FEATURED POST
June 24, 2025
From good to gloom. Main Street is bracing for a slowdown.
By almost every metric that matters, the U.S. economy has delivered in the first six months of 2025. Unemployment stayed low, consumers kept spending, and inflation retreated. Despite this encouraging performance, the economic outlook has dimmed. When Federal Reserve policymakers met last week to decide whether to cut interest rates, their individual forecasts combined painted a cautious picture.
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December 11, 2023
Main Street Macro: A soft landing for payrolls
Last week delivered the final job reports of the year from ADP and the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, we’ll dive into that data and discuss what it means for next year.
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December 4, 2023
Main Street Macro: Bumpy rides and soft landings
I spent last week at a lovely hotel in France with a beautiful view of the ocean. Naturally, because I’m an economist through and through, the ocean view had me thinking of inflation news on both sides of the Atlantic. Two of the world’s largest economies – the United States and the European Union – have suffered with big bouts of high inflation since the pandemic. Now, they’re adjusting to higher, for possibly longer, interest rates in three important ways.
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November 20, 2023
Main Street Macro: Data to be thankful for
Last week marked my three-year anniversary as head of the ADP Research Institute. It’s been an https://www.bls.gov/cpi/eventful three years in the economy.
Main Street has been on a bumpy ride these past years. As I reflect on that journey, there are three data points we can be thankful for this holiday season.
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November 13, 2023
Main Street Macro: The New Geography of Remote Work
At the ADP Research Institute, I work with an incredible team that stretches from Hawaii to Poland, with several stops along the way. Teams like ours have become more prevalent during the pandemic. Well-deserved attention has been given to hybrid work arrangements, and the associated compromises on how many days to spend in the office. However, unlike fully remote arrangements, hybrid work requires employees to live within a commuting distance of a work location.
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November 6, 2023
Main Street Macro: What a slowing job market means for women
Last week’s data on jobs showed us a solid but slowing labor market. Private employers added 113,000 jobs in October, according to the ADP National Employment Report, and the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that U.S. non-farm payrolls grew by 150,000. And the super-sized wage gains that defined the labor market over the past 18 months also have slowed dramatically.
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October 30, 2023
Main Street Macro: The economy’s comeback story
Everyone loves a good comeback story. Well, most everyone.
When the economy provided us with a comeback story last week, just in time for this week’s meeting of the Federal Reserve, only the stock market took the news as bad.
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October 23, 2023
Main Street Macro: That new-hire glow is fading
by Nela Richardson, Ph.D. • Liv Wang
Job-switching is looking a lot less lucrative these days. The pay premium new hires commanded during the pandemic has been falling steadily for more than a year. In this week’s MainStreet Macro, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson and ADPRI senior data scientist Liv Wang look at shrinking new hire pay.
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October 9, 2023
Main Street Macro: Unraveling clues to the job market
Occasionally, I like to leave the comfort of my Main Street and take a tour of the economy to see how other neighborhoods are faring.
One place that got my attention last week was the bond market. Last week, bond market investors were scrutinizing the job market for clues to determine whether the Federal Reserve will continue to raise interest rates this year.
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