FEATURED POST
September 16, 2025
The job market is telling us something about consumers
Consumers are the heartbeat of the U.S. economy, accounting for two-thirds of its growth. But let’s not forget that most of those consumers don’t just spend. They also work. And lately, the symbiosis between the job market and retail spending is getting more entwined.
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September 9, 2025
Behind the big picture
Last week’s economic data delivered new evidence that employment has slowed in 2025. But there’s more to the job market than the pace of hiring. Pay growth, hours worked, and productivity are combining to make the jobs picture more complex than the sum of its parts. Here is a look at how these three components operate in the background of the labor market and how they can shift the economic landscape.
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August 26, 2025
Yes, AI is affecting employment. Here’s the data.
Artificial intelligence is both old and new. Old in that its founding principles and techniques have been around since the 1950s. New because the technology has continuously reinvented itself ever since.
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August 19, 2025
In a transition, small changes add up
This week, the Federal Reserve holds its annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where some 120 central bankers, finance leaders, and academics gather to discuss important global issues. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell caps the meeting with a much-anticipated speech on Friday. For Main Street, there’s more to this gathering than Powell’s 20-minutes address that, by design, isn’t likely to articulate what’s next for interest rates. That’s a topic for another day.
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August 12, 2025
New hires, old pay
In recent months, pay has grown at a relatively steady pace for both job-stayers and job-changers for the past several months. But this data tracks only two subsets of the working population. If we zoom out to get a bigger picture, we see that pay for new hires—that big group of people who are brand new to a particular employer—has been stagnant for more than a year. When it comes to pay, new hires are in a rut.
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July 22, 2025
The pandemic changed the U.S. labor market. Here’s how.
It’s been five years since Covid-19 lockdowns brought parts of the U.S. economy to a halt. While the crisis has passed, its impact on the labor market, especially wages, is still unfolding.
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July 15, 2025
Gaming the odds of a pay raise in 2025? Flip a coin.
It’s a simple, but common, question for anyone with a job. Will I get a raise this year? Last week, we talked about the pandemic’s long-lasting effect on pay growth. Today, I’ll compare the current state of the labor market to where it was during the first half of 2019, the year before the pandemic began and the last year of the U.S. economy’s 10-year expansion.
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July 8, 2025
The pandemic changed the U.S. labor market. Here’s how.
It’s been five years since Covid-19 lockdowns brought parts of the U.S. economy to a halt. While the crisis has passed, its impact on the labor market, especially wages, is still unfolding. In February 2020, the U.S. economy was enjoying a Goldilocks moment. Unemployment was 3.5 percent, hiring was steady, and wages were rising modestly faster than inflation.
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