Hey friends - what are you doing on your phone? This is the weekend to celebrate your labors, not continue them.

I love the fall. But my wife would be a beautiful lizard on a rock in the sun if she could be an animal. So, we’re going to be out soaking up the last moments of summer. Go be a lizard.

🌎 The Big Picture

Headlines have been dramatic, but the underlying story of the economy has been pretty steady:

• No one’s really hiring

• But they’re not really laying people off

• Costs keep climbing, steadily, but more slowly

• Rents have calmed down

• Borrowing money won’t get cheaper anytime soon

• No one’s really buying or selling homes right now

• Business is fine

• No end in sight for the war in the Middle East

• AI is booming

▶️ Companies are increasingly blaming AI for layoffs, but it's often just an excuse. 

Revelio Labs, a workforce data firm, dug into the hiring records of companies that publicly cited AI as the reason for job cuts and found a messier story than the headlines suggest. More than half of these companies were genuinely restructuring: they brought in AI specialists while trimming other roles, and AI jobs made up roughly double the share of their workforce compared to industry peers. That pattern held up before and after the layoffs, which tracks with a real shift toward automation.

But for nearly half of the companies in the study, the story doesn't hold up. 

Those companies shrank their AI teams or fell behind their own industries in AI adoption before making the cuts, which directly contradicts what their executives said publicly.

Meanwhile, peer companies that never announced AI-driven layoffs hired AI specialists faster overall while keeping their non-AI workforce intact. So yeah, some of this is real transformation, but a big chunk of employers are probably just dressing up different business decisions to make them look smart.

▶️ Employers have mostly hit pause on hiring this summer, but they're holding onto their workers. 

The Labor Department reported 7.3 million open positions across the economy in July, a solid rebound from a five-year low of 6.5 million back in December. It's nowhere near the wild hiring surge of more than 12 million job postings in 2022, but it's pretty normal.

That said, actual hiring is moving at a crawl. Employers brought on 5.1 million people, a pace that mirrors 2010 and 2011, when unemployment was more than twice what it is today.

The August jobs report showed a big jump in the number of people working, but the month-to-month is volatile. The number of people working has grown by only 31,000 a month over the past year. Economists used to think ~150k/month was ideal.

That's slightly faster than 2025, which was the weakest hiring year outside a recession since 2002.

Layoffs, though, have stayed historically low, just 1.7 million in July, a rate of 1.0%. So while finding a new job isn't easy right now, most people's jobs are safe.

▶️ Fewer Americans are moving. 

Bank of America tracked address changes and card transactions among its customers and found that household moves slowed again in the second quarter of 2026, with families across every income level and generation pulling back. Lower-income households cut back the hardest, followed by middle-income earners, while higher earners stayed relatively steady. Millennials cut back on moves the most.

Put it all together, and it looks like Americans are choosing to renovate and stay put rather than take on the full cost of picking up and moving.

▶️ Borrowing's probably not getting cheaper anytime soon.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used the central bank's annual Jackson Hole gathering to warn that prices are still rising too fast and the Fed's got more work to do. The Fed's main tool for fighting inflation is raising interest rates to cool borrowing and spending. Investors now put a 66% chance on a rate hike at the September meeting, nearly double the 35% they expected before Warsh spoke.

When the Fed moves its benchmark rate, it hits credit cards, business lines, and short-term borrowing almost immediately. 

Longer-term rates like mortgages are mostly driven by bond market investors, but the Fed's decisions have a real pull there too. Mortgages mainly track the 10-year Treasury yield, which investors pushed to 4.75% on Monday, one of its highest levels in five years. Freddie Mac put the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 6.66% as of the week of August 27, much higher than the start of the year, though only slightly above last year's 6.56% average.

Homebuyers aren't facing a dramatic new shock right now, but businesses and households should expect higher costs when borrowing for big purchases.

▶️ Surging corporate profits pushed stocks higher last month, even with war headlines and wild oil swings. 

August closed out a turbulent summer with the S&P 500 up 2.6% for the month and up over 12% for the year, a strong result given everything investors had to deal with. Oil prices whipsawed all summer as Middle East tensions flared and cooled repeatedly. Global benchmark Brent crude briefly surged past $100 in July before diplomacy stepped in, then climbed again after U.S. military strikes, settling around $90 a barrel on August 31. The tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped roughly 7% in July as investors worried AI spending was getting ahead of real returns, then fully snapped back in August.

What actually drove markets higher was the fundamentals: huge profits. 

America's biggest companies reported surging profits. FactSet reported that S&P 500 companies collectively earned 52% more profit in the second quarter than they did a year ago, far ahead of what analysts had expected. Major tech companies proved AI is generating real returns.

But the story stretched beyond the tech giants. The smaller 493 companies in the broad S&P 500 index also earned 31.8% more than they did a year ago, their strongest profit growth since late 2021.

So how is the economy doing? Depends on who you ask.

🏭 The Companies Everyone’s Talking About

❔ The Big Question of the Week

Scoops app users: We have taken the beta app offline for a short period for some major updates. Can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on! Reach out if you have any questions.

We’re going to switch up the content in this spotlight for a bit to make sure you all have the info you need to master your week.