Q4 Government Shutdown Drags on GDP; Supreme Court Blocks Tariff Plan The government shutdown proved to be a far greater drag on the economy than earlier estimates indicated. On Friday, the U.S. BEA reported that fourth-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the...

Revisiting 2025 Employment The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published its final benchmark revisions covering employment during the 12‑month period between April 2024 and March 2025. The revisions showed that payrolls were revised lower by 898,000 jobs compared with...

Markets Rotate: What’s Driving the Shift; Plus, the Dow Crosses a Milestone After leading markets for much of the past two years, AI, tech stocks, and software specifically, are losing leadership in early 2026, as investors rotate capital toward other sectors,...

January Barometer Flashes Green, a Sleepy Fed Gathering The so-called January Barometer holds that the market’s performance in January—measured by the S&P 500 Index—tends to foreshadow how stocks will perform during the year. Since 1970, January finished higher 33...

It’s Hard to Say Good-bye: What Persistently Low Layoffs Say About the Economy Much has been made of the sluggish hiring environment, but less attention has been paid to an important counterpoint: the persistently low level of layoffs. Figure 1 highlights the number...

Forks, Knives, and Economic Clues Let’s review one narrow economic indicator that provides a useful, though not standalone, measure of the overall economy’s health. The US Census categorizes it as ‘food services and drinking places.’ That can best be described as...