The December 16, 2025, jobs report confirms that the stall observed since spring has hardened into a structural contraction. While the public narrative remains anchored to the headline “resilience,” a closer interrogation reveals that 2025 was the year we sub-primed our own workforce.

While headlines celebrated a soft landing, the underlying labor market was experiencing a phantom jobs reversal. January 2025 began with a surplus of 751,000 job openings; by December, the market moved into a deficit of 131,000 jobs—an 882,000 swing in labor-market balance. With Chair Powell’s December 10 admission of a 60,000 monthly overcount, the labor market has actually been contracting by 20,000 jobs per month since April.

We are also watching the real-time collapse of household solvency. The backbone of the American economy is being pushed from stable, professional roles into low-tier service work, resulting in an immediate 49% drop in income, and then financing their children’s basic nutrition with shadow debt. This isn’t just a failure of equity; it is a strategic economic blunder. You cannot stabilize a 2026 economy if you refuse to look at the demographic where the insolvency is actually occurring.

When workers are erased from the labor force, they don’t just leave empty desks; they leave empty tax rolls, and increasingly, unpaid debts. In 2025, we witnessed the early stages of an institutional bank run that fractured the financial system from both ends.

On December 12, 2025, the Federal Reserve validated this instability by initiating a $40 billion monthly liquidity injection to stabilize the banking system. This solvency crisis is inextricably linked to labor force erasure.

The results are in. Fixing the cracks in the economy is to stop erasing the people who hold it together. The bill is due and we will either pay it with investment or with stagnation.

https://fortune.com/2025/12/31/soft-landing-economic-narrative-wrong-black-women-unemployment/