Daniel sent us this one — and it's actually two questions wrapped around the same core tension. The shekel has strengthened dramatically against the dollar, hovering around two point nine, which is a level that would have seemed absurd just a couple of years ago. And he's asking about two groups caught in that pressure. First, foreign workers in Israel — the Nepali caregivers, the Thai agricultural workers, the Chinese construction crews, and increasingly workers from India and Sri Lanka filling gaps left when Palestinian labor access was restricted after October seventh. Second, Israeli exporters who are watching their margins get crushed and are increasingly asking a very uncomfortable question: why hire locally when you can outsource in dollars?
Daniel added a sharp observation I want to pick up right away — he noted that Israel has never been good value for money for visitors, but this takes it to a whole new level. The purchasing power parity gap is now genuinely extreme. I was looking at the OECD numbers — Israel's price level index has been running about thirty to forty percent above the OECD average for years, and a stronger shekel just amplifies that. But the foreign worker dynamic is where this gets complicated, because the remittance flows run in exactly the opposite direction from what you'd expect in a standard trade model.
Right — if you're a Thai worker being paid in shekels and sending money home, a strong shekel is actually a windfall. Your remittances suddenly buy more baht. So Daniel's instinct that foreign workers might be unaffected is partly right, but in the opposite direction from what most people assume. They're not unaffected — they're benefiting, at least in the short term.
That's created this weird dynamic where the labor market for foreign workers in Israel has actually become more attractive at the same time that the overall economic picture has gotten more complicated. Let me ground this — after October seventh, the government revoked work permits for Palestinians from the West Bank. We're talking about somewhere north of a hundred thousand workers who were previously crossing into Israel daily, many of them in construction. The construction sector basically ground to a halt. Something like forty percent of construction sites shut down in the weeks after the attacks.
That's the point where the fence question Daniel raised becomes interesting. The idea that gaps in the security barrier might have functioned as an economic relief valve — it's a dark observation, but it's not wrong. The pre-October seventh equilibrium depended on a certain amount of undocumented labor flowing through, and everyone kind of looked the other way because the alternative was a construction sector that couldn't function and an agricultural sector that couldn't harvest.
The numbers on this are striking. Before the war, roughly eighty thousand Palestinians with permits worked in Israel legally, but estimates suggested another thirty to fifty thousand were crossing without permits. Those workers were concentrated in construction and agriculture — sectors that are physically demanding, pay relatively low wages by Israeli standards, and have struggled to attract Israeli workers for decades. When that tap was turned off, the government scrambled to negotiate bilateral labor agreements.
This is where the shekel rate intersects with the labor story in a way that isn't obvious at first glance. The government went to India, Sri Lanka, Moldova, and several other countries to recruit replacement workers. But here's the thing — those bilateral agreements set minimum wages and conditions in shekels. So as the shekel strengthens, Israel as a destination becomes more attractive for foreign workers, which helps the recruitment effort. But it also means the cost to Israeli employers isn't falling — it's staying the same or even rising in dollar terms.
Let me pull up the numbers on this, because they're surprising. The bilateral agreement with India brought in something like ten thousand construction workers. The minimum wage for these workers is set at the Israeli minimum wage, about five thousand eight hundred shekels a month, plus overtime and housing allowances. At the current exchange rate of two point nine, that's about two thousand dollars a month. A year ago, at three point seven, that same wage was about fifteen hundred seventy dollars. So the dollar cost of that worker has jumped more than twenty-five percent for an Israeli employer thinking in dollar terms.
That's the pivot point to Daniel's second question about exporters and outsourcing. Because if you're an Israeli tech company, or even a manufacturing firm, and you're looking at your labor costs in dollar equivalents, that same math applies to your Israeli engineers and workers. The shekel strengthening makes your Israeli payroll more expensive in global terms, even if nothing changes in the local contract.
I want to pause on that point, because it's exactly where most coverage gets the story wrong. People talk about the strong shekel hurting exporters by making their products more expensive abroad, which is true. But the secondary effect — the outsourcing incentive — is arguably more consequential over the long term. Because once you've built an offshore team, you're probably not bringing those jobs back even if the exchange rate eventually reverses.
Daniel put his finger on something really important here — the international consortia bidding on Israeli infrastructure projects. This is where the foreign worker dependency and the exchange rate dynamics converge in a way that's worth unpacking.
Before we dive deeper — fun fact, DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today.
Appropriate, I suppose — we're talking about precision and economic discipline, and here we are being assembled by a model that presumably appreciates both.
Let's start with the foreign worker landscape, because it's transformed over the past eighteen months. Pre-October seventh, Israel had roughly a hundred and sixty thousand foreign workers in the country legally, plus the Palestinian workers who were a separate category. The foreign workers were concentrated in three sectors: caregiving, agriculture, and construction. The caregiving sector has been dominated by workers from Nepal, the Philippines, and increasingly Moldova. The agricultural sector relied heavily on Thai workers. Construction had a mix — Chinese workers from major infrastructure projects, some Eastern European workers, and the Palestinian labor force.
Daniel mentioned something that doesn't get talked about enough — the tragedy of October seventh for foreign workers. It's easy to forget that among the dead and the hostages were Thai agricultural workers, Nepali caregivers, and even foreign students. I think the final count was something like thirty-nine foreign nationals killed and a number taken hostage. These were people who had come to Israel to earn money, to send remittances home, and they were caught in a conflict that had nothing to do with them.
The Thai worker losses were particularly heavy. Thailand actually had the largest number of foreign nationals killed on October seventh, outside of Israel itself. And this created a secondary crisis — many of the surviving Thai workers went home. The agricultural sector lost something like a third of its foreign workforce in a matter of weeks. You had crops rotting in fields in the south. The government had to scramble.
Let's connect this to the shekel. You've got a labor shortage, which means upward pressure on wages. You've got a strengthening currency, which means those wages, when converted to dollars, are rising even faster. And you've got an economy that's trying to rebuild and maintain ambitious infrastructure targets — the Tel Aviv metro, housing construction, the whole build-out in the south. Who bears those costs?
This is where I want to push back slightly on Daniel's framing. He suggested foreign workers probably aren't affected by the exchange rate, and I think the answer is more nuanced. If you're a caregiver from the Philippines who's been in Israel for five years, earning the minimum wage and sending money home every month, the strong shekel is unambiguously good for you — your remittances go further, your family's standard of living back home improves, and your decision to stay in Israel looks smarter every quarter.
The flip side is that the strong shekel also changes the calculus for new workers deciding whether to come. If you're in rural India and you're being offered a construction job in Israel at the minimum wage, the shekel strengthening makes that offer more attractive. So the recruitment pipeline actually benefits. Israel becomes a more competitive destination relative to, say, the Gulf states or even South Korea, which also recruit heavily from South and Southeast Asia.
We're seeing this play out. The bilateral agreements with India have been surprisingly effective. I've seen reports that the Indian government has received far more applications than there are slots available. The strong shekel is part of that appeal. But here's the tension — the Israeli employers who are sponsoring these workers are seeing their costs rise, and they can't easily pass those costs on because construction contracts are often fixed-price or have limited escalation clauses.
The construction company is squeezed from both directions. Labor costs are rising in dollar terms because the shekel is strengthening. Material costs are often dollar-denominated because so much construction material is imported. And the end customer — whether it's a developer or the government — is pushing back on price increases. Somebody's margin is getting crushed.
Let me put some numbers on this. Israel's construction sector is roughly ten to twelve percent of GDP. Before October seventh, about thirty percent of the construction workforce was Palestinian. When that workforce disappeared, the sector didn't just slow down — it fundamentally had to restructure. The government's target is to bring in something like seventy thousand foreign workers to replace the Palestinian labor force, and they're probably about halfway there.
The cost differential is significant. Palestinian workers were typically paid below the Israeli minimum wage — one of the uncomfortable realities that nobody wanted to talk about too loudly. The bilateral agreements with India and Sri Lanka set wages at or above the minimum wage, plus housing, plus medical insurance, plus the recruitment fees that the employers have to cover. So the effective hourly cost of a foreign worker under the new agreements is somewhere between thirty and fifty percent higher than the pre-war cost of Palestinian labor.
Which brings us to the infrastructure consortium question Daniel raised. Israel has several massive infrastructure projects in the pipeline — the Tel Aviv metro is the biggest, with an estimated cost of something like a hundred and fifty billion shekels. The light rail extensions, the housing targets in the south, the military reconstruction needs. These projects are attracting international consortia — Chinese firms, European construction giants, some American companies. And they're bidding in mixed currencies.
This is the part where the exchange rate really bites. If you're a Spanish construction firm bidding on a Tel Aviv metro contract, you're probably pricing your bid in a mix of euros and shekels. Your European engineers and specialized equipment are euro-denominated. Your local labor and materials are shekel-denominated. When the shekel strengthens, your local costs rise in euro terms, and your bid becomes less competitive unless you can squeeze the local subcontractors. Which, of course, is exactly what happens.
The local subcontractors are the ones who are already dealing with the labor cost pressures we just described. So you've got this cascade — strong shekel raises the effective cost of local labor, international consortium tries to push those costs down to stay competitive, local subcontractors either eat the loss or try to substitute cheaper labor, which in many cases means more foreign workers rather than Israeli workers.
Let's talk about the outsourcing dynamic Daniel raised, because I think it's the most consequential long-term effect. Israeli tech companies have been outsourcing for years — Eastern Europe, India, increasingly Latin America. But the strong shekel accelerates this in a way that's worth examining.
The math is brutal. An Israeli software engineer earning thirty thousand shekels a month — a solid mid-level salary in Tel Aviv — costs the employer about forty thousand shekels a month including all the social benefits and overhead. At two point nine shekels to the dollar, that's about thirteen thousand eight hundred dollars a month. The same quality of engineer in Poland or Ukraine might cost four to six thousand dollars a month. In India, three to five thousand. The differential has always existed, but when the shekel was at three point seven, the Israeli engineer cost about ten thousand eight hundred dollars. The gap has widened by about three thousand dollars a month per employee purely due to the exchange rate.
That's per month. Annualize that, and you're looking at an additional thirty-six thousand dollars per employee per year that has nothing to do with salary negotiations or productivity — it's entirely the exchange rate. For a company with a hundred engineers, that's three point six million dollars a year in additional relative cost that just appeared out of the currency market.
I've seen anecdotal reports — and I want to be careful here because the data on this is still emerging — that Israeli tech companies have accelerated their offshore hiring significantly in the past six months. This isn't just the big players like Wix or Monday dot com, which have had offshore teams for years. It's mid-sized companies, series B and C startups, that are now saying, look, for non-core roles, or even for some core engineering roles, we simply can't justify the Tel Aviv salary premium when there's excellent talent available at a fraction of the cost.
The perverse thing is that this trend, if it continues, could actually weaken the shekel. If enough Israeli companies shift their payroll to dollars and euros by hiring abroad, that reduces the demand for shekels, which puts downward pressure on the currency. So the strong shekel contains the seeds of its own correction — but the jobs that leave in the meantime don't necessarily come back.
That's the hysteresis effect, and it's important. Once you've built a thirty-person engineering team in Lisbon or Bangalore, you've made an organizational investment. You've hired managers, established processes, integrated those teams into your workflow. Even if the shekel weakens back to three point seven or four, you're not going to unwind that team. You might slow the growth of the offshore team, but you're not bringing those jobs back to Israel.
This connects to something Daniel hinted at that I want to pull forward — the wage differential between Israel and the rest of the world. Israel has this weird status where it's a developed economy with developed-economy costs, but it's geographically isolated in a region where most neighboring economies have much lower wage levels. The only reason this didn't matter more in the past was that the Palestinian labor force provided a release valve for low-wage sectors, and the tech sector was so productive that the high salaries were justified.
Let me build on that, because I think it's the structural story that matters more than the cyclical exchange rate story. Israel's productivity growth in tech has been impressive — among the highest in the OECD. But productivity growth in construction, in agriculture, in retail, in the non-tradable sectors, has been mediocre at best. And those sectors can't just outsource their way out of the problem. You can't build an apartment building in Tel Aviv with a remote team in Bangalore.
Right — the construction has to happen here. The elderly care has to happen here. The agriculture, at least the fresh produce, has to happen here. So those sectors are stuck with the local cost structure, and they're the ones that depend most heavily on foreign workers who are now more expensive in dollar terms.
Here's where I want to complicate the story a bit. The strong shekel isn't entirely bad for the Israeli economy. It reflects some genuine strengths — the tech sector is exporting like crazy, foreign investment has been relatively resilient, and Israel's current account surplus has been substantial. The Bank of Israel has been buying dollars to try to moderate the appreciation, but they can only do so much. The fundamental drivers are strong.
The distributional effects are brutal. The strong shekel benefits importers and consumers — your iPhone is cheaper, your European vacation is cheaper, your imported car is cheaper. It benefits foreign workers sending remittances. It benefits Israelis who have dollar-denominated savings or who are paid in dollars. But it hurts exporters, it hurts the tourism sector, it hurts anyone whose income is in shekels but whose costs are local, and it accelerates the outsourcing dynamic we've been discussing.
Let's talk about the tourism angle for a moment, because Daniel mentioned Israel being notoriously expensive. At two point nine shekels to the dollar, a hotel room in Tel Aviv that costs a thousand shekels a night — which is honestly mid-range these days — is about three hundred forty-five dollars. Compare that to a comparable hotel in Barcelona or Lisbon, where you might pay a hundred and fifty to two hundred euros. Israel was already expensive for tourists; now it's eye-watering.
Tourism was already reeling. The war hit the sector hard, and even as things have stabilized, the exchange rate means that the tourists who do come are getting less for their money. That affects the entire hospitality ecosystem — hotels, restaurants, tour guides, rental cars, everything. These are jobs that can't be outsourced, and they're being squeezed by a currency dynamic that has nothing to do with the quality of the service.
I want to return to Daniel's specific question about foreign workers and the remittance flows, because I think there's a knock-on effect worth examining. When the shekel strengthens, foreign workers who are sending money home effectively get a raise. That's good for them and good for their families. But it also means that more of their earnings leave the Israeli economy rather than being spent locally. A Thai worker who was previously spending, say, thirty percent of his income in Israel and sending seventy percent home might now send eighty percent home because the exchange rate makes remitting more attractive.
The strong shekel actually increases the remittance outflow, which is a capital outflow that puts downward pressure on the shekel. But it also means less domestic consumption from the foreign worker population, which affects the local businesses that serve them. It's a small effect in the aggregate, but in communities where foreign workers are concentrated — the agricultural towns in the Arava, for instance — it's noticeable.
Let's shift to the policy response, because I think it's worth examining what the government and the Bank of Israel are actually doing about this. The Bank of Israel has been intervening in the foreign exchange market, buying dollars to try to moderate the appreciation. They've also been holding interest rates high — which paradoxically can attract capital inflows that strengthen the currency further. It's a difficult balancing act.
The interest rate channel is counterintuitive for a lot of people. Higher interest rates are supposed to fight inflation, but they also attract foreign capital looking for yield, which increases demand for shekels, which strengthens the currency. So the Bank of Israel is trying to fight inflation with one hand while the other hand is buying dollars to prevent the currency from strengthening too much. It's like trying to push water uphill.
The government's approach to the foreign worker question has been largely reactive rather than strategic. After October seventh, the immediate priority was getting bodies onto construction sites and into fields. The bilateral agreements with India, Sri Lanka, and Moldova were negotiated quickly, and the terms were relatively generous by international standards because Israel had limited leverage — it needed workers fast.
There's an irony here that I don't think has gotten enough attention. Israel has historically been ambivalent about foreign workers. There's been a persistent concern that foreign workers would stay permanently, that they would change the demographic balance, that they would create a dependent underclass. But the economic reality keeps forcing the country to rely on them more heavily. And now, with the Palestinian labor option severely restricted for security reasons, the foreign worker dependency is deeper than ever.
The strong shekel makes that dependency more expensive. If you're running a construction company in Israel right now, you're facing a perfect storm. Your labor costs are up because you've had to replace Palestinian workers with foreign workers under bilateral agreements that set higher wages. Your material costs are up because global supply chains are still recovering. Your financing costs are up because interest rates are high. And now your currency is strengthening, which means your shekel costs, when translated into the dollars that many of your contracts are benchmarked against, are rising even faster.
I've talked to a few people in the construction sector — not for the podcast, just in my own curiosity — and the mood is grim. Margins that were already thin have essentially disappeared. Some companies are walking away from contracts rather than completing them at a loss. Others are delaying projects and hoping the exchange rate moves back in their favor before they have to lock in their costs.
This is where the infrastructure consortium question Daniel raised becomes really acute. If you're a major European or Chinese construction firm looking at a multi-billion-shekel infrastructure project in Israel, you're not naive about exchange rate risk. You're going to hedge, or you're going to build currency adjustment clauses into your contract. But hedging is expensive, and the Israeli government, as the ultimate client for many of these projects, is going to resist open-ended currency adjustment clauses because they expose the public budget to unlimited exchange rate risk.
The Tel Aviv metro project is a case study in this tension. It's the largest infrastructure project in Israel's history, and it's being bid by international consortia that include firms from China, Spain, France, and elsewhere. The contracts are denominated in shekels, but many of the costs — specialized equipment, foreign engineers, imported materials — are in euros and dollars. A sustained appreciation of the shekel means those foreign costs become relatively cheaper, which is good for the project's overall budget. But it also means the local content — the Israeli subcontractors, the local labor, the domestic materials — becomes relatively more expensive. So the consortium has an incentive to minimize local content and maximize imported content, which is exactly the opposite of what the government wants.
Let's talk about the outsourcing dynamic in the tech sector more specifically, because I think it's the canary in the coal mine for the broader economy. Israeli tech has been the engine of the shekel's strength. Tech exports — software, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and increasingly AI — have been running at something like fifty to sixty billion dollars a year. That's a massive inflow of foreign currency that pushes up the shekel. But the tech sector is also the most mobile part of the economy. Those jobs can move.
They are moving. Not the entire companies — the headquarters tend to stay in Israel, the senior leadership stays, the core R and D often stays. But the growth is increasingly happening elsewhere. I've seen job postings from Israeli unicorns that are explicitly hiring for their Lisbon office, their Bangalore office, their Mexico City office. The Tel Aviv office isn't shrinking, necessarily, but it's not growing at the same rate as the offshore locations.
The numbers on this are worth examining. If an Israeli startup raises a hundred million dollars in venture funding, and the shekel is at two point nine, that funding translates to about two hundred ninety million shekels. If the same company raised the same amount when the shekel was at three point seven, it would have had three hundred seventy million shekels to spend on Israeli salaries, Israeli office space, Israeli services. The currency move alone has reduced the local purchasing power of that venture funding by more than twenty percent.
Venture capitalists are not stupid. They see this math. They're increasingly asking their portfolio companies why they're hiring in Tel Aviv at thirteen thousand dollars a month per engineer when they could hire in Warsaw at five thousand. The answer used to be that the quality of Israeli engineers was worth the premium. And for certain roles, it still is. But the premium has gotten so large that it's harder to justify, especially for roles that aren't at the absolute cutting edge.
This is the boomerang effect Daniel described, and I think it's the most underappreciated risk of the strong shekel. In the short term, a strong currency feels good — it's a vote of confidence in the economy, it keeps inflation down, it makes imports cheaper. But over time, it hollows out the tradable sector by making local production uncompetitive. And once those jobs leave, the high-productivity engine that drove the currency strength in the first place starts to sputter.
I want to be careful not to overstate this. The Israeli tech sector is resilient. It's survived wars, boycotts, global financial crises. The talent base is deep, the entrepreneurial culture is real, and there are network effects that keep companies anchored in Tel Aviv even when the costs are high. But resilience has limits, and the sustained appreciation of the shekel is testing those limits in ways that are new.
Let's bring this back to Daniel's two groups — foreign workers and exporters — and try to synthesize what the strong shekel actually means for each.
For foreign workers, the picture is surprisingly positive in the short term. If you're a caregiver from Nepal or a construction worker from India earning shekels and sending money home, the strong shekel is a significant benefit. Your remittances buy more rupees or whatever your home currency is. Your decision to work in Israel looks smarter every month. The challenge is longer-term — if the strong shekel persists and accelerates the outsourcing trend, the demand for foreign workers in some sectors might eventually decline. But for now, the labor shortages in construction and agriculture and caregiving are so acute that the demand is unlikely to soften.
For the exporters, the picture is difficult. Israeli manufacturers who price in dollars and pay costs in shekels are seeing their margins evaporate. The tech sector is responding by accelerating offshore hiring, which reduces the local employment impact of their growth. The tourism sector is becoming less competitive by the day. These are the costs of the strong shekel, and they're concentrated in the parts of the economy that generate foreign currency earnings.
There's a third group Daniel didn't explicitly ask about but that's worth mentioning — Israeli consumers. For them, the strong shekel is a mixed bag. Imported goods are cheaper, which helps with the cost of living. But the cost of living in Israel is driven more by housing, food, and services — all of which are locally produced and not particularly sensitive to the exchange rate. So the average Israeli is getting slightly cheaper electronics and slightly more expensive everything else. And the housing point is worth underlining. Israel's housing crisis is fundamentally a supply problem — not enough homes are being built, especially in the center of the country. The foreign worker shortage in construction has slowed the pace of building, which keeps housing prices high. The strong shekel makes imported building materials cheaper, which should help, but the labor bottleneck is the binding constraint.
I want to circle back to something Daniel said about the security fence and the economic relief valve. It's an uncomfortable observation, but it points to a deeper truth about the Israeli economy — it has always depended on labor from outside its borders to fill certain roles. In the eighties and nineties, it was Palestinian workers. In the two thousands, it was foreign workers from Asia and Eastern Europe. The specific source changes, but the dependency persists because there are jobs that Israelis, at the wages on offer, simply won't do.
The events of October seventh didn't change that fundamental reality — they just forced a rapid and expensive transition from one source of labor to another. The Palestinian workers are gone, probably for a generation. The foreign workers are more expensive. The strong shekel makes them more expensive still. But the alternative — not building, not harvesting, not caring for the elderly — isn't really an option.
Which brings us to the policy question. What should Israel do about the strong shekel? The Bank of Israel can intervene in the foreign exchange market, and it has been doing so. But foreign exchange reserves are finite, and sustained intervention can create its own problems. The more fundamental answer is probably to increase productivity in the non-tradable sector — construction, services, agriculture — so that those sectors can absorb higher labor costs without becoming uncompetitive. Productivity growth in construction is the holy grail, and nobody's found it yet. Modular construction, automation, better project management — these things help at the margin, but construction remains stubbornly labor-intensive.
Let me offer one more data point that ties this together. Israel's current account surplus has been running at about four to five percent of GDP. That's high by developed-country standards. A current account surplus means the country is a net lender to the rest of the world, which tends to push the currency up. The surplus is driven largely by tech exports and by the fact that Israel has been a net recipient of foreign investment. As long as that surplus persists, the shekel will have a structural tendency to appreciate.
The strong shekel isn't a fluke or a temporary blip — it's the logical result of an economy that exports high-value services and imports relatively little in the way of manufactured goods. The question is whether the adjustment mechanism — the outsourcing, the offshoring, the hollowing-out of the tradable sector — will eventually weaken the shekel by reducing the export engine that drives it. And the answer is probably yes, but on a timeline that's measured in years, not months.
In the meantime, the distributional effects are real and painful. Exporters are hurting. Construction companies are squeezed. Foreign workers are benefiting. Israeli consumers are seeing mixed effects. The country is, in a sense, living through a slow-motion adjustment that will reshape the structure of the economy in ways that are hard to predict but impossible to ignore.
Daniel's question about foreign workers and the exchange rate turns out to be a lens into something much bigger — the way a small, open economy like Israel's navigates the tension between global competitiveness and local resilience. The foreign workers are both a symptom of that tension and a partial solution to it. The exporters are the frontline casualties. And the rest of us are watching the numbers on the screen and trying to figure out what they mean for the country we live in.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In early medieval Mongolia, nomadic herders developed an unexpected cooperative relationship with the Pallas's cat, a small wild feline. The cats would hunt rodents that threatened stored grain and leather goods in temporary encampments, while the herders would leave out scraps of dried meat during harsh winters. This unspoken arrangement between two species with no domestication bond was documented by Chinese travelers along the northern Silk Road routes around the eighth century.
A Pallas's cat.
I didn't know Pallas's cats had a cooperative relationship with anyone, honestly.
I suppose if you're going to have an unexpected interspecies relationship, early medieval Mongolia is the place to do it.
One forward-looking thought before we wrap — the shekel-dollar rate is going to be one of the most important variables in the Israeli economy over the next few years, and it's worth watching not just for the headline number but for the knock-on effect we've been discussing. How many tech jobs move offshore? How many construction projects get delayed? How many foreign workers decide Israel is worth the journey? The exchange rate is never just a number — it's a signal about where an economy is headed.
Daniel's instinct to look at the groups that don't usually make the headlines — the foreign workers, the subcontractors, the remittance senders — is exactly the right way to think about this. The aggregate numbers tell one story, but the human economy is lived in the details.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this operation running. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. We'll be back soon.
