The ledger
Our calls, dated and public. Right or wrong, they stay.
Anyone can say they saw it coming, afterwards. This page works the other way. When we make a call about a market, it goes here first: dated the day it was made, with the reasoning attached. When reality answers, the verdict is stamped next to it. Wrong calls are never deleted.
How the ledger works
Every entry carries the date it went on record. The date never moves.
No entry without the reasoning attached. The why is part of the call.
When it resolves, the verdict is stamped: called it, missed, or half right.
Misses stay on the page next to the hits. Deleting one would end the point of this page.
Construction job openings, which bottomed near 200,000 in February 2026, will not close 2026 below 230,000. The hiring window firms think they have is closing, not opening.
The reasoningSeasonally adjusted openings climbed three straight months (February 201,000; March 234,000; April 259,000) while the quits rate ticked up from 1.6 to 1.7 percent: workers are getting confident again. Demand is anchored by multi-year committed capital in data centers, power, and advanced manufacturing that does not pause with the news cycle. Resolution test: the December 2026 federal job-openings print, published February 2027.
Through the second half of 2026, mid-size AEC firms in the data-center corridor (Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas) will lose power and mission-critical engineers faster than they can replace them, and posted compensation for those seats will keep climbing.
The reasoningWhen a hyperscaler launches a $115 million academy to train its own craft workforce, the engineering layer above that labor is already spoken for. A single data-center customer is funding seven new gas plants in Louisiana; national firms are standing up dedicated power business lines. All of it draws on the same fixed pool of power-delivery engineers.
New York heavy-civil and transit seats will be the most contested in the country through mid-2027. Firms without an anchor mega-project will lose senior people to the two joint ventures formed this June, and counteroffers will not hold them.
The reasoningThe Penn Station reconstruction and the Midtown bus terminal program both stood up joint-venture teams in the same month, in the same market, drawing on the same senior bench. Two simultaneous generational projects in one metro is a talent event, not a procurement event.
Baked from the ledger · 2026-06-11
A ledger that only shows its hits is an ad. This one is only worth reading because it cuts both ways, and because every entry was public before anyone knew how it would land.
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