New jobless claims just dropped and — whoops! — the economy isn’t collapsing after all. Initial unemployment claims came in at 207,000, beating expectations by about 11,000. That’s not just “okay.” That’s the labor market flexing on every doom-and-gloom pundit who spent the last six months telling you the sky was falling.
Ouch! Somebody call CNN and tell them to update the chyron. “ECONOMIC DISASTER IMMINENT” is going to need a rewrite.
We’ve been hearing the same song from the same people for months now. “Tariffs will destroy the economy!” “The Middle East is going to crash the markets!” “Uncertainty is killing business confidence!” And every single time the actual numbers come in, they tell a completely different story than the one the media has been selling.
Here’s the thing these geniuses in the press keep getting wrong. If businesses were actually panicking — if the tariffs were actually destroying jobs, if the Iran situation was actually tanking the economy — you’d see it in the claims data. Employers would be slashing payrolls left and right. Pink slips would be flying out of HR departments like confetti at a New Year’s party.
Instead? 207,000. Better than expected. Again.
Oil prices are down nearly twenty bucks from their peak on April 7th. The labor market is holding firm. Businesses are hiring, not firing. But sure, keep telling us about the “uncertainty.” The only uncertainty we can find is in the newsrooms trying to figure out how to spin good economic news into bad economic news.
They’ve been running this play since Trump took office. Step one: predict catastrophe. Step two: ignore the data when it doesn’t cooperate. Step three: find a new catastrophe to predict. Rinse and repeat until November.
Remember when tariffs were supposed to send inflation through the roof? Still waiting on that one. Remember when pulling out of bad trade deals was going to crash consumer spending? Consumers seem fine. Remember when every economist on MSNBC said we’d be in a recession by spring? Spring is here. Recession isn’t.
(At what point do these people just admit they have no idea what they’re talking about? Asking for 330 million friends.)
Meanwhile, Jerome Powell is sitting over at the Fed running out the clock on his term — which ends May 15th, by the way — and doing everything he can to slow-walk any rate relief. His resistance to the sitting president is, as Breitbart’s editor-in-chief put it, “unprecedented.” The guy has a DOJ criminal investigation hanging over his head for the Fed headquarters renovation and his congressional testimony, and he’s STILL playing games.
But even with Powell dragging his feet, the economy keeps chugging along. That’s how strong the fundamentals are right now. Trump’s tariff revenue is pouring in. American manufacturing is showing signs of life. And the job market just told every media doom prophet to sit down and be quiet.
Kevin Warsh — Trump’s pick to replace Powell — can’t get to that chair fast enough. The youngest person ever appointed to the Federal Reserve Board when he served from 2006 to 2011, Warsh actually understands that the Fed’s job is to support a growing economy, not sabotage a president you don’t like.
We should also take a moment to appreciate the contrast. While the American economy is beating expectations, New York City’s admitted socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani just proposed a pied-a-terre tax on luxury second homes over $5 million that he claims will raise $500 million a year. Because nothing says “economic leadership” like taxing rich people until they move to Florida. (Which they will. They always do. And then New York will wonder where the tax revenue went.)
The bottom line is simple. The economy is performing. The labor market is strong. Businesses aren’t panicking. The only people who seem terrified of the economic data are the journalists who bet their credibility on a collapse that never came.
Trump said he’d build an economy that works for American workers. The numbers — the actual, real numbers, not the ones the media wishes were true — keep proving him right. And that’s driving them absolutely crazy.