The Growing Labor Market Gap

Today’s labor market data came in line with expectations. Unemployment held steady at 4.2%.

Economists yawned. Markets – no doubt relieved to have something else to talk about besides the Trump/Musk feud – pushed higher.

But we can’t help but notice a growing gap in the data:

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The government’s employment data looks much stronger than data provided by ADP – the private sector payroll giant. Of course, ADP is basing its data on actual customers, and not making all sorts of seasonal or one-off adjustments.

There may be a case for those adjustments. But with a growing gap that causes the government’s data to look rosier than the private sector – it’s a warning sign.

And with many government job cuts still not showing up in the data – you can’t file unemployment while you’re still on severance – the trend is likely to worsen before it gets better.

Our colleague Andrew Zatlin, the #1 payroll analyst on Bloomberg, has made similar observations – that the trend will start to get worse in the third quarter, and that government revisions will likely start to bring today’s gap down as well.

Until then, mind the gap.

~ Addison

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Today’s labor market data came in line with expectations. Unemployment held steady at 4.2%.

Economists yawned. Markets – no doubt relieved to have something else to talk about besides the Trump/Musk feud – pushed higher.

But we can’t help but notice a growing gap in the data:

Turn Your Images On

There may be a case for those adjustments. But with a growing gap that causes the government’s data to look rosier than the private sector – it’s a warning sign.

And with many government job cuts still not showing up in the data – you can’t file unemployment while you’re still on severance – the trend is likely to worsen before it gets better.

Until then, mind the gap.

~ Addison

Get paid $1,500 to write a two-page story

GET ALL THE DETAILS HERE.

P.S. There are plenty of moving parts in the economy right now, and we explored several of those trends with Frank Holmes yesterday on Grey Swan Live!

As always, if you’re not yet a full-fledged member, you’re missing out on unique, timely, and ultimately critical knowledge about today’s markets.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

Trump and Powell are no buddies. They’ve been fighting over rate cuts all year—Trump demanding more, Powell holding back. Even after cutting twice, Trump called him “grossly incompetent” and said he’d “love to fire” him. The tension has been building for months.

And Trump now seems ready to install someone who shares his appetite for lower rates and easier money.

Trump has been dropping hints for weeks—saying on November 18, “I think I already know my choice,” and then doubling down last Sunday aboard Air Force One with, “I know who I am going to pick… we’ll be announcing it.”

He was referring to one Kevin Hassett, who—according to a recent Bloomberg report—has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to become the next Fed chair.

Here we sit — investors, analysts, retirees, accountants, even a few masochistic economists — gathered beneath the leafless monetary tree, rehearsing our lines as we wait for Jerome Powell to step onstage and tell us what the future means.

Spoiler: he can’t. But that does not stop us from waiting.

Tomorrow, he is expected to deliver the December rate cut. Polymarket odds sit at 96% for a dainty 25-point cut.

Trump, Navarro and Lutnick pine for 50 points.

And somewhere in the wings smiles Kevin Hassett — at 74% odds this morning, the presumed Powell successor — watching the last few snowflakes fall before his cue arrives.

With U.S. stocks trading at about 24 times forward earnings, plans for capital growth have to go off without a hitch. Given the billions of dollars in commitments by AI companies, financing to the hilt on debt, the most realistic outcome is a hitch.

On a valuation basis, global markets will likely show better returns than U.S. stocks in 2026.

America leads the world in innovation. A U.S. tech stock will naturally fetch a higher price than, say, a German brewery. But value matters, too.

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.