The US is in deep trouble, and the administration is not making it any better. Tariffs, healthcare cost increases, inflation, collapsing transparency and trust in official numbers, an almost complete lack of confidence in any cabinet-level leadership of the country, and most importantly, employment ’growth’ that is not growing. Do not expect Trump's "Golden Age" to arrive any time soon, and not before the Midterms for sure.
Two areas (among many) I’m looking at are Employment figures and oil prices. One (employment) provides figures that are not transparent, and therefore of limited value for projection, while the other (oil) is extremely transparent and has huge potential implications.
Employment
Looking at employment alone, the total number of employed people has actually fallen from July through November 2025. Not static but fallen. And that does not include federal government employment, which President Trump claimed was the real reason total employment is falling.
Government employment numbers cannot be trusted, but ADP, the payroll processing company, produces a jobs report every month. That report shows that in July 2025, there were 134,561,000 privately employed people. In November 2025, there were 134,544,000. Absolutely stagnant employment numbers over the past five months.
It is important to note that these numbers do not include federal or state (or local) employment figures. We know that federal employment has fallen, but the impact has been phased over several months through deferred early retirement and administrative leave arrangements. The biggest problem with government figures, however, comes from the exploitation of the recent shutdown to also inject uncertainty into the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment data, and explicit political interference in the independence of the BLS with Trump firing the head of the BLS statistical arm after a less rosy July jobs report.
Other sources become essential, as trust in the BLS numbers falls. For example, the total number of layoffs for the year comes not from the BLS, but from a private company.
Employers have cut more than 1.1 million jobs through November, the most since 2020, when companies laid off 2.2 million workers as the pandemic was slamming the U.S. economy, according to a new report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The layoffs represent a 54% increase from the same period a year earlier, when employers cut 761,358 jobs, according to the firm. It's also only the sixth time since 1993 that job cuts during the first 11 months of the year have risen above 1.1 million.
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/employers-cut-1-1-million-jobs-2025-why-layoffs-rising/)
Unemployment is going to get worse, not better, as costs increase and people spend the same money for fewer products. Consumer sentiment is at record lows, which will keep people out of the shops, or reduce significant capital item expenditure, especially as many larger personal items were purchased earlier in the year to avoid tariffs.
Oil
Inflation has been held “under control” at around 3% through unrealistic reporting and through international market conditions that are, temporarily, favourable.
Oil has been falling in price over the past year, from a peak of $80/barrel down to a low of $56/b last week and now hovering around $60/b. The oil price is a key element in the overall inflation picture, and of course, a significant indicator that Trump continues to point to, claiming that he has brought costs down.
But the oil price that we are seeing is not sustainable. Saudi Arabia has the ability to influence the price of oil, and finds it politically expedient to keep the prices low, for now. But Saudi Arabia cannot continue to keep the price down, and will not. Lower oil prices are a temporary benefit for Saudi Arabia, as it pushed other producers into financial difficulty (especially US fracking wells) to reduce competition. This allows Saudi Arabia to (expectantly or unexpectedly) reduce output, thus driving up the price.
And Saudi Arabia needs a higher price than it is getting today, and indeed for the past years. Only five of the past fifteen years (and only one of the past ten years) have the price of oil been higher than the “Breakeven Fiscal Oil Price for Saudi Arabia”; the price that Saudi Arabia needs for their national budget to break even. For ten of the past fifteen years, and nine of the past ten years, Saudi Arabia has needed to draw down national reserves to meet its budget. This cannot continue, and will not.
Therefore, we should expect to see oil production tighten over the coming year, and the price of oil to increase ‘dramatically’, at least back to the $80 - $90/b level that is required by Saudi Arabia simply to balance their books.
"Saudi Arabia is likely to rely on debt financing, and it will have to delay or scale back some planned contracting awards given 2024 was already in a twin deficit," said Karen Young, senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, referring to fiscal and current account deficits.
Before the U.S. tariffs announcement, she said analysts had expected Saudi public debt to surge by $100 billion in the next three years. It jumped 16% to over $324 billion in 2024, official figures show.
(https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/how-oil-price-plunge-complicates-saudi-arabias-economic-agenda-2025-04-08/)
So the oil price-driven reduction or stabilisation of the US inflation figures will be temporary only, and energy price rises should be expected over the coming year, further undermining Trump’s assertion that the US Economy is in a good place.
And as long as the lower oil price persists, it will have a negative impact on US employment figures, as the number of “rigs” drilling new wells declines. Over the past year, the number of rigs in the US has reduced by almost 9%.
Each rig taken out of service not only reduces direct employment but also reduces the number of downstream jobs produced. The numbers are not huge, but each rig removed also has a (very minor, for sure) negative impact on barrels of oil produced in the US, supporting conditions that will enable a rapid rise in the price of oil when Saudi Arabia decides the time has come.
Summary,
IF we cannot trust the numbers coming out of government, we will need to look to other, non-government providers of economic information. The government employment numbers cannot be trusted, and the latest GDP print seems wildly outside any projections, and was produced by a department that is under the control of a president who lies as he breathes. This will be the first time I've seen completely flat employment but very high GDP growth.
Private information, such as the ADP Employment Report and publicly available information about the oil market (just two of many publicly available indicators across a range of economic activities), would suggest that the coming months will be less rosy than the oft-repeated promises of a “Golden Age”.
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