The US economy continues to defy mounting recession fears fueled by record high inflation and rising gasoline prices, and added better-than-expected 372,000 jobs in June, while the unemployment rate remained stable at 3.6 percent.
After releasing Friday’s strong jobs report, however, Fox News seemed surprised by the growth before finally calling the plentiful number of job opportunities “America’s jobs crisis.”
For example, just ahead of Friday morning’s monthly payrolls release, the network primed its viewers to expect more bad news for President Joe Biden.
“The White House is preparing for what is expected to be a disappointing job report in just over two hours,” host Carley Shimkus told Fox & Friends’ morning flagship show. “The data is expected to show the weakest job growth since April 2021. But press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is trying to change the narrative. She insists the Biden economy is the strongest in our nation’s history but admits gas prices are spiraling out of control, though she blames Vladimir Putin.”
Two hours later, after Fox News host Julie Banderas told the station’s listeners that the latest jobs report had exceeded expectations, Trump-promoting Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo was brought in to provide an analysis of the numbers . And she says the report shows America is dealing with the “tightest job market” in recent history.
“We’ve been talking about this concern from employers for a number of months, the fact that this is the tightest job market they’ve ever seen, which is driving wages up,” she told anchor Bill Hemmer on America’s Newsroom. “Three hundred and seventy-two thousand jobs much better than expected. So many people are wondering how it is possible that even in a potential recession that we are in right now, we can create 372,000 jobs.”
Bartiromo continued to stoke concerns that both inflation and gas prices will continue to rise, although she admitted that “commodities have come off their peaks,” adding that we are “in an economy that is slowing despite job growth.”
Hemmer, meanwhile, noted that there are currently around 11 million job openings and that “if you want to work in America, you can”. During these remarks, the program aired a graphic that blared: “America’s job crisis’ while comparing the number of jobs available to the number of unemployed, which is estimated at 5.9 million.
Bartiromo continued to express doubts that the job market will sustain this level of growth, concluding that “we’ll see if this is the last strong report we see before signs of a recession”. Hemmer, praising Bartiromo’s “great analysis,” wondered aloud if “we dip or drop or go the other way.”
In the hour that followed on Fox News’ The Faulkner Focus, another Fox Business presenter also threw cold water on the jobs numbers, suggesting they point to elevated inflation and a faltering economy on the brink of recession.
“What’s happening now is that Americans are actually diving into their savings because of inflation,” explained David Asman. “So they’re running out of savings. What to do when you are at home and have no more savings? you go back to work A lot of people who were sitting on the fence are now looking at those 11 million jobs and picking the really good ones.”
Asman added that there are some forecasters who are predicting negative economic growth in the second quarter, noting that the United States may already be “in recession” and therefore “many of those 11 million job openings will dry up. ”
Not everyone at Fox, however, tried to turn Friday’s jobs numbers into negative.
“This doesn’t look like an economy in recession to me,” host Stuart Varney said on Fox Business Network’s Varney and Co.
Other economists also agreed that despite inflation concerns and the slowdown in economic activity in the first quarter of the year, recession concerns may have been premature and overdone.
“The jobs report strongly suggests the economy was not in recession for the first half of 2022,” former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman and research economist Wilson Powell III wrote on Friday. The pair added that the strength of the job market also suggests that inflation may be easing.
“The sharp rise of 372,000 nonfarm payrolls in June seems to mock claims that the economy is heading into, let alone into, a recession,” Capital Economics economist Andrew Hunter told CNBC.