As the Fed chair recently put it, the American economy is now "driving in a fog." Because the federal government remains shut down, no new official monthly economic statistics are being calculated and released to the public. This lack of data will continue until roughly a month after the government gets reopened, since the people who compile the statistics have to collect the data each month before they can calculate what it all means. The gap in collecting data could continue through November, which would mean there would be no official figures released at the start of next month. The most important of these statistics are the unemployment figures and the inflation rate.

Today, a private firm released their own report which has some very troubling news. The Washington Post article about this report was titled: "Layoffs Rise To Recession-Like Levels Through October, New Report Says."

Layoffs accelerated in October, pushing 2025 job cuts to levels typically seen in recessions, according to newly released data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that tracks workplace reductions.

U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far this year -- the largest reading since the pandemic recession and on par with 2008 and 2009 job cuts during the Great Recession, the firm's figures show. The data includes a recent spate of layoffs at major companies such as UPS, Amazon and Target, and adds to growing concern about a labor market slowdown.

. . .

Recent layoffs, the data shows, have been concentrated in technology, retail, service and warehousing jobs. Employers announced more than 153,000 job cuts last month, a 183 percent increase from the month before, marking the worst October for layoffs since 2003, the Challenger report said.

It's important to note that this report doesn't track actual employment figures. It is just a measure of layoffs. So there's no data on how many people got hired during the same period, to counterbalance the layoffs. But even so, the numbers are a bit alarming.

With a months-long gap in the official jobs numbers -- which would counterbalance the layoffs figure by adding in how many people got hired at new jobs -- we have no real idea of what the labor market is doing right now. But even before the shutdown happened, the jobs numbers had flattened out, showing very small increases in employment over the previous three months. The last official unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, which isn't that bad, but it has been slowly inching upwards over the course of the year. Once the official government numbers start appearing again, we'll all be able to see where things stand, after the gap in data the shutdown caused. But with so many layoffs, a spike upwards in the unemployment rate may already be happening.

Donald Trump and his administration seem rather ill-equipped to handle such news. Their answer to bad economic news, from Trump on down, is to deny it and lie about it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on social media two days ago: "Jobs are booming, inflation is falling," as he predicted: "We are approaching America's Golden Age under President Trump." Inflation is not falling, it is currently at three percent and appears to be heading upward. Jobs are not booming. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing, in fact, even though Trump's trade war and protectionist tariffs were somehow supposed to increase manufacturing here in America.

This tone-deafness to the realities of the economy is one of the reasons Democrats are -- after a big electoral win this Tuesday -- so focused on affordability and the cost of living. Donald Trump ran by promising the voters an impossibility -- that he would somehow wave a magic wand and return the economy to where it was before the COVID pandemic hit. But prices have not gone back down to pre-pandemic levels, they continue to rise. Trump just flat-out denies that this is happening, but such gaslighting isn't doing him much good politically, as people see the reality of the situation at the grocery store every week.

We are also at the start of a tectonic shift in employment that few politicians have even realized yet (and, to date, no politicians have any workable answer for, that I have seen). A lot of those layoffs were in the tech industry, as artificial intelligence has eaten into the jobs that companies are willing to pay actual human beings to do. College graduates with STEM degrees -- not English majors or other liberal arts grads -- are facing a dearth of entry-level white-collar jobs doing things like writing computer code. These graduates did everything they were supposed to, by focusing on the STEM fields, but their promised all-but-guaranteed high-paying jobs are rapidly disappearing, as companies turn more and more of the work over to A.I. instead.

That Post article ends with a grim anecdote which happens to show the problem in a rather stark way:

Scott Boggs lost his job as a software developer in Houston in late September. Since then, he's had a few interviews but says it's been much harder to find viable openings than the last time he was laid off, about 20 years ago. His most recent interview, on Wednesday morning, was a video call with an AI bot that lasted 12 minutes.

"I haven't been on the job hunt very long, but it's already been stressful," said Boggs, 52. "I am hoping something lands in my lap, but based on what people have told me, what I've read, I'm not hopeful."

Got that? He was interviewed by an A.I. bot. So far, the rise in automation has mostly affected people in low-paying jobs. Every time you are now forced to manipulate a "kiosk" -- to order fast food, or get checked in at the airport, or get checked out at the grocery store -- a human worker got replaced. Robots are taking over warehouse jobs and factory work and any number of other jobs, but with A.I. this trend is going to hit white-collar workers harder and harder as time goes by. So the large numbers of layoffs may not be a mere blip in the jobs numbers, it may be the leading edge of a trend that continues into the future.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant