A Jobs Debate

**Mark Zandi** (0:15)
Welcome to Inside Economics. I'm Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics, and I'm joined by my two trustee co-hosts, Chris Dorides, Marisa DiNatale. Hi, guys.

**Cris deRitis** (0:24)
Hey, Mark.

**Marisa DiNatale** (0:25)
Hi, Mark.

**Mark Zandi** (0:26)
Getting ready for the big July 4th weekend?

**Cris deRitis** (0:28)
Absolutely.

**Mark Zandi** (0:29)
Yeah, great. Good. Good. Any plans, Chris?

**Cris deRitis** (0:33)
Watching the fireworks off my back porch.

**Mark Zandi** (0:36)
Can you do that? You have fireworks off your back porch?

**Cris deRitis** (0:39)
Well, someone, a neighbor, an anonymous neighbor somewhere is shooting off fireworks for the whole neighborhood. So that's the, that's what we do. I'm assuming he has a permit. I'm not asking.

**Mark Zandi** (0:51)
Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun, actually.

**Cris deRitis** (0:53)
Yeah, it is. It is.

**Mark Zandi** (0:54)
Yeah. And you, Marisa, are you into fireworks as well?

**Marisa DiNatale** (0:58)
Yeah, but I haven't actually watched them the last few years. I may do that this year.

**Mark Zandi** (1:04)
Yeah. Our kids have gotten over the years a little jaded by, I don't know, they expect like, you know, the fireworks aren't absolutely fabulous, you know.
When I was a kid, you know, we, they'd throw off one or two or three every, you know, took, they were pretty leisurely about it. Then they had this grand finale, and we all waited for the grand finale and we were all satisfied. Now they, my kids just want grand finale the whole time. You know, if it's not like, right, Dante, you know what I'm talking about?

**Dante DeAntonio** (1:36)
Yeah, my kids are over fireworks, unless it's like some, you know, raging display for 25 minutes straight. Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't do it anymore.

**Mark Zandi** (1:43)
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. And of course, Dr. DiAntone has joined us because this is Job Thursday, because we have Friday off because of the holiday weekend. But we're talking about the job numbers and we also have Dante on. And how old are your kids, Dante?

**Dante DeAntonio** (1:58)
Eight and six.

**Mark Zandi** (1:59)
Eight and six. They should be deep into the fireworks.

**Dante DeAntonio** (2:02)
I feel like there's so many fireworks everywhere now that they've seen so many fireworks. It's like wherever you go, there's fireworks. I don't know.

**Mark Zandi** (2:08)
Yeah. Anyway, well, it's kind of blistering hot here in Pennsylvania. I mean, I think we're going to be over 100 degrees today. That's just outrageous.
Hopefully by the fireworks, it's going to cool off. Not really. It's going to still be pretty toasty, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. And I guess in Southern California, you're okay? The weather's-

**Marisa DiNatale** (2:30)
Yeah, it's like low 70s. It's nice.

**Mark Zandi** (2:32)
That feels, sounds good.

**Cris deRitis** (2:34)
Yeah, it's hard to hear that. I'm sorry to hear that.

**Mark Zandi** (2:38)
All right. Well, let's get down to business. We've got the job numbers for the month of June, June, 2026, and a lot to unpack there. Feels like all the strong job numbers we got over the last couple of three months, they all kind of evaporated with this report. So we're back to where we were, it seems. But we'll talk about that. We'll play the game, the stats game, and we changed the rules just a little bit. I'm not going to go into detail, but hopefully that speeds things up a little bit. Marisa can drag that game on for a long time. She likes to stick the knife in your back and like twist it around and make it very painful.
And then she declares victory.
We're going to speed up that process, hopefully. And then maybe some listener questions if we have time, but we'll see. So with that, Dante, tell us about the job numbers.

**Dante DeAntonio** (3:30)
Yeah, as you alluded to, we sort of ran out of upside surprises that we had over the last couple of months. We got a much more downbeat employment report. Top line payroll growth was only 57,000 jobs. Big downward revisions to the last two months, so combined 74,000 revised down in April and May. So if you look at three-month average growth, last month when we were talking about it, it was 188,000. It was very, very strong. Now three-month average growth is 111,000. So still obviously stronger than it was at the end of last year, but not nearly as strong as it seemed a month ago.
Industry composition-wise on the payroll side, we're back to where we were previously, where healthcare is doing most of the heavy lifting here. Healthcare added about 47,000 job. Out of the 57,000 total, professional business services also added about 35,000, and those are really the only two big highlights. On the downside, you had a big decline in leisure hospitality, a little over 60,000 information, retail, a couple of industries down by a few thousand here and there, but overall, just not a whole lot of action outside of healthcare and that decline in leisure and hospitality.