Despite the government’s reopening in mid-November, we are still missing almost all of October’s data points. October jobs data will be permanently missed. The 3-month rolling average of New Jobs peaked in April at 127,000 and has declined to 62,000 through September. The next jobs data we will see is mid-December covering data through November. The US needs about 160,000 new jobs each month to maintain the number of employed people in the US.

ADP, the private payroll processor, puts out its own monthly employment data. This data follows government data fairly well but leaves out government employees as well as estimates regarding the self-employed. Since July 2025, ADP has shown a cumulative loss in private payrolls. Not slower job creation, but outright fewer jobs.

Real estate is a major component of the US economy, estimated to be about 12% of the economy. New residential building permits have been in decline on a monthly basis since March 2025. Building ‘starts’ as of the most recent data, August 2025, is near the lowest level post-covid. I am very interested to see September, October, and November if it’s ever released.

Inflation data, CPI (Consumer Price Index), and PPI (Produced Price Index) were also largely skipped.  Fortunately, there are other data sources we can use that follow closely traditional data sources we can use to gauge the direction of inflation and the economy. The Wall Street Journal publishes PriceStats which closely follows CPI ex-shelter increased in October from 2.672% to 2.725%. Small numbers, granted, but headed in the wrong direction. Both metrics bottomed Aug/Sept of 2024, climbed and made a higher low in April 2025 and are now higher than at any point in 2024.

In 2022, rate hikes were expected to result in a recession, but income and employment continued to grow, avoiding recession. Today we have declining jobs and decelerating wage growth, and the Fed is cutting the rate it lends to other banks as an assumed tool to thwart recession.

At the end of the day, we appear to be in a stagflation-lite environment, perhaps even in the initial stages of a recession.