Hello, everyone. Good morning. This is JVL from The Bullwork. I am here this morning with my colleague at the Bullwork, the great Catherine Rampel, and our friend of the Bullwork, Paul Krugman. You can find him. He needs no introduction, obviously, but you can find him over on Substack, Paul Krugman's Substack. It is my second favorite economist substack. First being Catherine, of course.

Oh, I'm not an economist, to be clear. I'm an economic journalist. So he's my favorite

professional economist, but my second favorite person who writes about economics. I think

credentialism. I know some idiotic PhDs. I know some very smart people who don't have them.

So, hi, Caffin.

Hi, Paul. Good to see you.

Thanks for being with us, Paul. So we are live this morning because we just got the big Bureau of Labor Statistics report with job numbers for January.

That's interesting. But the reason we're live is because we get a full year numbers for January. That's interesting, but the reason we're

lives because we get a full year revision for 2025. And that is fairly interesting stuff.

Catherine, can you just set the table here and tell people what's going on? Sure. So I think the

top line things to know are that the January numbers were much better than expected,

130,000 jobs. That's like, I think, close to almost double what had been forecast. So that's

quite good. Paul can give some more insight about how much confidence we should have in that number

specifically, but, you know, headline number is good. However, there is some bad news, which is that last year's job

growth was significantly weaker than expected. So as you mentioned, JVL, we got some major

revisions. This happens once a year. It's very annoying to go through everything,

but in this case, it's pretty clear what the picture is, which is that we added many,

many fewer jobs than anticipated. The initial estimate had been something like, I'm looking

it up, 584,000 jobs, so more than half a million jobs added in 2025.

That has been sliced down to only about 181,000 jobs.

So it's still positive, but quite weak if we're talking about a year's job growth.

And most of the jobs have been in a couple of different sectors in health care and social assistance,

...