Wall Street Economists Are Using One Word to Describe the Job Market Right Now – Chilled

On a Tuesday morning, something seems a little strange when you walk through the lobby of practically any large office building in Midtown Manhattan. There is less foot traffic now than there once was. The coffee carts outside are bustling, but not as much as they were in 2022, when businesses were vying for talent so fiercely that signing bonuses had become commonplace. That specific frenzy has subsided. It’s more difficult to identify what has taken its place—a sort of pervasive caution that hasn’t escalated into panic but hasn’t decreased either. Economists have been trying to figure out how to put it. The word “frozen” keeps coming up.

On their face, the numbers that underlie that emotion are real, if not frightening. In October 2025 alone, businesses announced 153,074 layoffs, bringing the total number of cut announcements for the entire year to 1.1 million. This is the highest number since 2009, when the financial crisis was still in its early stages and entire industries were losing tens of thousands of workers.

Just that comparison merits consideration. 2009 was not a good year. It is not a neutral observation to put 2025 next to it. However, economists are exercising caution when drawing conclusions from it, pointing out that layoff announcements and actual unemployment filings have not moved in tandem and that, despite an increase, the headline unemployment rate stayed around 4.3% according to data available prior to the government shutdown interfering with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ reporting schedule.

The job market is in a funk, according to Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, with a directness that often gets lost in more measured economic commentary. not crumbling. By the numbers, it’s not historically disastrous. However, it is extremely uncomfortable for those who live there—those who browse job boards, wait for callbacks, and watch their leverage vanish in real time. As of late October, Indeed job postings had reached their lowest point since 2021, continuing a downward trend that has now lasted for almost four years.

There are fewer positions available, there are more applications for each position, and employers are less inclined to act quickly on applicants. The market has not collapsed. It’s motionless, and that stillness has a weight of its own.

This story has a detail that isn’t given enough attention. For 2025, Glassdoor chose “fatigue” as its word of the year—not fear or anxiety. There is a significant distinction. Duration is implied by fatigue. It suggests that employees have been navigating this slow, unpredictable market long enough that their weariness is due to the cumulative effort of a protracted search in circumstances that continue to resist improvement rather than a single setback.

One of the more telling behavioral signals in labor economics is that fewer people report receiving job offers that they felt confident enough to decline. When workers stop declining offers, it typically indicates that they no longer feel that a better one is on the horizon. It’s not panic. However, it’s also not confidence.

The overall figures don’t accurately reflect how uneven the situation is. Jobs in the fields of healthcare, security and safety, and some engineering are still being added, which keeps the overall employment picture from drastically declining. Together, healthcare and private education make up about 17% of all jobs in the country, but between July 2023 and July 2025, they accounted for an astounding 56% of all job growth. Depending on how you interpret it, that concentration can be both comforting and a little unsettling.

The apparent stability of the labor market may be based on a very narrow foundation, and any major decline in healthcare hiring, which Indeed’s economic research team’s Laura Ullrich called her personal alarm-bell scenario, could drastically and swiftly change the situation. That hasn’t occurred as of yet. However, the difference between “cooling” and something more serious is closer than the headline figures indicate.

This moment has a certain irony that is hard to overlook. The slowdown in the job market is happening to the economists who are responsible for researching and explaining it. With just 1,773 academic job openings listed in December 2025—a 20% decrease from 2020—the market for recently graduated Ph.D. economists reached what the Wall Street Journal called its worst point in memory.

Fearing uncertainty about federal funding, universities halted or reduced hiring. Jobs in the government became scarce. Even the private sector, which had eagerly hired economists during the previous decade’s fintech and data-science booms, retreated. The kind of recursive irony that would seem forced if it weren’t occurring in plain sight is witnessing the people who model labor markets struggle to find jobs in those same markets.

There isn’t a single cause for all of this, which makes it more difficult to address and explain. Federal employment and data collection were simultaneously disrupted by a government shutdown. Regional posting numbers were negatively impacted by tech layoffs, which concentrated job losses in California and Washington state.

Employers are reluctant to commit to headcount they might later need to reduce due to economic uncertainty, which is the diffuse, multidirectional kind that doesn’t attach to one clear narrative. Over the past year, senior-level employees’ workplace confidence has declined the most, by 4.6 percentage points since October 2024. This is important because executives who are uncertain about the business environment tend to hire more cautiously, invest more slowly, and communicate this restraint to the teams below them.

With all of this information, it seems as though the American labor market in early 2026 is in a sort of holding pattern, waiting for something to happen, though it’s still unclear what that something is or when it will happen. The recession that economists consistently fail to forecast has not occurred. The workers’ long-awaited recovery hasn’t either.

What’s left is the funk, which is exhausting in the particular way that protracted uncertainty always is, not dramatic enough for crisis coverage, and not good enough to feel like progress. There is still activity at the coffee carts outside the office towers. However, the dialogue taking place in them sounds a little more cautious, and the lines are a bit shorter than they were previously.