Guest Post by Jeffrey A. Tucker
he news of the falling unemployment and the rise in total payrolls in July 2022 came as a welcome relief to the White House. There were cheers all around, mainly because it plays into the story that this is not a recession, despite two consecutive quarters of falling output as measured by the GDP. If it is a recession – what’s in a name? – it’s different from any experienced in a century simply because it has not yet hit that key data indicator.
And yet, there are anomalies both anecdotally and in terms of the macroeconomic data. This week, we got news of both Walmart and Robinhood cutting jobs, plus hiring freezes in the financial industry.
As I’ve written many times, the truly vulnerable positions are not in the areas in which people actually do stuff with real skill but rather in the high-end, six-figure jobs in corporate and nonprofit management that became the stuff of envy during the lockdown years. In these jobs, you could both be “essential,” overpaid, and lounge around in your PJs all day.
Continue reading “Just How Healthy Are These Labor Markets?”
