Why A Hot Jobs Report Spooked Wall Street

Unpacking the Numbers with Ed Elson

The May jobs report was, frankly, really good news—172,000 jobs added, more than double what forecasters expected, and three strong months in a row averaging around 188,000. A lot of my liberal friends have suggested this couldn’t possibly be true. But I’m an empiricist, and my job is to read the data as honestly as possible. There’s no gain in pretending strong numbers are weak, or fake, or anything else.

I joined Ed Elson today on Prof G Markets to walk through what these numbers actually say, push back on some of the skepticism (stay tuned — I’m going to say a lot more about this tomorrow), and explain how healthcare and social services is propping up the job market.

I also get into why markets sold off on what should have been a celebratory Friday. A strong jobs report changes the Fed’s calculus on interest rates—lifting the odds of a hike. Suddenly, those long-horizon AI bets start looking a lot less attractive.

We also dig into the real wages story, which is going to generate a lot of breathless think pieces over the coming weeks—and I want to give you the tools to read those pieces a bit more critically.