the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show student loan and auto loan balances at record highs, while credit card balances have climbed to about $1.2 trillion. Delinquencies, particularly on credit cards, are also rising, with 90-day-plus late-payment rates for credit cards more than 12% higher than in prior years. Consumers are driving a lot of growth, but there are some signs of weakness for certain parts of the economy, Kan said, adding that these pressures could spill over into housing and mortgage performance.
and it appears that the job-hopping hack is unwinding.ADP's latest data suggests that there are now only a couple of industries where competition between employers results in better pay: industries where demand for skilled labor outweighs supply. A pay trends report shared with Fortune yesterday from the private payroll company showed that in January, year-over-year pay growth for job-hoppers slowed to 6.4%, down from 6.6% in December.
Most American dairy cows are milked by immigrants. On Dale Hemminger's farm in upstate New York, the cows are milked by robots. When a cow wants to be milked, it walks up to a machine that cleans its udder, attaches cups to its teats, draws the milk and dispenses a treat. In a barn that Hemminger plans to open this year, other robots will roam the floor like little automated pooper scoopers, picking up manure.
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.
In 2026, the grim comedy of late capitalism seems to have found a perfect punchline: workers laid off in a dismal job market are now being hired to train AI systems meant to replace them altogether. If a great AI replacement ever comes to pass, the scale of potential displacement is massive. MIT researchers recently calculated that today's AI systems could already automate tasks performed by more than 20 million American workers, or about 11.7 percent of the entire US labor force.
Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009's Great Recession. The data comes from Challenger, Gray & Christmas' new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires were announced-the lowest total on record for January.
And beneath the official jobs data is a growing accessibility crisis. More and more job seekers are finding themselves shut out of the labor market - not because there are no jobs to be had, but because torrents of AI slop are crowding them out of consideration. Case in point: a few months back, tech publication The Markup posted an opening for an engineer role.
Economist Claudia Sahm is an expert (if not the expert) on the conditions that presage a recession and how policymakers should react as a result. She is the creator of "the Sahm Rule," an employment indicator monitored by everyone from central banks to the global financial giants. The Sahm Rule says that a recession is likely when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more, relative to the minimum of the three-month averages from the previous year.
Democratic members of the US Congress, as part of the Congressional Labor Caucus, penned a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission to "thoroughly review" the $55 billion acquisition of EA. EA confirmed the sale to the Public Investment Fund, or the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in September, but the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. Before the official change of ownership, the 46 House Democrats who signed the letter to the FTC are calling for more scrutiny into the impacts of the deal.
A quiet but consequential shift is underway in the executive labor market. Companies are rethinking how they access senior judgment in the AI era. Rather than defaulting to full-time executive roles that command lofty salaries and long-term overhead, companies are increasingly turning to experienced consultants, strategists, and advisors to provide leadership on a limited and targeted basis. This is not a dilution of leadership, but a recalibration of where experience delivers the most value.
The reason mortgage rates are near yearly lows as we end the year is that the labor market has softened and mortgage spreads have returned to near-normal levels. Without these two variables, mortgage rates would have stayed higher for longer. My 2026 forecast is for the 10-year yield to range between 3.80% and 4.60%, and for mortgage rates to range from 5.75% to 6.75%.
Consumers confidence in the economy was shaken in December as Americans grow anxious about high prices and the impact of President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index fell 3.8 points to 89.1 in December from November's upwardly revised reading of 92.9. In April, when Trump rolled out his import taxes on U.S. trading partners, the reading was 85.7.
She shared a segment from her show on social media and wrote, If I had to summarize the first year of President Trump's second term in one word, it would be: dignity. From his foreign policy to his domestic policy to his immigration policy, the goal has been restoring the dignity of the forgotten working-class men & women of this country.
