Let us start obviously with the latest jobs numbers. The economy, according to BLS, lost 23,000 jobs in July when economists were expecting a 95,000 job gain. The job creation you boasted about for the previous two months, unfortunately, those numbers were also sharply revised down. It turns out 100,000 jobs were not created in May and June. You said in June that this was quote the strongest job market in your lifetime. By what metric?
Yeah, I think that one of the things we're seeing is that these jobs numbers are getting revised left and right. You can remember over the last couple of years there were millions of revisions. And the bottom line is that if you look at the overall economy, then things are really, really booming. As an example, there are 83,000 construction workers building factories right now. That's a number that we've never seen before. Initial claims for unemployment insurance are the lowest they've been since World War II. There are more job openings than there are unemployed workers. There are all these things that suggested the numbers should have been really strong, and when it didn't come out strong, we sort of dug in and we saw that the two things that made it negative — one of them was a reduction in government workers and it was mostly teachers at states taking July off. And the other thing was that the FIFA ended, so that we had a whole bunch of hospitality workers file for unemployment in July. So anyway, you take those two out and you get back to what the consensus number was, about 100,000 job creation. And the point is, if that were in isolation, I wouldn't be caring about throwing this or that on the side because it's a special story. But the fact is everything else is so strong that I think it makes sense that the consensus was about right.
Well, we can look at one month here or there, but let's take a look at the overall jobs record under President Trump. There have been job losses for six out of the 18 full months of President Trump's second term. That's a third of them. And the Trump administration has only added 548,000 net jobs so far, which is considered very slow growth. It's growth, but very slow. Two million jobs were created in the last 18 months of Biden's presidency. Are you really arguing that your numbers are better than that?
Well, I disagree with your number. We'll have to follow up on email, but you know, I just looked at the latest number. It was that job creation under President Trump since January 20th is about 880,000 jobs. But we won't argue about 800,000, 500,000, you know, factually out of show right now. But the fact is that the thing that really jumps out at us is that those are really good jobs. They're manufacturing jobs. They're construction jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden dropped by 230,000. And the reason that matters is the intuition that candidates of both parties understand — that these blue-collar jobs in construction, manufacturing, they're really high-paying jobs. And so the typical construction or manufacturing worker in the US has seen an increase under President Trump of three or four thousand dollars to salary, and under Joe Biden it was about negative that, it dropped about 3,000. And the reason is that manufacturing was collapsing and so the high-paying jobs were going away. And so I think that we'll take our record over his every day.
Well, you're talking about manufacturing jobs. I'm talking about the overall job market. Let's — even if we go with your number, which I think incorporates January 2025, when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20th, and I'm not going to bicker on that, it's 800,000 according to you versus 2 million under Biden. And I think the issue is that there are two things right now that the economists say are weighing on the economy. Both of them are specifically Trump policies. One is obviously the Iran war, which has led to high gas prices. The president said that that war would take four to six weeks. We're now in month six. And the second policy that's having an impact is tariffs, which according to a recent report by the Fed, those tariffs were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. So, it does seem as though the president's policies have led to this economic situation where the job growth is slower than in the last 18 months of Biden's administration, right?
Well, let's unpack these things. First of all, if you look at the latest inflation numbers, the consumer price index was negative for the month of June. Core was zero — that's the thing that the Fed cares about. The PCE index, which is the Fed's number one index, was negative both for core and topline. And so, all of the price data have been decelerating. Now, there was a big inflation in the previous administration, but there's been rapid deceleration of inflation under President Trump. And so, if you're going to tell a story that tariffs are causing some kind of positive shock to inflation, you've got to come up with some counterfactual that explains why it is that right now inflation is running at about zero. And so I don't think that that's an issue. And I think that again going forward, if you look at imports, the trade policy has made everybody want to onshore their stuff. If you look at imports right now, 50% of imports of the US are capital goods which are going into those factories that are being built by the 80-something thousand construction workers in the factories. And so that's a very, very successful trade policy because it's creating jobs that we'll see in the second half of the year when the lights go on in those factories.
It's not me that's saying that those costs were passed on to consumers. It's the Fed in a recent report that I'm sure you've read. Let's talk about gas prices. They're high because the Strait of Hormuz is still closed because of the war in Iran and Iran taking the strait hostage. A month ago, you said that you were quote bullish, that there's going to be a heck of a lot of traffic moving through every single day, unquote, and that you expect that this will quote cruise to normalcy sometime really, really soon, unquote. No, that is not the case right now. And Iran most recently has delivered this set of demands that must be met to open the strait. And that set of demands includes the lifting of the naval blockade and sanctions, war reparations, the release of frozen Iranian assets, an end to attacks on Iran's allies. So I guess I just don't know when really, really soon is.
Well, it's happening already, Jake. And now, first of all, I don't negotiate with the Iranians, and I don't think I'd be very good at it. But the fact is that right at the peak of the conflict early on you saw that oil prices were going way north of $100 a barrel. Right now they're like high 70s late in the week, I think they're running about 80 over the weekend. And so the reason oil prices have come down is that our excellent US Navy has been escorting ships out of the Gulf. But also we've taken a whole number of steps including increasing production of the US, waving the Jones Act, so that right now 100 million barrels of Gulf of America produced oil are now shipped to the east and west coast because we waved the Jones Act. That's put downward pressure on prices. Now prices are still higher than we would like, but we've taken a lot of steps so that when the Gulf situation is resolved, we could expect prices to go way, way down because of all these new measures that we've taken.
I know you don't negotiate with the Iranians, but you do talk about the economy and you said you're bullish, there's going to be a heck of a lot of traffic moving through every single day.
