Money was cheap, it no longer is. This is reach for profit in a less favorable macro by cutting labor costs. US economy, by all metrics, is extremely healthy. The stock market isn't the economy.
> No love of labor: Why the US labor market
needs some preventative medicine
> Benjamin Tal, CIBC’s Deputy Chief Economist, joins Ali Jaffery,
Senior Economist to talk through their latest note dissecting the
US labor market. Motivated by a desire to preserve margin
gains, businesses are adding less labor with job growth trending
down and a worrisome pattern of revisions making it difficult to
make a real-time read on the job market.
Rates are up, which makes it less attractive to borrow. I believe they re-did the tax rules on R&D to be less favorable to software development. It seems most large companies expect a large stock drop and recession in the next year or 2. Everywhere is pushing for higher productivity and efficiency. The belief is AI will boost productivity through Copilot and stuff.
The thing is these tech companies don’t have a lot to do with the normal employment statistics. For instance Facebook hires so few employees that it could fire everybody but it would not (directly) move the needle of unemployment statistics nationally.
The media has been all over the issue that conventional statistics don’t show the economy as bad but many people think that it is.
I read a critic comparing web tech to old school tech like GE, General Motors, etc. Old 1950's GM was connected to everything. Where ties to the rest of economy is nil for FAANG companies. Webshit can total crater and have zero effect on the regular economy.
My take what's bad about the current economy isn't business it's real estate particularly rents.
Right now the economy is fine, but there's a huuuuge likelihood of a recession. Why?
We just had a rate cut and in the past 30 years a recession happened after max. 2 quarters after the that.
If you see news from 2006 you will see people saying that the economy looks strong despite some structural issues, the economy is a huge machine and takes time to both take speed and stop, like a giant car.
Imagine the FED raising rates as pushing the brakes, the car won't stop suddenly, it needs time. The same happens with economic activity.
Now that the FED had to almost call an urgent meeting to cut .5, it's a clear sign that it could be that the car/economy was actually stopped. It isn't clear because everybody is working, but every cent that goes out of a central bank has an expectation of returns, if the expectations are that there will be negative returns, money will stop, it won't be invested, products won't get sold, houses won't be bought, everyone's plan will be delayed to the future.
And on Today's economy, you can't just stop or delay. Things need to be bought. A construction company needs to sell their real estate stock to pay back the bank and so on.
Money need to change hands, if it changes hands too slowly you get a recession and negative economic growth, if it changes too quickly you generate inflation.
^ let me do some subtext translation here “have you put your money where your mouth is? If so I want to know precisely what you’re predicting, if not STFU.”
Tech companies employ a lot of people that are not doing software development or technical roles. Think of your typical SAG (sales, administrative, general) which would include departments like HR, finance, sales, facilities, legal, etc. Seeing multiple Fortune 500 layoffs firsthand (and surviving), those departments are typically the first targets. As a company you don't want to target your core products/features in a layoff too much because that wouldn't be effective. Those roles are general in the sense that someone doing internal book-keeping can do that at any company in the US. Quick aside: is a project manager a tech role or general? I've seen PMs as general as you can get as well as very technical PMs.
The size of the Tech job market is small as part of the overall US economy and AI, as much press as it gets in tech circles, is probably useless in any physical on-site job like nursing or construction or automotive repair.
... except if it's a mature product, like dropbox is, in which case the optimal strategy is to fire all the developers, just do bugfixes and security patches, and keep milking the renewals/recurring revenue from the installed user base until they all get around to migrating to something else.
this is the inevitable fate of most products at the end of their lifecycle.
In my opinion, the US dollar system is blowing up: https://goldprice.org. But this is a highly subjective opinion.
- The job market is actually weak: The year long news about a strong job market are largely wrong. The Fed has revised its estimates and the job market is not that strong.
- Tech is a small part of employment.
- Everyone is investing in chips, nvidia, compute and training without much thinking.
- Last few years inflation has eroded lots of buying power. So even if you have a job, you still feel the pinch.
Tech overhired for many years, in part because higher head count leads to higher stock market valuation (at least in the eyes of gullible investors).
Meanwhile, more than a decade of this hiring extravaganza had passed already, and tech largely doesn't have much to show for it - mostly a graveyard of failed and cancelled projects and products. Perhaps the charade is no longer bought by investors, and they don't see tech stocks as super high growth any more, so companies can stop pretending to innovate via bullshit projects that mostly go nowhere, and cut a significant portion of the staff.
Edit: Phone post. There will be a few typos. Ex greatest ones instead of black swan.
It sounds like you're smashing together a lot of sensationalized views and over-extrapolated trends.
The US economy exited a period where the economy was extremely overheated and there was labor hoarding, especially in tech, due to labor shortages. The expectation was that this would unwind quickly post 2020, but (as is almost always the case with people predicting cyclical macro factors) this behavior tapered down slower than expectation.
No, we are not seeing a meltdown. No, it is not reasonable to predict an 07-08 style recession (that was a collateral, liquidity, and credit crisis. People bring up the GFC because of hindsight bias. There are better historical parallels to reference if that's the direction you want to go in. The banking crisis a couple of years ago started to look a little bit like that, but even that was much closer to the Savings and Loan Crisis.)
I look at macro indicators and analysis every day and have for years, and I'd recommend not making future predictions about macro unless you really know what you're doing. It's almost always a negative value ad vs being mentally agnostic. By the way, most professional participants do not know what they're doing. For example, a couple of years ago, there was a recession mania that included extreme positioning in hedge funds and sophisticated investors, and I found that extremely easy to fade because all I do is look at data, look at data, look at data. There are a lot of biases that you need to unlearn and there are a lot of non-intuitive things like rate of change (and even rate of change of rate of change) mattering more than levels. It's just too esoteric to get any value as it tourist these days, and it's such a financialized economy. For example, coming out of the banking crisis, why did things recover so quickly when it comes to liquidity? Because fixed income volatility went down and balance sheet capacity went up. Because central banks' main job has nothing to do with money printing and everything to do with controlling volatility. Because bond issuance was twisted and reverse repo absorbed short-end issuance, equaling a massive liquidity injection. Since companies are so hyper-financialized, you get all these esoteric factors feeding into what drives hiring and layoffs and capex. Then you also need to be looking at places like China, which almost nobody understands in the US although, everyone in the trading industry seems to have strong opinions, don't they?
Just keep it simple. I'd strongly recommend listening to a top level casual weekly podcast like Macro Mondays or Market Huddle, or the occasional Darius Dale interview. That will do 10x more than reading daily papers. Maybe read a good chart firehose like Market Ear.
Then keep it simple. US growth is strong. US consumer spending looked like it was weakening, maybe precipitously, but now it looks... pretty strong. US corporate profitability is quite strong. Consumer sentiment readings are improving and liquidity is fine, although, perhaps there are greatest ones in the banking system still. Don't try to predict that, though, unless you really have a killer argument.
So I don't know what else to say. The US is doing pretty well, and maybe it looks a bit late-cycle. If you want to predict from here, there are things you need to understand. And one of the big ones is that seeing a shift from this holding pattern usually requires a catalyst. An unknown unknown. To break down the known unknowns, you need to know what is price stand and what is not price stand when it comes to actual positioning and the economy and also within expectation. For example, right now it looks like Trump is quite priced into the market. Inflation picking back up could also bring out some swans. So if I wanted to make predictions, I'd be watching inflation indicators in particular right now. Especially any sort of stagflationary line from here, and I'd be looking at sentiment and positioning indicators in parallel.
When it comes to layoffs, the mass layoffs have been sensationalized in the media. Yes, they obviously exist, and yes, it has been sensationalized. If you're talking about a recession, you need to be looking at things like WARN notices unexpectedly flooding in. When it comes to job numbers, well that's a whole other mess right now. And that's probably not something you want to wade into. One of the other recession lines you need to be watching is along the lines of the general view that once unemployment starts to rise, it continues to rise. Sahm rule and all of that.
IMO just listen to one of those weekly podcasts I linked, do it weekly for a year and you'll be pretty in tune with what's actually going on. Then be mostly agnostic about the outlook, but be realistic with yourself when it comes to the immediate data.
This is the wrong take. Yes the general economy is strong. Also there’s a massive thing happening in tech.
There have been hundreds of thousands of tech workers laid off this year from a dozen different companies. Theres a recession in tech. It’s happening because of a massive market pivot and nobody knows who will own it yet.
If you want to understand the pivot look at who is firing and who is hiring.
// I can't make sense of anything going on in the US economy //
Just follow the money, for example:
// Stock market is up but people can't find jobs. //
Re-write that as: Companies are able to lower the amount they are paying on salaries and bonuses. This increases their profits, which boosts their stock price.
// Are we seeing meltdown due to AI in realtime? //
No, quite the opposite. This is what disruption looks like on the other side of it.
We are seeing companies using AI to make their workers more productive. So they don't need as many of them.
Remove one or two companies from the stock market does it still go up? Ozempic was such a hit for its maker that it covered up the stock market falling in its home country, Denmark I think.
So called core inflation. The figure with food and energy removed as though they were inconsequential.
Basket of goods. Government picks and chooses what it puts in the basket letting it massage the figures. Coffee was supposedly taken out of the US basket this year but I cannot find my source, only 2nd hand reports.
Electronics. The cost of equivalent TVs go down thereby pushing inflation down. Same for smartphones, computers, and so on. People are less inclined to buy when grocery bills go up 50%
"inflation is transitory". The lie of all lies because it is permanent. Economists and government mean it as the rate of change of prices, a derivative, whereas people just see inflated prices.
Money was cheap, it no longer is. This is reach for profit in a less favorable macro by cutting labor costs. US economy, by all metrics, is extremely healthy. The stock market isn't the economy.
https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/economy/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economy-posts-solid-gr...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/economy/us-economy-gdp-q3/ind...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/business/economy/economy-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-economy-grew-at-a-so...
Citation:
> No love of labor: Why the US labor market needs some preventative medicine
> Benjamin Tal, CIBC’s Deputy Chief Economist, joins Ali Jaffery, Senior Economist to talk through their latest note dissecting the US labor market. Motivated by a desire to preserve margin gains, businesses are adding less labor with job growth trending down and a worrisome pattern of revisions making it difficult to make a real-time read on the job market.
https://economics.cibccm.com/cds?id=ea74f68e-588c-42e6-9031-...
https://cibccm.com/en/insights/podcasts/no-love-of-labor-why...
Rates are up, which makes it less attractive to borrow. I believe they re-did the tax rules on R&D to be less favorable to software development. It seems most large companies expect a large stock drop and recession in the next year or 2. Everywhere is pushing for higher productivity and efficiency. The belief is AI will boost productivity through Copilot and stuff.
The thing is these tech companies don’t have a lot to do with the normal employment statistics. For instance Facebook hires so few employees that it could fire everybody but it would not (directly) move the needle of unemployment statistics nationally.
The media has been all over the issue that conventional statistics don’t show the economy as bad but many people think that it is.
I read a critic comparing web tech to old school tech like GE, General Motors, etc. Old 1950's GM was connected to everything. Where ties to the rest of economy is nil for FAANG companies. Webshit can total crater and have zero effect on the regular economy.
My take what's bad about the current economy isn't business it's real estate particularly rents.
Right now the economy is fine, but there's a huuuuge likelihood of a recession. Why?
We just had a rate cut and in the past 30 years a recession happened after max. 2 quarters after the that.
If you see news from 2006 you will see people saying that the economy looks strong despite some structural issues, the economy is a huge machine and takes time to both take speed and stop, like a giant car.
Imagine the FED raising rates as pushing the brakes, the car won't stop suddenly, it needs time. The same happens with economic activity.
Now that the FED had to almost call an urgent meeting to cut .5, it's a clear sign that it could be that the car/economy was actually stopped. It isn't clear because everybody is working, but every cent that goes out of a central bank has an expectation of returns, if the expectations are that there will be negative returns, money will stop, it won't be invested, products won't get sold, houses won't be bought, everyone's plan will be delayed to the future.
And on Today's economy, you can't just stop or delay. Things need to be bought. A construction company needs to sell their real estate stock to pay back the bank and so on.
Money need to change hands, if it changes hands too slowly you get a recession and negative economic growth, if it changes too quickly you generate inflation.
>but there's a huuuuge likelihood of a recession.
Can you share your short positions in the market?
^ let me do some subtext translation here “have you put your money where your mouth is? If so I want to know precisely what you’re predicting, if not STFU.”
Tech companies employ a lot of people that are not doing software development or technical roles. Think of your typical SAG (sales, administrative, general) which would include departments like HR, finance, sales, facilities, legal, etc. Seeing multiple Fortune 500 layoffs firsthand (and surviving), those departments are typically the first targets. As a company you don't want to target your core products/features in a layoff too much because that wouldn't be effective. Those roles are general in the sense that someone doing internal book-keeping can do that at any company in the US. Quick aside: is a project manager a tech role or general? I've seen PMs as general as you can get as well as very technical PMs.
The size of the Tech job market is small as part of the overall US economy and AI, as much press as it gets in tech circles, is probably useless in any physical on-site job like nursing or construction or automotive repair.
... except if it's a mature product, like dropbox is, in which case the optimal strategy is to fire all the developers, just do bugfixes and security patches, and keep milking the renewals/recurring revenue from the installed user base until they all get around to migrating to something else.
this is the inevitable fate of most products at the end of their lifecycle.
In my opinion, the US dollar system is blowing up: https://goldprice.org. But this is a highly subjective opinion.
- The job market is actually weak: The year long news about a strong job market are largely wrong. The Fed has revised its estimates and the job market is not that strong.
- Tech is a small part of employment.
- Everyone is investing in chips, nvidia, compute and training without much thinking.
- Last few years inflation has eroded lots of buying power. So even if you have a job, you still feel the pinch.
Tech is oversaturated; boots on the ground to move atoms are still necessary however.
Tech overhired for many years, in part because higher head count leads to higher stock market valuation (at least in the eyes of gullible investors).
Meanwhile, more than a decade of this hiring extravaganza had passed already, and tech largely doesn't have much to show for it - mostly a graveyard of failed and cancelled projects and products. Perhaps the charade is no longer bought by investors, and they don't see tech stocks as super high growth any more, so companies can stop pretending to innovate via bullshit projects that mostly go nowhere, and cut a significant portion of the staff.
Edit: Phone post. There will be a few typos. Ex greatest ones instead of black swan.
It sounds like you're smashing together a lot of sensationalized views and over-extrapolated trends.
The US economy exited a period where the economy was extremely overheated and there was labor hoarding, especially in tech, due to labor shortages. The expectation was that this would unwind quickly post 2020, but (as is almost always the case with people predicting cyclical macro factors) this behavior tapered down slower than expectation.
No, we are not seeing a meltdown. No, it is not reasonable to predict an 07-08 style recession (that was a collateral, liquidity, and credit crisis. People bring up the GFC because of hindsight bias. There are better historical parallels to reference if that's the direction you want to go in. The banking crisis a couple of years ago started to look a little bit like that, but even that was much closer to the Savings and Loan Crisis.)
I look at macro indicators and analysis every day and have for years, and I'd recommend not making future predictions about macro unless you really know what you're doing. It's almost always a negative value ad vs being mentally agnostic. By the way, most professional participants do not know what they're doing. For example, a couple of years ago, there was a recession mania that included extreme positioning in hedge funds and sophisticated investors, and I found that extremely easy to fade because all I do is look at data, look at data, look at data. There are a lot of biases that you need to unlearn and there are a lot of non-intuitive things like rate of change (and even rate of change of rate of change) mattering more than levels. It's just too esoteric to get any value as it tourist these days, and it's such a financialized economy. For example, coming out of the banking crisis, why did things recover so quickly when it comes to liquidity? Because fixed income volatility went down and balance sheet capacity went up. Because central banks' main job has nothing to do with money printing and everything to do with controlling volatility. Because bond issuance was twisted and reverse repo absorbed short-end issuance, equaling a massive liquidity injection. Since companies are so hyper-financialized, you get all these esoteric factors feeding into what drives hiring and layoffs and capex. Then you also need to be looking at places like China, which almost nobody understands in the US although, everyone in the trading industry seems to have strong opinions, don't they?
Just keep it simple. I'd strongly recommend listening to a top level casual weekly podcast like Macro Mondays or Market Huddle, or the occasional Darius Dale interview. That will do 10x more than reading daily papers. Maybe read a good chart firehose like Market Ear.
Then keep it simple. US growth is strong. US consumer spending looked like it was weakening, maybe precipitously, but now it looks... pretty strong. US corporate profitability is quite strong. Consumer sentiment readings are improving and liquidity is fine, although, perhaps there are greatest ones in the banking system still. Don't try to predict that, though, unless you really have a killer argument.
So I don't know what else to say. The US is doing pretty well, and maybe it looks a bit late-cycle. If you want to predict from here, there are things you need to understand. And one of the big ones is that seeing a shift from this holding pattern usually requires a catalyst. An unknown unknown. To break down the known unknowns, you need to know what is price stand and what is not price stand when it comes to actual positioning and the economy and also within expectation. For example, right now it looks like Trump is quite priced into the market. Inflation picking back up could also bring out some swans. So if I wanted to make predictions, I'd be watching inflation indicators in particular right now. Especially any sort of stagflationary line from here, and I'd be looking at sentiment and positioning indicators in parallel.
When it comes to layoffs, the mass layoffs have been sensationalized in the media. Yes, they obviously exist, and yes, it has been sensationalized. If you're talking about a recession, you need to be looking at things like WARN notices unexpectedly flooding in. When it comes to job numbers, well that's a whole other mess right now. And that's probably not something you want to wade into. One of the other recession lines you need to be watching is along the lines of the general view that once unemployment starts to rise, it continues to rise. Sahm rule and all of that.
IMO just listen to one of those weekly podcasts I linked, do it weekly for a year and you'll be pretty in tune with what's actually going on. Then be mostly agnostic about the outlook, but be realistic with yourself when it comes to the immediate data.
This is the wrong take. Yes the general economy is strong. Also there’s a massive thing happening in tech.
There have been hundreds of thousands of tech workers laid off this year from a dozen different companies. Theres a recession in tech. It’s happening because of a massive market pivot and nobody knows who will own it yet.
If you want to understand the pivot look at who is firing and who is hiring.
// I can't make sense of anything going on in the US economy //
Just follow the money, for example:
// Stock market is up but people can't find jobs. //
Re-write that as: Companies are able to lower the amount they are paying on salaries and bonuses. This increases their profits, which boosts their stock price.
// Are we seeing meltdown due to AI in realtime? //
No, quite the opposite. This is what disruption looks like on the other side of it.
We are seeing companies using AI to make their workers more productive. So they don't need as many of them.
Remove one or two companies from the stock market does it still go up? Ozempic was such a hit for its maker that it covered up the stock market falling in its home country, Denmark I think.
Also the government lies about inflation.
Can you elaborate on the lies about inflation?
So called core inflation. The figure with food and energy removed as though they were inconsequential.
Basket of goods. Government picks and chooses what it puts in the basket letting it massage the figures. Coffee was supposedly taken out of the US basket this year but I cannot find my source, only 2nd hand reports.
Electronics. The cost of equivalent TVs go down thereby pushing inflation down. Same for smartphones, computers, and so on. People are less inclined to buy when grocery bills go up 50%
"inflation is transitory". The lie of all lies because it is permanent. Economists and government mean it as the rate of change of prices, a derivative, whereas people just see inflated prices.