Hiring slows in April amid turmoil triggered by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs
Recession fears are growing on Wall Street.
Recent data on Friday showed hiring remained slow but strong in April after President Donald Trump announced the “Liberation Day” tariffs early last month. The figure exceeded economists’ expectations.
The U.S. added 177,000 jobs in April, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure represents solid growth, but is slower than the 228,000 jobs added the previous month. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.2%, a historically low figure.
In a post on social media, President Donald Trump praised the jobs data and touted his tariff policy.
“We are in a transition phase, it’s just the beginning!!!” Trump said. Trump called on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, criticizing the central bank just weeks after he welcomed the “dismissal” of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
The move is the latest example of Trump pressuring the Fed, despite a longstanding norm of political independence at the central bank. Last month, Powell cited solid economic performance as a reason to take a patient approach as policymakers wait for the impact of tariffs.
The closely watched tariff announcement on April 2 triggered the biggest single-day stock market drop since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Days later, Trump suspended a large portion of the tariffs, triggering the biggest single-day increase the market has ever seen. The Yale Budget Lab found that a simultaneous increase in tariffs on Chinese goods put the effective tariff rate at its highest level in more than a century.
The jobs data comes days after a government report showed the US economy shrank in the first three months of 2025, much of it as Trump’s flurry of tariff proposals created uncertainty among businesses and consumers. US gross domestic product, or GDP, fell at a 0.3% annual rate in the three months ended in March, according to government data released on Wednesday. The figure marks a sharp drop from the 2.4% annual growth in the final three months of 2024. Despite the turmoil in consumer sentiment and markets, the labour market has provided a bright spot since Trump took office. The US has added an average of 170,000 jobs each month this year, while the unemployment rate remains low. Meanwhile, inflation eased in March, bringing price growth well below the peak achieved in 2022, the data showed. Still, recession fears are growing on Wall Street as Trump’s tariffs threaten to hit global trade. Goldman Sachs raised the probability of a recession to 45% from 35% earlier this month. JPMorgan put the probability of a recession this year at 60%. Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago earlier this month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the “strong state” of the U.S. economy, but he warned about signs of a possible recession. “Life moves very fast,” Powell said. The Trump administration, for its part, has refused to rule out the possibility of a recession. Trump has vowed to strike new deals with many U.S. trade partners, predicting that the U.S. economy may suffer short-term pain but will ultimately flourish under a more favorable set of international rules. “We’ve been duped by practically every country in the world. And by both friend and foe,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last month. “We won’t do that anymore.”
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