The US Challenger jobs report this week offered some insight into our economic cycle as well as ongoing upheaval in the energy and automotive sector. US job cuts in the first quarter were 190,410, 10.3% higher than in the final quarter of 2018 and 35.6% higher than the same quarter last year. This was the highest quarterly total since the first quarter of 2015 and the highest first-quarter total since 2009 (during the last recession).
Notably, the economically sensitive and consequential auto and energy sectors were the largest job cutters in the midst of mean-reverting