DENVER, CO – The panic surrounding the infamous 1938 Halloween Eve broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds escalated today as Denver resident John Trigg filed a lawsuit against the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and radio impresario Orson Welles. Trigg is seeking $50,000 in damages, alleging the realistic, fake-news bulletins describing a Martian invasion caused him acute “nervous shock” and subsequent physical injury, possibly a heart attack. Trigg’s legal claim asserts the network was negligent in airing content so convincing it terrified listeners into believing the nation was under genuine alien assault. While numerous claims of emotional distress have surfaced nationwide, Trigg’s suit is one of the most substantial to challenge media accountability for psychological impact. Legal analysts, however, predict an uphill battle, citing the network’s on-air identifications confirming the program was a work of dramatized fiction, placing the onus on the listener.
Were we writing news copy circa 1938, this would have been our final draft of John Trigg’s historic overreaction. Ultimately, his case was dismissed; the program’s introduction and subsequent announcements audibly identified the dramatization. Thus, CBS was not liable for damages.
Low bar set, yesterday’s November employment report was anything but a dramatization. October-to-November volatility was superficially explained by the government’s shutdown and subsequent reopening. There’s no doubt that DOGE left its mark. As QI friend Philippa tallied, “Federal employment is down 271,000 since January, or 9.0%. As a share of the total, 1.7%, it’s the lowest it’s been since monthly payroll numbers began in 1939.”
Still, there’s much more at play here than shrinking government headcount. Take revisions. Though the two-month net -33,000 nonfarm payroll (NFP) revision for August and September was no shocker, it did maintain a losing streak of overcounting for every month this year. The 548,000 cumulative net losses thus far in 2025 (red bars) were second only to 2020’s -588,000 during a 100-year pandemic. In absolute terms, 2025 also eclipsed 2008’s -473,000 in the Great Recession. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been in the business of overstating things in recent years as 2024’s -373,000 and 2023’s -372,000 round out the top five net payroll downward revision years through the year’s first nine months. (These figures are based on the regular two-month revision cadence and exclude annual benchmark revisions.)
Cyclical indicators, like payroll employment, grow persistently in expansions and contract consistently in recession. Uneven performance is a sign the previous trend has turned. That made the hair on the back of our necks stand up given three alternating losses and gains since June. In “recent” cycles, these dates were the first months that a similar pattern emerged: September 1990, April 2001 and March 2008. Each incident marked the early months of their respective recessions. The worsening trend in underlying private sector employment is more definitive than the headline. Job losses in industries outside of Education & Health Care occurred in five of the seven months ended November.
Digging deeper, the weakening in managers’ employment picture is outpacing that of workers. On a six-month annualized basis, manager private core payroll growth contracted 0.6% in November (purple line). This marked the second drop in three months, was the current cycle’s largest decline, and aligned with May 2010, when the economy was emerging from the Great Recession. On the worker side, private core job growth has been marginally negative in three of the last four months, also the sole preserve of recession (lilac line).
This next metric could have Federal Open Market Committee scribes nervously revising policy statement language from downside employment risks to upside unemployment risks. The transition away from NFP expansion to unemployment gains manifested in November. On a six-month flow basis, the spread of NFP over unemployment inverted to -494,000 (green line). Over the entirety of the postwar period, a flip of this magnitude accompanied recession (red dashed line). It’s clear that two 2026 Fed cuts priced in futures markets can’t defend the Fed’s employment mandate.
Meanwhile, with average hourly earnings rising 0.1% last month, the weakest showing in more than two years, it’s evident that workers are scrambling for income. “Hours before bodies” is every downturn’s mantra and highlights the loneliest number on Bloomberg’s US ECO page: the U6 8.7% underemployment rate. This figure vaulted 0.685 percentage points (ppt) from September to November. Notably, two-month gains above the 0.5 ppt threshold designate recession.
Despite missing October data, the Household Survey revealed a trifecta of adjustments. Scaled with the population to normalize, employers have dramatically cut full-time employment this year, slashing 1.726 million positions through November. In turn, at 48.9%, the full-time employment-population ratio has accelerated to the downside (fuchsia line). The pandemic aside, the last time the ratio fell to this level was February 2009, in the depths of that recession.
The scrambling theme becomes more obvious via two other Household Survey gauges. Workers employed part-time for economic reasons – those who’d prefer full-time work – shot up by more than 900,000 from September to November to the highest level since mid-2021. This rare, short-term deterioration from the leading NFP indicator which pressured up the underemployment rate illustrates the severity of what’s unfolding. At a 2.0% ratio to the population (yellow line), this small number looms large in business cycle history. Danielle dubbed the yellow dashed line, “A Recession Runs Through It.” On that note, she also flagged the 316,000 spike in the ranks of those who’ve been unemployed for five weeks or less. We dub these folks the “good unemployed,” as they tend to represent the “Take this job and shove it” cohort. Given the sinking Quits rate, a proxy for job insecurity when it’s falling, however, the likelier case is that a lot of firing has taken place in a short period of time, which October layoffs back. Moreover, at 1.9 million, the number of those who’ve been unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose to one of the highest levels since 2021, suggesting workers are anything but brazen enough to tell their bosses to shove anything.
As if that wasn’t enough, multiple jobholders also jumped by nearly 500,000 over the two-month stretch. American households’ needs for another gig – another paycheck of any kind– are flagrant. This elevated the multiple jobholders-population ratio to a cycle high 3.4% (blue line). For comparison, this level was crossed just once during the 2007-09 episode. All told, the multitude of recessionary signposts emanating from yesterday’s employment elicited a troubling underreaction.