Big, Beautiful Bill Clears Senate, Heads to House; Passage Certain; ADP Reports (oh, no!) 33,000 Jobs Lost in June (where did they go?)

The Dow Jones Industrials tacked on 400 points on Tuesday because, as anyone following U.S. stocks knows, all major indices MUST make new all-time highs on a regular basis. It's written into the algorithms and assisted by AI, so it's not even debatable.

45,014.04 is the Dow's all-time high, accomplished on December 4, 2024, leaving just more than a one percent gap between Tuesday's close and another record. With the S&P, NASDAQ, and NYSE Composite already making new ATHs, the Dow needs to catch up, but there seems to be a disturbance in the Wall Street farce, a fly in the stock grease ointment, sand in the gears of commerce.

Maybe it's anxiety over the big, beautiful bill the Senate passed on Tuesday and is now headed back to the House for final consideration and reconciliation, or it might be this morning's ADP National Employment Report that posted a -33,000 jobs for June.

The nerve of those private economists and number-fumblers! The U.S. can't be losing jobs. We are strong. We are growing. We are, well, AI bots are replacing human job-holders at an alarming rate. Sooner or later, there won't be many jobs for humans, though, with illegals being deported at a quickening pace, the non-farm payrolls due out tomorrow (Thursday) may want to start checking on those farms, because there are openings galore for cherry-pickers, cotton-pickers, hayseeds, slaughterhouse hands and anything other position that requires human bending, stooping, using hands - things AI bots cannot do.

One solution to this problem of the loss of human jobs would be to start counting the jobs filled by robots and bots. Those numbers should be awesome for the foreseeable future, assuring that the fudgers over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) can keep the human jobs for a while longer. That is, until they are replaced by AI.

No matter what, tomorrow's NFP report is likely to be a real stinker, though, given the assembled brain power of the Wall Street trading elite, there is likely to be a way to report that as a positive development, which, essentially would be that the loss of human jobs at such a breakneck pace should encourage Fed Chairman Powell and his cadre of FOMC voters to lower interest rates, at least by 25 basis points. In case the jobs number is deeply negative, like a million jobs lost (we know the BLS is capable of that degree of dissembling), the Fed may just take the extraordinary step of doing an emergency cut, maybe a full percent, or even more.

It's this kind of disaster management that keeps U.S. stocks elevated. Wall Street's interpretation of economic data is second to none when it comes to turning negatives into positives. There should be a massive rally prepared for the day before the 4th of July celebration so that all those folks with 401k accounts loaded with tech stocks, blue chips and assorted high-leverage penny stocks can enjoy the three-day weekend, secure in the knowledge that, no matter how bad things may look on the surface, Wall Street and the Fed has a response ready to counter any ill will.

That, at least, is how it appears to be going. The House should just get on with reconciliation, pass the big and the beautiful (there's a soap opera plot in there somewhere) and head home for the holiday.

Big, Beautiful, Zero jobs. Christmas in July! What could go wrong?

At the Close, Tuesday, July 1, 2025:
Dow: 44,494.94, +400.17 (+0.91%)
NASDAQ: 20,202.89, -166.85 (-0.82%)
S&P 500: 6,198.01, -6.94 (-0.11%)
NYSE Composite: 20,541.37, +111.82 (+0.55%)