What the [BLANK!] Just Happened?
A Short Weekly Series: The History and Data Behind the Operating & Economic Headlines
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February 13, 2026
Every Friday, I take the week’s biggest economic headlines, especially those making us collectively lose our minds, and trace them back over history. Hope this helps!
1. The Economy Added 130K Jobs in January. Unemployment Fell to 4.3%.
The headline: 130,000 new jobs. Healthcare and social assistance led. Private payrolls were actually up 172,000, but public sector cuts dragged the number down. Unemployment ticked from 4.4% to 4.3%.
The backstory: This is not a hot labor market. In the mid-2010s, we were averaging 200,000+ jobs a month coming out of the Great Recession. That number has been decelerating ever since, driven by two forces nobody wants to talk about: automation eating low-skill roles and an aging workforce shrinking the labor pool. Prime-age labor force participation hit 83.3% in 2024, its highest since 2000, but that’s the ceiling, not the floor. The BLS quietly revised hundreds of thousands of jobs out of 2024–2025 estimates. Translation: the labor market has been softer than reported for a while. January’s number isn’t a rebound. It’s the new normal.
2. Tech Layoffs Have Already Hit 38,000 in Six Weeks.
The headline: Amazon cut 16,000 in January. Meta trimmed 1,500. Salesforce dropped nearly 1,000. Total tech cuts globally: 30,700 by mid-February, on pace to blow past 2025’s 245,000.
The backstory: This is the hangover from a decade-long hiring binge. U.S. tech employment grew 50% from 2010 to 2020—fueled by zero-interest-rate money and the assumption that growth would never slow. It did. Since the 2022 peak, the sector has shed over 500,000 jobs cumulatively. And it’s not just about overhiring corrections anymore. Companies are explicitly citing AI efficiency as the reason for cuts. This pattern isn’t new. Manufacturing lost 1.7 million jobs to robots and early automation between 2000 and 2010. Tech is just the latest sector learning that headcount and productivity aren’t the same thing.
3. S&P 500 Q4 Earnings Grew 8.4%. Margins Hit a Post-2009 High.
The headline: Blended Q4 2025 earnings growth came in at 8.4% year-over-year, beating estimates. Revenue up 7.7%. Net profit margins: 13.2%—the highest since 2009. That’s ten consecutive quarters of positive growth.
The backstory: Companies have gotten ruthlessly good at protecting margins. The playbook started in the early 2010s: cut costs, automate operations, buy back shares, repeat. Calendar-year 2025 EPS finished up 12.4%, and analysts project 14.9% for 2026. But here’s the wrinkle we’re easily missing, this isn’t the broad-based prosperity it looks like. Earnings growth is increasingly concentrated in tech and a handful of sectors running AI-driven productivity gains. The 2000s taught us that double-digit earnings growth can flip to sharp contractions fast. Enjoy the margins. Just don’t confuse efficiency with invincibility.
4. AI Adoption in Knowledge Work Is Up 300% Since 2023.
The headline: Companies deploying AI in knowledge work report 30% productivity gains. Agentic AI systems are handling increasingly complex tasks. Projections show 10–20% of roles will evolve or shift by 2030.
The backstory: AI-exposed occupations grew 38% from 2019 to 2024, but the impact is uneven. High-exposure, high-paying roles saw a 3.5% employment drop over five years, meaning the people who thought they were safe aren’t. McKinsey now estimates AI could automate 45% of high-wage activities by 2030, up from 30% pre-2023. This mirrors the early 2010s industrial automation wave but at a faster clip and aimed squarely at white-collar work. The companies winning right now aren’t replacing people wholesale, they’re building hybrid models where fewer people do more. That’s the real story. And it’s been building since the mid-2010s when basic AI tools first started reshaping operations.
That’s the week. Four headlines that feel like breaking news but are really longer term trends trends playing out in real time. Hope this helped!
See you next Friday!
- j -
120 Substack founders are watching me turn this newsletter into a company.
I’ve scaled and sold companies for eight figures. Now I’m building Operating by John Brewton as my next business, not a funnel to consulting, not a side project, a media company. And I’m documenting every decision, metric, and mistake live on Zoom every Friday.
52 sessions. Every template I use. Real performance data. Open Q&A. $99.
Let’s build together. I’m here to help you.
[Become an Operating Founder →]
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John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
Wonderful....it helps alot to updates...keep going John 👍👍
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