Today’s post will conclude this week’s discussion on the major economic risk indicators I follow. After looking at interest rates and jobs, we will close with a discussion of confidence, both consumer and business.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s look at the yield curve, today we will review employment, another indicator that does a good job of signaling economic risk. The reason employment works as an indicator is simple: More than 70 percent of the economy is made up of consumer spending, and the vast majority of that spending comes from wage income—which is to say, from jobs. No jobs? No spending. No spending? No economy. It really is that simple.

One of the key indicators I look at when evaluating economic and market risks is the yield curve, which is a fancy name for how interest rates for different time periods vary. You would expect the rate an investor needs for a 10-year loan, for example, to be different from what she needs for a 3-month—or 30-year—loan. And, by and large, that is the case. Exactly how different the rates are, however, can change quite a bit, and those changes can tell us a lot about the economy.

One of the big themes so far this year has been the return of volatility to the stock market. After a very calm 2017, markets have gotten much more turbulent in 2018. One way to quantify this is to look at daily movements. In 2018 (through April 9), the S&P 500 had an intraday swing of 2 percent or more on 13 days. The day-to-day price movements, measured at the close, have been more than ±2 percent on eight days. Neither of those happened in 2017, at all. There clearly has been an increase in volatility, and in a big way.

Earnings season is here again, and expectations are high. In fact, expected growth is at the highest level since 2011, with growth expected to continue through 2019. You would anticipate markets to respond positively. So, the fact that the stock market has instead just been bouncing around is a bit concerning. What is going on—and what does it mean for the future?

It seems to me that a couple of recent news items need to be put together in a way that, so far, I have not seen. Although the idea that inflation is rising and the discussion of the Fed’s rate increases are often connected, the link to the stock market has been neglected. Let’s see if we can make that connection.

This morning, the jobs report came in with a surprising miss: the total number of jobs created dropped from 339,000 in February (including a 26,000 upward revision to the initial figure) to 103,000. This is quite a drop. At face value, it raises concerns about whether the economy has slowed dramatically. But while the headline number is weak, the report is not nearly as bad as it looks.

The first quarter of 2018 saw the end of the bull market. Not in stocks necessarily, as the upward trend remains intact, but certainly of the bull market in confidence. January was a strong month, but then the world changed. Markets dropped in early February, only to bounce and then drop again in March. Let’s review why things changed in Q1, plus what we might expect in Q2.

It has been a difficult couple of months in the stock market—and things have only gotten worse over the past couple of weeks. After the drop in early February, which took the S&P 500 down by almost 9 percent from the all-time high, the market bounced back. But it started dropping again in mid-March, which takes us to where we are right now: down 9.6 percent from early February.

In the first couple of years after the financial crisis, there was a lot of discussion about the “new normal.” This referred to the new environment characterized by lower interest rates, lower growth, lower inflation, and lower volatility. The sense was that things really were different this time, and we had to understand that.