everybody went to Harvard (or Stanford)

73 degrees. Friday night in Brooklyn. Grilling with @ThomasHerndon1 and @PEWilliams_. A-OK.

The unemployment rate is at 4.2%, the stock market is soaring and both consumer and business confidence have been rising in recent months. Objectively odd conditions for a President to be having a connip about the Fed and the BLS.

The unemployment rate is at 4.2%, the stock market is soaring and both consumer and business confidence have been rising in recent months. Objectively odd conditionals for a President to be having a connip about the Fed and the BLS.

This acts as a brake on basically everything in the economy that you can build

Julian Casablancas’ post-Strokes career is McCartney-esque. The sheer number of great songs he’s written in the second act is incredible.

Here's a link to the Odd Lots ep I mentioned.

What's the cause of the big job revision? @TheStalwart and @tracyalloway had a fantastic Odd Lots episode earlier this year with the BLS Chief on how budget cuts and survey response declines have made data collection increasingly difficult/inaccurate. The federal hiring freeze likely reduced the resources available to compile and verify administrative data from state and local governments. This could have led to an initial overestimation of payrolls (e.g., by including outdated or incomplete records), which was corrected in the revision once updated data was received. The timing of this revision (early August 2025) aligns with the end of a fiscal or reporting cycle where such corrections might be finalized. Additionally, the concurrent employment shifts from immigration policy and reporting of native-born gains, foreign-born losses could exacerbate the issue if administrative systems struggled to reclassify workers amid rapid policy changes. Not a huge deal IMO. It's difficult to get real time employment data. The BLS does a good job with its limited resources and while the more accurate revisions lag it still gets it right in the end. The big lesson is to treat monthly employment data lightly and overweight aggregated quarterly data for a better perspective.

The Chinese manufacturing ecosystem has become so sophisticated, smooth, and efficient that US tariffs on China aren't driving businesses away from China. That's one of many crucial insights from this great Odd Lots podcast episode.