FEATURED POST
May 21, 2025
Summertime: For some employers, it’s no picnic
Summer paints a vivid picture. For many Americans, it’s a season of relaxation and adventure. But for employers, especially those in retail and leisure and hospitality, it’s a period of heightened labor demand and a less-visible struggle with high worker turnover.
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March 18, 2025
What’s slowing the inflation slowdown?
Good news! Inflation is slowing. The annualized pace of consumer inflation fell to 2.8 percent in February from 3 percent in January. For businesses, price growth was 3.2 percent, down from 3.7 percent. We’re getting closer to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate of inflation. But there’s another 2 percent touchstone that matters even more for inflation in the long term—productivity growth.
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March 11, 2025
The other T word: Part II
In my last Main Street Macro exploring the state of labor market turnover, I argued that a healthy job market requires a healthy level of churn. Employers need to have the ability to attract talented and skilled people with strong pay and better career prospects, and they need to be able to replace departing employees. But how much turnover is too much? How much is enough?
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February 25, 2025
The other T word
Economic news has been dominated by two T words this year: Technology and tariffs. But there’s another T word that promises to have a far greater impact on the job market and inflation: Turnover.
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February 18, 2025
Worker-consumer synchronicity
Last week’s consumer sentiment data flashed a yellow light of caution that the consumer resilience that has powered the U.S. economic engine over the last four years is sputtering. Consumer retail sales in January fell by 0.9 percent from December, a much stronger pullback than economists had expected. The spending decline was broad-based, meaning that even colder-than-average temperatures across much of the country couldn’t completely explain the magnitude of the slowdown.
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February 10, 2025
January job reports are different. Here’s why.
Every job report is important to economists, but the January releases stand apart. Not only do they set the tone for the year, they also introduce annual technical adjustments and benchmarking, which affects employment estimates all year.
Got questions? Here are some answers about January job reports.
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January 21, 2025
Skills in the Era of AI and Aging
Last week, I wrote about the skills opportunity uncovered by ADP research. However, within that opportunity there lies a paradox. In today’s workplace, skills are being created and retired simultaneously, at rapid rates. How can skills evolution be jumping forward and falling behind at the same time? The answer lies in two megatrends which will reshape the workforce of the future: aging demographics and rapid-fire innovation.
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January 13, 2025
The skills opportunity
Job reports move markets because they’re the strongest signal economists have about the strength of the U.S. economy. But worker productivity is just as important to economic growth; it’s just harder to measure or capture.
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December 16, 2024
Word of the year: Stability
The path to becoming a Merriam-Webster or Oxford word of the year differs, but the goal of each is the same: To capture society’s mood or ethos over the past 12 months. In keeping with the spirit of these annual pursuits, I’ve come up with my own word to describe the vibe of the 2024 labor market: Stability. Here’s why stability wins the word of the year for me, and why its days as an apt description of the labor market are numbered.
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