Natural Intelligence vs. AI: The Last Stand of Human Employment?

As algorithms eat the world, Friday’s charts ask the uncomfortable question: can human ingenuity outpace its silicon rivals?

The data doesn’t lie—while AI cuts costs and bypasses human error, Wall Street still pays six-figure salaries to analysts who can’t distinguish between a blockchain and a Excel spreadsheet.

One thing’s certain: in the race between wetware and hardware, only the shareholders are winning.

A simple but amazing chart: Exactly one month after Liberation Day, Nasdaq is 3.2% higher. That is ….not what I expected. Also, Liberation Day was ONE month ago??? Feels like 10 years.

Not all is well in markets, however:

Gold is up, the dollar is down and oil is down a lot. This seems more consistent with yesterday’s news that tariffs are costing Apple $900 million a quarter and this morning’s news that Japan isn’t interested in the trade deal currently on offer.

Zooming out:

The US dollar tends to move in decade-long trends. With Japan now threatening to unload its massive stockpile of US Treasurys, it’s easy to see why the next trend might be down.

The economy’s firewall:

This morning’s report that the US added 177,000 jobs in April, which is encouraging, but of course backward looking, according to Mark Zandi: “The job market remains a firewall between continued growth and a downturn. But…the firewall feels fragile. Unless the trade war de-escalates in the next few weeks, the firewall will come down, and a recession will ensue.”

Looking forward: 

Torston Slok warns that this morning’s employment data was collected the week after Liberation Day tariffs were announced and that the correlation to University of Michigan survey data suggest that employment is set to turn lower and “perhaps even negative.”

Don’t forget the little guys:

Apple can weather tariffs at even a cost of $1 billion a quarter, but smaller businesses dependent on imports from China probably cannot.

Congratulations to the class of 2025:

This chart from the Atlantic shows that contrary to the historical norm, recent college graduates now have a higher unemployment rate than the average American. (I’d probably still trade places with them though.)

It’s cheaper to stay in school, at least:

Bloomberg’s Jon Authers notes that Covid broke the multi-decade uptrend in the cost of college, which is now headed lower.

Recession odds:

The Polymarket odds have been ticking up, which seems weird given what stocks are doing. One analyst estimates that stock prices are now pricing in only a 34% chance of recession. Even more discordant is the estimate from Constance Hunter, chief economist at the economist intelligence unit, who puts the probability at 80%.

Not a prediction:

The latest data from Vizion’s Global Ocean Bookings Tracker shows exports from China to the US down 48.6% from a year before. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty,” the president said in response this week. “Maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”

That sounds pretty recessionary to me — but maybe he’s right that the boats are filled with “stuff we don’t need.”

As long as we keep the jobs we need, I think everyone would be fine with that.

Let’s hope that’s what the markets are telling us.

Have a great weekend, naturally intelligent readers. 

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