Plenty of teenagers are nabbing summer jobs this year and the pay is way better than you'd think, Emily writes.

Why it matters: The surge of young folks into the workforce has been happening for the past few years and at first seemed like a pandemic blip —but turns out it's a trend with some legs.

• Hourly workers are still very much in demand in the sectors where teens tend to work — retail, restaurants, or summer gigs at the pool or beach.
• Some of those jobs used to go to older workers — think an older semi-retired guy working part time at the Home Depot. But those folks exited the labor market in the pandemic, boosting demand for younger workers.

The big picture: Employment rates for teens are expected to rise this summer from last year, according to a team of labor economists who put out an annual summer job forecast.

• Gusto, which handles payroll for about 300,000 small and midsize businesses, says the average hourly wages for teens (aged 15-19) on its platform hit $14.89 in May — up a whopping 41% since January 2020.
• Teens are forecast to make up 18% of all hires this summer, per Gusto's report. It's the highest level in the four years they've been tracking the data. In June 2019, that share was 2%.

For example: As soon as school let out this year in Birmingham, Alabama, job applications from high schoolers started coming into Tortugas Homemade Pizza — and owner Matt Vizcaino was happy to hire them.

• He hadn't seen many applicants over the spring. People "can be a little bit pickier in choosing a job than they used to be," he said. He's had to raise pay by about 15%. Starting pay for a teen without experience is $12 an hour.

Zoom out: The share of teens with jobs had been steadily declining for decades before the pandemic — notching lower after the recessions in 2008 and 2001. The trend is moving the other way now, as the chart below shows.

• The extra-tight labor markets of the past few summers drove a surge of teens to work and is "really showing itself to be a much clearer long-term trend — of more teens working not only during the summer but during the school year," says Luke Pardue, chief economist at Gusto.

Worth noting: Pardue says that while strong demand is driving the surge, the teens he's talked with also really want to get out there and work — particularly after the isolation of the pandemic years.

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As we await new inflation data and a Federal Reserve decision next week, there's an important backdrop emerging from the markets, Axios' Neil Irwin writes.

• Bond prices imply that the Fed's war on inflation is, in effect, won.

Why it matters: This backdrop makes it easier for the Fed to pause its rate hikes next week, as it has telegraphed it may, regardless of what the backward-looking May Consumer Price Index data due out Tuesday says.

By the numbers: The five-year breakeven rate — the gap between rates on five-year Treasury notes and comparable inflation-protected bonds — was 2.14% Thursday. That implies that the CPI will rise by that much each year over the next half-decade.

• Because the CPI runs a few ticks higher than the PCE price index the Fed targets, those breakeven numbers are entirely consistent with the central bank's 2% inflation target.
• By contrast, last spring, the five-year breakeven reached as high as 3.56%, a more alarming number that implied inflation was getting out of control — which surely contributed to the Fed's aggressive interest rate hikes last year.

Between the lines: Bond investors are pricing in enough of a growth slowdown that inflation will recede even without the Fed raising rates more. In that sense, they have a more benign outlook than ordinary Americans.

• The New York Fed's most recent survey of consumer expectations, for example, showed American households see inflation coming in at 2.9% annually over the coming five years.

Yes, but: Bond investors are hardly perfectly prescient. Breakeven rates didn't give any early warning of the outburst of inflation in the spring of 2021, for example. Market prices, just like any forecast, can be wrong.

• And from the Fed's perspective, the fact that ordinary citizens still expect inflation well above the 2% target in the coming years could be alarming in its own right.

The eurozone is now in recession, although just barely, Matt writes.

• If it stays this modest, the slight downturn would be a much better economic outcome than many expected a year ago.

Why it matters: Taken as a whole, the 20-nation currency union is the third largest economic entity on earth, behind the U.S. and China.

The latest: GDP stayed in slightly negative territory for the second consecutive quarter, according to EU data out Thursday.

• That meets the conventional criteria of a recession.

Context: Once overwhelmingly reliant on Russia for its energy needs, Europe suffered an energy crisis in the aftermath of Moscow's attack on Ukraine, resulting in the sudden rupture of supplies of relatively cheap oil and gas.

• Energy prices soared, setting off a cost of living crisis that continues to hamper the ability of consumers to keep spending.

Yes, but: The impact of the Russian energy shock on Europe hasn't been as bad as many expected. For instance, the unemployment rate in the monetary union is at a record low.

What they're saying: "The decline of 0.1% in both the fourth and first quarters is so minimal though, and the labour market is so strong, that it’s hard to argue that this is a recessionary environment," wrote Bert Colijn, an ING senior economist, after Thursday's report.