The Job Market is in Crisis Mode No One Is Getting Hired

Right now the United States is facing the worst job market that we have had going back to the GFC in 2008 when we had the last economic meltdown because we have this horrible combination of a lot of people getting fired and not a lot of new job openings coming up. In fact, this combination of slow hiring and low unemployment is unprecedented going back 25 years. Take a look at the U.S. hiring rate in this chart right here, which shows you as of 2026, it's almost just as low as it was back in 2008 when things were completely in meltdown mode. And going back at least until 2000, so for 26 years, we haven't seen it this low with the exception of 2008. Guys, only a brief stint during the pandemic and you can see how much it bounced back up with all the stimulus our economy received. But this awful job market is taking a massive financial toll on American households and a lot of people who are being laid off right now are actually very surprised on how bleak the job opportunities are out there. People are kind of being blindsided by the fact that I thought it was going to be easier to get a job because I guess if you have a job, you're probably not watching a whole lot of YouTube videos or anything like that talking about how bad the job market is because it doesn't really apply to you. People only kind of look at stuff like this once it starts affecting them. And the amount of time that people are going without work right now is absolutely exploding, guys. As of March, more than one quarter of unemployed Americans have been looking for work for 27 weeks or more. That's about 18% more than three years ago. Take a look at this chart going back to 2018. This is the share of unemployed people who've been out of work for at least 27 weeks. These people do not fall into the official unemployment data, which helps keep it artificially low. And outside of the pandemic, you can tell we haven't seen anything like this in quite some time now. We had more people out of work for 27 weeks or more back during the pandemic. The big difference was all of those freebie benefits, which turned out not to be free because we're all paying for it now with record high inflation and record high prices for everything. But at least back then, people were getting $600 a week to stay home and do nothing. That's just from the federal government. You might have gotten more than that from your state unemployment benefits as well. And those benefits were extended to go longer than usual. But people are taking massive financial hits from this because here's a guy, for example, who was laid off last August. That's already a long time to be out of work. This guy's been out of work for half a year now. Within just a few months, he had to withdraw about $50,000 from his 401k in order to pay down high interest debt, much of it on credit cards, which is yet another reason why I tell people you shouldn't be carrying this debt. Whether you are employed or not, it's a bad idea. But especially once you become unemployed, it becomes a massive burden. Now, and losing $50,000 out of a retirement account does permanent damage to your ability to have a comfortable retirement in the future. This guy's only in his 40s, so he still has time to build up a sizable nest egg, but his poor financial habits are coming back to haunt him. Like I'm telling you guys, you lose a job right now and you're already not in tip-top financial shape, you are putting yourself in the position where you could lose everything, including your ability to retire one day. And like I said, he's been laid off since August, still no job. Like how long can you go without a job before you have to empty the retirement account? You emptied your savings accounts and now you're back to living on even more credit. And here's a big distinction between what's going on right now and what happened in 2008 during the Great Recession. Back then, Congress actually funded additional weeks of unemployment, allowing some people to collect up to 99 weeks of unemployment, which was even more than what we saw during the pandemic. But now we have the same crisis level of people who are out of work without any of the stimulus to help them out. They already spent all the money, guys. They spent the money doing the COVID stimulus. They spent the money doing the 2008 stimulus. We're tapped out. They don't have any more money left to spend. If they continue to pump in the stimulus like they did back during those two time periods, inflation would completely spiral out of control. I would argue it's already spiraling out of control with how much things are costing compared to how much money people are making. Now, this guy that had to take 50,000 out of his 401k, he was collecting unemployment in North Carolina, which is a maximum of only $350 a week. Then he became ineligible after finding part-time freelance work. So once again, people who jump into the gig economy instead of being unemployed, because $350 a week is nothing, guys. You could work 50 or 60 hours a week in the gig economy and pull in $1,000 a week. Many people need that money, so they have no choice. But you also don't count as unemployed. Some people have to try to play this balancing act. Here's a woman got laid off from Wells Fargo back in April of last year. She received a few months of severance pay. After a few months of searching for a job, she landed a role as a substitute teacher, which is obviously not consistent work. It's just here and there as needed. So what she had to do is balance her time that she was working as a substitute teacher. That way, she wouldn't become ineligible for unemployment because you can't make enough taking one or two extra jobs doing substitute teaching. So you need that extra weekly paycheck. And right now, the job market is so bad that people have less of a chance of finding a job right now than they actually did during the pandemic when our economy was literally shut down. Think about that one for a minute. I have to sit there and do a double take and wonder how that's even possible. You know, when half of all of the businesses were actually closed and you couldn't go in for work, it's harder to find a job now than it was then. That's insane. According to the New York Fed, the average worker now believes they have about a 45% chance of finding a job within three months after they lose one. That's lower than it was back in December of 2020 when people thought they had a 46.2% chance. This is all happening despite the supposed strong labor market. And this is supposed to be the best economy ever, guys. But once again, this is the perfect storm that is hitting the job market. You have hiring at basically all-time lows. You have a ton of people being fired right now. You have costs rising at an exponential rate for just keeping the lights on. AI is also supposedly replacing about 25,000 jobs a month. And they claim that it's adding 9,000 jobs a month, but I don't really believe that. But even if those numbers were true, it's still a net 16,000 job loss per month due to AI. You're not gaining jobs net. In the end, you're still losing jobs. You have some people that are so desperate to find a job right now, they're paying recruiters up to $1,500 a month just to find positions for them. And this is showing how competitive and frustrating the whole process has become. It has become basically one AI talking to another. You have an AI program submitting a resume, another one reviewing your resume, nothing's actually getting done. According to LinkedIn, they say that more than half of the job seekers are applying for jobs for six months or more without any success. And now we have this war going on where gas prices have shot through the recently, which has made things even more unaffordable.