"One Michigan Stadium Full of People Fewer Have Jobs"

The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. Wall Street had expected to gain 80,000. That miss of roughly 100,000 jobs is what economist Justin Wolfers calls "a big deal," not the kind of small statistical wobble he'd normally shrug off. And the previous two months were revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs, meaning the economy had been performing substantially worse than the B-plus or A-minus territory many thought it was in. "The good news of the past few months, some of it turned out to be something of a statistical illusion," Wolfers says.

What the Jobs Report Actually Shows

The headline unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%, but for the wrong reason: over 260,000 people left the labor force entirely and stopped being counted. Wage growth sits at 3.2%, while inflation runs around 3.5%, meaning real wages are still being squeezed. Wolfers emphasizes a second, less-cited survey where the government asks Americans directly whether they found work, and that survey suggests conditions are even weaker than the main firm-based survey shows. "It's suggested that now for enough months that it really is time to be a little bit concerned," he says. "Yesterday was bad news, but perhaps we need to put an asterisk next to it, which is it may actually be worse than it looked."