From today’s release, +133K v +66K Bloomberg consensus on NFP:
Households under Debt Stress: Two Pictures
Miran: No “…material inflation from tariffs.”
From CNBC:
If at 5pm ET, Trump Starts Posting about “Fake” Employment Numbers, Be Prepared
The White House receives embargoed BLS (and other) releases before the official release at 8:30am. If memory serves (and is still relevant), this is late afternoon the day before. So (if as before), Trump starts posting to get people to ignore the numbers, be prepared for a disappointing release.
Announced Job Layoffs Attributed to AI
In the Challenger, Gray and Christmas report for January is an interesting table, reporting the job losses attributed to each factor.
Is Accelerating Inflation Just around the Corner?
Households say yes (preliminary), while Wall Street economists says no:
0.68%: Truflation Y/Y CPI Inflation Rate as of 8 February 2026
The Cleveland Fed nowcast for February 2026 as of today is 2.34%.
What Could Go Wrong? The AI Asset Price and Investment Boom
Last semester, teaching the Financial System, I laid out three things that worried me: Crypto & stablecoins, private credit, and the AI boom. How’re things looking for the latter?
The Layoff Announcement-Labor Force Ratio and Recessions, 1989-2025
Using Challenger, Gray, Christmas data at quarterly frequency, normalized by civilian labor force.
Nowcasting January Private NFP
BLS will release (w/delay) on Wednesday. Until then, we have ADP (which underwent benchmarking). Using ADP data (2022M01-2025M12) to extrapolate the implied preliminary benchmark, we have the following picture: