August 7, 2026

The July jobs report landed like a gut punch: the U.S. labor force shrank by 23,000, a brutal miss below every estimate and the worst print since February, while the unemployment rate oddly slipped to 4.1% as revisions quietly carved 103,000 jobs out of May and June. Underneath the headline, the damage is harder to ignore — employment has been grinding lower for most of the year, and July’s count was the weakest in nearly two years, a warning shot for a cooling labor market.

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