Top Economist Claudia Sahm says everyone is looking at the wrong alarm

“I get concerned when I hear, ‘Well, we don’t have layoffs, so we don’t have a recession,’” Sahm told Fortune in an exclusive interview. “But you do have a very low hiring rate. It might not be an aggregate event; it might not be a broad-based contraction like we see in a recession. But it certainly has real implications for workers coming into the labor market.

“Something’s happening here,” Sahm adds. “It’s clearly bad for people looking for work, but we can’t just have this, ‘Oh, if we avoid a recession, all is good.’ It could be that we’re dealing with much more structural shifts, and those aren’t just hard to forecast, they’re hard to assess in the moment because those structural shifts can be very slow.”