By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-10-02 23:35:18 | Updated at 2026-10-03 01:27:34
4 hours ago
The Weekly Wrap: The Buck Doesn’t Stop with Jerome Powell
Welcome back to Friday!
Happy Jobs Day to all who celebrate. This week we learned that GDP is stronger than we thought, more people want to work in America, Powell’s friends think he was vindicated because an inspector general didn’t declare him a crook, and the liberals are still worried about women getting so many jobs.
Let’s go!
Powell’s ‘Pass the Buck’ Fed Gets Stinging Rebuke
Remember back when Jerome Powell insisted that the Justice Department’s investigation into the Fed’s headquarters renovation was a pretext for trying to influence monetary policy? This was treated as obviously correct by the legacy financial press even though no one could explain how it was supposed to work. Why would Donald Trump or anyone else think that subpoenaing the Fed over construction would cause the Fed to alter the path of interest rates?
The inspector general of the Fed this week released its report on the renovation. As it turns out, the Fed was doing a lot of things wrong. Perhaps most importantly, the project was inadequately supervised in such a way as to allow the top Fed officials—including Powell—to avoid accountability.
The financial press bizarrely treated this as a vindication of Powell. There was nothing criminal! Powell wasn’t embezzling the funds! He was just running an organization, negligently supervising billions of dollars of construction on its headquarters. “You can’t pin the blame on top officials because they didn’t actually supervise things” is not quite the exoneration some journalists think.
Fortunately, the Fed’s new leadership read the report differently. Warsh didn’t pop the champagne corks and mock Trump for noticing something was fishy with the project. Instead, he announced serious reforms to the supervisory structure to make sure no more plausible deniability escape hatches exist. In effect, this was a stern repudiation of Powell’s supervisory practices—just as the IG report was.
Unemployment Ticked Up Because More People Want to Work
The booming Trump economy is drawing more people into the labor force.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday that the jobless rate edged up to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent. The number of unemployed increased by 78,000, to 7.1 million. Over the same month the labor force grew by 485,000, and employment rose by 406,000. The participation rate moved to 61.8 percent from 61.6 percent, and the employment-population ratio to 59.2 percent from 59.1 percent.
People who lost a job or finished a temporary assignment fell by 45,000, to 3.2 million. Permanent job losers slipped to 1.75 million. Workers on temporary layoff were essentially unchanged, at 845,000.
In other words, it’s not people losing jobs that drove up the unemployment rate. The counts of job losers declined. Instead, we had rising participation.
Liberals Are Sad That So Many Women Got Jobs
Liberals love battling demons they conjure in their imaginations rather than actually debating conservatives.
For the second month running, liberals are once again pretending to be worried that women gained more jobs than men gained since the start of the Trump administration. If there were a Democrat in the White House, they’d be celebrating this as a huge gain. Men are far more likely to be employed than women, so women gaining net jobs is a step toward equality.
Liberals are convinced, without evidence, that conservatives secretly hate female employment and want a “male breadwinner economy.” So they see the latest jobs numbers as a sign that conservatives are failing to achieve the objective they imagined for them—an objective that the liberals think is bad.
Or maybe the answer is more cynical. They may believe that these figures will drive sexist voters away from Republicans, hurting their chances in the midterm elections. It could just be an attempt at manosphere manipulation.
In any case, those numbers don’t establish what liberals think they establish. The net gains for men seem smaller because so many more men than women are being deported or self-deporting. As we explained last month, the number of foreign-born men in the workforce has fallen by a lot. All other things being equal, that reduces male employment.
GDP Growth Is Better Than the Government Thought
The government this week announced that the economy grew significantly faster in the first half of the year than previously estimated. What had looked like a somewhat sluggish start to the year, turns out to have been much stronger. The third estimate for second-quarter real GDP raised growth to 2.2 percent from 1.5 percent. First-quarter growth was revised up to 2.5 percent from 2.1 percent.
The reasons for the revisions were themselves very bullish: stronger household consumption, stronger nonresidential investment, and a smaller drag from inventories. Corporate profit growth was revised down slightly but still posted the strongest quarterly jump since the “reopening” second quarter of 2021.
The political media appear to have successfully convinced Republicans not to tout the economy for fear of showing they are “out of touch” or “ignoring suffering.” By design, that disarms Republican candidates of one of the best reasons they have to offer voters to cast their ballot for GOP candidates. If anyone asked our advice, we’d say this should be ignored. It’s a great economy. Talk about it!
Breitbart Business History: The Income Tax Is Loosed on America
Not every dip into economic history is really going to be a celebration. This week we’re noting the 213th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson signing the Underwood–Simmons tariff legislation, including the modern federal income tax. The law reduced tariffs while introducing income taxation under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment.
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. (CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
This was the beginning of the shift away from taxing imports to the system of taxing Americans’ incomes. It started the process of moving the revenue agents of the federal government from the ports and borders to the domestic economy.
The initial basic rate was one percent above exemptions of $3,000 for individuals and $4,000 for married couples. In today’s dollars, that would be $102,000 for individuals and $135,000 for married couples.
