Brian Stewart

The payrolls were up more than expected.

Unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3%.

It's been kind of a habit of these jobs reports where you get a couple of stinkers in a row and then you start to get worried about the job market and then you'll get a good one that kind of, you know, kind of wipe away the sweat from your brow and move on.

So again, like the jobs market remains murky, but not,

panic inducing.

This is the same as I said about the inflation data.

So the economic news is sort of, you know, in this sort of low grade anxiety causing situation, but not really in a situation where you sort of raise the white flag and start to really get concerned about recession risk.

So

We'll see.

I mean, we've talked about before how there's kind of a structural change going on with AI and we've seen layoffs at places like Amazon where they're starting to think that they need fewer employees to do the same tasks because of the new technologies coming up and whether or not how that's going to play into the longer term employment situation.

With the unemployment rate taking down last time, you also saw labor participation at relatively high level or relatively low levels, meaning that there are, it seems like there are people just coming out of the workforce, you know, people who are retiring early, people who are going back to school, families where they've decided they're going to be a one-income household for a while.

You have a complicated situation.

You have the near-term effects of things like oil prices and just the overall economy.

And then you have this long-term structural change that's going on with AI.

So it's hard to predict where things are going to go.

So I think we're going to have to just take it sort of data point by data point.

Yeah, I mean, gold's had... And silver, too, has had kind of a strange run recently.

I think that the dynamics in that market are...

Um, have been unusual.

So I think it's worth keeping an eye on just as things go forward.