Ken Griffin

One of the challenges that exists is during the pandemic, the labor markets were very tight.

It was very hard to hire people.

And across corporate America, companies hoarded labor.

A number of friends who are in the tech space, they would tell you openly that their workforces were 20% bigger, they were 30% bigger than need be.

But they didn't wanna let anybody go because no one knew what work from home was gonna mean in terms of productivity.

Clearly, most of the country's gone back to work in the office, but in that transition, there was a lot of turnover of people.

Citadel put in place a thou must come back to the office very early, and we lost a few percent of our workforce over that.

For us, it was worth it for the collaboration that goes with that, but these were the kinds of issues that corporate America was navigating.

Okay, the employment market today is still reasonably robust, but it's not as tight as it was two years ago.

And companies are now saying, do you know what?

I can trim some of my workforce in areas that are not strategic.

I can tighten my belt a little bit here at this moment in time.

What a great headline.

I'm sorry I'm letting you go because we've introduced AI

in our business.

It's just much more kinder and gentler than saying, I've kind of employed you for the last three years, but I don't really need you.

So I think AI has gotten a lot of very negative headlines in terms of being the excuse that companies have used to trim their workforces down.

But objectively, I think very few businesses are actually seeing productivity gains that come anywhere close to the headline of job losses that we have seen.

I haven't seen it.

I mean, I always get asked, is the market going up or down over the next three months?