CNN 5 Things

This is One Thing. I'm David Rind, and looking for a new job? Good luck. No, seriously, good luck.

The length of time that it took this time was shocking to me.

Stick with us.

On Monday, giant excavators roared to life in front of the East Wing of the White House and started to knock it down. Past presidents have undertaken renovations at the White House before, but nothing like this.

I think it'll be one of the great forums anywhere in the world. It's about $300 million. It's set to do many, many things, including meetings of foreign leaders, including the honoring of foreign leader. You can see this.

President Donald Trump says this new ballroom will be funded by himself and many other wealthy donors, including companies like Amazon, Meta, and Lockheed Martin. Critics say Trump demolished a part of the people's house without going through the customary approvals, and even some Trump supporters concede, at the very least, it's a bad look, especially during a government shutdown. Remember, roughly 1.4 million federal employees have either been furloughed or are working without pay. Thousands more have been straight up fired. And that doesn't even include the doge cuts from earlier this year. But government workers aren't the only ones facing a career crisis.

Back in like May or even earlier than that, I kind of envisioned myself having a job already. I mean, it's October.

'This is Elie Bryan. She's 23 years old. Just graduated from Indiana University in the spring. She wants to work in social media marketing. And she didn't wait for graduation to start applying for jobs. She's been sending out resumes and cover letters day after day since February. But to paraphrase fellow 20-something Olivia Rodrigo, it's brutal out there.

Have you landed any interviews?

Like since I started applying, I'd say I've had about 10 to 12 total, but since the summer to now, I think I've only had about three.

So like 10 to 12 total interviews and you'd say you've done hundreds of applications at this point?

Um, I would say it's closer to a thousand.

A thousand?

Yeah, I was told, um, it sounds bad to say how many have applied to, but if I'm being honest, I've applied to probably about like 1500 or more since February.

Oh my gosh. I mean, how does that make you feel to think about all that work they've done and to just have a handful of interviews to show for it?

I mean, I posted about this on my LinkedIn, but I mean it's really frustrating, especially because and I know that I'm not the only one who's going through this. I know there are so many other people who are in the exact same boat as me. So I know it's not just me, but it's frustrating because I'm putting in all this work. I have lost hope so many times and then I've gained hope so much times. I know eventually, I mean I hope so, eventually it will work out. Just got to keep going.

'Now, it's not uncommon for recent grads to have a tough time breaking into the job market, but even those with decades of experience are feeling stone-walled.

My name is Amy Suman, I am 53 years old and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Amy has spent 20 plus years working as a teacher and administrator. In 2021, she began pursuing an administrative license and a doctoral degree. And since then, she's been able to seamlessly move between jobs nearly every year around that work. So she didn't think it would take too long to find a new position after leaving her superintendent job in May.

I figured, you know, no problem. I'll find something really quickly. I'm well qualified. I'm highly educated.

But it didn't quite work out that way.

The length of time that it took this time was shocking to me.

'Resume after resume was disappearing into the AI screening void. Follow-up emails went unanswered. Amy was on the verge of becoming one of a growing number of people who are considered long-term unemployed, out of work for more than six months. That number rose to nearly 26% in the August jobs report, the highest level in over three years. This group is also becoming more likely to include highly educated, experienced Americans, someone like Amy.

And as the week started to turn into months, I started to feel really desperate. I was just watching my savings dwindle away and literally scratching my head going, I don't get it. And that's when after three and a half months of no paychecks, I applied to the local gourmet grocery store and started cutting meat because I needed to pay the mortgage and take care of my family.

Wow, I mean, what did that feel like?

Well, I mean, having come up the ranks as a teacher, I had been a waitress for years, putting myself through school. I have a level of humility, but talk about swallowing humble pie, right? I mean all of a sudden I'm wearing a name tag again and a hairnet and having been in charge of a $62 million budget, 3,000 students, five schools, 300 employees. And now having to answer to a manager half my age when I cut the turkey meat. Yeah, that was something.

Now, plenty of folks would jump at the chance for a job like that, but listening to Amy is a reminder of the number of job loss and a tough job market can do on any of us. But just how rough is the jobs market? What does it say about the rest of the economy and the rest us? The Federal Reserve meets later this week to discuss interest rates, so this is a big moment. I want to bring in Diane Swonk. She is the chief economist at KPMG. So, Diane, we just heard from two women who describe some truly grueling job searches, but can you paint the fuller picture for me? What is the state of the US job market right now?

Well, as far as we know, and we haven't had a lot of data because we're in a government shutdown, but the data we had as of August has already given us a picture of a very low hire and low fire job environment. It's also a low quit rate environment. We are seeing people not opting to or able to basically job hop and get that premium they once did in terms of wages at the same time that those workers who are entry level workers trying to get. Into this labor market or who have been sidelined by layoffs, we have seen that their length of layoffs have gone even longer than in the past. And it really is a very stuck labor market, almost frozen, a very chilling kind of situation, which is being complicated by everything from the government shutdown to the introduction of AI in addition to tariffs, the uncertainties we have and changes in the supply of workers. Where we have actual labor shortages in some places where immigrants play a very large role.

So there's just like a lot in the stew that is really complicating this and dragging out some of these searches for some people.

Exactly.

Is it worse for certain groups? Because I've been hearing, for example, about how black jobs can tell us a lot about the health of the economy. Can you explain why?

'So not only is it Black workers, but Black women with ABA or above and a child under five have been among the hardest hit. And that is a real turnaround where we saw women's participation in the labor force, especially prime age women's participate in the Labor Force, moving up during much of the post-pandemic recovery. We lost ground in 2025. And a lot of that is due to everything from child care costs being very high, and unable, people are actually dropping out of the labor force with some of the highest educational levels because of having to care for a child or elder care, which is more evenly split between the sexes. But it is falling disproportionately on the shoulders of black and brown workers. And then you add on top of it return to office mandates, which are somewhat disguised as a way to oftentimes for companies to reduce. Their labor force and they can't control who opts out, but those who opt out tend to be more women in marginalized groups.

'I've heard it called the 'She-cession.'

Yeah, certainly, it's one that we used during the pandemic. It was the first recession that we saw did not hit blue collar workers harder than white collar workers. It hit a lot of service sector workers extremely hard, obviously, when we had the pandemic recession. And women are disproportionately represented. We have some 11,500 people a day turning 35. And the much harder. To get into the labor market or to retain their job because of child care, which makes this all the more difficult in terms of, you know, I have many millennials who work for me and their child care costs alone are sometimes more than their mortgages.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Now, I have friends who are in that same boat, and it's wild. So there's jobs, that's one thing. But what can that tell us about the broader health of the US economy? Is the economy in a good place or not? I can never seem to get a straight answer. Yeah.

'Well, the economy, it really is a good question because I think what we're seeing is something we've never really seen at this level before. The economy adds up on paper to look much better than it does to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Those people who earn $200,000 and more, those people who have large stock portfolios, they are in a much better place and are showing it in the consumer sentiment and confidence in disease. In their attitudes about the economy while the rest of the economy, most overwhelming majority of Americans are saying, listen, I don't feel so great about this. They have an uncertainty about the level of prices which are moving back up again. They have uncertainty about their own job security. We don't usually see those two move up in tandem. You usually see concerns about inflation sort of in the background, not a major issue during times when the unemployment rate is moving up especially for the long-term unemployed. We have the largest number of people who've had over 27 weeks unemployed since 2021 when we were first emerging from the recession that we saw of the pandemic and reopening the economy. But more importantly, the number of those workers as a share of both the civilian labor force and the unemployed are rising. That's historically with the exception of a spot in the labor market a year ago. That has always happened after the U.S. Economy is in a recession. Now, what's propelling economic growth? Everything from major investments in AI to the wealth effects they generate, that inequality that we're seeing where not only the top 10% is accounting for about half of consumers spending today, the top 20%, almost two thirds of consumers' spending, the bottom 80% are feeling like they're spinning their wheels, because they're not spending faster than the overall pace of inflation. And when you add up the overall economic aggregates, the economy looks better on paper than it feels to the overwhelming majority of Americans, especially when it comes to the labor market, when they go to the grocery store and see the price of everything they have to buy.

'We gotta take a quick break, but I'll add more with Diane Swank in just a bit. You mentioned the R word, recession. I've been seeing a lot of people post about these so-called recession indicators. Yes. Some of these are jokes, which I do enjoy, but I wanna tick through a couple of the warning signs people have been talking about to get a sense of whether I should actually be worried about it or not. So I've hearing about subprime lending, and I basically only know the word subprimed because of the 2008 financial crisis and that movie, The Big Short. So that doesn't sound good to me. Like, what should we know about that?

So these are the most vulnerable of consumers out there. And what we've seen is these are people with very low FICO scores. They have harder access getting to credit. Many of these people did get access to credit in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic because of the stimulus checks and their FICO score has improved. There was also some forbearance in terms of student loans. We're now seeing everything from student loans, which were the single largest driver of defaults in the 2010s. Are now at their highest default rate on record.

What about gold? Why are people buying up gold bars?

Oh gosh, this is one of these things that, you know, one, it is considered a safe haven. Usually during periods of uncertainty, what we've seen is, and measures of uncertainty have eclipsed the pandemic. This is certainly, I'd love to live in precedent in times. We continue to live an unprecedented time.

Don't we all die, don't we?

Oh, gosh, I would love to go back to something that was slow and predictable and precedented. But this is not that. And in this period of uncertainty, what we've seen is central banks, in addition to individuals, are buying gold bullion in ways we have not seen in decades. And why do we worry about that? It doesn't mean that the dollar has been dethroned as the reserve currency of the world. But clearly there are doubts about it when you're talking about inflation in the country. That is your reserve currency, which is the U.S. Dollar, we are seeing people try to hedge that with a commodity buy like gold and

Like people are just generally a little on edge and they want a safe place to kind of park their dollars.

Absolutely, this goes back to I think of my relatives that came through Ellis Island that actually sewed gold jewelry into their lining of their clothing to be able to have something to start when they got here. That is, you know, what you tend to see is this sort of visceral move into things like gold, whether or not it can retain its value. What we often see is gold prices tend to fall right before there's a market correction and were much more. In a brittle situation dependent on very high income households. If anything were to disrupt their confidence, the overall economy would collapse. But we also know many individual states, Mutees Analytics has done a state by state analysis and they estimate that some 23 states are already in what they think is a recession due to the contraction in payrolls.

That's a little concerning. Yes. I saw a stat from the Law School Admission Council the other day, and it said roughly 23,000 people took the LSAT in September this year, a 25% increase from a year ago. And someone on Twitter, now not the most trustworthy place in the world, but they commented that this is one of the best indicators of impending economic disaster there is. Is that true?

Absolutely. One of the things we see is that people go into school and extend their schooling when the job market isn't very good and they look for skills to be able to get paid on the other side of it, hoping that they emerge in a better job market. And to be honest with you, I'm one of those people. When I first started my career, I went straight into graduate school because I knew the economy in the Midwest, where I was, was still very bad and not very conducive to My degree, in fact, I actually got turned down twice by the people who actually eventually ended up hiring me at the company and I made less than I could as a waitress. I could afford to do that with a graduate degree when I did it and climb the rungs. Many people can't afford to that anymore and I always.

Yeah, now with the tuition the way it is now.

'Also just the sheer cost of education at a time when we're seeing the initial research that is now coming out, the more thoughtful research on AI and how it's affecting and disrupting the labor market is showing that it's hitting entry-level workers 22 to 25, the hardest, and those the most exposed to AI, the especially hardest, in those our computer science jobs once used to be a golden ticket. Yet older, more experienced workers with know-how of on the job, know- how using these large language models and spotting what's right or wrong in them, they are doing better. And that begs the question is, how do you sustain growth with an innovation rather than cause stagnation with creative destruction? You create winners and losers, but you cannot leave so many people behind that there are more losers than winners when you have a new technology.

Well, so given all that we've talked about, I guess I'm wondering, should the average American be truly worried or doing anything differently with their finances right now?

I am worried. I'm worried that there's still at least a 40% chance of a recession. I don't have a recession as our baseline, but the longer the government shutdown goes on, it's nonlinear in its impact as well. And that's adding insult to injury in a labor market that we already knew on October 1st, 151,000 workers that took buyouts from the federal government would fall off of federal payrolls. You know, their ability to find a job. In this economy is much less than it once was, and so, again, most of those workers work outside of the beltway, and even though Washington DC is the hardest hit, you certainly see it in individual communities around the country, and seeing food banks open up to deal with people not being able to pay for their groceries, that's a sure sign that something's not correct.

Well, Diane, thank you very much for coming on. Maybe the next time we chat, we'll be in precedent times, but I'm not holding out hope.

I wouldn't hold your breath, so thank you.

'Just a quick note on Amy, the former school superintendent who we heard from earlier. After four and a half months and 60 applications, she finally landed a new gig at a local college earlier this month. When New Mexico becomes the first state to provide no-cost universal childcare starting November 1st, her team will be part of a multi-agency collaboration tasked with rolling out the program. Elie Bryan, meanwhile, is still hunting. That's it for us. We're back on Wednesday. Make sure you follow the show so it pops in your feed automatically. I'll talk to you later.