US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

Last year we cancelled a planned US vacation, this year we didn't even think about it. Going back to Europe two years in a row. I don't give a fuck about tariff policy of our supposed "friends" but when our "friend" repeatedly threatens our independence and sovereignty, no thanks. Not going to step into the USA for a long time.

Likewise, I used to live in Germany, now in California, I used to get a fairly steady stream of old friends in town to visit, but not anymore, they essentially to a person refuse to come to the U.S.

I took a taxi ride from Niagara (ON) to Buffalo. The Canadian driver really was leery of Americans and I apologized for everything. It's a dang shame, and I don't blame you all for feeling this way.

Someone mentioned how they had to go to America for the job, and everyone worried for his safety. His answer: Don't worry, it is South America. Everyone felt better for him, then we all wondered how 1 year could cause such a flip.

I was surrounded by Canadians in Arizona (BC, Calgary) and Florida (Ontario) this winter. I could not tell a difference in the RV world (2021-present) which I thought was odd given all the boycotts I read about online.

I'm not Canadian, and I usually visit the US for business. While being a Muslim often means enduring the humiliation of being singled out because of my name by CBP, I'm comfortable enough that I could travel private for my US trips, which means the entire CBP experience is completely different (friendly chitchat and conversation as the CBP officers check our passports inside the aircraft itself). But with ICE roaming the streets, I'm not taking any chances of being deported to Libya or El Salvador or something. Which in turn means that we have severely halted all of our US investments, simply because I am unable to visit the country (!).

My mom's condo complex in Hawaii used to have many owners from Canada. Over the last year, the number of units for sale has probably 10x'd from previous years.

Less people visit the US because it's do damn expensive. That's the biggest reason for most people. Most people don't have any principles, they go where they can afford. Last year I was in NYC and Miami beach and was shocked how expensive everything was. (I know these are expensive places but that's where most tourists go - they don't visit Kansas)

> I recently went back for a funeral, and I had to spend a moment reminding myself that it would be fine for me.

Your passport does not matter, the colour of your skin does:

"US citizens jailed in LA Ice raids speak out: ‘They came ready to attack’":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...

"A U.S. citizen says ICE forced open the door to his Minnesota home and removed him in his underwear after a warrantless search"

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop

I’ve read some horror stories already that are enough for me to decide that I will not go to the U.S. until sanity returns. Here is one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

Probabilistically speaking, the entire thing is fine.

But seeing my engineer freak out about flying in a plane, despite passing Diff Eq and knowing the probability of a crash... Feelings/emotions do matter.

This is why populist demagogues win elections... ugh...

I have a US passport. I'm avoiding the US. ICE has already openly killed US passport holders. My Irish accent could get me in trouble or create a misunderstanding. Why risk anything like that?

Being a USC is no assurance, I've sat in immigration jail cuffed and legs bound where every other person but me was brown and spoke another language. It is rather bizarre when it happens because none of them empathize with you because at the end of the day you know you have the right to enter and they are just fucking with you out of sadism, while for the others they are wondering if they'll be deported. Although generally after a shift or two they forget why they were fucking with you and you get released.

Our president is abusive, he hired other abusers ("stephen miller", etc), and they are spreading abuse.

I WISH governments would be for the people and not for the powerful who can buy "justice" .. for themselves.

Just this week we had yet again someone in German TV telling their pleasure to be put into jail and sent back to Germany, due to her tatoos.

Unfortunely my home country has too many fanboys of older times, aka Chega, so I hope you still manage a good time there.

I agree that there are other factors likely impacting job losses in 2026, but it is possible that the impacts of a tourism downturn are only now being felt.

One thing worth noting is that the tax structure of American cities can be more based on sales taxes than property taxes, and so if tourism is down, and sales is down, this will begin to impact city budgets, which can have rippling effects elsewhere. For example municipal cutbacks to landscaping budgets could impact private contractors etc.

> I’m not saying tourism is not a factor or denying anecdotes about people not visiting the US, but I don’t think it’s the explanation for the February 2026 job losses.

This is accurate. This thread is people emoting. I get it, might as well let it out. Tourism being major part of the US GDP feels like countries whose GDP depends on tourism, projecting. I get that too, if that is the paradigm you live in every day, that is the lens you view things through.

Tourism is probably affecting local economies at the margins, and there is a real loss there for those communities. The US GDP as a whole? Not even a rounding error.

Most industries take notice when they lose 12% of a market. This is Russian style propaganda to say 'ignore this it's nothing'. We have an insane amount of policy/policy discussion around coal which only employs 40,000 people.

I live in a border state with Canada and this is having a huge impact for my community and those around us. I can't imaging it not impacting at least 40,000 Americans.

I had never vacationed abroad in my whole life, then last year I traveled separately to Amsterdam (with 2 nights in Groningen) and Paris. Both trips ended up being cheaper than similar domestic trips. Both times I was extremely sad to return home.

I would love to emigrate to Europe. One of the nights in Amsterdam, I couldn't sleep and spent the night frantically researching how to legally emigrate.

> the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate

As a US citizen who has daydreamed about moving to a Dutch city like Ultrecht I'm curious what they found, and how it feels to be an immigrant in the Netherlands.

The number of promotional emails I get from Virgin and British Airways, offering pretty big discounts for US destinations, suggests this is true.

That can't be right, the real figure is probably closer to 7%.

I come from healthcare staffing.

Contracts were heavily affected by cuts in federal programs that are critical to some rural regions, and uncertainty caused by inconsistent messaging about the future of such programs. Some areas are very dependent facilities that can only survive with public funding.

For example in nursing categories, CNOs (Chief Nursing Officers) would be requesting more staff, but CFOs would block those requests due to changing budget forecasts. The unpredictability of the fed is causing chaos downstream.

There is also a continuing trend to "realign" staff levels post-COVID, but that now is much easier to forecast for compared to the political chaos. In 2026 healthcare, that would not be a reason for attrition at these levels.

A little under half of US healthcare spending is public programs, the President’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill” made massive cuts to the federal component of that which started impacting in July of last year, consequently....

My personal take is that it's just hit a breaking point where people have finally decided that it's not worth the money. Im not the only person I know with an uninsured wife, and only coverage for my kids. If it weren't for my kids, I wouldn't have enrolled in insurance either. The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. And with the government cutting back spending, which you can see that hitting big insurers like UNH directly, the market is getting a little tighter.

Medicare rolled out prior authorization gatekeeping to kill more patients in 6 states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington to use the Orwellian-sounding "Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction" (WISeR) that is administered by unaccountable private corporations using AI to deny and delay care. Medicare is a corporate joke that people confuse for single-payer healthcare which it ain't, and so Medicare for all (M4A) would be awful. (Medicare "Advantage" is even worse.)

I can't find a reference for this, but listening to NPR this morning there was an offhand mention that last month there were significant strikes going on, and that those are now resolved, but showed up in the employment numbers for last month.

So that part could just be a blip. The rest seems on-trend.

>Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?

The fact that it's such big part of the economy is a really bad thing because it's "overhead" or "broken windows" for the most part.

And it's falling because people are stretched thin so they're not going to the engaging healthcare unless they truly NEED it. Even if you have "great" insurance contacting that system still costs you money if not every time then on average.

Healthcare is a cost not a profit in the economy: the Healthcare sector consumes what is produced by other parts of the economy. Similarly government can't exist without businesses. And a large part of healthcare is dependent on taxation.

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Trump has made coming into the US less attractive which is a source of a huge amount of money for colleges and other schools in the US. Foreign tuition is $$$.

Plus cuts to the department of education, non profit spending in general.

That’s just a guess though.

It’s almost like there are additional causes to consider outside of the latest Trump story.

Not sure why you're being down voted, it's a legitimate question. In some places, illegal immigrants constitute a majority of the construction labor.

I saw a lot of comments trying to guess where the job were lost in other comments and I think this give a little more context. I put the original source, there are 42 pages of data, if you want more details.

The distinction between + and - is useful even without either of those.

Not only that, Iran is attacking Saudi and friends infrastructure so that they have to use their capital there and not invest in the USA's AI nor government debt.

"As long as it's just theoretical I don't have to feel bad. Just keep plowing ahead and breaking things."

Well it's about to turn from theory to reality very soon.

I like your ethic of thinking critically regardless of who's in power.

Sincere question: do we have any stats on how (party in office) correlates with (government publications containing lies and/or misleading info)?

What do you mean noise? American people pay 96% of them with an average cost of $1000+ per family over the last year. To the vast majority of people that's waaayyyy above the noise floor.

Just noise that puts people out of business and livelihood.

As an European, I would actually love tariffs on American services. Kick them where it hurts.

Do you buy goods? Have you somehow not noticed the huge increases in prices for those goods?

What a head-in-the-sand comment. Are you very wealthy? Congrats! You can ignore the flames for a little longer than the rest of us.

With oil prices now 90+, there is 0 chance of an interest rate decrease even with a new Fed chair.

They always revise the numbers later after the headlines fade.

Dear leader says prices are down. So they are down. He tells me I’m doing better than ever before. So I must be.

But at least Russia can fund their war better, right?

The state of the Country is fully on display here when comments like this one are getting downvoted consistently... quite amazing (and sad) to see

They quite publicly fired an official related to reporting these numbers, and they also decided not to publish numbers during the government shutdown nor backfill them. I have zero trust the administration isn’t fudging things.

They absolutely fudge the numbers. Summary below, but in short every possible mechanism for keeping economic reporting numbers honest is being systematically dismantled.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...

Don't kid yourself. You're missing the part where the heads of departments who deliver bad or embarrassing news get publicly vilified and/or fired.

That's direct pressure now to fudge/push the numbers before they come out. At the department level, there is usually a long culture of objective process to overcome, so it will probably start off subtle/small, but once they clear the old guard away they will report anything they want.

> the administration is very sensitive to market motion

Not exactly. The administration (Trump) is sensitive to embarrassment and criticism from his own side. Tanking markets are such an embarrassment, and while he might back down when markets tank, he might also do the the other thing he does to deflect embarrassment and criticism, which is to perpetrate some new outrage so that everyone complains about the new thing instead of the old thing.

And, of course, the markets will adjust. Iffy government numbers will get priced in.

You might like to believe there's a rational actor there, but there isn't. It's a guy moving from one gut reaction to the next, where his gut reaction is often to push everyone's buttons.

My man this is cope and we're in hell, never trust anyone who gets off on lying and cheating

>There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid

The Biden administration pulled out all the stops (without resorting to outright corruption, like Trump) to get ahead of the fact that we briefly entered a recession in 2022 (which would not have been as brief if it had been correctly identified as the recession that it was). They changed how they calculated inflation around this time, which coincided with headline staying below 10% even though it had been trending higher and likely was much, much higher for parts of the country. I have no issue with the notion that they also changed the way that they calculated job growth and then, surprise, numbers are good (but then get revised down later when no one cares anymore).

Yes, they have. The BLS actually tracks a number of different "unemployment" numbers, whose definition you see here [0].

The "official" unemployment number, the one now reported as 4.4%, basically only counts the "percent of people actively looking for work that can't find it, who have been looking for work for more that 15 weeks.

The number you are trying to capture is what the BLS calls "U-6". That number is defined as:

> total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

In other words, anyone that would like more work but can't get it. I encourage you to read the entire definition and footnotes at the link I shared. It's very interesting!

Right now U-6 is at 8%. During the 2007 recession it peaked at about 17%. [1]

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

> mildly right leaning

This is nonsense even if we calibrate to North America and the EU (versus the American voting public).

Within America, Democrats are center left. Internationally it’s a hodgepodge of left-wing social, centre right-wing foreign and across-the-board economic policy.

It’s fine to say the part is right of your preferences. But it doesn’t help your argument to be delusional about where other Americans stand.

Even with Biden, the pandemic situation was handled relatively well compared to most of the world. We were due for a "soft landing", and then we voted to instead tax ourselves with tsrriffs and scare off the lion's share of our tourism. Oh, and give tax cuts to billionaires, of course.

Yes if you ignore his failures, Trump is actually a very decent president.

Obama dealt with two pandemic-level threats: H1N1 2009 and Ebola 2014. He made it look easy.

Which policies specifically? Certainly not the income tax on million+ income, seems pretty modest. We moved from TX. Property tax rate is low, no income tax sub million in income, schools are great (and almost all new), roads are fine and transit seeing massive investment. They definitely need to fix budget, but there's _ample_ wealth here to deal with it. I think they'll figure it out.

_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.

I don't think they killed the goose at all.

The tech companies killed the golden goose that was handed to them. They got too greedy. Amazon basically got carte blanche to build in Seattle, and plenty of tax credits to do so.

Amazon and their founder then told WA gov that they were going to relocate to Florida. WA gov said "well, we paid billions for your infrastructure, so if you're going to leave, please partially refund us" and Bezos whined and whined and whined. Imagine, a guy worth (at the time) nearly half a trillion dollars being told that he should have to pay a few hundred million dollars for his broken promises.

Imagine being given incredibly generous tax incentives for decades that allowed you to build a multi trillion dollar company, and then whining when the giver of those incentives asks for a tiny portion of that to be paid back when you tell them you're leaving.

For readers not in Washington, there is currently legislation being worked on that is essentially a millionaire's tax, (simplified as) 10% income tax on income over 1 million dollars, inflation adjusted.

There are a few very angry, emotional, and vocal opponents of this in most corners of the internet, although very few of them actually make a million dollars and there are many million+ income people supporting this.

Demographically, there are over 3 million households in WA, and only 20k of them would be affected.

Golden Goose? WA has a massive budget shortfall.

Seattle and Portland OR are ground zero for the burgeoning anti-AI movement.

Will you elaborate on the “indefensibly bad legislation”?

Like poor people have always understood, assume taxes always go up. Time for the rich to learn this lesson as well.

They also want to get as close to a skeleton crew as possible. They believe developers can do everything while simultaneously driving down the cost of developers.

They've been boiling the frog with increasing job requirements since at least one or two decades ago, and AI is conveniently aligned towards this goal.

Considering the first companies to claim AI has made many redundant are the same companies that overhired during Covid, I think it's pretty clear how the wind is blowing.

Companies move in a group, if you're the only company doing layoffs you look weak and predators will pounce and the board will ask uncomfortable questions, but if everyone is doing it, they'll ask why you are NOT.

> Instead we would expect the increased productivity to grow businesses further

This assumes infinite demand which is not a good assumption imo. Especially if people are losing their jobs.

In a shrinking economy there isn't much growth. They can take the productivity gains to shrink their payrolls and get the same output with fewer people

That said I don't think there is a ton of productivity growth yet with LLMs that would show up in the numbers that are getting thrown around. Companies are just finally seeing that they have a bunch of people not doing much at all and cleaning house

I personally feel that people are coming to realize that whatever they build can be copied in a short amount of time so its value is much lower than it would have been in the past. So what's worth building?

AI is killing the notion that SW companies are infinite money printing machines. The idea is that someday soon(in the next 5-10 years as markets are forward looking), someone will vibe-code a replacement for Photoshop/TurboTax/Office and if nothing else that will kill the profit margins. This changes the entire economics of SW and affects current hiring and spending.

Where is the money that was going to VC investments going now? With increasing inequality, I figure rich people have more money than ever that they need to figure out where to invest.

Always good to see an A/B test done.

This is absolutely backwards.

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Dorsey is in a huge bind with runway and lack of revenue. Blaming AI for a massive cut needed just to get by lets investors trick themselves into believing that he has a plan that makes the company grow to reach the level of profitability that the stock prices suggests will happen.

And perhaps Dorsey has a long enough of a runway for something to come along to save the company from eventual collapse. Maybe not, since firing 40% of a company tends to put a damper on innovative efforts that would massively grow revenues.

I think the point is that these tech leaders can be saying "AI" to appeal to their board/shareholders, but the truth is more mundane typical reasons for layoffs (bad economy, overhiring, offshoring, bad debt, etc).

Or it’s possible he was lying!

If Block is really so much more efficient, while doing well, they should invest that talent into expanded products and services. But that’s not what we’re seeing.

Some things:

- They acquired AfterPay for $29bn. Their market cap today, after the big AI bump, is $40bn. BNPL did not pay off the way payments companies thought it would.

- They have a weird internal combination of Cash and Square and AfterPay internally. They’re not as unified as they ought to be.

This feels more like Jack coming to terms with a company that’s hugely inefficient organizationally. It’s easier to clear out thousands of people and rebuild.

Sure, a CEO has never lied before about the reasons for layoffs.

That's not the point. The number of white European people arrested and shackled by CBP/ICE is very small. But it's NOT ZERO! So at the margin plenty of potential tourists would prefer to go some other place where that chance is effectively zero.

But other people did have issues. Examining a single person's experience won't work for this sort of thing.

California confirmed 100% safe.

ICE agents shooting US citizens, the mass shootings, the school shootings, the crime rate and fentanyl 'bend' posture that makes loads of poor people look like zombies, the aggressive police with guns who sometimes shoot people, burglaries that involve shootings. A lot of the problems in America seems to stem from guns and drugs but also policy.

Even something as simple as crossing the road is unnecessarily complicated in America. Some roads you seem to need a car to get from A to B. It just doesn't seem peaceful but very chaotic and intense.

Several Europeans have been detained at U.S. borders or during their stays, sometimes for weeks or months, even with valid documents.

Unsurprisingly, most people don't like hearing they might go to prison for no real reason.

The tradeoff with many EU countries would be that they enjoy their leisure time a lot more and sooner than Americans. Americans make more and save more statistically, but they spend it on cars, houses, and medical care, and generally have way less free time. So I think it's a wash.

>>you live in Europe if retirement isn't important for you.

Wouldn't the robust social safety net found in many European countries offer a dignified retirement for most people?

How does the cost of living difference work out? And quality of life?

Except lots of vacation, travel, etc.

Where is the evidence AI makes people more productive?

How can you trade on projected jobs numbers? The stock market seems detached from macroeconomics anyway.

Projected by people who have no idea?

It also decreases the consumption rate. introduction of immigrant populations has not been shown to increase the unemployment rate, rather the opposite.

https://www.epi.org/blog/immigrants-are-not-hurting-u-s-born...

> I'd have expected mass deportations to decrease the unemployment rate, since there are now a bunch of job openings.

Yes, for jobs that Americans don't typically want to do.

Which birthright?

You can be anti billionaire and still not be a fuckass racist

It was always "criminals only", but the problem is they have quotas for the number of immigrants to deport, and can't (at all) get to those quotas by just deporting criminals.

Remind me again which administration's Fed chair cut interest rates to near 0%, during which administration? And which administration has been pressuring the same exact chairman to cut rates now?

You realize your propaganda bullshit is very easy to spot, right?

Spout off a bunch of random disconnected facts, in hope that nobody fact checks them, hoping that people forget that pedofile who tried to coup the government is our President right now.