Bloomberg Surveillance TV: June 1st, 2026

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
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**Jonathan Ferro** (0:11)
This is the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. I'm Jonathan Ferro along with Lisa Abramowitz and Annmarie Hordern. Join us each day for insight from the best in markets, economics and geopolitics. From our global headquarters in New York City, we are live on Bloomberg Television weekday mornings from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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The Nvidia boss, Jens of One, saying concerns around AIs impact on the workforce are overblown. Torsten Slok of Apollo agrees, writing there is zero evidence of job losses because of AI. Non-farm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the around 90k expected. Torsten joins us for more. Torsten, good morning. Good to see you. What do people get them wrong?

**Torsten Slok** (0:57)
Well, I think what people are getting wrong is this whole notion that it's not only about individual companies, it's what's happening at the macro level. At the macro level, it's become much easier to open a business. You see this in the surveys from the census of how many businesses are created every week is exploding higher. You're also seeing data from Stripe showing you the number of solo founders of new businesses is also exploding higher. So there's a lot of new businesses that are created. Yes, some of them will probably only be one employer, namely the founder. But a lot of these businesses will also result in a lot more jobs. So it's not only about the displacement that might come on some micro levels, it's much more about the aggregate where we have a significant increase in the number of new businesses that are formed.

**Jonathan Ferro** (1:37)
It doesn't help as you know that some of the individuals at the frontier of this massive push are talking about a white collar washout when it comes to the labor force. What's your message to them?

**Torsten Slok** (1:46)
Well, this has started actually already in the spring of last year, where there was a lot of people beginning to talk about whether within one year's time, we will already have layoffs and we will have entry-level jobs that may no longer exist. But here we are with ADP on a weekly basis for the last eight weeks, producing 30,000, 40,000 jobs every week, jobless claims still being low. ISM today, over the last six months, ISM has gone up. We are above 50 ISM is likely going to be also high today. And now we have some very strong tailwinds, not only from the AI spending boom, but also from the one big bill of a bill. This economy really is on fire in the sense that we both have strong growth and we also have upward pressures on inflation. And now we also have, of course, the ultimate risk that if AI does result in more job growth, it will be really the miracle drug that both creates higher productivity and also creates higher job growth.

**Lisa Abramowitz** (2:32)
That can be true at the same time that John's assertion can be true, which is that white collar jobs can decline as proportion of overall jobs. If you look at the job growth and where it's come from, it's construction, it's manufacturing, it's in healthcare, it's in education, it's not in finance, it's not in media and media services. So how do you square those two ideas?

**Torsten Slok** (2:50)
Well, if you look at also the unemployment rate, so now we'll get more data on Friday. If you look at the unemployment rate for people that are between 20 and 24 years old, that has exactly gone down in the last six months. Also telling you that it's not the case that young people can't find a job. There's some issues around what type of job they can get and yes, maybe they may not be getting an issue to the job that they wanted. There may be something else about expectations for young people when it goes into that discussion. But the bottom line still really here is that at the end of the day, young people are actually doing really well because the unemployment rate for young people is actually lower than where it was six months ago.

**Lisa Abramowitz** (3:20)
We had to build on that, the conversation yesterday among some of the people who might be entering the workforce in a not so distant future, plumbing. A discussion around becoming a plumber because you're going to make a lot of money in plumbing, but you're not necessarily going to make a lot of money going into white collar workforce. So at what point is that the type of work that is going to be the future of a lot of the job creation? Is that what we're seeing right now in some of the data?