From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to free expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor-at-large for the journal.

Thanks very much for listening.

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This week, we're going to take a look at what's happening with the US economy.

It's been a pretty interesting couple of weeks, statistically.

We've had, of course, the evidence from the Jobs Report a couple of weeks ago

that the rate of jobs growth slowed very significantly over the spring and early summer.

This, of course, led to an eruption from the White House and President Trump,

firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that's responsible for producing those data

and appointing on an interim basis a Trump loyalist, I think it's fair to say, as someone to run that agency.

Nonetheless, whatever you think about the data,

and there are certainly some problems. These were very significant revisions, and we've seen a lot

of revisions in the data in the last couple of years. There does seem to be some evidence that

the US economy may be perhaps entering a rougher patch. We had negative growth in the first quarter.

We had reasonably solid GDP growth in the second quarter, but there's

been some evidence from consumer sentiment surveys, from some production surveys, and of course,

now from this jobs report that the economy may be slowing. Of course, the big question on everybody's

mind is, is this perhaps somehow related to Donald Trump's tariffs, which he imposed starting

earlier this year? We didn't, of course, get the massive Liberation

Day tariffs that he announced on April 2nd, but we of course have seen a very significant

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