Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created.

Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in.

NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html

Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era.

You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US.

[1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.

This dismissal of a massive drop in hiring (literally 1.5% of the previous half year’s reported hiring) is wishful thinking.

“Ignore this data point, NYC is special.” Color me skeptical.