Big Tech laid off about twenty thousand people in a single day this week. The letters were unusual. They named the work being replaced. Customer support, junior code, copywriting, mid-career analysis. Three of the letters used the same phrase, no longer headcount-justified at current AI capability. The same companies wrote similar letters last year and used the word efficiency.

Tech employment has not shrunk this fast since 2001. The difference, this time, is which jobs go. Dot-com cuts came from the bottom of the org chart, the new graduates and the contractors. The current cuts are senior. Anthropic's measure of how much pre-2023 white-collar work an AI is now used for sits near eight per cent. In January 2023 it was zero.

Three readings will tell us whether this is the new floor. The Friday count on the industry layoff tracker, which arrives weekly. The American unemployment release for May, out 6 June, which picks up fresh cuts on a six-to-ten-week lag. And the average hourly earnings print, the same morning, which is where cuts first reach wages. If wages bend, the next chapter gets harder.

Work is upstream of almost everything in this issue. The mood number of 49.8 you read at the top is partly the layoffs of 2024 and the flat wages of 2025 catching up. The next Tuesday a company sends a letter, watch what cancels in the supermarket basket on Wednesday.

The five-year fixed mortgage in the United Kingdom held at 5.2 per cent this week. It has been above five since November. A first-time buyer in London now pays nine times their salary for a starter flat. In 1999 they paid four. Median rent across the United States rose seven per cent year on year, the same as last quarter.

There is no peacetime stretch in the last hundred years for this many of these numbers being this far from their long average at once. Mortgage rates are not historically high. The early eighties saw fifteen per cent. The difference is that wages used to chase rates. They no longer do. The average British wage has risen eleven per cent since 2019. Rent has risen thirty-eight.

The Bank of England meets on the seventh of May. A cut would knock the average new mortgage offer below five per cent within a week. A hold pushes the next remortgage cohort, the people who locked in at 1.9 per cent late in 2021, into a roughly doubled monthly payment. Around 1.4 million British households remortgage in 2026.

Housing is downstream of work and upstream of nearly everything else. When the monthly mortgage moves, the dinner-out goes first, then the holiday, then the second car. The 49.8 mood number is partly that. Watch what the supermarkets report for May, especially the share of the basket marked own-brand.