U.S. Economy Has Been in Decline Since April 2024 — Biden’s Presidency

9 September 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Apparently, the current U.S. recession, as judged by the employment numbers, started in April 2024, when JP Morgan reported that “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. economy added 175,000 jobs in April 2024, the slowest jobs gain in six months and below market expectations. The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.8% to 3.9%.”

On 9 September 2015, now after the shock-news-report on 1 August 2025, that the July figures were terrible and that the May and June numbers were actually far worse than had initially been thought, the Financial Times headlined “US hiring growth revised down by 911,000 jobs in year to March. Updated figures from Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on more comprehensive employment data.”, and reported that,

The US added 911,000 fewer jobs than previously thought in the year to March, according to new official statistics that suggest the labour market in the world’s biggest economy is weaker than earlier data showed.

The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show national employment in the 12 months to March 2025 was far below levels implied by its closely watched monthly jobs reports and suggest the labour market had begun to slow in the latter period of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Tuesday’s revision roughly halves the 1.8mn job growth figure the agency had previously estimated for the period from March 2024 to March 2025, with monthly hiring averaging 75,000 positions less than thought.

The report will be a boost to President Donald Trump, who has argued that his aggressive tariff and immigration policies were not to blame for recent signs of weakness in the labour market.

However, Trump’s argument “that his aggressive tariff and immigration policies were not to blame for recent signs of weakness in the labour market” is extremely weak, because loads of news-reports from around the country have made clear that Trump’s having constantly changed his predictions of what his tariffs would be, has greatly disrupted supply chains, as manufacturers and retailers have needed to replace, and contract with new, suppliers, and thus have locked in contracts that turn out to have been based upon different tariff-percentages than Trump had promised to impose. American — and foreign — firms will thus suffer for years from this. The uncertainty itself, in an international economy that constantly requires long-term commitments (contracts), constitutes a major cost, which will randomly affect the most, the unlucky firms that had relied upon Trump’s promises that he subsequently changed. Having an idiot in the White House did not initiate the downturn that had started under Biden, but it certainly is making the economic slide worse than it would otherwise have been.

Trump is constantly blaming others for problems that he himself has significantly contributed to causing. For example, he blames Biden for the war in Ukraine, though actually it had been started by Obama back in 2014 and was merely continued, first by Trump, and then by Biden, and now yet again by Trump, who still threatens to increase it. He actually has no idea of how stupid he is.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.