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
Source: Me trying to use it and encountering prior fraud. Light reading suggests many have experienced it.
Well run systems experience fraud. It's something you generally want to minimize, but like, it's not necessarily an indicator that the system is broken. Like... AWS has tons of fraud. AWS is still very much not a disaster. (Well, it kind of is a disaster, but mostly because it's a machine that chews up humans via oncall, which is unrelated to their fraud.)
"NY's COVID unemployment fraud topped $11B, partly due to system failures..."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nys-covid-unemployment-fraud-topp...
It looks like fraud rate was typically 5-10%, which might be high, might be "fine". In 2020-21 and 21-22 fraud rate jumped way up to 20%, which is obviously way too high.
But in 2023-24 fraud rate is back down below 10%. We don't have 24-25 data yet, but it looks to me like we had a couple of unusual years during the pandemic, but audit controls seem to have reigned a lot of that back in.
I'd say, evaluate this year's data and then decide if this was a blip or not, then revise your mental model with data.