 |
|
|
|||||
U.S. employers added 147,000 jobs in June as the American labor market continues to show surprising resilience despite uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s economic policies. The unemployment rate ticked down 4.1% from 4.2% in May, the Labor Department said Thursday.Hiring rose modestly from a revised 144,000 in May and beat economists expectations of fewer than 118,000 new jobs and a rise in the unemployment rate.The U.S. job market has cooled considerably from red-hot days of 2021-2023 when the economy bounced back with unexpected strength from COVID-19 lockdowns and companies were desperate for workers. So far this year employers have added an average 124,000 jobs a month, down from 168,000 in 2024 and an average 400,000 from 2021 through 2023.Hiring decelerated after the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023. But the economy did not collapse, defying widespread predictions that the higher borrowing costs would cause a recession. Companies kept hiring, just at a more modest pace.But the job market increasingly looks under strain. A survey released Wednesday by the payroll processor ADP found that private companies cut 33,000 jobs last month. “Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month,” said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson. (The ADP numbers frequently differ from the Labor Department’s official job count.)Employers are now contending with fallout from Trump’s policies, especially his aggressive use of import taxestariffs.Mainstream economists say that tariffs raise prices for businesses and consumers alike and make the economy less efficient by reducing competition. They also invite retaliatory tariffs from other countries, hurting U.S. exporters.The erratic way that Trump has rolled out his tariffsannouncing and then suspending them, then coming up with new oneshas left businesses bewildered.Manufacturers responding to a survey released this week by the Institute for Supply Management complained that they and their customers were reluctant to make decisions until they understood where Trump’s tariffs would end up. “That whiplash has to stop and it has to stay stopped,” said Susan Spence, chair of the ISM’s manufacturing survey committee.Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy could also show up in June’s job report. Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, expects federal jobs dropped by 20,000 last month, “reflecting a hiring freeze, voluntary quits and retirements.” For now, she wrote in a commentary Wednesday, court rulings “have put massive federal layoffs on hold.”The president’s deportationsand the threat of themalso are likely to start having an impact on the job market by driving immigrants out of the job market. In May, the U.S. labor forcethose working and looking for workfell by 625,000, the biggest drop in a year and a half. Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
The S&P 500 is going through a bit of a changeup. The stock market index announced on Wednesday, July 2, that its adding Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG), a software company, to its lineup. Datadog is replacing Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), which was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE). Heres what you need to know about the S&P 500 change. What is the S&P 500? Launched on March 4, 1957, the S&P 500, officially known as the Standard and Poors 500, tracks the stock price of 500 prominent companies in the United States. As one of the best-known stock market indexes globally, it provides investors with insight into the market over a certain period of time. The S&P 500 aims to cover all U.S. sectors. Stock market indexes are not the same thing as stock market exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The S&P 500 is one of many stock market indexes across the world. Theres the Dow, Nasdaq-100, S&P Euro, FTSE 100, Nikkei 225, Hang Seng, and more. Why is Datadog joining the S&P 500? On Wednesday, July 2, HPE completed its acquisition of Juniper Networks after striking a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Plans for the purchase were first announced in January 2024. As a result, Juniper’s common stock will no longer trade on the NYSE and thus will no longer be part of the S&P 500. Juniper’s departure from the S&P 500 will leave only 499 companies listed on the stock market index. Datadog is replacing the company to keep the number at 500. Why was Datadog chosen to join the S&P 500? An index committee chooses which stocks are included in the S&P 500 and takes into account each companys sector for a broad range. Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and security platform for IT and development teams. The S&P Global lists specific requirements for a company to be selected for the stock market index. These include: Making a profit in its last quarter, and when considering the previous four quarters together Sufficient liquidity Being a large-cap stock (a market capitalization of over $10 billion) Having enough shares available to the public (sufficient public float) Contributing to the sector balance Datadog must have met all of these criteria to have been selected. How unusual is this? The S&P 500 makes changes to its roster throughout the year in order to maintain 500 leading companies. When will this change take place? S&P Global announced in a press release that Juniper Networks will be removed from the stock market index before trading begins on Wednesday, July 9. Datadog will replace it that morning. How have Datadog and Juniper Networks stock prices reacted to the news? Well, Juniper Networks has already been delisted from the NYSE. Anyone holding the stock should receive $40 per share, according to an acquisition filing. Meanwhile, shares of Datadog were up more than 10% in premarket trading on Thursday following Wednesday’s announcement. The stock has struggled this year and was down roughly 6% year to date before Wednesday’s close.
Category:
E-Commerce
House Republicans are ready to vote on President Donald Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax breaks and spending cuts bill early Thursday, after staying up all night as GOP leaders and the president himself worked to persuade skeptical holdouts to drop their opposition by his Fourth of July deadline.Final debates began in the predawn hours after another chaotic day, and night, at the Capitol. House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted the House would meet the holiday deadline after the Senate approved Trump’s signature domestic policy package on the narrowest vote.“Our way is to plow through and get it done,” Johnson said, emerging in the middle of the night from a series of closed-door meetings. “We will meet our July fourth deadline.”The outcome would be a milestone for the president and his party, a long shot effort to compile a long list of GOP priorities into what they call his “one big beautiful bill,” an 800-plus page package. With Democrats unified in opposition, the bill will become a defining measure of Trump’s return to the White House, with the sweep of Republican control of Congress. Tax breaks and safety net cuts At it core, the package’s priority is $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in Trump’s first term, in 2017, that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. This includes allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year.There’s also a hefty investment, some $350 billion, in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.To help offset the costs of lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a massive rollback of green energy investments.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.“This was a generational opportunity to deliver the most comprehensive and consequential set of conservative reforms in modern history, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the House Budget Committee chairman. Democrats united against ‘ugly bill’ Democrats unified against the bill as a tax giveaway to the rich paid for on the backs of the most vulnerable in society, what they called “trickle down cruelty.”“Have you no shame?” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut “Have the moral courage to oppose this bill.”House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries invoked the powerful history of the nation’s Independence Day holiday, and asked: “What does any of that have to do with this one, big ugly bill?”He read for nearly two hours from a binder of letters, written by people across the country explaining how the health care programs have helped their familiesand how devastating cuts would hurt.Hauling the package this far in Congress has been difficult from the start. Republicans have struggled mightily with the bill nearly every step of the way in the House and Senate, often succeeding only by the narrowest of margins: just one vote. In the Senate, Vice President JD Vance broke the tie vote. The slim 220-212 majority in the House leaves Republicans little room for defections. Political costs of saying no But few GOP lawmakers have been fully satisfied with the final product. Several more moderate Republicans had reservations about the cuts to Medicaid health care and the loss of green energy credits that could derail solar, wind, and other renewable projects in their districts.At the same time, conservatives, including those from the House Freedom Caucus, held out for steeper reductions. Republicans had warned the Senate against making changes to the House-passed bill, but senators put their own stamp on the final draft.The House ground to a standstill Wednesday as a handful of holdouts refused to move so quickly. A morning roll call dragged for about seven hours, while an evening vote stalled for more than five, and Trump himself worked the phones and lashed out on social media.“What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove???” Trump railed in a post-midnight vote.Johnson, who has pulled close to Trump, relied on White House officialsincluding Cabinet secretaries, lawyers and othersto work skeptical Republicans through the details. Lawmakers were being told the administration could provide executive actions, projects, or other provisions they needed in their districts back home.“The president’s message was, ‘We’re on a roll,'” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina “He wants to see this.”And the alternative, of bucking the president on his signature second-term package, carried grave political risks.Trump has publicly threatened to campaign against the defectors. One House Republican who has staked out opposition to the bill, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, is being targeted by Trump’s well-funded political operation.And Senate Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s lashings, announced he would not seek reelection shortly before voting against the bill. Rollback of past presidential agendas In many ways, the package is a repudiation of the agendas of the last two Democratic presidents, a chiseling away at the Medicaid expansion from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and a pullback of Joe Biden’s climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act.Democrats have described the bill in dire terms, warning that cuts to Medicaid, which some 80 million Americans rely on, would result in lives lost. Food stamps that help feed more than 40 million people would “rip food from the mouths of hungry children, hungry veterans, and hungry seniors,” Jeffries said.Republicans say the tax breaks will prevent a tax hike on households and grow the economy. They maintain they are trying to rightsize the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled, and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud, and abuse.The Tax Policy Center, which provides nonpartisan analysis of tax and budget policy, projected the bill would result next year in a $150 tax break for the lowest quintile of Americans, a $1,750 tax cut for the middle quintile and a $10,950 tax cut for the top quintile. That’s compared with what they would face if the 2017 tax cuts expired. Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Matt Brown contribute. Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick and Leah Askarinam, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||