Today (July 7, 2023) was a good day for those that believe the Federal Reserve (Fed) has done enough to slow down economic activity in order to rein in the U.S. labor market as well as inflation, i.e., that is, for us! This doesn’t mean that the Fed is going to agree with us any time soon, but it helps us be more confident regarding our outlook for the second half of the year. In our Thoughts of the Week for June 9, 2023, we indicated that there were sectors of the U.S. economy that had already created more jobs during the first five months of the year than during the whole of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic ... (full story)