Matt Grossman

There are a few things happening at once.

The economy is changing quite a bit.

That's both from the big immigration crackdown from the Trump administration, the uncertainty because of tariffs, and more recently, the war in Iran.

On top of that, the survey that the government uses to figure out how many jobs are being created is not quite working as well as it used to because fewer companies are responding to it.

And the government also changed its formula earlier this year.

And economists are still struggling to figure out how that's going to affect the numbers.

Last year, they did a pretty good job on the average month.

They missed maybe by about 30 or 40,000 jobs in a typical month, which is pretty decent.

This year, the average miss has been over 100,000.

It matters a lot if you're a certain kind of investor who is making big bets on how the market's going to move on a given day.

If there's a really positive economic report, that could move the stock and bond prices quite a bit because it gives a lot of updated information very quickly about how the economy is doing and also, importantly, how the Federal Reserve is likely to respond next.

So far, the inflation forecasts haven't been nearly as difficult.

And that could be because inflation just hasn't changed much over the past year or two.

We've kind of been floating around this range where consumer prices over the past 12 months have been going up by 10%.

2.5% to 3%.

Of course, the war in Iran has lifted oil prices quite a bit.

We'll see how much that has played into other price increases as well.

And we'll see on Friday how well Wall Street has done at predicting exactly how big that increase is going to be.

Thank you.

Economists at the Fed and the policymakers there still have a lot of questions about how the war is going to affect the economy.