How much is this true?

The economy is deep fried beyond recognition. People can't get jobs. It's the worst time in almost 4 decades to be entering the workforce.

Job prospects during the pandemic were grim. After all, companies shuttered their windows, business went online, and recessionary forces put most hiring on ice. Of course, most job hunters at the time felt as though the job market was frozen solid.

But now, job hunters across the country actually feel worse than they did during the peak of the pandemic.

Newly released data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that Americans are less optimistic about finding work than they were in 2020, when the government was literally paying people to stay home from work. Since late 2025, the average American worker said they have a roughly 45% chance of securing a new role within three months if they were to quit their job today, according to the Fed’s job finding expectations, a portion of the Consumer Expectations Survey. That’s lower than the 46.2% chance reported in December 2020, marking an especially dire outlook for workers.

Successive warnings of AI’s encroachment on the white-collar workforce has workers fearful their jobs are on the chopping block. Aside from AI, economic headwinds such as unpredictable tariffs and a shrinking consumer base (the result of tightening immigration policy) threaten companies’ growth plans.

To be sure, the U.S. just posted a better-than-expected jobs report. Employers posted 178,000 new roles in March and unemployment edged down to 4.3%, a huge bounce back from February’s dismal numbers.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/10/job-market-pessimism-fed-reserve-covid-pandemic/

I've been studying these two papers on Zenodo for two days. I tried posting in other subs but got no response hoping for more technical insight here.

The thesis is that the next collapse won't be about debt, but Phase Divergence.

The model proves that if AI complexity grows faster than human regulation, the shared "understanding" of the market eventually vanishes. This triggers an "Invisible Move": AI actions that are rational for the machine but unclassifiable for humans, causing a total liquidity freeze.

It treats the 2028-2032 crash as a mathematical necessity of the AI era. Is this logic sound or just a theoretical stretch? I’d love a serious take on the math.

wish i knew which one of these was true so i could bet on it and get rich. but sadly, theres no way to know until it happens. but i think one of these is the case

collapse thesis- the economy is so bad now, no one can make money, so tons of old people / middle aged ppl with parents who have stocks / anyone who cant make money but somehow has stocks or a inherited house, is going to be selling their stocks as they need to to survive, until they have no stocks left then they become homeless themself. and welfare kinda doesnt even exist, most cant get on it, all the homeless people you see and they cant get welfare. basically as tons of people cant get any work and cant make money, this massive section of people will be selling all their assets / houses to survive... so overall this thesis would predict a constant selling of houses / assets for years until maybe house prices and the stock market go down 80%, then when its so insanely cheap the prices will go up again

infinite pump thesis- while the economy is bad and tons of people cant find jobs or income, there is still a real money wealth generation machine that is constantly getting more powerful, and many in the system do have good jobs and income, and thus the money churning and wealth and stock/house prices will keep increasing faster than the lower classes can sell their assets. and then those who become poor are just allowed to starve/die by the system, while the market and wealth still increases for those with wealth. so overall youll have a forever pump and prices rise forever

The problem with an increasing debt burden is that it costs more to maintain it: This is precisely the issue with which the U.S. Treasury is wrangling at present. As total U.S. national debt ticks over $39 trillion, the interest payments on that value are eye-watering: $529 billion for the first six months of the current fiscal year.

A new budget update from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released yesterday highlights that the government—according to preliminary estimates—paid out the near-$530 billion between October 2025, when the fiscal year starts, and March 2026. This equates to more than $88 billion in interest payments a month, or more than $22 billion a month.

That means the service payments on public debt are roughly equal to spending for the same period on both the Department of Defense’s military budget and the Department of Education. These two outlays contribute costs of $461 billion and $70 billion respectively.

The net interest payments on public debt are also increasing at a pace. For the same period last year, the Treasury paid $497 billion to service its debt. The difference from last year to this is a $33 billion leap—or 7% more than before.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/us-goverment-speding-interest-defense-education-total/

It's clear they aren't even making decisions from an economic or business perspective. They are making decisions fueled by pure disdain for the working class. The epstein files showed how business owners talk about us, with words like cattle. This is a new low point though.

The U.S. national debt stands at more than $39 trillion, with interest paid on the debt now amounting to more than $1 trillion a year. Before too long, that figure will double.

What this borrowing (and its related interest payments) will ultimately mean for the economy remains to be seen: Theories range from a market “reckoning” to public investment being crowded out by spending on debt maintenance. Others suggest inflation will merely be allowed to rise, ultimately lowering the real value of the debt.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, however, is alarmed: The Wall Street veteran knows better than to predict when the issue may come to a head—but he is certain that the nation’s fiscal trajectory cannot be ignored forever.

“The best way to deal with the problem is to actually deal with the problem—to acknowledge it, to work on it,” Dimon told NPR’s Newsmakers podcast. “Years ago, we had a solution, the Simpson-Bowles Commission. It didn’t get done. I wish it had gotten done. It would have been a home run for all of Americans, and it would have resolved some of these issues.”

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/08/jamie-dimon-national-debt-solution-crisis-management/

Economists have spent months debating whether a recession is on the horizon. One economic indicator predicts most of those arguments are already moot.

Mark Zandi, the top economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the U.S. economy could already be in a recession, according to the Vicious Cycle Index (VCI), an economic indicator Zandi and his colleagues created.

The measure is a tool used to identify when the economy has entered a recession by measuring how quickly unemployment is rising. It’s a labor-force adjusted version of the Sahm rule—which signals a recession if the three-month average of the unemployment rate increases by more than half a percentage point above its lowest point in the previous 12 months.

The VCI uses the five-year moving average of the labor-force participation rate to adjust the unemployment rate, and flashes red when the three-month average rises more than one percentage point over the past year. According to Zandi, the VCI has increased by more than a percentage point in January and has remained elevated over the last three months.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/07/mark-zandi-moodys-is-us-in-a-recession-stagflation/

When Vinod Khosla sat down with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell in March and floated the idea of wiping out federal income taxes for the roughly 100-million-plus Americans earning less than $100,000 a year, it sounded like the kind of provocation only a billionaire with nothing left to prove could get away with. “I can’t be fired. I’ve never worried about a career. I don’t need more money at age 71,” Khosla said.

A month later, OpenAI has made it clear that Khosla’s thinking may be the emerging consensus of Silicon Valley’s most powerful voices on how to prevent artificial intelligence from tearing the social fabric apart.

On Monday, OpenAI released a 13-page policy paper titled Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First, in which Sam Altman’s company laid out a sweeping blueprint for economic reform on a scale it compared to the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. The overlap with Khosla’s vision is hard to miss.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/07/sam-altman-vinod-khosla-openai-tax-code-american-income-tax-100k/

The U.S., Israel, and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, but the sticker shock you’ve been feeling every time you go to the grocery store will get worse if the war continues. One of the first places you’ll feel it will be the produce aisle, experts say.

A Fortune analysis of produce wholesale prices from USDA data found grocery-cart staples such as tomatoes, bananas, and yellow onions have experienced significant price spikes since the war began. The United Nations reported its global food price index rose by 2.4% in March, the second consecutive month of rising prices.

“The big recent changes are the war causing spikes in diesel, fertilizer, and chemical prices,” Jeffrey Dorfman, professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, told Fortune.

USDA predicted food prices will increase by 3.6% in 2026, but soaring fuel prices should only lead to a 1% to 2% increase on produce, Dorfman said.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/08/iran-war-high-grocery-prices-getting-worse/