Why economists need to 'reset' jobs reports expectations

Why economists need to 'reset' jobs reports expectations

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Tue, January 13, 2026 at 2:30 PM EST

The US economy is expected to grow 3.4% in 2026, according to Visa (V). Watch the video above to hear Visa chief economist Wayne Best explain the economic outlook.

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Video Transcript

00:00

Speaker A

With the massive investments like you just mentioned in AI, data centers in this country, companies are clearly still investing a lot in their business, even outside of AI. Why isn't the US economy growing quicker than than 2.7%?

00:13

Speaker B

Well, 2.7 is the global outlook uh for real GDP. For the United States, our new estimate is 3.4%. So that's substantial growth for for the year overall. and again, a lot of that front loaded because of the taxes. but also a massive amount of business investment. and we see that in the United States that's happening globally also. and you're almost getting to a point, well, certainly consumption is the key driver of the economy in terms of where the growth is coming from, business investment as businesses continue to try to stay ahead of the curve for uh using an AI and AI tools.

00:53

Speaker A

Will this be a jobless recovery?

00:58

Speaker B

Um, it's going to be a slow level recovery, but this is really the demographic shifts that we've been talking about. Once again, I got 11,400 people that are turning 65 every single day between now and the end of this decade. That's a lot of people. Not all of them retire at 65, but many of them do. Uh, immigration is down to, I think last year, uh, the final figures aren't in yet, but maybe two, 300,000 people came into the country. And we're not having kids. So we talked about this before. So between those three things, a 50,000 print is probably going to be expected. I mean, our break even is around 40 to 50,000 now. Anything above 50,000 will cause the unemployment rate to fall further. So we're going to see, we have to really reset what we're thinking about with regards to jobs because for the last four decades, 150, 200, 250,000 jobs was the norm every month. Well, for the foreseeable future, it's going to be 30, 40, 50,000 on average. It's going to be a much slower pace. and of course, we'll see some periods of time when the number's actually negative.

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