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Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Newts World Podcast on the IHeart Podcast Network.

I want to talk about a number this week that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved

because it tells you more about the state of the country than almost anything happening in

headlines. The June jobs report came in at 57,000 new payroll jobs, 57,000. That's well below

the 129,000, added in May, and it's well below what economists were forecasting. Treasury yields dropped on the news

because Wall Street immediately read it as a sign

the labor market is cooling fast.

Now, I've watched a lot of economic cycles

from a lot of vantage points,

as speaker, as historian,

and frankly, as somebody remembers

what real-stafflation looked like in the late 1970s.

And I want to give you a framework for thinking about this number, because the single jobs

report can be noise, but the trend line behind it is not noise.

Earlier this year, private payroll growth was running at two and a half times the pace we saw all through last year.

Strong numbers. Real momentum. And now, just a few months later, it's cold off enough to spook the bond market.

That kind of whiplash usually means the underlying economy is more fragile than the headline numbers we're letting

on.

Layer inflation on top of it.

The Fed's preferred measure, the price index, was running at 3.5% as of the spring,

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