BBD Investors

The U.S. Neutral Rate Is High and Nobody Can Prove It Will Fall The Rate Nobody Can See The neutral rate does not exist in the way a mortgage rate exists. You cannot look it up. You cannot call a bank and ask for today's r-star. Economists define it as the interest rate that keeps the economy at full employment while holding inflation steady around the Fed's 2% target. When policy sits at that level, it neither presses the gas nor pumps the brakes. That is the theory. The practice is messier. The neutral rate moves. It shifts with productivity growth, demographic trends, global capital flows, and the mood of investors who decide where to park their money. It is inferred, not observed. Every estimate carries a confidence interval wide enough to drive a truck through. And right now, those estimates are drifting upward. The Federal Reserve's median neutral-rate estimate climbed to 3.25% in its latest projections, up from 3.1% — a jump Goldman Sachs called unexpectedly large. T...

Midlife Employment Instability Linked to Cognitive Deficits, Here Is What the Research Shows The phone rings. It is HR. You already know what they will say. You have been here before. Another restructuring. Another "strategic realignment." Another door closing on a Tuesday afternoon. You pack your desk. You drive home. You stare at the wall. What you do not think about, not yet, is your brain. Not the anxiety. Not the sleepless nights. The actual gray matter. The hippocampus. The frontal lobe. The tiny architecture that holds your memories and your ability to plan, to reason, to remember where you left the keys. A growing body of research says you should think about it. Midlife employment instability, the kind that leaves you bouncing between jobs, gigs, and stretches of nothing, is linked to cognitive deficits later in life. The science is not speculative. It is longitudinal. It tracks people for years. Sometimes for decades. This article walks through what the research ...

  Global Call Center Employment Is Shrinking, Here's What the Data Actually Shows The phone still rings. Someone still answers it. That part hasn't changed. But the numbers behind the headset have shifted in a way that nobody quite predicted, and the people who study this for a living are now saying the same thing in different ways: global call center employment is shrinking, and it has been shrinking for eight consecutive quarters. This isn't a blip. This isn't a seasonal correction. Revelio Labs tracks headcount across the global workforce, and their data shows call center employment sitting 5.3% below its December 2023 peak. That peak ended more than a decade of growth. What followed was a decline that started in high-income countries and worked its way down the income ladder like water finding cracks in a foundation. You can look at the graph and see the story. Seventy quarter-end readings since 2009. Headcount fell from a year earlier only eight times. All eight o...

  California’s 2027 Employment Laws: More Rules, Higher Stakes, The Robots Need a Babysitter Now Fall arrived in Sacramento. The legislature did what legislatures do. They passed over a thousand bills. The governor signed most of them, the last one on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a thing that happened. Among the pile: a fresh batch of employment laws that take effect January 1, 2027. Some of them are about artificial intelligence. Some are about money. Some are about the right to pee without being watched. All of them change something for California employers. Here's what's actually in the box. The No Robo Bosses Act: SB 947 The headline grabber is Senate Bill 947, informally called the "No Robo Bosses Act." It targets automated decision systems, the algorithms that score you, classify you, recommend firing you. Under the new law, an employer cannot solely rely on an ADS to make a disciplinary or termination decision. That's the key word.  Solely. If ...

  From Custodian to Stationary Engineer: How Marc Lusby Became a First at Melwood Enterprises The building doesn't care who fixes it. A boiler either holds pressure or it doesn't. A compressor either runs or it fails. The floors of a 128,000-square-foot federal facility in Beltsville, Maryland, don't ask questions about the person pushing the mop or turning the wrench. Marc Lusby figured that out. He started at Melwood Enterprises as a custodian. No mechanical background. No union card. No reason on paper to believe he'd end up anywhere near a boiler room. Four years later, he's about to become the first stationary engineer with a disability in Melwood's sixty-plus year history. This October, during National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Melwood Enterprises is putting his name in the spotlight. Not because it's a nice story. Because it's a true one. And true stories about work tend to be messier, harder, and more useful than the polished version...

  Connecticut Just Changed the Rules: What Every Employer Needs to Know About the New Employment Laws The first of October arrived like a hangover you didn't earn. You didn't drink anything. You just woke up and the room was spinning anyway. That's what compliance feels like in Connecticut right now. A stack of paper on the desk. A calendar with dates circled in red. A nagging feeling that something got missed. The 2026 legislative session produced one of the most ambitious workforce packages the state has seen in recent memory. Governor Ned Lamont signed Public Act 26-12 on May 11, and the thing spans 75 sections. Another law, Public Act 26-15, slipped in through Senate Bill 5 and created an entirely new regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in employment. None of this is subtle. None of it is optional. And most of it hit the ground running on October 1. You can read the legal alerts. They're thorough. They'll give you the bullet points. But bullet point...

  Shasta County Moved Its Employment Office. Here's How to Find It, And What It Saves You The Shasta County Health and Human Services Agency reopened its Employment Training Services office on October 1. It sits at 2600 Park Marina Drive. Same building as Child Support Services. The old spot on California Street is gone. Shut down at 4:30 p.m. on September 23. A lease expired. A parking headache ended. And the county says the move will save about $600,000 by 2028. That's the short version. The longer version involves budget lines, EBT card printers, and the kind of bureaucratic shuffling that rarely makes headlines but absolutely changes how people get help. So let's walk through it. Why the Shasta County Employment Office Moved Out of Downtown Downtown Redding rents aren't cheap. Neither is downtown parking. The county had been leasing the California Street space for years. Clients complained. Many of them have disabilities. They couldn't find empty spots. They cou...