Burnes Center Senior Fellow Seth Harris appeared on MS Now's Money, Power, Politics with host Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday, July 2 to discuss the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest jobs and unemployment report, which had been released only one hour before. MS Now business analyst Ron Insana joined the conversation.
The BLS report showed that the U.S. economy created only 57,000 jobs in June 2026, but the unemployment rate declined to 4.2%. As Harris explained, the jobs report is astonishingly weak illustrating a rough year for workers in a stagnant labor market. The unemployment rate fell for bad reasons, not good, and real wages (i.e. inflation-adjusted) continue to shrink.
Harris discussed the narrow scope of job growth over the last year that indicates that the jobs market in almost all industry sectors in the U.S. is either stagnant or in recession. For comic relief, Ruhle showed clips of Trump Administration officials predicting better times to come that never arrive. Watch the clips and Harris's response, along with the rest of the segment, right here: