Guy Berger
@econberger.bsky.social
Senior Advisor on Labor Markets at Access/Macro; Workforce Economist in Residence at Guild; Senior Fellow at the Burning Glass Institute. I tweet a lot about labor markets, macro, and (sorry) music! Tweets represent my own views.
My preview of the July jobs report: the pace of labor market improvement we saw in the 1st half of the year will probably slow (indeed, has already slowed) in the 2nd half. Link: macromostly.substack.com/p/bls-jobs-r...
Fiscal policy is going to become a bigger drag on economic growth as we move into the back half of the year www.brookings.edu/articles/hut...
Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure | Brookings
The Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure shows how much fiscal policy adds to or subtracts from overall economic growth.
brookings.edu
The decision to make communication by the Fed Chair more opaque has increased rather than decreased the significance/impact of Fed beat reporters. The quickest way to reduce their significance/impact is for the Chair to speak more explicitly & frequently. You gotta choose!
Before you congratulate me on my exemplary parenting, I also scared my 5 year old by showing her a David Attenborough YouTube clip about Venus fly traps
Guy Berger@econberger.bsky.social · yesterdayOk, my 8.5 yr old just got sucked into Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy
Ok, my 8.5 yr old just got sucked into Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy
Grand Admiral Thrawn in Imperial Uniform
ALT: Grand Admiral Thrawn in Imperial Uniform
static.klipy.com
My recap of the June JOLTS report. If the small labor market recovery of 2026 continues, we'll see it show up via rising hiring and quits rather than lower layoffs. Link: macromostly.substack.com/p/jolts-reca...
The decomposition of faster employment growth looked a little odd two months ago - overly "lower layoffs" heavy, with quits moving in the wrong direction. As of June it looks much more conventional, with hiring doing more heavy lifting and quits rising a teeny tiny bit.
JOLTS: 1/ Another meh report in June. Quits stable, hiring stable or maybe rising very slowly, layoffs stable but lower than a year ago.
Reporters really need to clarify whether the hedge fund wiz in the news is Ken Griffey SENIOR or JUNIOR
Thanks to Andrew Keshner at @marketwatch.com for chatting with me about the rise of health insurance costs and their impact on workers' finances. www.marketwatch.com/story/disapp...
Disappointed by your skimpy pay raise? Blame your healthcare benefits.
It’s been two decades since companies’ health-benefit costs have climbed this fast.
marketwatch.com
I had the pleasure of talking to @hughesstephanie.bsky.social at @marketplace.org about a depressing topic: health insurance taking a growing bite out of US workers' paychecks. www.marketplace.org/story/2026/0...
Rising health insurance costs may take a bite out of your paycheck
Health insurance costs for employers have been growing at a high rate. To cope, experts said employers could raise costs, hold off hiring, or cut into employee raises.
marketplace.org
Where does the presumption that “Wall Street” is a loser from Fed opacity come from? The less and more vaguely the Fed communicates, the higher the return to specialized information gathering. Would make more sense to say, “Stop whining about something that will make you rich
There are people who put too much weight on the ISM employment indices. Some signal in this indicator, but we also have a lot of other data in hand. Goes double for the ISM *manufacturing* employment index, this is such a small share of the US labor market.
Agentic AI is introducing enormous productivity gains into the process of losing money
First Waymo ride since we moved out of SF proper. Will never get old
Columbia should have recorded a version of dog barks edited to play the “Donna Lee” melody and Charlie Parker’s solo to put on the B side, and released it with Jaco Pastorius’s version as a novelty single youtu.be/-0NNA6w8Zk4?...
Jaco Pastorius - Donna Lee
YouTube video by ApollonianKing
youtu.be
For anyone who is interested, I wrote up my take on the Q2 employment cost index: macromostly.substack.com/p/a-brief-no...
A Brief Note on the Employment Cost Index (ECI)
Non-Wage Benefit Costs Are Becoming More of a Problem, With Health Insurance as a Key Culprit
macromostly.substack.com
Not that this is a good idea, but if you were a central banker who REALLY wanted to extract pure signals about the world out of market price movements, you’d want a very explicit and comprehensive reaction function that you stuck to doggedly
Not a politics guy and I'm not sure my assessment of major legislative activity on health insurance is correct (did I omit anything?), but I don't think it's a coincidence that both Clintoncare (failed) and Obamacare (successful) happened after periods of elevated cost growth
1/ Some not-great news from the Q2 2026 employment cost index (ECI), for both the Fed and for workers. For the first time in a while, non-wage benefit costs are outgrowing wages. For the Fed that means wage data understate labor-induced inflationary pressures...
The ADP data lags initial claims by 2 weeks (and is a 4 week average, so the lag is actually bigger). It's worth chewing on what this indicator will soon look like if initial claims are correct! (Non-trivial "if")
Guy Berger@econberger.bsky.social · last wk.Private sector employment growth as measured by ADP is still OK (+60K the last 4 weeks; probably enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising) but the slowest it's been since late March
for tomorrow's ECI release, I'll be looking closely at the grey line - are wages starting to understate labor cost pressures? (Alternatively: is faster benefit cost growth eating away at wage growth?)
If the following story makes sense to you I strongly recommend cleaning up your information environment (Screenshot from the other site)
My friend @chipcutter.bsky.social has a great article on the 2026 change in hiring sentiment at big companies. But everyone should curb their enthusiasm. Hiring has increased by a measly 1% in the first 5 months of '26 relative to the 2nd half of '25... www.wsj.com/business/big...
Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout
After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AI.
wsj.com
Indeed job postings: 1/ Overall postings are flat; not rising, not falling. On a year-over-year basis they're still down a little but we'll cross the X axis in the next few months.
Claims: 1/ I thought last week's initial claims number (188K) was a freakish fluke. This week: 197K, a little higher but still very low... increases the odds that we've seen a further small decline in layoffs. (Let's give it a few more weeks before big pronouncements.)
Neither the Lucas Critique nor Goodhart’s Law apply to policymakers’ choice of a specific broad based inflation metric :/