It's Friday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's pretty brutal, with non-farm payrolls falling by 92,000 and unemployment rising to 4.4%.

Hiring fizzled in February, a sign of unexpected weakness in the labor market that sent warning signs flashing through the broader economy.

Employers slashed 92,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, with losses cutting across nearly all major sectors. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4 percent.

The report dimmed the picture of the labor market, injecting a surprising note of caution into an economy already reeling from chaos in energy markets brought on by the war in Iran and fresh unknowns over trade policy. And it all but foreclosed the prospect of a swift resurgence in job growth after an anemic year of hiring that was weighed down by economic uncertainty.

………

Revisions to previous months bolstered the case that the job cuts in February were consistent with a broader decline rather than a blip. In December, employers shed 17,000 jobs, down from an earlier estimate of a gain of 48,000, and hiring figures for January were also revised downward slightly, to 126,000. Taken together, job growth for the last three months effectively slowed to zero.

 In related news the stock market is now officially down for the year. 

A roller-coaster week in the stock market left the S&P 500 in negative territory for the year, after data on Friday showing weakness in the job market added to investors’ consternation stemming from the Iran war.

The S&P 500 fell 1.3 percent on Friday, taking the index’s losses for the week to 2 percent, its worst week of the year so far. The index fell into negative territory for the year on Thursday and now sits 1.5 percent lower than it was at the end of 2025.

Stocks were choppy all week as investors gauged the inflationary impact of the war with Iran, with oil prices rising sharply as crucial energy exports from the Persian Gulf have ground to a halt. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, settled on Friday at over $92 a barrel, up almost 30 percent over the past week. That’s the biggest weekly rise in the oil price since April 2020, when markets globally were roiled by the coronavirus pandemic. In turn, what customers are paying at the pump has risen sharply as well.

The war ain't helping, but I called recession a few months ago, and I am sticking by that.