Unemployment as of August

I made the graph tall this time instead of wide:

Unemployment  2009 to 2025

I made the graph tall to make the vertical differences bigger in the red circle.

I made the graph narrow to make the data points close together so we can see a horizontal trend near the 3.5 percent level, an up-slope from the 3.5 level to the 4 percent level, and a horizontal near the 4 percent level. So I can summarize and say unemployment has increased, but I don't see any great crisis in the numbers -- not like there was in 2009, and not like there was in 2020. And not like what I see in the Google News. There is too much wishful thinking that passes for news these days.

I don't want to say I'm hoping Trump fails, because that would be bad for me and bad for us. But I do expect him to fail, because he is doing things that make no sense to me. 

The red circle highlights the recent years. In the red circle, unemployment comes down rapidly from the pandemic recession, then levels off and runs flat, in the neighborhood of 3.5 percent, from mid-2022 to mid-2023. Then it runs uphill for about a year, to the 4 percent level. Then it runs flat for a year, near the 4 percent level. And that brings us to where we are today.

I looked at it because the news is not good:

Yeah, 22,000 new jobs is a low number. But I don't see "dismal" in the red circle on my graph. Not yet, anyway.

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UPDATE. --  7 Sept 2025  --  I'm finding plenty more bad-news-on-jobs. The news is certainly not good. 

From ABC News:

Job cuts soared in August, offering the latest evidence of a slowdown in the labor market as some economists warn of a possible recession, according to data released on Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas (CGC).

U.S. companies announced nearly 86,000 jobs cuts in August, which amounted to a 39% increase from the previous month, CGC said. The figure indicated the largest number of job cuts in the month of August since 2020, which coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Couple days, I will follow up with a follow-up post.