“In a van down by the river” just got real AF… 

I’ll be blunt with this one: The November ADP print hit, and it wasn’t a “soft landing” number… it was a friggin’ “soft body hitting the pavement” number. Why? Because it appears that private-sector payrolls fell 32,000… the biggest drop since early 2023. But that’s not even the bad part. The bad part is that this wasn’t big tech trimming the fat or Fortune 500 companies pulling out the workforce guillotine… instead, it was the little guys, a.k.a, small businesses which shed 120,000 jobs. 

(Source: Giphy) 

In short, this whole clusterf*ck on Main Street lands one week before the Fed sits down to pretend they’re not watching the same charts we are. And because the government’s been shut down, Powell & Co. now have the pleasure of basing a trillion-dollar rate decision on one ADP report, three stale anecdotes, and whatever mood the bond market is in that morning.

(Source: Bloomberg) 

Which means, good news for Donny Interest rates and all those aboard the bandwagon… futures traders are assigning almost 90% odds of another cut in 2025. Bigly. Meanwhile, hiring trends look like someone ripped the batteries out. Professional and services, information, and manufacturing has all been kneecapped. The only thing up is “education and health services”.

Additionally, wage growth cooled too… job-switchers saw the smallest lift since early 2021. Even the people brave enough to leave their jobs aren’t being rewarded anymore. But overall, the small-business collapse is the tell of a recession-adjacent environment getting closer every week. Translation: Small businesses don’t have lobbyists, they don’t have PE vultures waiting to infuse cash, and they definitely don’t have the balance sheet to absorb a multi-year rate experiment. When they start cutting 120,000 jobs in a single month, it means the pressure has already rolled downhill and hit bedrock.

(Source: Giphy)

So yeah… the Fed is cutting. They won’t say it out loud, and they’ll dress it up as “data dependent” next week. But this is the last print they get before the meeting, and it’s a disaster wearing business casual. The only question now is whether the cut is a parachute… or the ground rushing up lower. Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that no one’s hiring right now… and that’s the scary part. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.