Friday's jobs report was shocking but not surprising. It was a useful lens through which to view the overarching economic reality heading into the final months of 2025.
The big picture: We're living in an economy in which powerful policy winds are buffeting both the supply and demand sides of the economy, each with uncertain magnitudes and lags.
- It makes for unusually high uncertainty about how to interpret incoming data that covers the recent past — and makes forecasting even the near future a perilous exercise.
- In effect, business decision-makers are sailing through a sea in which extreme winds and crosscurrents are pushing in different directions at different moments.
