So last night here on the show, we talked about some worrying new hiring numbers, which seemed just like a bad indicator of where the economy appears to be heading very quickly, now that Donald Trump has taken office again.

Those numbers from ADP, the payroll company, showed private sector employers hiring less than half the number of people they did last month,

which was half the number economists had been expecting them to hire in February.

That was very bad news.

Now we've got new numbers not on the number of hirings, but the number of firings.

And those numbers are way worse.

Quote, layoffs across the United States soar to highest level since 2020.

What was going on in 2020?

Employers cut more than 170,000 jobs last month. That is a 245% increase from the number of

layoffs in January. 245% increase. It's also the highest monthly number of layoffs since the

height of the COVID pandemic in Trump's first term in July 2020.

Now, that said, to be fair, there can be a seasonal component to layoffs and to employment numbers, generally, hiring and firing numbers tend to look different in the summer months than they do in the winter months, for example. So if you're really trying to get an honest grasp on how bad this outlook is

economically, as Trump's policies are taking hold, consider specifically that these are

February numbers that we just got. If you really want to compare apples to apples, the last time we got February numbers this bad, it was actually February 2009 when Wall Street had collapsed and we were plunging into not just a national, but an international great recession.

That's the last time firing numbers looked like this.

That's it.

These are just indicators, and maybe they are wrong.

Maybe these are outliers.

We expect the official government monthly jobs report tomorrow morning.

It's actually not expected to be bad,

in part because a lot of the firings since Trump has been president have happened so recently that they may not be reflected in government figures yet. But we shall see, weirdly and worryingly,

because the president and his commerce secretary have both started to make

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