I suppose the Donald Trump macro “golden age” quips are tired by now.

If not, they’re at least unimaginative.

As a matter of editorial course, I try to steer clear of all things hackneyed, particularly jokes.

With that out of the way, allow me to present this:

On the left is the component breakdown of the Bloomberg Economic Surprise Index for the US as it stood on February 3. On the right is the same snapshot, only for September 4.

For the horror film fans among you, I call that 28 Weeks Later. It’s perfect. Everything was generally fine, then along came a scourge and seven months on, there’s nothing left but red.

If you’re unfamiliar with those sorts of “surprise” indexes, they measure the prevalence of macro beats and misses to consensus. So, when Trump took office for the second time beats were pervasive. Seven months on, it’s all misses, and the labor market’s the locus of concern.

Commenting on Thursday in his first post-Labor Day note, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott said “it’s pretty clear we are passing the baton from the natural ‘normalization’ of tight labor markets to now instead something more ominous.”

He highlighted the Challenger report which, among other things, suggested last month was the weakest August on record for announced hiring plans — not exactly encouraging, and even less so when you consider it was the third-worst August ever for announced job cuts.

In the same note, Charlie suggested clients, already cozy in front-end longs (deteriorating labor market conditions and the perception of a dovish coup at the Fed ostensibly make bullish front-end wagers a slam dunk), are now beginning to venture out the curve.

There’s a “modest trend in client flows increasingly willing to push deeper into [the] belly because the data is by and large missing versus expectations across all subcomponents in recent months, indicative of policy uncertainty and tariff drag finally ‘realizing,'” he said.

[Insert clichéd ‘golden age’ joke.]