The jobs report came out this morning, and it was a painful one. The U.S. added only 22,000 new jobs in August, according to the latest BLS report.

And unemployment ticked up to 4.3%. What does this mean? While we already knew with over 90% certainty that the Fed was going to lower interest rates at their meeting later this month, September 17 to 18, we now, even though

we already knew that was going to happen, we now have a much stronger case for it. In fact, I think

the question can be asked, are they going to lower interest rates only by 25 basis points, a quarter

of a percentage point, or will they lower it by half a percentage point? I think there could be a

case made for that.

So we're going to discuss all of that in today's first Friday, monthly economic update.

Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything.

The show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship.

It's double-eye fire. Typically, every Tuesday, we answer, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Typically, every Tuesday we answer listener submitted questions and every Friday we

interview a guest. But there's one exception, and that is the first Friday of every month,

in which on the first Friday, which is the same day that the jobs report comes out, we dedicate

an episode to a macroeconomic look at what's happening in the economy.

So welcome to the September 2025 first Friday episode.

Okay, so no one was really expecting the jobs report to be this bad. I mean, we know that the

May and June jobs report numbers were revised downwards to 14,000 and 19,000

respectively. We also know, of course, that the former head of the BLS lost her job as a result of

such dramatic downward revisions. In spite of those two elements, we did have positive news

that came from the ADP report.

As a reminder, ADP is a private payroll processing company.

Every month, in advance of the BLS numbers,

ADP releases their own report that uses actual payroll data from approximately 460,000 companies,

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