One bank sees recession canaries in the US jobs data. And I don’t mean the unemployment rate or anyone’s namesake “rule.”

“Private sector jobs are <40% of total hiring,” BofA observed, in this week’s installment of Michael Hartnett’s popular “Flow Show” series.

Hartnett’s away again this week, but Flow Show struck familiar thematic chords in his absence. The figure below illustrates declining participation (there’s a bad labor market joke in there) for private sector employers outside of education and health.

As you can see, BofA thinks 40% is a key threshold. “Typically that’s recessionary,” the bank said, of episodes when the contribution of private payrolls excluding teachers and the constellation of occupations that comprise the BLS’s healthcare category slips below the red line.

I take the bank’s point, but it’s important to note that we’re really just making this up. Nobody has any hard and fast rules for accurately predicting recessions, other than the rule that says they eventually do occur, albeit less frequently than they did a few generations ago. The yield curve failed us this time — sorry Cam Harvey, but as a friend of my father’s once told me about stop signs and red lights when I was learning to drive a car, “you can’t catch ’em all” — and the Sahm rule would have you believe the US is already in a recession when that’s clearly not the case.

Anyway, BofA — and in Hartnett’s absence I’m attributing Flow Show to Jared Woodard, fairly or not — seemed to sneer at job creation by what they called “government and friends,” the “friends” being the people who teach your children, put out fires and deliver you to the emergency room when you need to get there in a hurry and can’t drive yourself.

The figure above is meant to show that the YoY pace of government hiring, alongside hiring in education and healthcare, is still elevated, while the 12-month rate for the private sector outside of those two categories is more subdued.

I’d be totally remiss (and Woodard will forgive me for critiquing the bank’s handy work) not to gently note that the chart is a bit tortured. They’re rolling up three categories of employment and plotting them against a whole hodgepodge of other categories also rolled up together, with everything measured against the same month of the prior year, and using two separate y-axes scaled to make the ostensible disparity as glaring (i.e., as conducive to red oval-drawing) as possible.

Anyway, if you ask BofA, “dominance by government and friends” in hiring is ominous, both for productivity and the economy more generally. “The policy put and credit resilience have cut hard landing fears, but watch US hiring,” the bank wrote. “The last six times the private sector share fell below 40%, a recession followed.”

Allow me to say this: America could do worse than hiring more government workers, teachers, first responders and nurses, particularly considering we can get five or 10 nurses and elementary school teachers for the price of one half-million dollar “investment strategist.”