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Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

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Unemployment still pretty low. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

The environment is much less forgiving of management mistakes, but someone's layoffs can also be a competitor's hiring opportunity.

The laid-off email job corporate worker isn't going to take a job for $15/hr at the Flying J unclogging toilets. You can't use the total national average unemployment rate, which has issues of its own, to say the economy is healthy. In the same way, the stock market indices aren't helpful either beyond catastrophic values.

I don't claim that it can be used to say the economy is healthy. I take issue with OP's claim that large layoffs necessarily imply recession. Unless you know that the laid off workers aren't rehired by a competitor, you don't know if the layoff isn't just an outcome of competition. The national unemployment rate is a proxy for it. At least at the first order, if a large number of people are being laid off (and this isn't the first layoff in the sector, Wells Fargo has cut over 40k jobs from their peak) then so far they are being rehired. And I agree with you, desk workers aren't going to take a $15/hr job at the Flying J, which is why I believe they were likely to be hired either by competition or at least in occupations consistent with their skill set and aspirations, else we'd see them show up in unemployment stats. Check sector stats too - very low for finance https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04032216#

Fun fact. If I'm laid off from my corporate job and after weeks of searching start driving for Uber or delivering pizzas, I am considered employed in the U3 (the unemployment rate most often reported). I would be excluded in U5 rate (they are referred to as "marginally employed") which is about 1% higher.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Another fun fact. If I work 2 jobs at 2 different employers I'm counted as 2 employed people.

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesfaq.htm

There's some much noise in "unemployment rate" that I would argue it's essentially useless for most purposes.

Median real wages are rising, too.

And personally, I’d rather be a delivery driver than be unemployed.

I think there is a correction in sectors that had been inflated by cheap money. The rest of the economy is doing pretty well.

Median real wages going up is people moving to new jobs with inflation-adjusted salaries and rates.

Right, unemployment staying low through the layoffs show that the laid off have been able to find acceptable jobs.

Not to nitpick, but I wonder if we can better define "acceptable." For a good layoff outcome, I'd expect the employee to find a new gig within a few months, that's +/- X% of their previous comp. Open question: has anyone seen this data?

A healthy economy shouldn't go straight up, and neither should healthy companies. Adjusting the workforce is a normal course of business. The big media news early in the week started with Google having a lay off which eventually turned out to be ~1k people. It sucks for those people, but is < 1% of the workforce. It's not even something that should have made big news, but everyone is looking for anything to fit a recession narrative right now.

You are really cherry picking to bring your point across. Google was not the only layoffs this week and last year we saw a dramatic increase in number of layoffs in tech from prior years. It is still hard to predict how this trend will continue but healthy is not the word I would describe things at the moment.

What was probably unhealthy was the insane amount of hiring that happened. Even with last year's cuts we're probably still above 'normal' company headcount growth trends.

There is no recession, enterprises are struggling to obtain profits from zero interest rate macro that is unattainable in the current macro. Unemployment will remain low due to structural demographics (10k Boomers retiring per day, 3.65M/year, 1.8M people over the age of 55 die every year, ~1/2 of which are in the labor participation rate). A healthy economy creates ~1-3M jobs/year.

So there will be churn as long as the labor arrangement in the US continues to be tenuous and management struggles to achieve shareholder demands. Labor market might become even more favorable if the death rate or retirement exit rate picks up for whatever reason. Workers 65+ on Medicare and a bit older than that on Social Security have a stronger position to operate from in the labor market.

ok123456 is correct [1] that labor is not super fungible (white collar->Flying J clerk), but importantly, while there is uncertainty, this is not early 2000s or 2007-2008 financial crises from a labor market softening perspective.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38970052

(about 7M people work in finance and insurance in the US as of 2023, these cuts are ~0.003% of the industry)

Additional citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987509

In a tight labour market, you will also see firings because less profitable companies can no longer afford the rising wages.

The people fired will immediately be rehired by other companies.

Indeed, and unemployment coffers are mostly full, so collect whatever benefits you can between roles. Have a robust emergency fund, don't overextend with unproductive debt. I believe you can collect Social Security and unemployment at the same time (if applicable due to age) as well (but double check).

I think the firings are pretty limited to white collar jobs, in particular software developers.

Statistically, factually, there is no recession. If anything a big chunk of the media likes to pick out anecdotes like this and say there is a recession when there isn't.

You are free to label a time period a recession, just like the media is free to refer to the NBER’s labeling of a time period as a recession.

There were a whole bunch of layoffs a year ago too and people like you were saying the same thing, and you were wrong. At least wait for the monthly job numbers before you launch into the same tired spiel about the lying media.

I'm mostly making a star wars jedi joke to spark discussion about what is a recession.

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