I have started to attend a monthly US-focused economic update webinar. It's presented by Jason Schenker with special attention to the Material Handling industry (MHI sponsors the webinar. The first thread comment will be my notes from today's webinar , I thought you might find them interesting.
Due to data processing delays due to the gov't shutdown, we only have -some- of the official GDP data for 2025 Q3. Some of that likely won't come until January. Some data simply wasn't collected during the shutdown, and cannot be reconstructed after the fact, so we will simply be missing that data. This seems to be the data based on just-in-time surveys. Surveys include talking to people, looking at daily prices of things, etc. If you don't take the moment-in-time picture, there is no data snapshot to reference later. As we get more data released by the Gov't, we're "coming out of the data fog". - I like this term, "Data Fog" as it relates to needing to make data-driven decisions in the absence of data. "The higher the education level the lower the unemployment rate. We've seen that pretty consistently over time." Unemployment rates are relatively high (4.8% IIRC) for recent college grads Job growth and loss by industry, highest losses and gains for the past month: Health Care and Social Assistance up 57% Hospitality up 47% Professional & Business Services down 20% Transportation and Warehousing down 25% He is expecting 2-3 more rate cuts between now and mid-2026. We are reindustrializing for a wartime ready economy. Spending more on manufacturing, soon that part of the economy might look like the material handling part of the economy looks now (which doesn't quite make sense to me since transportation and warehousing is reportedly down 25%, but maybe material handling numbers are separate?). There are way more jobs than applicants right now for utilities, warehousing, nursing. Lots and lots of job demand in those areas. It's going to take time for the training/prep of young adults entering the workforce to retool towards those types jobs, so the demand is likely to stay high for a little while. Notes regarding AI and its impact on the economy AI is way too cheap for end users right now. Think of the economic value that it provides vs the electricity it consumes. That money will have to come from somewhere. AI end user fees will go up. With AI, we may move from a subscription model (like SaaS software licensing) to a tokenized model (like using toll roads). The more you use, the more you'll pay. You may not want to pay to make AI-generated cat videos, but you will be willing to pay more to increase your productivity. After our companies are all hooked on using AI for productivity boosts, suppose AI companies decide to raise their prices a lot. Are you willing to give up your AI tools completely? How much will you be willing to pay to keep it? Either pay more to keep it, lose the productivity gains, or pay for more workers to replace your productivity drop from giving up those GenAI tools.
This is fascinating, thanks for sharing all this. The AI bit in particular tracks with what I've been expecting in that market - it's either all got to go away, become hyper-localized and in-house (read: worse), or get WAY more expensive. So using the classic "dealer model" as described here is what I've been expecting to see happen. Less a complete bubble burst than a significant reduction in both use and use-cases.
And I'm confused in a similar way you've described here. I also don't see that sector of the economy growing quickly - the amount of time and money it takes to "re-industrialize" a country whose economy has been service-based for a significant period of time seems too great IMO to see anything significant materialize in <12 months. But I'm an armchair over here, at best. Anyway, thanks again for sharing.
Happy to share. Thank you for sharing your perspective. It feels good to me that your thinking is in a similar spot to my own on this. This is just the 2nd one I've attended. I shared notes last time in SupportDriven, this time in ElevateCX. I'll keep sharing my notes from time to time, provided that the webinars are sufficiently different from month to month.
