It’s jobs week in the US, where overall employment probably expanded in May at a moderate pace, despite uncertainty stoked by the war.

Consensus expects around 90,000 from the headline NFP print on June 5. That’d mark a deceleration from the prior two months, but an as-expected headline would push the three-month average above 100,000 for the first time during Donald Trump’s second term.

Recall that Trump’s labor market hadn’t produced consecutive monthly job gains on the BLS’s headline measure in a year before March and April’s back-to-back increases.

To state the obvious, ongoing job gains are critical at a time when consumer sentiment’s never been worse, particularly with the mid-terms on the horizon.

“Obvious” or not, that sort of commentary feels perfunctory. This isn’t your grandfather’s economy, nor even your father’s. The US spending impulse is sustained by discretionary outlays in the upper-half of the so-called “K,” where near-daily S&P 500 records are minting paper wealth and home values, while contracting when adjusted for headline inflation, are still hitting new records in nominal terms in a plurality of locales.

Meanwhile, hundreds of billions — on the way to several trillion — in spending on AI infrastructure’s driving a boom in nonresidential investment, helping to offset drag from residential construction, which has subtracted from overall real GDP growth for seven of the last eight quarters.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model shows real growth tracking at a 3.8% pace for Q2 and nominal growth currently exceeds 7%. When you throw in the fact that consumer sentiment polling’s hopelessly skewed by partisanship, I doubt we’re really saying much useful when we speak of a never-ending “vibecession.”

That term’s popular among (forgive me for being racially specific, but I think it’s necessary in this case), white GenZers distraught that their “rightful” path to the American dream is now littered with potholes. That’s nothing new for African American youth, and the unfortunate reality is that “vibecession”‘s been the zeitgeist on Main Street since America’s social capital began to crumble in the 1970s. The situation worsened materially in the late-1990s with the onset of the opioid epidemic.

If your question is, “What happened to America?” or, similarly, “How did we get here?”, read “Bowling Alone” and “Deaths of Despair” back-to-back. Virtually all of your questions will be answered.

None of that’s going to show up in the aggregates investors and traders monitor. Those metrics will probably continue to suggest the world’s largest economy’s nowhere near recession, particularly given the fillip from AI which, for now, is doing far more to boost growth than undermine it, even if many still argue that by and by, mass layoffs of redundant humans will usher in a dystopia.

In the context of the May jobs report, it’s worth reiterating that the change in the employment level on the household survey side’s been negative for four straight months.

Historically, that presages an upturn in the jobless rate, although as BMO’s Ian Lyngen noted earlier this month, “in the present cycle, the household survey is subject to the noise associated with declining response rates and changes in immigration policy.”

In addition to the BLS jobs report, this week brings all the usual secondary indicators including JOLTS for April (that report comes on a two-month delay), Challenger job cuts (recall that AI’s now the third-leading cause of layoffs in America) and ADP private hiring.

The ADP headline’s seen at 118,000 for May. That’d be a solid encore from April and the best of Trump’s second term.

The figure above shows you the weekly ADP series. The latest update, from May 27, showed that for the four weeks ending May 9, private employers added an average of 35,750 jobs a week.

Also on deck this week: ISM manufacturing and services. The former’s seen at 53.1. That’d be the best read on overall factory activity in nearly four years and it’d mark a fifth straight month in expansion territory for the headline.

All eyes will be on the ISM price gauges given the read-across from the war. Last month, the input price gauge on the manufacturing side printed a harrowing 84.6, the highest since headline CPI was on its way to a nine-handle.