Mike Madowitz

I also think it’s a risky habit to hang big overarching labor market narratives on individual jobs reports, they aren’t load bearing

Yeah, construction is, as always, a weird one. Don’t color me shocked if a lot of household replies about working for pay or profit on last minute snow removal never gets reported as formal taxable employment 😉

I mean, markets are way down on these numbers because they are worse than we guessed based on other data, acting director is career and was acting under multiple admins.

Its still not there

Nope, baseline revision go the opposite of what admin has been pushing

I’m probably east coast biasing, but my intuition is ref week between storms wouldn’t show up here in hh survey, but slows onboarding reporting on the payrolls side (could even explain some divergence)

I guess best test point for this would be positive feb payroll revisions next month?

The best laid plans....

[Energy secretary]: plans? who said plans?

www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/his...

And even more now that we don’t depend on imports at all because tariffs have breathed new life into US mfg…

It was me!

Some times payroll data is bad. It was bad this month.

But the idea that an economy with 4.4% unemployment, 80.7% prime age employment, and 2.4% inflation is "destroyed" is very silly.

I have been so good about not using my 'that's one way to win TX senate' jokes!

Just that if you really believed the hype on jobs reversing you're not worried about an oil shock causing a recession, but same jobs market looks like you could knock it over with a feather after today + revisions

if it wasn't for the war, I'd say that very negative takes on the US labor market based on this report would be a big overreaction

(just like people overreacted with optimism last month)

I don't think the last few month, or the revisions, should radically change your view on a consistently weak labor market.

However, you could convince me that someone who asks if we should really start an oil shock war gets shot down a week ago and prevails today

The latest population control revisions indicate a -1.4mn revision to the US labor force with 1.4mn fewer employed

We're going through a historic negative labor supply shock with net migration falling from over 2mn per year to close to zero while ageing demographics are at play

threw me for a bit too--the California erasure continues

Elise has the bigger story here: these population control revisions are huge.
I expected big ones and I'm still getting my head around them

"Offices of physicians lost 37,000 jobs in February, primarily due to strike activity."
www.bls.gov/news.release...

Weather-Adjusted Employment Change - San Francisco Fed Updated 1/9/2026

My spiciest take at this point:

This job market is officially mid--not as fire as last month looked, not as bad as this month's topline looks

Gonna go back to hitting refresh for a bit

Not convinced this jobs report is as scary or as bad as initial reaction.

Household survey looks mostly fine
Little change in participation
Little change in EPOP
U-6 falls again

and again, really bad weather hitting payrolls

Pinning everything on weather rn

Shit, this sucks.

Weather is our best excuse today!

Watch for SF Fed weather adjusted data later in the day

Big Revisions Are a Reason to Question Jobs Numbers, Not Dismiss Them

More in my story today. Oh, and happy #jobsday!
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/b...

Brb, building destroyers

Some people have asked how the timeline for Kevin Warsh's confirmation as Fed chair looks right now.

The answer is that by this point, Powell in 2017 had not yet had (but would soon have) his confirmation hearing.

This table shows when each hurdle of the confirmation process was cleared.

We've been calling @besttrousers.bsky.social The Best Matt since the bad site showed people our posts!

Law professor says a federal fair share tax would address wealth inequality A new federal “fair share tax” could raise significant revenue from the nation’s wealthiest households while avoiding constitutional barriers that have stymied other proposals to tax extreme wealth, U...

Professor Brian Galle (@bdgesq.bsky.social) shared insights from his new book, 'How to Tax the Ultrarich,' at a recent @berkeleyls.bsky.social event that discussed a range of policy tools aimed at raising federal revenue: https://bit.ly/3OQ7eZz
#BerkeleyLaw #UCBerkeley

AI has nothing (or at most very little) to do with it; Claude is not writing 25k words for you. Law journals short-sightedly destroyed the Fall submission season, and compacted the Spring season into a few weeks, and now complain they get too many submissions at once to manage.

Because the price of oil is global, a disruption to oil flows in the Strait of Hormuz or elsewhere raises the global price. Doesn’t matter if we don’t import any oil. We all pay about the same price, except for the shipping costs.

So as Fat Joe said, “yesterday’s price is NOT today’s price”.

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

Shoutout to EIA for already having a chokepoints tag:

www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...