If you’re fortunate enough to have Labor Day off, the government delivered an early holiday gift Friday morning:

162,000 new jobs.

That’s how many jobs the U.S. economy added in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report — nearly triple the 56,000 economists surveyed by Reuters expected.

Even better, June and July were revised upward by a combined 55,000 jobs, and the labor force participation rate ticked up from 61.4% to 61.6%.

Unemployment, meanwhile, held at 4.1%.

Of course, government employment numbers deserve the usual grain of salt. Or two.

But Jim Rickards has a useful way of looking at employment statistics.

“An economy is nothing more than two things: How many people are working and how productive are they?” he said years ago.

Which gets us beyond the BLS headline number.

Your Rundown for Monday, September 7, 2026...

What’s an Hour of Your Life Worth?

The average private-sector worker now earns $37.75 an hour, according to Friday’s BLS report. That's up 3.1% from a year ago.

But a paycheck is only useful for what you can exchange it for.

And Jim has a fascinating way of explaining money.

In Currency Wars, he argues that money can be understood as stored energy.

Imagine a baker making a loaf of bread. There’s the baker’s labor, the farmer’s labor, the energy required to grow the wheat and the fuel and machinery needed to turn it all into something you can grab off the shelf.

When the baker sells that bread, all that economic effort gets converted into money.

“Money works exactly like a battery,” Jim writes.

You work. You charge the battery.

You spend the money later. You discharge it.

That makes inflation more than an annoying increase in your grocery bill. It drains your financial battery. More quickly.

But there’s another employment wrinkle Jim has been watching.

What happens when the worker isn’t human?

Jim published MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy in late 2024.

By then, AI had already gone mainstream. Millions of people were using it to write emails, generate images, analyze documents and answer questions.

But Jim looked beyond what AI could do for us, asking what would happen when AI could do the work instead of us.

Technology has been replacing certain kinds of human labor for centuries. The mechanical loom displaced weavers. Tractors displaced farmhands. ATMs changed bank branches.

But AI is marching into territory we once assumed belonged exclusively to people with college degrees and desk jobs.

And there’s an ominous footnote buried in Friday’s jobs report.

The information sector lost 23,000 jobs in August. Among the casualties: computing infrastructure, data processing, web hosting, publishing and broadcasting.

One month doesn’t make a trend. And it certainly doesn’t prove AI caused those losses. But it’s worth noticing.

Still, Jim’s two-part equation hasn’t changed.

How many of us are working? And how productive are we? AI could send the second number through the roof while scrambling the first.

Jim offered a hopeful reminder, however, around the Fourth of July — particularly for younger Americans wondering what careers await them.

America, he wrote, still offers “untold educational and vocational channels” to “take your passion, learn your trade and have a rewarding career.”

That could mean becoming a lawyer. Or running a beauty salon, tree removal service or garage-based tech startup.

Jobs may change. Opportunities won’t disappear.

As Jim put it: “America doesn’t tell you what to do but she empowers you to do anything.

“In America, the sky’s the limit. (Actually, it’s the moon).”

Have a wonderful Labor Day.