'Job growth has stopped': Recession fears stoked as latest economic numbers lag behind
The last jobs report for 2025 has been released, and the numbers don't look great for President Donald Trump, according to numerous experts.
The U.S. economy added 50,000 jobs in December, a slight improvement over a plunge in October and a slight rebound in November, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent after creeping upward for months.
Wall Street had expected a gain of 73,000 jobs in the final month of the year, according to a survey of economists, and the measured unemployment rate was slightly lower than the 4.5 percent they had projected.
The Labor Department reported that most of the gains were food services, health care and social assistance, while most of the losses came in the retail trade and manufacturing sectors.
"The U.S. economy added only 50,000 jobs in December and a meager 584,000 jobs in all of 2025," reported Heather Long, chief economist for Navy Federal Credit Union. "That’s the worst year for job gains outside of a recession since 2003. And nearly 85% of the job gains happened by April. There was little hiring the rest of the year. Unemployment rate: 4.4% in December, up from 4% in January. Wages: 3.8% wage growth in 2025, which is above ~3% inflation."
"2025 is now, officially, the worst year for job creation outside of recession since 2003," determined CNBC's Carl Quintanilla.
"It's clear we are teetering on the edge of a recession," opined Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. "The most notable trend is the collapse of job growth after the tariffs were implemented. In 2025 it was 144k per month before the tariffs, 23k after."
"Every republican president destroys the economy," posted Andrew Lawrence, of Media Matters.
"It’s wild that this is empirically true but not part of any political narrative," agreed Johns Hopkins political scientist Lily Mason.
"Its the sunk cost of the Boomer generation," added Bluesky user daughtersofwitches. "If they admit that the GOP is bad at the economy, they would have to admit they were the target of a grift and lied to for their entire lives. They destroyed their retirements, familial futures, and country for a lie."
"Trump never said, 'Making America Great requires demolishing the economy along with the East Wing,' but he might as well have," said Bluesky user James Neal.
"If you throw out the year of COVID, the average of 48,667 jobs added per month in 2025 is the lowest monthly job growth since 2010," noted congressional reporter Jamie Dupree.
"A reliable gauge of the underlying job market is average job growth over the past three months," posted Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. "Right now, that's -22k. (And again, the Fed's Powell says that likely overstates reality for technical reasons.) We're losing jobs. Call it a jobs recession. Since Liberation Day, U.S. job growth has stopped (and may even be in decline)."
"It's not just that total manufacturing employment is shrinking," warned Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal. "The number of manufacturing sub-sectors that are adding jobs is rapidly shrinking. Of the 72 different types of manufacturing tracked by the BLS, just 38.2% are still adding jobs. A year ago it was 47.2%"