S8 Ep689: 15. SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMICS AND LABOR CHALLENGES GUEST: Gene Marks Gene Marks discusses job data revisions, the rise of gas prices, and the "Buy Now, Pay Later" retail trend. He also explores the difficulties small businesses face with H-1B visas and COV
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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15. SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMICS AND LABOR CHALLENGES GUEST: Gene Marks Gene Marks discusses job data revisions, the rise of gas prices, and the "Buy Now, Pay Later" retail trend. He also explores the difficulties small businesses face with H-1B visas and COVID-era loan repayments. (15)
AUGUST 1963
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batcher. Gene Marks. Welcome home, Gene Marks. Small business comments |
| 0:19.9 | for the Guardian newspaper, UK and U.S. edition, as well as our hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Enquirer. |
| 0:26.8 | Since you've been away, we've had a dramatic change of direction for the price of gasoline and also energy worldwide, so that electric bills are climbing, natural gas is climbing, |
| 0:38.9 | and liquefied natural gas is very expensive. |
| 0:42.0 | There are questions about shortages and energy challenges because of the war in the Gulf. |
| 0:48.7 | The price of gasoline now in Pennsylvania looks to be above $4, $4.11. The price of gasoline at Costco, which is the least |
| 0:59.1 | expensive gasoline you can find in certain counties, is around $4. And we're headed higher. |
| 1:05.9 | The question is, what does this do for the American economy? Right now, we have new jobs numbers in that suggest the economy is doing just fine. |
| 1:14.5 | Are you surprised, Gene? |
| 1:15.5 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:16.9 | Hey, John. |
| 1:17.6 | So, yeah, so the Department of Labor reported 178,000 new jobs and everybody's, you know, excited. |
| 1:22.6 | They were surprised by that number. |
| 1:25.1 | John, I, I, let's do a bet, okay? I mean, I'm going to go on Fandul and see if they offer this kind of a bet that sometime in the fall, the Department of Labor is going to go back and revise all of its numbers for the years and say, oh, we were wrong. The economy didn't add 178,000 jobs. They lost a thousand jobs, you know, because every time the Department of Labor, for the past two years in the fall, the Department of Labor this past fall announced that it had overstated jobs by 918,000 for the year. |
| 1:55.3 | This was last this past fall. |
| 1:57.0 | And in the fall of 2024, the Department of Labor announced that they had overstated jobs by 800,000 for the year of 2024. |
| 2:05.7 | And you can, you know, if you're listening to this, you can go back and look this up. |
| 2:09.3 | They, their methodology, the way that they gather their data, the surveys that they use, they're, you know, it's not great. And the entire world, |
| 2:20.4 | you know, at least the economic world, looks at these Department of Labor jobs numbers. |
| 2:24.3 | Like they're the, you know, they're the pinnacle of things to rely on. And I just, I've given up |
| 2:31.1 | on relying on that when, you know, they go back and they have such massive revisions. |
| 2:35.7 | Now, also remember, this is the first release of this job's data. |
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