#bls-revision

#bls-revision

"Today's increase is significant, but it doesn't mean the labor market is back on track or growing robustly. The gains are highly concentrated in a few industries, not broad-based across the economy."

'Walmart Worries' just keep multiplying. It's currently close to the highest level ever recorded which was during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09.

The job market is struggling in the face of so many headwinds. Companies are going to be even more reluctant to hire this spring until the war ends and they can see consumers still spending. It's a tense time for the U.S. economy.

We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily. AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what's feasible.

Sectors that showed notable job gains in December include food services and drinking places (+27,000 jobs), health care (+34,000 jobs) and social assistance (+17,000 jobs). On the other end of the spectrum, the retail trade sector lost 25,000 jobs in December. Residential building construction lost 4,200 jobs in December, although employment for residential specialty trade contractors rose by 1,100 jobs. The real estate sector also posted a small increase, adding 2,300 jobs in December.

On Wednesday, the government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate fell to a still-low 4.3% from 4.4%. However, government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands. That reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, a third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.

Friday's December employment report - the last for 2025 - reinforced the biggest theme in the job market last year: It's a hard time to be looking for work, unless you're looking at a few select corners of the economy. "The job market is ending the year with a fizzle rather than a bang," Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, said. In total, the US added just 584,000 jobs in 2025, a big drop from the past few years.