rate. It rose a tenth not because people lost jobs but because people came looking for them. The labor force participation rate jumped two tenths to 61.8 percent, well above expectations.

Behind the curtain, the share of prime-age Americans holding a job rose three tenths to 80.7 percent; for prime-age men, four tenths to 86.2 percent. When more people enter the labor force than the economy can hire in a single month, the unemployment rate rises. That is not weakness. That is Americans coming off the sidelines.

Now the headline number itself. Wall Street still reads payrolls through a Biden-era lens, when open borders swelled the labor force and the economy had to create well over 100,000 jobs a month just to stand still.

That world is gone. With the border secured and the population aging, the breakeven pace of job creation – the number that holds unemployment steady – has fallen to roughly 40,000 a month by most estimates, and the Dallas Fed puts it near zero. This month’s 29,000 is well within the neighborhood of breakeven.

Now consider the composition: private employers added 46,000 jobs in September while government shed 17,000. Under Biden Wokenomics, government hiring padded the headline month after month. Under Trumpnomics, the private sector carries the load and the public payroll shrinks. That is exactly the right direction.

Then there is the industrial turn, which the headline – and the anti-Trump media – hides every month and which matters most. Manufacturing added 9,000 jobs in September, bringing this year’s gain to roughly 72,000, after the sector lost more than 200,000 jobs in the last two years of the Biden administration.

Ahead of those production jobs comes the construction that makes them possible. Nonresidential specialty trade contractors, the electricians, pipefitters and concrete crews who build factories, added 12,300 jobs in September and are up nearly 112,000 since January 2025.

The factory-construction numbers of 2025 and 2026 are the manufacturing payrolls of 2027 and 2028. Real fixed private investment, up 2.3 percent in 2024 and 3.8 percent in 2025, is running at a 6.9 percent annual rate this year.

And a MAGA White House – built on blue-collar America – loves this: the unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma has fallen two and a half points over the year to 4.3 percent, the lowest on record.

Moreover, initial jobless claims, measured against the size of the workforce, are the lowest since the data began in 1967. Employers are holding on to the workers they have.

Nominal weekly earnings for manufacturing workers are up 5 percent, too, over the year, nearly 6 percent for production and nonsupervisory workers, while construction workers’ earnings are up 4.7 percent.

Against the latest CPI – 3.4 percent headline, 2.4 percent core – those gains are comfortably positive in real terms, roughly 1 to 2½ percent after inflation. Solid, and no sign of a wage-price spiral.

Yet the newly minted Warsh Fed hiked rates in September into the teeth of an oil shock, breaking the Greenspan-Bernanke-Navarro rule: watch the second-round effects of an energy spike before you attack the first round.

This jobs report is the second-round evidence. There is no demand-side inflation for a rate hike to cure, and NOTHING in Friday’s report offers a reason to tighten again in October.

Which raises the question: who is really running the Fed? The Trump-appointed chairman, who certainly must know better than to hike rates now? Or is Warsh leading from behind, appeasing a group of partisan anti-Trump Fed governors?

Remember that on September 18, 2024 – 48 days before Election Day – the Fed cut the federal-funds target by 50 basis points, from 5.25-5.50 percent to 4.75-5.00 percent. It was the first rate cut since March 2020. It was larger than the quarter-point move most forecasters expected, and it was a blatant attempt to help a hapless Kamala Harris beat Donald John Trump.

Now the Fed is interfering again, this time in the midterm elections. The September 16 hike has come again 48 days before Election Day – the same 48 days as in 2024. How other than politics do you explain a Fed rate hike on the eve of an election unsupported by the data and in flagrant violation of the Greenspan-Bernanke-Navarro rule?

There, I said it. And it damn well needs to be said.