Oct 2, 2026 · 15 min · 12 segments
A new jobs report offers the latest look at a slowing labor market as workers deal with wages that are not keeping up with prices and higher borrowing costs. Tennessee has paused executions after…
American consumers are heading toward the holiday season with their budgets not quite adding up.
Inflation is up, meaning people have to pay more for things they need or want to buy.
Wages have grown less than inflation, meaning that many people who pay more also have to borrow more.
Those are the trends as we receive the government's update on the job market today.
Forecasters think it's gonna be somewhere in the middle, uh, that employers added between 80 and 90,000 jobs in September.
That'd be a slowdown from August, but not nearly as slow as we saw earlier in the summer.
You're seeing some modest hiring.
But it's really hard if you are one of those workers who loses their job, or you're new to the labor force or maybe coming back.
There's just not a lot of turnover, so it makes it harder to get your foot in the door right now.
One way to measure the strength of the job market is what's happening with wages.
Average wages in August were up 3.1% from a year ago, and House expects a similar gain for September.
That's not enough to keep pace with rising prices, so the typical worker is losing some buying power month after month.
Uh, this week the Commerce Department released its inflation scorecard for August.
American consumers are heading toward the holiday season with their budgets not quite adding up.
Inflation is up, meaning people have to pay more for things they need or want to buy.
Wages have grown less than inflation, meaning that many people who pay more also have to borrow more.
Those are the trends as we receive the government's update on the job market today.
Forecasters think it's gonna be somewhere in the middle, uh, that employers added between 80 and 90,000 jobs in September.
That'd be a slowdown from August, but not nearly as slow as we saw earlier in the summer.
You're seeing some modest hiring.
But it's really hard if you are one of those workers who loses their job, or you're new to the labor force or maybe coming back.
There's just not a lot of turnover, so it makes it harder to get your foot in the door right now.
One way to measure the strength of the job market is what's happening with wages.
Average wages in August were up 3.1% from a year ago, and House expects a similar gain for September.
That's not enough to keep pace with rising prices, so the typical worker is losing some buying power month after month.
Uh, this week the Commerce Department released its inflation scorecard for August.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
