Greg Ip

That's right.

I will try to sound a little less irrationally exuberant than Heather on this.

But truth be told, I'm not going to take a negative view on this report because I agree with Heather.

that it is on balance pretty good.

But I want to step back from April alone and take a look at the bigger picture.

Now, the numbers have been bouncing up and down.

Like a few months ago, we had a big negative number.

But year to date, we're actually averaging about 76,000 new jobs per month.

And that's not a lot.

But last year, we only averaged 10,000 jobs per month.

In fact, last year, job growth is so slow that we went through, I think, an eight-month period where it was negative for four of those eight months.

And I think there was genuine fear that we were dropping to stall speed, maybe even flirting with recession.

So I'd say that stepping back here, the most encouraging thing about this report is

is that despite all the headwinds from tariffs and oil in Iran and so on, is that we seem to have now established a moderate but stable pace of job growth.

Yeah, I know it's probably an unpopular view, certainly in Wall Street.

But I mean, hey, like Heather said, there's basically two economies right now, the AI economy and everything else.

If you look at the GDP numbers, for example, they look pretty solid, around 2%.

But if you take out all the spending on data centers and all that stuff, you're somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%.

And by the way, a lot of that AI spending isn't even on stuff we make here in the United States.

We import it from Taiwan and South Korea.