For years, Jackson Hole has been the Fed’s launchpad for regime shifts. 2019 gave us easing hints. 2020 delivered FAIT, a framework shift that aged like milk and lit the fuse for the hottest inflation run since Volcker’s days. 2021 was the taper foreshadow. 2022 slammed “higher for longer” into the tape. 2023 softened into “proceed carefully.” Powell knows history remembers what gets said here. Markets do too. That’s why even if positioning is subdued, the event commands attention.
August 22, 2025Your Summer (Or Any Season) Travel Can Save You at Tax Time!
August 22, 2025
According to the Census Bureau, the 5 major milestones of adulthood are living away from your parents, completing your education, getting a job, marrying, and living with a child. Since 1975, the success that our young people have had in attaining these milestones has declined dramatically…
According to the working paper, “Changes in Milestones of Adulthood,” almost half of all young adults in 1975 had reached four milestones associated with adulthood: moving out of one’s parents’ home, getting a job, getting married and having a child.
Five decades on, that progression has changed dramatically. The share of young adults that have followed the traditional pathway to adulthood has dropped to less than a quarter, according to the paper.
After reading that CBS News article, I had to go find the original paper.
I found it on the official Census Bureau website, and it says that in 2023 only 17 percent of young adults had attained the 5 major milestones of adulthood…
In 2005, the most common combination was young adults who had all five milestones (about 26% experienced all five milestones). By 2023, however, the proportion of young adults who experienced all five markers of adulthood declined to about 17%, and young adults who reported only experiencing the three economic milestones of living away from parents, completing education, and participating in the labor force was the modal combination. Finally, the residual category in Figure 2 representing the proportion of young adults who experienced any other combination of milestones declined from 36% to 30%, suggesting that the experiences of young adults have become more homogeneous for contemporary cohorts.
17 percent!
Just think about that.
If our society was in good shape, most of our young adults would be in a position to achieve all 5 milestones by the age of 25.
But our society is not in good shape. According to the Census Bureau paper, the primary reason why young adults are not achieving these milestones is because they are “facing economic barriers”…
The reason for this, according to the paper, is that more young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 are facing economic barriers compared with previous generations. Changing societal attitudes around family formation are also contributing to the sharp decline in the share of young people reaching what the U.S. Census Bureau considers to be “key milestones.”
If I keep hitting people with more evidence day after day, maybe the skeptics will finally start getting it.
Our young adults are not entering the middle class fast enough to replace the older middle class adults that are dying off.
As a result, the middle class is steadily shrinking.
To be a part of the middle class, you have to be able to get a middle class job.
And right now the competition for middle class jobs among our young people is extremely fierce.
If you doubt this, just consider what a 23-year-old college graduate recently admitted to NBC News…
“Every guy I know that is without a job right now wants to work, but they just can’t get it,” said Eli McCullick, who has been looking for a job for more than a year after he graduated with a degree in sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s demoralizing for guys who really want to get ahead and it’s just not happening.”
McCullick, 23, said he hasn’t even been able to get an hourly job at a restaurant or doing cleaning work at a hotel in the Boulder area, where he’s living at a property his father owns. The only way he has been able to earn money to cover his food and daily expenses has been to do odd jobs for friends and relatives, like shoveling horse manure, mowing lawns and helping an older woman prepare for a yard sale.
There is no way that I would want to be a fresh college graduate looking for a job right now.
It is terrible out there.
Another recent college graduate told NBC News that nearly all of his friends are unemployed and living with their parents…
Sean Breen, who graduated this spring with a communications degree from California State University, Long Beach, said he and nearly all of his high school friends, both men and women, are back home living with their parents and unemployed. He said even those who went to top-ranked colleges and got seemingly in-demand degrees are unable to find work.
“It is like a high school reunion,” Breen said. “We’re all, we are back in Marin County this summer, all unemployed, all trying to find a barista job, a part-time something, because we haven’t found anything.”
After having applied to hundreds of jobs, he said, Breen now plans to go to graduate school in the fall at Trinity College in Ireland, where tuition is significantly lower and, he hopes, jobs will be more plentiful.
This is the reality of what is really going on out there.
Those that keep insisting that “everything is fine” just need to stop.
The job market is freezing up and layoffs have absolutely skyrocketed compared to last year…
Layoffs have risen 140 percent from a year ago, a new report reveals.
Companies have already announced more than 800,000 job cuts this year alone, the highest since the pandemic upended the economy in 2020.
US-based employers cut 62,075 jobs in July compared to 25,885 in the same month last year.
Those numbers are staggering.
Unfortunately, 62 percent of U.S. consumers believe that unemployment will continue to get even worse during the months ahead…
- About 62% of consumers believe unemployment will worsen in the year ahead, according to the University of Michigan’s latest monthly survey.
- That’s bounced around a little in the last few months, but consistently hung around levels not seen since the Great Recession.
Do you remember how difficult it was to get a good job during the Great Recession?
Well, now we are entering a similar time.
That may help to explain why “job hugging” has become a thing in 2025…
Job hugging is the act of holding onto a job “for dear life,” consultants at Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm, wrote last week.
The rate at which workers are voluntarily leaving their jobs — known as the quits rate — has hovered around 2% since the start of the year, according to data from the U.S. Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Outside of the initial days of the Covid-19 pandemic, levels haven’t been that consistently low since early 2016.
The quits rate is a barometer of workers’ perceptions of the broader labor market, said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. In this case, they may be nervous about getting another job or aren’t enthusiastic about their ability to find one, she said.
If you have a job that you highly value, don’t let go.
Hold on to it as tightly as you can, because if you lose it you may not find work again for a long time.
A lot of people are shocked by what is happening, but the truth is that nobody should be surprised.
There was no way that we were going to be able to defy the laws of economics forever.
The inexorable march of time cannot be stopped, and our future is going to look a whole lot different than most people anticipated.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
