Kathryn Anne Edwards

Zandi, I think, hit the nail right on the head.

Layoffs are the biggest concern.

What we're seeing in the labor market is a slowdown of the gears.

If you think of the back of a watch and you turn it over and you see the gears rotating and the cogs hitting, that's...

how you should picture the labor market, if workers go from job to job to unemployment to job again.

Mobility is everything for workers, the ability to move jobs, change jobs, get job offers.

We have now three years of data showing just how much those gears have slowed.

And it's something that we typically and historically see in the unemployment rate, but we're not seeing now.

You can look at hiring.

You can look at quits.

You can look at the three-month growth in wages.

They all point to a decline in labor market mobility.

Layoffs would just dump enough workers into unemployment in a labor market that's already slowly churning, and it could lead to a terrible recession quite quickly.

One data point, one jobs report does not make or break the labor market.

What's more concerning for me is that the economy shed jobs in four months of last year.

And in fact, we've been on track.

Every other month since June, we've lost jobs.

So let's see if I can do this on the fly.

June, August, October, December, February, we lost jobs.

That's, I mean, I don't know how to say this more plainly.