BOOST MOBILITY

“Zandi, I think hit the nail right on the head. Layoffs are the biggest concern. What we're seeing in the labor market is a slowdown of the gears. If workers go from job to job to unemployment to job again, mobility is everything for workers. Layoffs would just dump enough workers into unemployment in a labor market that's already slowly churning, and it could lead to a terrible recession quite quickly.”

“If you think of the back of a watch and you turn it over and you see the gears rotating and the cogs hitting, that's how you should picture the labor market. We have now three years of data showing just how much those gears have slowed. It's not something that we typically and historically see in the unemployment rate, but we're not seeing now. You can look at hiring, you can look at quits, you can look at the three month growth in wages. They all point to a decline in labor market mobility.”

“One data point, one jobs report does not make or break the labor market. What's more concerning for me is that the economy shed jobs in four months of last year. And in fact, we've seen these numbers keep on getting revised down. It's hard to tell how close we are to that point and if we're actually approaching it, but the gears of the labor market have clearly slowed.”

“Consumer prices rose 3.3 percent year over year in March. That is the biggest increase we've seen since 2024. If inflation continues to climb, the Fed may have to respond by raising rates, which would only add more strain. With all eyes on the labor market, we thought it was a great time to bring in our resident labor market expert.”

“Several forces are converging that could reshape employment in a meaningful way. First, AI is already starting to show up in the data, emerging as the top cited reason for planned layoffs last month. Second, the Trump administration is tightening immigration, which has historically been a key driver of growth for the US labor force.”