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December 17, 2024
Employee sentiment fell in December
Employee sentiment fell by seven points in December, the third straight decline, but manufacturing remained a standout.
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June 17, 2024
Main Street Macro: Jobs aren’t everything
By several measures, the job market is starting to look like its pre-pandemic self. Openings are marching resolutely downward. Fewer people are quitting. Unemployment is still low. Recently, we learned that the labor market is generally doing pretty well in aggregate (see the ADP National Employment Report, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey and establishment survey). But jobs aren’t the whole story, not by a long shot. Wages link the job market to inflation, and while hiring might be normalizing, pay patterns are changing dramatically.
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June 10, 2024
Main Street Macro: AI and the global workforce
Artificial intelligence—heard of it? Of course, you have. In the past year, advanced AI has made its presence known on Main Street and worldwide. What we know as generative AI has been around in less-sophisticated forms for decades, but it only recently captured the public’s imagination with the release of inexpensive tools that create content on the fly. In our annual global survey, the ADP Research Institute asked nearly 35,000 private-sector workers in 18 countries how they felt about artificial intelligence. Here’s what they told us.
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June 3, 2024
Main Street Macro: The elusive Goldilocks economy
When economists tell tales about the economy, it’s never about the Cinderella economy or the Snow White economy. It’s almost always the Goldilocks economy. Because that’s what economists want: Growth that’s not too fast and not too slow, where inflation is neither too hot nor too cold, and hiring isn’t too strong or too weak.
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May 20, 2024
Main Street Macro: Staycation, road trip, or none of the above?
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of the summer vacation season in the United States, but with consumers looking downbeat recently, the question is whether they’ll be hitting the road in force like they did last year. How people spend their time off this year–be it binge-watching Netflix from the couch or flying to Hawaii–can tell us a lot about how the economy will perform in 2024.
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May 13, 2024
Main Street Macro: Are consumers still all right? An update
Last week, a measure of consumer sentiment showed that people are more downbeat about their current and future economic well-being than they were a month ago. With the stock market reaching new highs in May, gas prices falling, and unemployment below 4 percent for the longest time since the 1960s, this gloomy shift is puzzling.
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May 6, 2024
Main Street Macro: What the pay gap says about inflation
One of the puzzles of today’s economy is inflation: Why isn’t it falling as fast as economists or the Federal Reserve expected? Inflation has slowed a lot over the past year, but recently it has stubbornly defied expectations of further declines.
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April 29, 2024
Main Street Macro: Curious about the economy? So are these kids
In my experience, kids ask the best questions. So for this, the 150th issue of MainStreet Macro, I took advantage of ADP’s Take Your Kids to Work Day to invite three young friends to talk about the economy. Here’s what was on their minds.
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April 15, 2024
Main Street Macro: All that glitters
Last week’s hotter-than-expected inflation report surprised and rattled investors. The Consumer Price Index accelerated by 0.4 percent in March from the previous month. After a months-long slowdown, price increases in February and March reached their highest level since September and put the annual rate of inflation at 3.5 percent, firmly out of reach of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
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