Trump may be exciting, but can listening to him make you money?
The conundrum of President Donald Trump is one I try to stay away from. Not because I don’t want to go there, but because it hasn’t been all that lucrative to do so. Because of the president’s sheer, endless presence in the media, and his love of CEOS — to hang with or to dominate — he’s the main event when it comes to the news, including business news. But he is decidedly not the main event when it comes to owning stocks. Notice, I used the word owning because when it comes to trading stocks, you could have been in and out and in again with Nvidia or Apple , maybe ten times, all to no avail. Through this first year of Trump’s second presidency, I have urged you not to focus on his initiatives because you can’t make money doing so. Why then, after dodging bullets and a couple of explosive shellings, look at the president’s role in the economy on fall Sunday when the NFL stops the nation in its tracks save for DraftKings ? Simple: the employment report. It’s not to be trifled with. Job growth needs to stay vibrant for the market to stay strong, and the subtext of Friday’s weak August report — nonfarm payrolls increased by just 22,000 for the month, lower than the 75,000 forecast, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3% — is that this one is on Trump. It’s his fault. And it will only get worse. Let’s do some caveating. Don’t worry, I won’t be wishy-washy: August is not an important month for jobs data since the whole nation tends to be in flux. But even the least important employment number is more important than any other number generated by the Labor or Commerce departments. Plus, we did have the big shake-up in the tabulation subset of our government, but I don’t think that will matter. The president did not offer a turnkey compilation solution, the obvious one being giving the whole shooting match to ServiceNow and letting CEO Bill McDermott handle it. That would be the end of the chaos and the beginning of consistency because it could be algorithmic. Don’t giggle: given that many companies are no longer cooperating with the Labor Department — or so the department claims — an algo model might help. The current system of revisions renders an important set of numbers impossible to use. The president could have made lemonade out of this one, but chose to be haphazard in his pique and ended up looking … well, sometimes you don’t need to finish the sentence with this guy. Now, to the matter at hand. Or matters, because there were two components to the chaotic job picture painted by the Labor Department: the creation and the destruction of jobs in this country. And there were lots of signs that pointed to the White House for the latter in a very negative way. First, we are finally seeing the savagery of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Having never worked for the government, and having been fired by private corporations and felt the end of my paycheck stream rather immediately, it was hard to fathom how long it took for the fired employees to actually depart from the rolls. It’s clear now, though, that we have a turbo-charged Reagan at the helm. Ronald Reagan really did try to shrink the government to get it off our backs. I have no idea what the heck DOGE had in mind in terms of back pain alleviation. There is a sense that if the jobs historically went to Democrats with a demographic that mimics the makeup of our country, the chainsaw lopped that department. No matter: Under President Joe Biden, you could count on consistent growth from all ends of the government. Now you have the opposite. Even the Department of Defense is shrinking. Excuse me, the Department of War . Does it matter? Philosophically, yes. The headline-grabbing firings of government workers give some the appearance of chaos, but others a sense that the Deep State is declining in its invasion of our lives. I come back and say “our cultural lives,” but when it comes to our daily lives, it is hard to imagine a more intrusive government than this one right now — down to a Hyundai factory floor in Georgia, a natural ICE raid flashpoint . Leave it to ICE to create an international incident to blunt the president’s endless attempts to force foreign companies to create jobs here. But in reality, other than DOGE and the possibility of delayed government contracts, I just don’t see a lot of important layoffs surfacing in the numbers. You don’t see layoffs in any other important area. How about job creation? There, the paucity is real. And it is strange. When you consider how little attention Biden paid to business, except when it came to climate change, you would have thought that job growth would be hard to come by. It wasn’t, though. We had jobs galore. That’s because we had so much infrastructure stimulus that we had to beat the hustings to find labor. We still do: only about half of the money has been spent. Ward Nye, CEO of Martin Marietta Materials , and a much better gauge of the economy than the Labor Department, given the need for concrete and aggregate for so many of the jobs required, indicated to me that the job creation is nowhere near done. That’s especially true in the boomtown parts of our country: the Southeast and West, especially California. But there’s an interesting intersection between the two presidencies. The jobs that Biden wanted and did create are the same ones that Trump hates: wind, solar, electric vehicles, the usual gang of sainted Democratic projects. The metaphor of an ICE-targeted EV battery plant should be lost on no one. The confluence of jobs taken away by the feds in Washington and jobs taken away in the field speaks to the culture wars being waged all over the place. They are hurting job growth for certain. It matters because these were jobs that could be tabulated. They count. They reverberate everywhere, too. Then there are the tariffs. They make things more expensive, but so far, they have netted zero new jobs that I can tell. We have so many industries that are tainted by tariffs, but the only impact is higher prices for all of us. Ugly. Worrisome. But we know how to play it: TJX , Costco , Walmart , Amazon , Burlington , Dollar General , Brinker , and McDonald’s are winners; everyone else is a loser. Still, I can’t see any positive impact on job growth. No one is hiring because of tariffs, and I can’t even see any expansion plans, save Apple ‘s partnership with Corning in Kentucky. The jobs lost from an offshore wind cancellation may exceed those created by private industry, except those needed for the data center buildout. I just don’t see much that is positive in manufacturing, ironic given the president’s obsession with the recreation of small-town factory jobs. Thank heavens for Nucor , which still creates them. Otherwise, it is more Thornton Wilder than it is Henry Ford. (Okay, so I auditioned for the narrator in “Our Town” but didn’t get it, and still hate Mrs. Dusenbury, our high school drama teacher.) I keep thinking we will see the big increase in jobs created by the aforementioned data center growth, but it would come from the utility companies, and they don’t seem to be hiring anyone yet. If they are, they have been mighty quiet about it. We do have the usual increases in the health-care sector, because we remain incapable of any rationalizing that portion of the economy in the way we take care of people, other than to throw a lot of money at the system. Offsetting that — and there does seem to be an offset for everything — are the dramatic cutbacks in drilling as a result of the decline in oil prices. The ability of these companies to ratchet back is undeniable. Those are high-paying, cyclical jobs, and they are going away as the price of oil sinks, and will continue to sink a great deal. OPEC+ just added another 137,000 barrels a day, a pathetic boost, not even worth a headline, but enough to keep drilling plans on hold domestically. So, let’s call the Trump effect on current jobs one big push. Nothing that nets to any new hirings given the federal government wipeout, the decline and fall of Biden’s pet projects, and the creation of meager health-care jobs and some small AI data center construction. However, there is good news here that controlled the positive opening of Friday’s session but got lost in the shuffle as the day went on: housing could make a dramatic recovery if the yields on long-term bonds go down with the short-term ones when the Federal Reserve starts cutting rates. It didn’t last year, and it was devastating to the housing complex, including Club name Home Depot . The Fed has plenty of room to cut because of short-term job losses. It matters because we saw a current of worry about credit creation shrinkage, and the bad debts that come with this stage of the economic cycle, hence the decline of the financials on Friday. Worrisome. Against that is the lack of growth in jobs from the Hispanic cohort. Hiring here usually bodes well for housing. It will soon be too hard to risk hiring even legal Hispanics for home building. The fuzzy statistics of illegal immigration count to an influx of 7.2 million workers. Without them, it’s hard to have more job growth than we have because we have a stretched workforce as it is. Can you imagine the possibility of minimal job growth because of minimal new people to hire? It could be the case. Away from Friday’s jobs report, we know that the private sector is committed to creating jobs in this country, but they seem to be front-loaded construction jobs. Once whatever is built comes to fruition, whether it be warehouses or utility plants, the emphasis will be on robots. We don’t have enough people who can take these jobs. But that’s a pretty ethereal analysis until we can have an empirical analysis. How about the layoffs from agentics, the autonomous AI systems? We see 4,000 from Salesforce . But we haven’t seen anything substantive yet from anyone else. When on Friday I asked Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, about the lack of new jobs because of the rise of AI, he said his two kids got jobs, so he’s not worried. I don’t even know if he was being flip, funny, or dismissive, but it shut me up good. Or I may have just been tired from going to the Eagles game the night before and arriving home at 3:30 a.m. ET — enough time to grab 40 winks and a shower before appearing at my desk at The New York Stock Exchange. Now, we know the president has plenty of psychological impact on all sorts of private industry. Some companies seem to be freezing their hiring plans, but they would be fools to admit it. Nobody’s moving factory jobs out of the U.S. The opprobrium would be too loud. No CEOs want Jan. 6 rioters to picket her house. But let’s default to my stated position about commenting on Trump: As much as it’s a big deal that the president hobnobs with CEOs or causes India to gang up with China and Russia against us, it doesn’t mean that much at all to the private sector at large, or specific industries and the stock market, for that matter. It does mean that the yields on long-term bonds could come down with the short end, and that could change things dramatically for the better. Ultimately, I come down to one place: the president is about as irrelevant to the economy as he is relevant to the media. It’s a powerful, liberating concept when picking stocks. In a true oddity, the only thing that his sound and fury seems to be accomplishing is the need for the Fed to cut. It’s a more powerful way for the president to get his way than browbeating Fed Chief Jerome Powell, even if it is the most destructive way to do so. The president’s stories wind up to be prurient when it comes to the economy and nothing more. Call me an apostate when it comes to the need to hang on his every word. I’d rather listen to conference calls. It’s more boring, but a lot more lucrative for all of us. Go watch some football. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) 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