Ken Fisher on the “Low-Hire, Low-Fire” Job Market

Transcript

Ken Fisher:

So, in the back part of 2025 and the beginning parts of 2026 through February, there's been a lot of talk about the world being a low-hire, low-fire world. And in fact, there's a lot of truth to that. People ask me about that. What I say, which you may find annoying, is that whatever it is that people talk about the most or a lot, is already priced into stocks. So in terms of how it impacts stocks, you can just take it off the table.

The things that move stocks are things that are not what people talk about; hiring in and of itself, firing in and of itself. Both of them together in and of itself, are not good leading indicators of the economy. They are not predictive. They are subject to too many other what you might view as whimsical features, cultural norms of a moment.

CEOs as a group, not everyone, of course, but CEOs as a group tend to be heavily reactive to what others around them are saying. And I would take all of this and treat it as one of the many, many things that people talk about all the time. That really isn't a useful tool for figuring anything out. If you look at the notion that layoffs are big, well, they really aren't. But there's a significant number of them. There's always layoffs going on, sometimes more, sometimes less. And there's been more and more recently. But increases in layoffs are not themselves predictive. There's a long history of layoffs. There's a long history of GDP. There's a long history of stock markets. There's a long history of interest rates. And layoffs themselves, don't tell you anything.

Employment continues to rise in what people think of as a low-hire, low-fire world. The economy continues to grow. All of the features of the world that would lead to a moderately growing economy largely remain intact. There's always some things doing better and some things doing worse, but there's nothing abnormal right now, in February 2026, that would make you think hiring and firing is having some important impact.

And therefore, my view is the more people talk about that, the more you hear them with that, the more you ought to be thinking about something else. Thank you very much for listening to me.

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