Historical Serenity, BLS BS & Too Late on Interest Rates – Top 3 Takeaways, September 10th, 2025
Takeaway #1: The year was...
The Russian Federation was established. The Cold War officially came to an end. The Americans with Disabilities Act took effect. Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison. Johnny Carson called it a career. The Rodney King riots took place in LA. The number one song was End of the Road by Boyz II Men...and if you still haven’t come up with the year by now this should do the trick...Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States. For South Floridians there’s one other reference point that probably prints, and that’s that the year in question was also the year of Hurricane Andrew. The year was of course 1992. And the reference point to Hurricane Andrew is also of particular appropriateness because that’s also how far back you have to go to find the last time that at the peak of hurricane season the National Hurricane Center wasn’t tracking anything (that could become a tropical cyclone within seven days anyway) until this week. So yes, we enter today, the historical peak of hurricane season activity without the imminent threat of anything developing and instead the eleven most wonderful words that ever appear on the NHC’s Tropical Weather Outlook: Tropical cyclone activity is not expected during the next 7 days. That’s great news for a lot of reasons. Not only does that mean that the earliest there could, based on the Hurricane Center’s guidance, be a named tropical cyclone would be September 18th, but when do you think the last year was that we made it as far as September 18th without a named storm active during the month? My hint for you on that one is this...the top song that year was Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland. That’s right, the year was 1939. So yes, as of today we’ve had the quietest start to a September in the tropics that we’ve seen in 33 years, and should the National Hurricane Center’s current guidance hold, it will likely become the quietest start to September in at least 86 years. And as exciting as the prospect of that is (at least for a weather dork like me or anyone who doesn’t want to deal with hurricanes)...there’s a stretch of the ultimate hurricane repellant, Saharan dust, that’s currently reaching clear across the Atlantic. Serenity in September is, as demonstrated, a real rarity and it’s an especially great thing as we’ve reached the historic peak of hurricane season.
Takeaway #2: Good riddance...
Anyone who questioned Presidnet Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because, well, they proved to be especially bad at statistics – should surely be silent now. Last year, in the middle of the presidential election season you may recall a jobs revision bombshell turned in during the BLS’s annual jobs report revision – where they issue one final report about the number of jobs gained or lost during the previous year. The stunning revision showed that a total of 818,000 fewer jobs had been created during the year than the government had stated throughout the year. It was the biggest revision in BLS history...until this year. Yesterday we learned that during the tracking year ended before March of this year. (March 2024-February 2025) there were a total of 911,000 fewer jobs added than what had been stated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the course of two years, that not-so-coincidently overlapped with the final two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overstated job growth by a total of 1.73 million jobs – or an average of 144,000 per month. In other words, the BLS’s monthly reports had become essentially useless, and these revisions demonstrate once again that the ADP Report, which showed consistently lower job growth, has been the far more accurate way to track private sector job growth. But much more importantly what the revision showed is that the labor market, and by extension, the overall U.S. economy wasn’t in anywhere near as good of shape as reported when President Trump took over and what this also means is that Trump’s right when he says that the Fed...
Takeaway #3: Is Too Late.
If President Trump needs cause to fire Federal Jerome Chairman Jerome Powell, how about the fact that he’s just plain awful at his job? Not only was he entirely on the wrong side of history during the onset of the Biden administration when he led the pack in stating that inflation was only transitory (failing to raise rates until it was too late and inflation had run away to 40+ year highs) but his stubbornness to rely on dated and unreliable metrics, like the BLS’s employment reports, has without a doubt put this country way behind the curve with interest rates that have been way too high for way too long. As a result of yesterday’s revisions along with last week’s weak jobs reports investors haven’t just priced in a cut in interest rates in next week’s meeting. Most investors now believe that the Federal Reserve will now need to cut interest rates by up to 1% (or the equivalent of four typical rate cuts) by the end of the year. The story of the BLS and the Fed has been the proverbial garbage in, garbage out scenario so now the fed will need to play catch up. Let’s just hope it’s not too late for the overall economy to be able to continue growing.