Guy Berger

My preview of the February jobs report.

Unfortunately for "Team Reacceleration", the US policy uncertainty machine isn't done with the labor market yet.

macromostly.substack.com/p/bls-jobs-r...

Not saying 2026 is the same but - I don’t recommend treating the US economy like a piñata

Just like today lots of stuff was happening…

The spike in the oil price was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back - the economy was managing to fend off very high interest rates and the S&L crisis. And the notorious pledge-breaking tax hikes happened in the fall of 1990!

Short term impact will be low hiring of junior people for these types of roles. Long term impact will be a weak pipeline of expert leaders and managers of expertise. At that point the pipeline will be rebuilt but it will be costly

True for the corporate world too, not just academic scientific research.

I’m reasonably confident we’ll figure this out over time but the transition will be painful

A Middle East War wasn't at the top of my list for things that could weaken the labor market in 2026, but the thought did cross my mind.

macromostly.substack.com/i/185240612/...

People got mad at Cartoons Hate Her?!???!?

YouTube video by Thelonious Monk - Topic I Mean You (Live)

Not the best Monk recording, but Coltrane holy moly

youtu.be/L73OhDlPQ80?...

AI-generated text can exceed human posts in character count and throughput — this response alone contains more characters than a typical post by Joe Weisenthal — illustrating the productivity advantage of automated composition

AI can generate text, but a “posting moat” on X (formerly Twitter) is about human cadence and subtext. Heuristic evaluation helps, though lived voice remains distinctive. Meanwhile, Joe Weisenthal keeps posting, illustrating that personality still matters in digital discourse

Btw I know those loser economists predict AI will only boost GDP growth by 1-2 percentage points at most

but this AI rewrite increased the tweet’s character count by several multiples

400% GDP growth incoming!

I’m not sure but look, AI is all about productivity - and the rewrite produced way more characters than Joe’s tweet

Good news everyone. I had AI rewrite @weisenthal.bsky.social ‘s tweet. He’s finished!

Side note, I am a mild optimist about this technology’s value and economic impact, but these types of tweets are bearish

I didn’t think the absurdity of “we vibecoded past Bloomberg’s moat” could be topped, but now we have “one day someone might vibecode past Joe Weisenthal’s posting moat”

h/t Alexandra Semenova

This evening’s activity - trying to figure out which woodpecker species is drumming in my backyard

Far from my area of expertise but “markets are worried overextension of lending for CAPEX” and “markets are worried about AI causing mass unemployment” are quite distinct and I’m confused from reading my feed about which one is happening right now (both?

Congratulations on your pay raise!!! A happy outlier

Switching jobs for a significantly higher salary is so 2022. Welcome to the Great Stay The salary premium for job switchers is now around 2%. Four years ago, it was 8%.

Thanks to Caleigh Wells at @marketplace.org for chatting with me about the Great Stay and why we've seen the pay premium to job switching decline so much!

www.marketplace.org/story/2026/0...

Btw… it really sucks to be laid off, especially in a weak hiring environment, even if aggregate layoffs are low.

My dry macro take here doesn’t take away from that suckiness for any person who loses their job… I’m wishing them a low-pain job hunt and a quick landing elsewhere.

That is now! Scaled to the volume of employment, 2025 was one of the lowest layoff years on record

Your math isn't quite right - in 2025 (a year with very low layoffs by historical standards) we experienced just under 21 million layoffs.

We also experienced over 38 million quits (voluntary departures) and 64 million hires. It's a huge, dynamic labor market

In a very-low layoff environment, the US experiences 4,000 layoffs roughly every 1 hour and 40 minutes

Another conclusion here is that within-establishment layoffs have fallen even more dramatically than overall layoffs

It's interesting to think about this data within the context of other layoff indicators.

For example, layoffs from establishment deaths have risen relative to pre-pandemic even as *overall* layoffs have declined.

May explain why job cut announcements are so unrepresentative!

Side note: I love this data set, but for several reasons I strongly recommend against drawing strong inferences from the Q-Q employment changes within it about what's going on in the labor market.

We got the Q2 2025 (yes, 8 months ago) update from the BLS's Business Employment Dynamics. One useful perspective from this data is job gains & losses attributable to establishment births/deaths are playing a much bigger role now than they did in the 2010s.

“Nobody can compete on how ugly and kludgy this looks”

I know I’m vagueposting, but search the other side for “moat” and have a good laugh

I know it's not the vibe-coded faux-Bloomberg-terminal, but would be funny if it was