Guy Berger

The Indeed job postings time series continues to very slowly converge toward a trough...

-4.7% Y/Y toward the end of February - the least bad since late 2022.

i love smart people who know things. thank you.

There will probably lots of hemming & hawing about how job cut announcements in Feb 2026 are flattered by a comparison to the DOGE announcements a year earlier BUT

More important: the supposed surge in actual layoffs heralded by fall announcements barely materialized (if at all)

for those who know things... is it possible that covered employment (the denominator for the insured unemployment rate) has been overestimated recently?

3/ The reason I'm casting doubt on this upbeat news from a high quality data source is that we don't (yet?) see the same improvement in the corresponding BLS data.

Unemployment due to permanent layoff has not fallen in the last few months, unlike continuing claims.

2/ And continuing claims continue to run a little below 2025 levels. A big break from most of the past few years when they were growing at mid-single-digit levels.

As with initial claims, I have some mild doubts the picture is this rosy. (But hope to be proven wrong.)

Claims:

1/ Jobless claims low, again. 213K in the week ended 2/28 - below 2025 & 2023 levels; near 2024 levels.

No sign of rising layoffs here, indeed they seem to have declined. (Though I do worry this is a *little* too optimistic... let's see what January JOLTS looks like.)

I agree quits is a better “average” but very low hiring is interesting for “distributional reasons” (from outsiders to insiders)

Yeah. Hiring has strong early 2010s vibes. Other dimensions, (much) less so

7/ To wrap... I think it's a good idea to think about ways to fix online job matching which has clearly gone astray. But unfortunately I don't think it will boost hiring that much.

6/ I'm open to the possibility that falling hiring efficiency has had a second order effect here. I'm also open to falling hiring efficiency as a partial explanation for why the current low hiring / low firing combo is a more extreme version of its 2007-08 version

5/ Granted, prime-working age employment did fall a little in 2007 and early 2008; the trajectory has been flattish over the past few years. Baseline layoffs (before increase) were quite a bit higher in 2005-08 than now. My guess is that might account for the difference.

6/ I'm open to the possibility that falling hiring efficiency has had a second order effect here. I'm also open to falling hiring efficiency as a partial explanation for why the current low hiring / low firing combo is a more extreme version of its 2007-08 version

4/ We saw something similar in 2007 and the beginning of 2008. Hiring fell a lot leading up to, and in the early part of, the Great Recession without much of an increase in layoffs. Prime working age employment fell only a little.

3/ I'm less convinced by the 2nd half. The divergence between weak gross hiring and resilient prime working age employment is not surprising! Weak hiring is much likelier to negatively impact young people who don't have a job (or job hop a lot) than prime working age folks.

Tech Innovation in Labor Market Matching A Formerly Useful Sword Develops a 2nd Edge

2/ The most provocative argument in the essay: falling costs of application have reduced the efficiency of the hiring process, lowering hiring. I think the 1st half is correct, though it isn't solely due to LLMs. I wrote about this last year: macromostly.substack.com/p/tech-innov...

The Tinder-ization of the job market Why nobody's getting hired in a "good" economy

Thread: I don't think reduced efficiency in the hiring process is primarily responsible for weak hiring.

1/ I'm a long-time fan of Matt Darling (@besttrousers.bsky.social ) and enjoyed reading his piece in
@theargument.bsky.social . However...

www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-tinder...

One impression I get from the reactions to ADP this morning is people don't follow the weekly data they publish very closely

(chart is what that data showed as of a week ago)

Insurance that underprices risk is not a good business model! In this case it’s imposing a cost on American taxpayers

The other website. Lots of tweets on the same topic with a similar claim though

Normies don’t understand the economics of insurance, exhibit 5,000,001

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