The latest S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing PMI, a survey-based monthly overview of factory activity in the United States, fell deeper into recession territory in September, data released on Sept. 23 shows. The manufacturing index slumped to 47.0 in September, down from August’s 47.9 and the lowest in 15 months. Readings below 50 represent a contraction in activity.

The decline signals continued deterioration in business conditions within the manufacturing sector, which has been plagued by weakening demand and falling new orders. In particular, new orders in September fell at their fastest pace since December 2022, as manufacturers struggled with declining export demand and reduced domestic sales.

Slumping employment also made a significant negative contribution to the downbeat manufacturing figures, with job losses accelerating at a pace not seen since June 2020.

“Excluding the pandemic, the decline in factory jobs was the steepest since January 2010 as an increasing number of firms reported the need to reduce operating capacity in line with weak sales,” the S&P Global report states.

Cracks in the labor market were behind the Federal Reserve’s decision last week to deliver a large, 50-basis point interest rate cut, with one Fed official saying on Sept. 23 that he was surprised by the pace of deterioration in employment conditions.

“Progress on inflation and the cooling of the labor market have emerged much more quickly than I imagined at the beginning of the summer,“ Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic, a voting member of the Fed’s interest-rate-setting council, said in comments to the European Economics and Financial Centre. ”In this moment, I envision normalizing monetary policy sooner than I thought would be appropriate even a few months ago.”

The central bank’s rate-setting body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of which Bostic is a voting member this year, decided last week to lower rates to within a range of 4.75–5.0 percent.

Markets are fully pricing in another rate cut when the policymaking panel meets again on Nov. 7, with the odds split roughly evenly between a smaller quarter-point cut or another jumbo half-point reduction.

But while central bank officials celebrate inflation falling closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target, Monday’s S&P Global data suggests it may be too soon to declare victory in the fight against high prices.

Inflationary pressures picked up across both goods and services, per the S&P Global report, with the increase driven mostly by rising input costs. Prices charged for goods and services rose at their fastest pace in six months, with service sector costs surging due to wage growth. Input costs in services grew at their highest rate in a year, reflecting increased labor expenses, while manufacturing input cost growth cooled slightly, aided by lower energy prices and fewer supply chain snags.

“The survey’s price gauges meanwhile serve as a warning that, despite the PMI indicating a further deterioration of the hiring trend in September, the FOMC may need to move cautiously in implementing further rate cuts,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global, said in a statement.

In contrast to a deepening slump in manufacturing, service sector activity grew at a solid pace in September, per the S&P Global report. The services business activity index came in at 55.4, a slight decline from August’s 55.7. Relatively robust growth in services helped lift the composite PMI measure—which combines both manufacturing and services—to 54.4 in September, a slight decline from the prior month.

“The early survey indicators for September point to an economy that continues to grow at a solid pace, albeit with a weakened manufacturing sector and intensifying political uncertainty acting as substantial headwinds,” Williamson wrote, while partly blaming election-related uncertainty for a sharp slump in optimism about business output in the year ahead.

The deterioration in output-related confidence sent the sentiment gauge to its lowest level since October 2022 and the second-lowest since the pandemic.

The number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. fell by 24,000 in August, with the industry down 14,000 jobs year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Altogether, manufacturing employment has grown just 0.3% since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Chips and Science Act were signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, despite the bills earmarking more than $400 billion in subsidies for the industry.

The August decline is in addition to a recent BLS jobs revision that showed the federal government had overestimated manufacturing employment by 115,000 between April 2023 and March 2024.

“Despite hundreds of billions in Inflation Reduction Act subsidies going to manufacturing and the mind-boggling U.S. deficit, we’ve only seen a less-than-1% increase in total employment,” Aaron Hedlund, director of research at the America First Policy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There is no manufacturing boom.”

The U.S. national debt currently sits at around $35.34 trillion as of Aug. 4, up from $27.75 trillion when Biden took office in January 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The increase of more than $7.5 trillion dollars is equivalent to over $57,000 for each of the 131,434,000 households that the Census Bureau estimates were in the U.S. in 2023.

Average weekly earnings in manufacturing rose from roughly $1,361 to approximately $1,370 in August, according to BLS data. Weekly earnings remain below their levels from when Biden first took office when adjusted for inflation, with manufacturing salaries rising 17.7% between January 2021 and August 2024, while inflation in that period was roughly 20%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the BLS.

In July 2023, the White House issued a press release claiming the U.S. was in the midst of a “manufacturing boom” driven largely by federal initiatives from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the IRA to boost domestic green technology and semiconductor production. $84 billion worth of the nearly $228 billion of manufacturing projects worth more than $100 million that the Biden administration subsidized via the IRA and the Chips and Science Act have been paused or delayed, according to an investigation from the Financial Times published in August.

“All of the Biden-Harris administration claims on job creation are essentially false,” Peter Earle, a senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Most of the rise in employment they are taking responsibility for are actually just jobs slowing returning after being destroyed by pandemic policies — most of all, lockdowns. A sizable number of the remainder of jobs that have appeared over the past three-and-a-half years are not jobs created via economic growth and commercial expansion, but rather a product of their massive debt and deficit policies.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

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How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

Nine months later, we are delighted to see that our relentless efforts to bring attention to this critical topic finally worked, and the relentless replacement of native-born workers with immigrants and illegal aliens was finally the biggest political and media talking point, as demonstrated by such articles as “How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force” by the WSJ and “Without Immigrants, US Working-Age Population Would Shrink” from Bloomberg, both of which are an extension of the latest and greatest narrative, first spawned by Fed chair Powell, and then picked up by Goldman, which came down to the following: you can have (record) illegal immigration, or you can have even more (breakneck) inflation. So don’t be bad and just accept the roving gangs of Venezuelan murderers in your neighborhood if you know what’s good for you.

There it is: You can have illegal immigration or you can have even more inflation https://t.co/4npStzH8ft pic.twitter.com/xYofvgPjXV

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 5, 2024

Which brings us to today’s jobs report… where the native vs foreign-born debate just exploded.

As we discussed earlier, superficially the August payrolls report was a mixed bag. On one hand, it was disappointing in that the payrolls print came in softer than expected, but was a big bounce from sharply downward revised June and July prints. On the other hand, the unemployment rate did drop from the Sahm Rule’s recession trigger level of 4.3% to 4.2%, and effectively eliminated the clear cut case for a 50bps rate cut, especially since the Household survey was not only far stronger than the Establishment survey, but indicated the biggest increase in employment since March.

That, at least, was the quantitative view. And while that was mixed, there was no confusion in the picture painted by the qualtitative aspect of the jobs report. Here, everything was a disaster.

Starting at the top, while the number of employed workers did rise by 168K, looking closer at the composition of this increase is disastrous: that’s because it consisted of an increase of 527K part-time jobs, offset by a 438K plunge in full-time jobs.

This means that since last June, the US has added just over 2 million part-time jobs, and lost over 1.5 million full-time jobs.

Needless to say, part-time jobs pay far less, don’t offer benefits, and generally lead to a suboptimal outcomes for the labor market, one of which is the need to get more than one job, and sure enough, the number of multiple jobholders – or people who for whatever reason have more than one job – jumped above 8.5 million, back to all time highs.

And while the quality of job gains in the past year has clearly been catastrophic – a necessary condition to give the impression that headline, or quantiative, job growth was strong –  there was a very clear reason for that, and it goes back to what we have been pounding the table on in the past: the reason is the continued replacement of native-born workers with immigrants (some legal but mostly illegal). And as the following chart shows, it is anything but a theory: it is cold hard fact.

Presenting exhibit A: the number of native-born vs foreign-born workers in August.

In an absolute shocker of a data point, in the past month, the US added 635K foreign-born workers, while losing 1.325 million native-born workers. This was tied for the biggest one-month drop in native-born workers since the covid crash!

But it’s not just the past month, or two, or three… As regular readers know, the reason why suddenly we are bombarded with media pitches for why illegal immigrants are actually great for you, is that the US has not created a single job for native-born workers since July 2018! And in that interval, it has created 4.7 million jobs for immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Finally for those wondering when the Great Job Replacement Fact (again, not theory) kicked in, the following chart showing the historical divergence between native and non-native born workers will make it clear: the gap first emerged at the start of the Biden administration and has exploded to a record size today!

Finally, for those who would push back that these are mostly legal immigrants, here is what Standard Chartered strategist Steven Englander wrote at the start of June to refute that claims and prove that most of these immigrant workers are virtually all illegal: echoing what we have said for the past two years, Englander wrote that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, “is a political flashpoint that has also become an important factor in assessing economic performance. Detailed data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) suggest that half of non-farm payroll (NFP) growth to date for FY24 (started 1 October 2023) has been from undocumented immigrants who have received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD)” (he defines undocumented immigrants as those who entered the US through non-traditional immigration pathways, such as asylum seekers, parolees, and refugees, i.e. illegals).

“The ability to track EAD issuance to undocumented workers is an advantage in estimating how much they have contributed to employment growth. NFP counts workers with an EAD just like any other. Using that data, it is easy to estimate that undocumented workers have added 109k jobs per month to NFP out of the average 231k increase so far in FY24.”

Which is a big problem because as the BLS now admitted with its revision two weeks ago, the monthly increase in jobs in the past years was not 230K as it had indicated previously, but rather 150K!

So if the true pace of job creation in the past year was 150K, and another 109K jobs per month are illegal aliens, that leaves just about 40K jobs for everyone else, i.e., law abiding Americans.

It also means that, great worker replacement scandal aside, the labor market in the US has – for the past year – been an absolute catastrophe and harbinger of economic disaster.

The latest figures, released by the ADP Research Institute in collaboration with Stanford Digital Economy Lab, reveal a stark reality. The previous month’s job gains were revised downward, further underscoring the troubling trend. Wage growth has stagnated, with no increase for workers who switched jobs or those who remained in their positions. What does this say about the state of the economy under the current leadership?

“The job market’s downward drift brought us to slower-than-normal hiring after two years of outsized growth,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP. This statement is a glaring indictment of the administration’s economic policies. Are we really to believe that this is just a natural shift in the labor market, or is it a symptom of deeper issues stemming from the White House’s mismanagement?

Now, after seemingly rushing to tout job growth in the past, the administration is faced with the reality of a cooling labor market. Companies, hesitant to let go of their workforce entirely, are scaling back hiring in the face of high costs and elevated interest rates. This latest data only adds to the evidence of moderating labor demand, which could further exacerbate the economic pressures that Americans are already feeling.

Federal Reserve officials are now expressing greater concern about the risks to the labor market than inflation. With price pressures easing from their pandemic highs, are we really prepared for the potential interest rate cuts that could follow? It seems the administration is more focused on optics than on the real economic challenges facing everyday Americans.

In a separate report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., hiring plans at US companies have plummeted by 41% this year through August compared to the same period in 2023. Announced job cuts have only decreased by 3.7%. What does this tell us about the confidence of businesses in the current economic climate?

“The next indicator to watch is wage growth, which is stabilizing after a dramatic post-pandemic slowdown,” Nela Richardson noted. But can we trust that this stabilization is a sign of recovery, or is it merely a façade masking the underlying issues?

As we approach the 2024 election, the implications of these economic indicators cannot be overstated. The Biden-Harris administration’s track record is under scrutiny, and the American people deserve transparency and accountability. It’s time to question the narrative being spun and demand real solutions to the economic challenges we face.