June 5, 2026
The U.S. jobs market is really firing on all cylinders.
A blockbuster jobs report was released this morning, and I’m going to tell you what that means for you.
President Trump is obviously thrilled, but he also doesn’t seem to understand why the stock market isn’t celebrating these numbers. Spoiler alert: It’s because this report is sparking new fears about what may be ahead.
So first, let’s look at the numbers.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. employers added a whopping 172,000 jobs in the month of May.
You can understand what this means when you look at it on a chart. Here are all the jobs numbers going back to January 2025. You can see we had a lot of job losses toward the end of last year. But in the last three months — March, April, and May — you can see big numbers. That’s an average of 188,000 jobs added every month.
That’s great news.
So where are all these new jobs coming from?
There was a big bump in leisure and hospitality jobs (70,000). Then there were gains in local government jobs (55,000) and health care jobs (35,000).
And the unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3 percent.
But for most of the morning and part of the afternoon, the stock market has been in the red by around 400 points.
President Trump doesn’t get why. He posted: “With a great Jobs Report, like just announced, stocks should go up, not down. That’s the way it was for 200 years.”
Trump may be trying to will the market to follow his logic, but the numbers are the numbers and the reality is the reality.
And the reality is today’s jobs market, while generally very good, has to be taken in the context of the inflation report.
Now, we’re going to get fresh inflation data next week. But as of our most recent Consumer Price Index report, inflation was up 3.8 percent in the month of April. And it’s going in the wrong direction — up.
So typically, when inflation is going up and the jobs market is really strong, which is what this report is showing, it makes it almost impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.
And it may actually force the Fed to increase interest rates.
President Trump’s brand-new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, will lead his first Federal Reserve meeting to decide on interest rates in a few weeks.
Read the May Jobs Report here.
Read Trump’s post here.
