Taking everything together, we remain at a potential inflection point.

With this week's release of labor and inflation data, we finally have a read on the economy from the fall. And in some ways, we can say really no new information.

While the unemployment rate did tick up from four point four percent in September to four point six percent in November, we still see limited layoffs.

On the payrolls front, we did see a big decline in October, which was partially offset by a gain of sixty four thousand jobs in November. Putting these two sides together, payrolls and unemployment, we're still in this no hire, no fire labor market. And, of course, November inflation data came out today. We saw a continuation of the cooling trend and services that we first observed in September.

Overall headline inflation came in at two point seven percent and core inflation, which strips out energy and food prices, came in at two point six percent. But, of course, the devil as ever is in the details.

First, on the labor front, the Doge effect government job losses hit hard in October, but that remains unlikely to continue. Meanwhile, we did see other trends from twenty twenty five reoccur in this latest release.

Health care, for example, remains a key driver of the labor market, and that means that overall labor picture is sensitive to any decline in that particular industry.

And, of course, not having unemployment data from October makes the calculations a bit difficult.

On the inflation front, data also seems a bit suspect. Core services came in a lot lower than most would anticipate, and a lot of that was particularly because of a lower read on the shelter front. It's possible that inflation suddenly collapsed, but it's also possible that there is some difficulty in restarting the government data collection engine after the long government shutdown.

I guess when we put everything together, we remain in a potential inflection point where we wanna watch closely for the risk that this low higher labor market turns into a layoff market. That's not our base case, but it's within the range of possibilities.

We'll also wanna watch inflation trends closely. We didn't see a whole lot of progress over the course of twenty twenty five, but that could shift in twenty twenty six, particularly if some of these stickier areas of inflation, especially around services, continue to show some measure of relief.

This marks our final taking stock video of twenty twenty six. Have a wonderful holiday season.