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Tag: labor

  • Meet the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, who skipped finals to make an empire out of teaching AI ‘what only humans know’ | Fortune

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    In the spring of 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, Brendan Foody was busy testing out his new theory of work.

    “I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he told Fortune. “I just didn’t go to finals.”

    By then, Foody had already found something he couldn’t learn in a lecture hall. A few months earlier, at a hackathon in São Paulo, he and his co-founders had stumbled onto a simple but powerful model: match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics, and take a small cut of each deal. Their first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer; Mercor paid the engineer roughly 70% and kept the rest as a service fee.

    What began as a way to connect talent soon evolved into something more ambitious: a marketplace where humans could help train the AI systems that might one day replace them. Mercor now hires professionals—consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors—to create “evals” and rubrics that test and refine models’ reasoning.

    “Everyone’s been focused on what models can do,” Foody said. “But the real opportunity is teaching them what only humans know—judgment, nuance, and taste.”

    Within nine months, he and his co-founders—high school friends and debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha—had turned that fledgling idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate. The trio’s early success was less a fluke than a proof of concept: that the same structured reasoning they once practiced on the debate circuit could be codified to teach machines how to think.

    Two years later, Mercor has become a $10 billion company, turning the trio into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The product of that São Paulo experiment had transformed into one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era, attracting major investors who view it as a linchpin in the future of human-in-the-loop automation.

    To Foody, the leap from college dropout to billionaire founder was rational.

    “When I was in college, work was something I had to be disciplined to do,” he said. “When I started Mercor, it became something I couldn’t stop thinking about.”

    Foody still hasn’t taken a day off in three years. He says even when he’s at the dinner table with his parents, he thinks about work, which, to him, doesn’t feel like work. 

    “People burn out when they work hard on things that don’t feel compounding,” he explained. “I see the ROI of my time every day.”

    That mindset has become the philosophical core of Mercor’s mission. In Foody’s view, AI isn’t eliminating labor: it’s reallocating it. As software automates repetitive white-collar tasks, humans will move up the value chain, teaching machines how to reason, decide, and create. 

    “It’s like we have this bottleneck of only so much human labor in the economy,” he said. “That shape is going to change radically over the next decade.”

    How is Mercor alleviating the bottleneck? Its platform allows enterprises to commission thousands of micro-tasks that measure model performance in real professional contexts: writing a financial memo, drafting a legal brief, or analyzing a medical chart. Human evaluators grade each output against detailed rubrics, feeding structured feedback back into the model. Every evaluation helps AI learn how people make decisions, and how they measure quality.

    At the center of that system is APEX—the AI Productivity Index, Mercor’s proprietary benchmark for assessing how well AI performs economically valuable work. Rather than test abstract reasoning or mathematical puzzles, APEX evaluates large models on 200 tasks drawn from the workflows of investment bankers, lawyers, consultants, and physicians. To build it, Mercor enlisted a heavyweight advisory group that includes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, ex-McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and cardiologist Eric Topol. Each helped design the evaluation rubrics and case structures to mirror the realities of high-stakes professional labor.

    As the company puts it: “It’s great to have 10,000 PhDs in your pocket—it’s even better to have a model that can reliably do your taxes.”

    The implications of Mercor’s success are sweeping. In Foody’s eyes, this new labor market could employ millions of people globally while accelerating AI progress. 

    “We’ll automate maybe two-thirds of knowledge work,” he said. “And that’ll be incredible, because it lets us do things like cure cancer and go to Mars.”

    For investors, Mercor’s growth story is irresistible. It sits at the intersection of two seismic shifts: the mainstreaming of AI and the rise of flexible, project-based work. Each corporate client adds new evaluators, and each evaluator helps refine more models, creating a flywheel of both data and demand. 

    “We have one of the fastest revenue ramps of any company in history,” Foody said matter-of-factly.

    Foody likes to describe it as the next industrial revolution. He knows people are afraid of being replaced by AI, and constantly fields questions on the ethics of training AI to replace jobs. Foody argues we ought to just bite the bullet. 

    “It’s easy to fall into a Luddite mindset and see productivity gains as bad because they cause short-term job losses,” Foody said. “But every major technical revolution has ultimately made life better.”

    After the industrial revolution, the economy went from 75% of Americans working as farmers to about 1%, and that freed people to do everything else, Foody said. 

    “The challenge now is to be thoughtful about what comes next: the higher, better things humans will spend time on,” Foody said, “and how quickly we can help make that future real.”

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    Eva Roytburg

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  • Washington’s struggling economy takes another economic hit from the government shutdown

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    WASHINGTON — With the combination of the longest government shutdown, the mass firings of government workers and a fresh cut in federal food aid, the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington is bracing for the swell of people who will need its help before the holiday season.

    The food bank, which serves 400 pantries and aid organizations in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and two Maryland counties, is providing 8 million more meals than it had prepared to this budget year — a nearly 20% increase.

    The city is being hit “especially hard,” said Radha Muthiah, the group’s CEO and president, “because of the sequence of events that has occurred over the course of this year.”

    The nation’s capital has been battered by a series of decisions by the Trump administration, from the layoffs of federal workers to the ongoing law enforcement intervention into the district. The added blow of the shutdown, which has furloughed workers and paused money for food assistance, is only deepening the economic toll.

    The latest figures from the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis do not account for workforce changes since the shutdown that began Oct. 1. But even the September jobs report shows that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hovers at 6%, compared with the most recent national rate of 4.3%, and has been the highest in the nation for months.

    The economic woes appear to be reverberating politically. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won election Tuesday as Virginia’s governor after focusing her campaign message on the effects of President Donald Trump’s actions on the state’s economy.

    The shutdown’s long-term impact on the regional economy will be felt long after the government reopens, experts say.

    Washington has the country’s largest share of federal workers — about 20%, according to official figures — and roughly 150,000 federal employees call the area home. By Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country will have missed at least two full paychecks because of the shutdown. Nationally, at least 670,000 federal employees are furloughed, while about 730,000 are working without pay, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    During the shutdown, the number of federal employees on Washington’s transit system each weekday has dropped by about one-quarter compared with ridership in September. Eateries that the Restaurant Association of Greater Washington says were already dealing with thin margins from seasonal declines and the fallout from Trump’s deployment of armed National Guard members on city streets are facing more challenges at a time when owners had hoped for a rebound.

    Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro, a think tank, said that going without paychecks is causing significant cash flow issues for federal workers, potentially leading to defaults on mortgages and student loans. For local businesses, especially those reliant on federal workers’ discretionary spending, it could exacerbate the impact during the high-sales October-December quarter.

    “A lot of businesses rely on higher spending in Q4 in order to have a revenue positive year,” Loh said.

    Small businesses are feeling the loss of that spending.

    The crowd watching Liverpool’s Premier League game last weekend would have been standing room only at The Queen Vic, a bar in Northeast Washington. But that was not the case, said Ryan Gordon, co-owner of the British pub.

    “We still had seats for people, which means the bars around us who get our overflow got nothing,” Gordon said.

    Business is down about 50% compared with what it was before the shutdown, he said. He considers himself lucky in the local restaurant scene because he owns the building and does not have to pay rent.

    “To the extent to which discretionary spending by D.C. area households is limited, that could push a lot of local businesses into the red,” Loh said. The culmination of the shutdown, cut in SNAP benefits and layoffs are weighing heavy on households that have never sought help before, she added.

    Thea Price was fired from her job at the U.S. Institute of Peace in March of this year, part of the wave of layoffs meant to shrink the size of the federal government. Her husband, a government contractor, also lost his job at a museum. Since then, they have lived on savings, Medicaid and SNAP.

    Price, 37, recently went to a food pantry in Arlington, Virginia, for the first time recently. The shutdown halted funding for SNAP, after it took her months to get it, and the $500 payments she receives each month were set to stop. Virginia sent a partial payment but it was not enough, Price said. With her options to sustain herself and her family running out, Price is moving back to her hometown in the Seattle area.

    “We can’t afford to stay in the area any longer and hope that something might pan out,” she said. “We’re just in a much different place than when these things started in March.”

    At the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, forklifts sped around in a controlled chaos, unloading trucks, moving food and preparing for a distribution set up for federal employees and contractors, and preparations are intensifying with the holiday season in mind. The organization is expecting to provide 1 million more meals this month than it had anticipated before the shutdown.

    “We’re very focused obviously on the immediacy of all of these impacts today and getting food to those who need it,” said Muthiah, the group’s director. But she cautioned there were long-term implications to the unfolding crisis, with people tapping their savings and retirement funds to get by.

    “People are borrowing against their futures to be able to pay for basic necessities today,” she said.

    ___

    Associated Press video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

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  • Washington’s Struggling Economy Takes Another Economic Hit From the Government Shutdown

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    The food bank, which serves 400 pantries and aid organizations in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and two Maryland counties, is providing 8 million more meals than it had prepared to this budget year — a nearly 20% increase.

    The city is being hit “especially hard,” said Radha Muthiah, the group’s CEO and president, “because of the sequence of events that has occurred over the course of this year.”

    The latest figures from the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis do not account for workforce changes since the shutdown that began Oct. 1. But even the September jobs report shows that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hovers at 6%, compared with the most recent national rate of 4.3%, and has been the highest in the nation for months.

    The economic woes appear to be reverberating politically. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won election Tuesday as Virginia’s governor after focusing her campaign message on the effects of President Donald Trump’s actions on the state’s economy.

    The shutdown’s long-term impact on the regional economy will be felt long after the government reopens, experts say.


    Local businesses feeling the crunch

    Washington has the country’s largest share of federal workers — about 20%, according to official figures — and roughly 150,000 federal employees call the area home. By Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country will have missed at least two full paychecks because of the shutdown. Nationally, at least 670,000 federal employees are furloughed, while about 730,000 are working without pay, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    During the shutdown, the number of federal employees on Washington’s transit system each weekday has dropped by about one-quarter compared with ridership in September. Eateries that the Restaurant Association of Greater Washington says were already dealing with thin margins from seasonal declines and the fallout from Trump’s deployment of armed National Guard members on city streets are facing more challenges at a time when owners had hoped for a rebound.

    Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro, a think tank, said that going without paychecks is causing significant cash flow issues for federal workers, potentially leading to defaults on mortgages and student loans. For local businesses, especially those reliant on federal workers’ discretionary spending, it could exacerbate the impact during the high-sales October-December quarter.

    “A lot of businesses rely on higher spending in Q4 in order to have a revenue positive year,” Loh said.

    Small businesses are feeling the loss of that spending.

    The crowd watching Liverpool’s Premier League game last weekend would have been standing room only at The Queen Vic, a bar in Northeast Washington. But that was not the case, said Ryan Gordon, co-owner of the British pub.

    “We still had seats for people, which means the bars around us who get our overflow got nothing,” Gordon said.

    Business is down about 50% compared with what it was before the shutdown, he said. He considers himself lucky in the local restaurant scene because he owns the building and does not have to pay rent.

    “To the extent to which discretionary spending by D.C. area households is limited, that could push a lot of local businesses into the red,” Loh said. The culmination of the shutdown, cut in SNAP benefits and layoffs are weighing heavy on households that have never sought help before, she added.


    A family gets squeezed out of the region

    Thea Price was fired from her job at the U.S. Institute of Peace in March of this year, part of the wave of layoffs meant to shrink the size of the federal government. Her husband, a government contractor, also lost his job at a museum. Since then, they have lived on savings, Medicaid and SNAP.

    Price, 37, recently went to a food pantry in Arlington, Virginia, for the first time recently. The shutdown halted funding for SNAP, after it took her months to get it, and the $500 payments she receives each month were set to stop. Virginia sent a partial payment but it was not enough, Price said. With her options to sustain herself and her family running out, Price is moving back to her hometown in the Seattle area.

    “We can’t afford to stay in the area any longer and hope that something might pan out,” she said. “We’re just in a much different place than when these things started in March.”

    At the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, forklifts sped around in a controlled chaos, unloading trucks, moving food and preparing for a distribution set up for federal employees and contractors, and preparations are intensifying with the holiday season in mind. The organization is expecting to provide 1 million more meals this month than it had anticipated before the shutdown.

    “We’re very focused obviously on the immediacy of all of these impacts today and getting food to those who need it,” said Muthiah, the group’s director. But she cautioned there were long-term implications to the unfolding crisis, with people tapping their savings and retirement funds to get by.

    “People are borrowing against their futures to be able to pay for basic necessities today,” she said.

    Associated Press video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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    Associated Press

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  • South Korean solar firm cuts pay and hours for Georgia workers as US officials detain imports

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    A South Korean solar company says it will temporarily reduce pay and working hours for about 1,000 of its 3,000 employees in Georgia because U.S. customs officials have been detaining imported components for solar panels

    ATLANTA — A South Korean solar company says it will temporarily reduce pay and working hours for about 1,000 of its 3,000 employees in Georgia because U.S. customs officials have been detaining imported components needed to make solar panels.

    Qcells, a unit of South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions, said Friday that it will also lay off 300 workers from staffing agencies at its plants in Dalton and Cartersville, both northwest of Atlanta.

    The company says U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been detaining imported components at ports on suspicion that they contain materials that may have been made with forced labor in China, meaning it can’t run its solar panel assembly lines at full strength.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in August that her department was stepping up enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a 2021 law that restricts Chinese goods made with forced labor from entering the U.S. Published reports indicate that U.S. officials began detaining solar cells made by Qcells in June. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection couldn’t immediately answer questions about Qcells on Friday.

    Qcells says none of its materials or components are made with forced labor or even come from China. Spokesperson Marta Stoepker said the company maintains “robust supply chain due diligence measures” and “very detailed documentation,” which has been successful in getting some shipments released.

    “Our latest supply chain is sourced completely outside of China and our legacy supply chains contain no material from Xinjiang province based on third party audits and supplier guarantees,” Stoepker said.

    She said Qcells is continuing to cooperate and expects to resume full production in the coming weeks and months.

    “Although our supply chain operations are beginning to normalize, today we shared with our employees that HR actions must be taken to improve operational efficiency until production capacity returns to normal levels,” Stoepker said in a statement.

    Qcells has said it pays workers an average of about $53,000 a year. Workers will retain full benefits during furloughs.

    Qcells is completing a $2.3 billion plant in Cartersville that will let it take polysilicon refined in Washington state and make ingots, wafers and solar cells — the building blocks of finished solar modules. That will allow it to reduce imports of solar modules. The company has said it will finish the plant even though President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress dismantled most of the tax credits for buying solar panels earlier this year.

    “Our commitment to building the entire solar supply chain in the United States remains,” Stoepker said. “We will soon be back on track with the full force of our Georgia team delivering American-made energy to communities around the country.”

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  • Consumer sentiment tumbles close to record lows in latest U Michigan survey

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    NEW YORK — Consumer sentiment dropped to a three-year low and close to the lowest point ever recorded by the University of Michigan one month into the government shutdown, with pessimism over personal finances and anticipated business conditions weighing on Americans.

    The November survey showed the index of consumer sentiment at 50.4, down a startling 6.2% from last month and it plunged nearly 30% from a year ago.

    Economists were caught off guard. Those polled had expected a slight month-to-month increase for a reading of 54.2.

    “With the federal government shutdown dragging on for over a month, consumers are now expressing worries about potential negative consequences for the economy,” said Joanne Hsu, Surveys of Consumers Director at University of Michigan. “This month’s decline in sentiment was widespread throughout the population, seen across age, income, and political affiliation.”

    The one exception, Hsu said, were those with large stock holdings. Big tech companies, particularly in artificial intelligence, have driven explosive returns for investors. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 17% this year.

    “The top 20% of households by income drive 40% of consumer spending, and we think the wealth effect from the buoyant stock market has strengthened this year,” according to Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

    The nation’s largest retail trade group on Thursday forecast a trillion-dollar Christmas, with sales during November and December seen growing up to 4.2%.

    The UMich survey showed that year-ahead inflation expectations inched up to 4.7% in November from 4.6% last month, and long-run inflation expectations declined to 3.6% from 3.9% last month.

    James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, said the report’s key takeaway is jobs.

    “Seventy-one percent of households now expect unemployment to rise over the coming (12 months) while only 9% expect unemployment to fall. That gives a net reading of 62% predicting higher unemployment versus 52% last month,” Knightley said. “A huge increase which … has historically been the prelude to an ugly outcome for jobs.”

    The first Friday of the month is typically when the government releases its key jobs report, but all data reports are on hold during the shutdown. Economists have turned to private sources which are showing that job seekers are taking longer to land a job in a ” low hires, low fires ” market.

    At least one economist noted a change in methodology may have impacted the survey results.

    “These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, given the likely temporary drag on confidence from the ongoing government shutdown, plus the Michigan survey’s switch to online rather than phone-based sampling last year, which seems to have introduced a structural break that produces more downbeat results,” said Oliver Allen, senior U.S. economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.

    The UMich survey was conducted before Election Day on Tuesday.

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  • ‘No hire’ job market leaves unemployed in limbo as threats to economy multiply

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    WASHINGTON — When Carly Kaprive left a job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she figured it would take three to six months to find a new position. After all, the 32-year old project manager had never been unemployed for longer than three months.

    Instead, after 700 applications, she’s still looking, wrapped up in a frustrating and extended job hunt that is much more difficult than when she last looked for work just a couple of years ago. With uncertainty over interest rates, tariffs, immigration, and artificial intelligence roiling much of the economy, some companies she’s interviewed with have abruptly decided not to fill the job at all.

    “I have definitely had mid-interview roles be eliminated entirely, that they are not going to move forward with even hiring anybody,” she said.

    Kaprive is caught in a historical anomaly: The unemployment rate is low and the economy is still growing, but those out of work face the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, calls it a “jobless boom.”

    While big corporate layoff announcements typically grab the most attention, it has been the unwillingness of many companies to add workers that has created a more painful job market than the low 4.3% unemployment rate would suggest. It is also more bifurcated: The “low hire, low fire” economy has meant fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.

    “It’s like an insider-outsider thing,” Guy Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute said, “where outsiders that need jobs are struggling to get their foot in, even as insiders are insulated by what up until now is a low-layoff environment.”

    Several large companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including UPS, Target, and IBM, though Berger said it is too soon to tell whether they signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But a rise in job cuts would be particularly challenging with hiring already so low.

    For now, it’s harder than ever to get a clear read on the job market because the government shutdown has cut off the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly employment reports. The October jobs report was scheduled for release Friday but has been delayed, like the September figures before it. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all the data may be collected.

    Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the hiring rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of those employed — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest figure outside the pandemic since March 2013.

    Back then, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, as the economy slowly recovered from the job losses from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. That is much higher than August’s 4.3%.

    Many of those out of work are skeptical of the current low rate. Brad Mislow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing a job as an advertising executive in New York City. Now he is substitute teaching to make ends meet.

    “It is frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who are basically fighting every day and holding on to pieces of flotsam in the shark-filled waters or, they have no idea what it’s like.”

    With the government closed, financial markets are paying closer attention to private-sector data, but that is also mixed. On Thursday, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas unnerved investors with a report that announced job cuts surged 175% in October from a year ago.

    Yet on Wednesday, payroll processor ADP said that net hiring picked up in October as businesses added 42,000 jobs, after two months of declines. Still, the gain was modest. ADP’s figures are based on anonymous data from the 26 million workers at its client companies.

    Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics company, estimated Thursday that the economy shed 9,000 jobs in October. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% last month.

    Even when the government was releasing data, economists and officials at the Federal Reserve weren’t sure how healthy the job market was or where it was headed next. A sharp drop in immigration and stepped-up deportations have helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by reducing the supply of workers. The economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

    Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has called in a “curious balance” because both the supply of and demand for workers has fallen.

    Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: Greater uncertainty from tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power AI is booming, elevated interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.

    “The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has left the economy looking better on paper than it feels to most Americans,” Swonk said.

    Younger Americans have borne the brunt of the hiring slowdown, but many older workers have also struggled.

    Suzanne Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago the Chicago resident also found work quickly — three months after she left a job, she had three offers. Now she’s been unemployed since April.

    She is worried that her age is a challenge, but isn’t letting it hold her back. “I got a job at 63, so I don’t see a reason to not get a job at 65,” she said.

    Like many job-hunters, she has been stunned by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by hiring software. She received one email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, though she never had an interview. Another company that never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about their interaction.

    Weak hiring has meant unemployment spells are getting longer, according to government data. More than one-quarter of those out of work have been unemployed for more than six months or longer, a figure that rose sharply in July and August and is up from 21% a year ago.

    Swonk said that such increases are unusual outside recessions.

    A rising number of the unemployed have also given up on their job searches, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That also holds down the unemployment rate because people who stop looking aren’t counted as unemployed.

    But Kaprive is still sticking with it — she’s taken classes about Amazon’s web services platform to boost her technology skills.

    “We can’t be narrow-minded in what we’re willing to take,” she said.

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  • ‘No hire’ job market leaves unemployed in limbo as threats to economy multiply

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    WASHINGTON — When Carly Kaprive left a job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she figured it would take three to six months to find a new position. After all, the 32-year old project manager had never been unemployed for longer than three months.

    Instead, after 700 applications, she’s still looking, wrapped up in a frustrating and extended job hunt that is much more difficult than when she last looked for work just a couple of years ago. With uncertainty over interest rates, tariffs, immigration, and artificial intelligence roiling much of the economy, some companies she’s interviewed with have abruptly decided not to fill the job at all.

    “I have definitely had mid-interview roles be eliminated entirely, that they are not going to move forward with even hiring anybody,” she said.

    Kaprive is caught in a historical anomaly: The unemployment rate is low and the economy is still growing, but those out of work face the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, calls it a “jobless boom.”

    While big corporate layoff announcements typically grab the most attention, it has been the unwillingness of many companies to add workers that has created a more painful job market than the low 4.3% unemployment rate would suggest. It is also more bifurcated: The “low hire, low fire” economy has meant fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.

    “It’s like an insider-outsider thing,” Guy Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute said, “where outsiders that need jobs are struggling to get their foot in, even as insiders are insulated by what up until now is a low-layoff environment.”

    Several large companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including UPS, Target, and IBM, though Berger said it is too soon to tell whether they signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But a rise in job cuts would be particularly challenging with hiring already so low.

    For now, it’s harder than ever to get a clear read on the job market because the government shutdown has cut off the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly employment reports. The October jobs report was scheduled for release Friday but has been delayed, like the September figures before it. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all the data may be collected.

    Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the hiring rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of those employed — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest figure outside the pandemic since March 2013.

    Back then, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, as the economy slowly recovered from the job losses from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. That is much higher than August’s 4.3%.

    Many of those out of work are skeptical of the current low rate. Brad Mislow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing a job as an advertising executive in New York City. Now he is substitute teaching to make ends meet.

    “It is frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who are basically fighting every day and holding on to pieces of flotsam in the shark-filled waters or, they have no idea what it’s like.”

    With the government closed, financial markets are paying closer attention to private-sector data, but that is also mixed. On Thursday, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas unnerved investors with a report that announced job cuts surged 175% in October from a year ago.

    Yet on Wednesday, payroll processor ADP said that net hiring picked up in October as businesses added 42,000 jobs, after two months of declines. Still, the gain was modest. ADP’s figures are based on anonymous data from the 26 million workers at its client companies.

    Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics company, estimated Thursday that the economy shed 9,000 jobs in October. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% last month.

    Even when the government was releasing data, economists and officials at the Federal Reserve weren’t sure how healthy the job market was or where it was headed next. A sharp drop in immigration and stepped-up deportations have helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by reducing the supply of workers. The economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

    Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has called in a “curious balance” because both the supply of and demand for workers has fallen.

    Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: Greater uncertainty from tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power AI is booming, elevated interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.

    “The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has left the economy looking better on paper than it feels to most Americans,” Swonk said.

    Younger Americans have borne the brunt of the hiring slowdown, but many older workers have also struggled.

    Suzanne Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago the Chicago resident also found work quickly — three months after she left a job, she had three offers. Now she’s been unemployed since April.

    She is worried that her age is a challenge, but isn’t letting it hold her back. “I got a job at 63, so I don’t see a reason to not get a job at 65,” she said.

    Like many job-hunters, she has been stunned by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by hiring software. She received one email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, though she never had an interview. Another company that never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about their interaction.

    Weak hiring has meant unemployment spells are getting longer, according to government data. More than one-quarter of those out of work have been unemployed for more than six months or longer, a figure that rose sharply in July and August and is up from 21% a year ago.

    Swonk said that such increases are unusual outside recessions.

    A rising number of the unemployed have also given up on their job searches, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That also holds down the unemployment rate because people who stop looking aren’t counted as unemployed.

    But Kaprive is still sticking with it — she’s taken classes about Amazon’s web services platform to boost her technology skills.

    “We can’t be narrow-minded in what we’re willing to take,” she said.

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  • Asian Shares Advance After Solid Earnings and Economic Reports Updates Lift Wall Street

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    BANGKOK (AP) — Shares bounced back Thursday in Asia after Wall Street got a boost from upbeat economic updates and a steady flow of quarterly reports from U.S. companies.

    U.S. futures were little changed and oil prices advanced.

    In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 gained 1.5% to 50,959.14.

    Shares in Nissan Motor Co. gained 1.3% after the company said it was selling its headquarters building in Yokohama to raise cash. Nissan was due to report its earnings later in the day.

    The Kospi in South Korea advanced 1.2% to 4,054.15 and Taiwan’s Taiex was up 0.7%.

    Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 1.6% to 26,361.40, while the Shanghai Composite index climbed 0.9% to 4,004.25.

    However, shares in autonomous driving companies Pony.ai and WeRide fell in their debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

    Pony.ai was down 13% while WeRide’s shares fell 13.7%.

    On Wednesday, U.S. stocks gained ground with broad gains, reversing the prior day’s dip. Much of the market’s push and pull came from the technology sector, where several companies with huge values have an outsized influence over the market.

    Google’s parent, Alphabet, jumped 2.4%, Broadcom rose 2%, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms rose 1.4%. They helped lead the way higher for the broader market. Their gains also helped counter losses from a few technology behemoths, including Nvidia and Microsoft.

    Overall The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to 6,796.29. The Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 0.5% to 47,311. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.6% to 23,499.80.

    Company earnings and forecasts were once again a big focus for Wall Street, with results coming from a broad spectrum of industries.

    McDonald’s rose 2.2% after reporting that its sales benefited from the return of its popular Snack Wraps in the third quarter. International Flavors & Fragrances jumped 4.1% after beating Wall Street’s latest quarterly profit forecasts.

    On the losing side, Taser maker Axon Enterprise slumped 9.4% after forecasting weaker profits than analysts were expecting. Live Nation Entertainment fell 10.6% after its latest results fell short of analysts’ forecasts.

    The latest round of earnings offers Wall Street a source of information on consumers, businesses and the economy that is otherwise lacking amid the government shutdown. Important monthly updates on inflation and employment have ceased, leaving investors, economists and the Federal Reserve without a fuller picture of the economy.

    There are still several informative private economic updates that Wall Street can review.

    A monthly report from ADP showed that private payrolls rose more than expected in October. The report offers a partial glimpse into the job market, which has been generally weakening and raising broader concerns about economic growth.

    A weaker job market remains a big concern for the Fed. The central bank cut its benchmark rate for the second time this year at its most recent meeting, in part to help bolster the economy amid a weakening job market. Lower interest rates can make a wide range of loans and credit less expensive, potentially promoting economic growth. But, lower rates can also add fuel to inflation, which could stunt economic growth.

    Fed Chair Jerome Powell and several other Fed officials have expressed concerns about more rate cuts, as inflation remains stubbornly above the central bank’s target of 2%. Consumer prices rose 3% in September.

    The mix of a weaker job market and hot inflation leaves the Fed in a tough position.

    The threat of tariffs also continues to hang over consumers and businesses. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, Canada and many other nations has been unpredictable, making it hard to measure the full impact of higher prices. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday about the legality of the sweeping tariffs.

    In other dealings early Thursday, U.S. benchmark crude gained 26 cents to $59.86 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, advanced 25 cents to $63.77 per barrel.

    The U.S. dollar fell to 153.85 Japanese yen from 154.11 yen. The euro rose to $1.1510 from $1.1494.

    AP Business Writer Damian J. Troise contributed.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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  • The AI Data Center Boom Is Warping the US Economy

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    The amount of capital pouring into AI data center projects is staggering. Last week, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon reported their 2025 capital expenditures would total roughly $370 billion, and they expect that number to keep rising in 2026. The biggest spender last quarter was Microsoft, which put nearly $35 billion into data centers and other investments, equivalent to 45 percent of its revenue.

    Rarely, if ever, has a single technology absorbed this much money this quickly. Warnings of an AI bubble are getting louder every day, but whether or not a crash eventually happens, the frenzy is already reshaping the US economy. Harvard economist Jason Furman estimates that investment in data centers and software processing technology accounted for nearly all of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

    Today, we’re looking at how data centers are impacting three crucial areas: public markets, jobs, and energy.

    Cashing Out

    The US stock market is booming, mostly thanks to AI. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns and 80 percent of earnings growth, according to JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest. The question now is whether that growth will be sustainable as tech firms continue spending heavily on AI infrastructure.

    At the start of this year, tech giants were financing their AI projects mostly with cash they had on hand. As financial journalist Derek Thompson pointed out, the ten largest US public companies kicked off 2025 with historically high free cash flow margins. In other words, their businesses were so profitable that they had billions of dollars sitting around to put towards Nvidia GPUs and data center buildouts.

    That trend has largely continued through 2025. Alphabet, for example, told investors last week that its capital expenditures this year would be as much as $93 billion, an increase from its previous estimate of $75 billion. But it also reported that revenue was up 33 percent year over year. Put another way, Silicon Valley is both spending more and earning more. That means everything is fine, right?

    Not exactly. For one thing, tech giants appear to be using accounting tricks to make their financials look rosier than they may really be in reality. A significant portion of AI investment flows to Nvidia, which releases new versions of its GPUs approximately every two years. But companies like Microsoft and Alphabet are currently estimating that their chips will last six years. If they need to upgrade sooner to stay competitive—a likely possibility—that could wind up eating into their profits and weaken their overall performance.

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  • Pope Leo Calls for ‘Deep Reflection’ About Treatment of Detained Migrants in the United States

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    VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV called for “deep reflection” in the United States about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”

    Leo underlined that scripture emphasizes the question that will be posed at the end of the world: “How did you receive the foreigner, did you receive him and welcome him, or not? I think there is a deep reflection that needs to be made about what is happening.”

    He said “the spiritual rights of people who have been detained should also be considered,’’ and he called on authorities to allow pastoral workers access to the detained migrants. “Many times they’ve been separated from their families. No one knows what’s happening, but their own spiritual needs should be attended to,” Leo said.

    Leo last month urged labor union leaders visiting from Chicago to advocate for immigrants and welcome minorities into their ranks.

    Asked about the lethal attacks on suspected drug traffickers off Venezuela, the pontiff said the military action was “increasing tension,’’ noting that they were coming even closer to the coastline.

    “The thing is to seek dialogue,’’ the pope said.

    On the Middle East, Leo acknowledged that the first phase of the peace accord between Israel and Hamas remains “very fragile,’’ and said that the parties need to find a way forward on future governance “and how you can guarantee the rights of all peoples.’’

    Asked about Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians i n the West Bank, the pope described the settlement issue as “complex,’’ adding: “Israel has said one thing, then it’s done another sometimes. We need to try to work together for justice for all peoples.’’

    Pope Leo will receive Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Vatican on Thursday. At the end of November he will make his first trip as Pope to Turkey and Lebanon.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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  • American Airlines announces cuts to management at its Texas headquarters

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    American Airlines has announced plans to cut a small number of management and support roles, mainly at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas

    American Airlines said Tuesday it will cut a “small” number of management and support roles, mostly at its Fort Worth headquarters, in an effort to recalibrate its workforce to match current needs.

    The company said in a statement that the layoffs “will help us optimize our performance and become even more efficient across the organization.” It also said it plans on investing in other areas that support its “long-term business objectives.”

    American did not disclose the number of jobs that will be affected by the cuts, and a company spokesperson declined to further comment.

    Airlines, including American, hired aggressively after the pandemic to meet a surge in travel demand as passengers returned to the skies. But that demand slowed earlier this year amid wider economic uncertainty, prompting major U.S. airlines to reduce their flight schedules and revise or withdraw their profit outlooks for the year.

    In September, Lufthansa Group said it would shed 4,000 jobs by 2030, most of them in Germany. Southwest Airlines announced earlier this year it was slashing 15% of its corporate workforce, its first major layoffs in 53 years.

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  • France threatens to block Shein over sale of childlike sex dolls ahead of Paris store opening

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    PARIS (AP) — French authorities have warned they may block access to Shein after it emerged that the online fast fashion giant had been selling sex dolls with a childlike appearance.

    France’s consumer watchdog, the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, said last week it had discovered the dolls on Shein’s website, noting that their descriptions and categorization left little doubt as to their child-pornographic nature.

    The agency has referred the case to public prosecutors, and Economy Minister Roland Lescure said on Monday he would seek to ban Shein from the French market if such incidents were to occur again.

    “This is provided for by law,” he said. “In cases involving terrorism, drug trafficking, or child pornographic materials, the government has the right to request that access to the French market be prohibited,” Lescure told BFM TV.

    The law authorizes French authorities to order online platforms to remove clearly illegal content such as child pornography within 24 hours. If they fail to comply, authorities can require internet service providers and search engines to block access and delist the site.

    The watchdog said it has issued a formal notice urging the platform to take urgent corrective measures.

    Shein said in a statement that it has banned all sex-doll products, and temporarily removed its adult products category for review. It added that it has launched an investigation to determine how these listings bypassed its screening measures.

    “The fight against child exploitation is non-negotiable for Shein,” said Executive Chairman Donald Tang said in the statement. “These were marketplace listings from third-party sellers, but I take this personally. Trust is our foundation, and we will not allow anything that violates it.”

    He noted that every related product has been removed and that “We are tracing the source and will take swift, decisive action against those responsible.”

    Meanwhile, a parliamentary fact-finding mission on the inspection of products imported into France announced it will summon Shein officials for questioning.

    “No economic actor can consider themselves above the law. A retailer who sold such an item would have had their store immediately closed by a prefectoral order. Shein must provide an explanation,” said the mission rapporteur, Antoine Vermorel-Marques.

    People protest outside BHV Marais departement store in Paris, Monday, Oct. 3, 2025, where Shein is due to open its first permanent physical store world wide. Poster right reads, “Shein is involved in child sexual abuse”. (AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga)

    Under French law, the distribution via electronic communication networks of child-pornographic materials is punishable by up to seven years in prison and a 100,000 euro ($115,000) fine.

    The watchdog also noted that Shein sells other pornographic products including adultlike sex dolls without effective age-filtering measures to prevent “minors or sensitive audiences from accessing such pornographic content.”

    Shein was founded in China in 2012, and the low-cost online retailer is now based in Singapore. Reaching customers mainly through its app, it has enjoyed a meteoric rise to become a global leader in fast fashion, shipping to 150 countries. The company has faced criticism over its labor practices and environmental record.

    Lescure’s comments came just days before Shein is due to open its first permanent physical store in Paris, located inside the BHV Marais department store in the heart of the French capital city. The opening has sparked controversy, with an online petition protesting Shein’s arrival gathering more than 100,000 signatures.

    Frederic Merlin, president of Societe des Grands Magasins, which owns BHV, called the sale of the dolls on Shein’s platform “indecent” and “unacceptable,” adding that “no product from Shein’s international marketplace” will be sold at the department store.

    Meanwhile, the child-protection NGO Mouv’Enfants staged a protest at BHV. “As long as these dolls are available somewhere in the world, the company will remain an accomplice to a system that enables sex crimes against children,” co-founder Arnaud Gallais said.

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  • Federal Reserve likely to cut key rate Wednesday and may signal another cut to follow

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve will almost certainly cut its key interest rate on Wednesday and could signal it expects another cut in December as the central bank seeks to bolster hiring.

    A cut Wednesday would be the second this year and could benefit consumers by bringing down borrowing costs for mortgages and auto loans. Since Fed chair Jerome Powell strongly signaled in late August that rate cuts were likely this year, the average 30-year mortgage rate has fallen to about 6.2% from 6.6%, providing a boost to the otherwise-sluggish housing market.

    Still, the Fed is navigating an unusual period for the U.S. economy and its future moves are harder to anticipate than is typically the case. Hiring has ground nearly to a halt, yet inflation remains elevated, and the economy’s mostly solid growth is heavily dependent on massive investment by leading tech companies in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

    The central bank is assessing these trends without most of the government data it uses to gauge the economy’s health. The release of September’s jobs report has been postponed because of the government shutdown. The White House said last week October’s inflation figure may not even be compiled.

    The shutdown itself may also crimp the economy in the coming months, depending on how long it lasts. Roughly 750,000 federal workers are nearing a month without pay, which could soon start weakening consumer spending, a critical driver of the economy.

    Federal workers laid off by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency efforts earlier this year may formally show up in jobs data if it is reported next month, which could make the monthly hiring data look even worse.

    Powell has said that the risk of weaker hiring is rising, which makes it as much of a concern as still-elevated inflation. As a result, the central bank needs to move its key rate closer to a level that would neither slow nor stimulate the economy.

    Most Fed officials view the current level of its key rate — 4.1% — as high enough to slow growth and cool inflation, which has been their main goal since price increases spiked to a four-decade high three years ago. The Fed is widely expected to reduce it to about 3.9% Wednesday. WIth job gains at risk, the goal is to move rates to a less-restrictive level.

    Kris Dawsey, head of economic research at D.E. Shaw, an investment bank, said that the lack of data during the shutdown means the Fed will likely stay on the path it sketched out in September, when it forecast cuts this month and in December.

    “Imagine you’re driving in a winter storm and suddenly lose visibility in whiteout conditions,” Dawsey said. “While you slow the car down, you’re going to continue going in the direction you were going versus making an abrupt change once you lose that visibility.”

    In recent remarks, the Fed chair has made clear that the sluggish job market has become a signficant concern.

    “The labor market has actually softened pretty considerably,” Powell said. “The downside risks to employment appear to have risen.”

    Before the government shutdown cut off the flow of data Oct. 1, monthly hiring gains had weakened to an average of just 29,000 a month for the previous three months. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.3% in August from 4.2% in July.

    Layoffs also remain low, however, leading Powell and other officials to refer to the “low-hire, low-fire” job market.

    At the same time, last week’s inflation report — released more than a week late because of the shutdown — showed that inflation remain elevated but isn’t accelerating and may not need higher rates to tame it.

    Yet a key question is how long the job market can remain in what Powell has described as a “curious kind of balance.”

    “There have been some worrisome data points in the last few months,” said Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at Santander, an investment bank. “Is that a weakening trend or are we just hitting an air pocket?”

    The uncertainty has prompted some top Fed officials to suggest that they may not necessarily support a cut at its next meeting in December. At its September meeting, the Fed signaled it would cut three times this year, though its policymaking committee is divided. Nine of 19 officials supported two or fewer reductions.

    Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s governing board and one of five people being considered by the Trump administration to replace Powell as Fed chair next year, said in a recent speech that while hiring data is weak, other figures suggest the economy is growing at a healthy pace.

    “So, something’s gotta give,” Waller said. “Either economic growth softens to match a soft labor market, or the labor market rebounds to match stronger economic growth.”

    Since it’s unclear how the contradiction will play out, Waller added, “we need to move with care when adjusting the policy rate.”

    Waller said he supported a quarter-point cut this month, “but beyond that point” it will depend on what the economic data says, assuming the shutdown ends.

    Financial markets have put the odds of another cut in December at above 90%, according to CME Fedwatch — and Fed officials have so far said little to defuse that expectation.

    Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS, said that he will look to see if Powell, at a news conference Wednesday, repeats his assertion that the risks of a weaker job market remain high.

    “If I hear that, I think they’re on track to lowering rates again in December,” he said.

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  • How Americans are feeling about their chances on the job market, according to an AP-NORC poll

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are growing increasingly concerned about their ability to find a good job under President Donald Trump, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds, in what is a potential warning sign for Republicans as a promised economic boom has given way to hiring freezes and elevated inflation.

    High prices for groceries, housing and health care persist as a fear for many households, while rising electricity bills and the cost of gas at the pump are also sources of anxiety, according to the survey.

    Some 47% of U.S. adults are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a good job if they wanted to, an increase from 37% when the question was last asked in October 2023.

    Electricity bills are a “major” source of stress for 36% of U.S. adults at a time when the expected build-out of data centers for artificial intelligence could further tax the power grid. Just more than one-half said the cost of groceries are a “major” source of financial stress, about 4 in 10 said the cost of housing and health care were a serious strain and about one-third said they were feeling high stress about gasoline prices.

    The survey suggests an ongoing vulnerability for Trump, who returned to the White House in January with claims he could quickly tame the inflation that surged after the pandemic during Democratic President Joe Biden’s term. Instead, Trump’s popularity on the economy has remained low amid a mix of tariffs, federal worker layoffs and partisan sniping that has culminated in a government shutdown.

    Linda Weavil, 76, voted for Trump last year because he “seems like a smart businessman.” But she said in an interview that the Republican’s tariffs have worsened inflation, citing the chocolate-covered pecans sold for her church group fundraiser that now cost more.

    “I think he’s doing a great job on a lot of things, but I’m afraid our coffee and chocolate prices have gone up because of tariffs,” the retiree from Greensboro, North Carolina, said. “That’s a kick in the back of the American people.”

    Ioan Barsan a recruiter with the Miami Dade School Police Dept. talks to a a job seeker during a job fair Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

    Voters changed presidents, but they’re not feeling better about Trump’s economy

    The poll found that 36% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a figure that has held steady this year after he imposed tariffs that caused broad economic uncertainty. Among Republicans, 71% feel positive about his economic leadership. Yet that approval within Trump’s own party is relatively low in ways that could be problematic for Republicans in next month’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and perhaps even in the 2026 midterm elections.

    At roughly the same point in Biden’s term, in October 2021, an AP-NORC poll found that 41% of U.S. adults approved of how he was handling the economy, including about 73% of Democrats. That overall number was a little higher than Trump’s, primarily because of independents — 29% approved of how Biden was handling the economy, compared with the 18% who currently support Trump’s approach.

    The job market was meaningfully stronger in terms of hiring during Biden’s presidency as the United States was recovering from pandemic-related lockdowns. But hiring has slowed sharply under Trump with monthly job gains averaging less than 27,000 after the April tariff announcements.

    People see that difference.

    Four years ago, 36% of those in the survey were “extremely” or “very” confident in their ability to get a good job, but that has fallen to 21% now.

    Biden’s approval on the economy steadily deteriorated through the middle of 2022 when inflation hit a four-decade high, creating an opening for Trump’s political comeback.

    President Donald Trump walks with Air Force Col. Christopher M. Robinson, Commander of the 89th Airlift Wing, from Marine One to board Air Force One, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., for a trip to Florida. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

    President Donald Trump walks with Air Force Col. Christopher M. Robinson, Commander of the 89th Airlift Wing, from Marine One to board Air Force One, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., for a trip to Florida. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

    Electricity costs are an emerging worry

    In some ways, Trump has made the inflation problems harder by choosing to cancel funding for renewable energy projects and imposing tariffs on the equipment needed for factories and power plants. Those added costs are coming before the anticipated construction of data centers for AI that could further push up prices without more construction.

    Even though 36% see electricity as a major concern, there are some who have yet to feel a serious financial squeeze. In the survey, 40% identified electricity costs as a “minor” stress, while 23% said their utility bills are “not a source” of stress.

    Kevin Halsey, 58, of Normal, Illinois, said his monthly electricity bills used to be $90 during the summer because he had solar panels, but have since jumped to $300. Halsey, who works in telecommunications, voted Democratic in last year’s presidential election and described the economy right now as “crap.”

    “I’ve got to be pessimistic,” he said. “I don’t see this as getting better.”

    At a fundamental level, Trump finds himself in the same economic dilemma that bedeviled Biden. There are signs the economy remains relatively solid with a low unemployment rate, stock market gains and decent economic growth, yet the public continues to be skeptical about the economy’s health.

    Some 68% of U.S. adults describe the U.S. economy these days as “poor,” while 32% say it’s “good.” That’s largely consistent with assessments of the economy over the past year.

    In addition, 59%, say their family finances are “holding steady.” But only 12% say they’re “getting ahead,” and 28% say they are “falling behind.”

    People see plenty of expenses but few opportunities

    The sense of economic precarity is coming from many different directions, with indications that many think middle-class stability is falling out of reach.

    The vast majority of U.S. adults feel at least “minor” stress about the cost of groceries, health care, housing, the amount they pay in taxes, what they are paid at work and the cost of gas for their cars.

    In the survey, 47%, say they are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could pay an unexpected medical expense while 52% have low confidence they will have enough saved for their retirement. Also, 63%, are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could buy a new home if they wanted to.

    Young adults are much less confident about their ability to buy a house, though confidence is not especially high across the board. About 8 in 10 U.S. adults under age 30 say they are “not very confident” or “not at all confident” they would be able to buy a house, compared with about 6 in 10 adults 60 and older.

    For 54% of U.S. adults, the cost of groceries is a “major source” of stress in their life right now.

    Unique Hopkins, 36, of Youngstown, Ohio, said she is now working two jobs after her teenage daughter had a baby, leaving Hopkins with a sense that she can barely tread water as part of the “working poor.” She voted for Trump in 2016, only to switch to Democrats after she felt his ego kept him from uniting the country and solving problems.

    “It’s his way or no way,” she said. “Nobody is going to unite with Trump if it’s all about you, you, you.”

    ___

    The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Oct. 9-13, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

    ___

    This story has been corrected to reflect that the name of the NORC Center is NORC Center for Public Research, not Public Affairs.

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  • Federal Reserve cuts key rate yet Powell says future reductions are not locked in

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate Wednesday for a second time this year as it seeks to shore up economic growth and hiring, even as inflation stays elevated.

    But Fed Chair Jerome Powell also cautioned that further rate cuts weren’t guaranteed, citing the government shutdown’s interruption of economic reports and sharp divisions among 19 Fed officials who participate in the central bank’s interest-rate deliberations.

    Speaking to reporters after the Fed announced its rate decision, Powell said there were “strongly differing views about how to proceed in December” at its next meeting and a further reduction in the benchmark rate is not “a foregone conclusion — far from it.”

    The rate cut — a quarter of a point — brings the Fed’s key rate down to about 3.9%, from about 4.1%. The central bank had cranked its rate to roughly 5.3% in 2023 and 2024 to combat the biggest inflation spike in four decades before implementing three cuts last year. Lower rates could, over time, reduce borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards, as well as for business loans.

    The move comes amid a fraught time for the central bank, with hiring sluggish and yet inflation stuck above the Fed’s 2% target. Compounding its challenges, the central bank is navigating without the economic signposts it typically relies on from the government, including monthly reports on jobs, inflation, and consumer spending, which have been suspended because of the government shutdown.

    Financial markets largely expected another rate reduction in December, and stock prices dropped after Powell’s comments, with the S&P 500 nearly unchanged and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing slightly lower.

    “Powell poured cold water on the idea that the Fed was on autopilot for a December cut,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of U.S. rates strategy at TD Securities. “Instead, they’ll have to wait for economic data to confirm that a rate cut is actually needed.”

    Powell was asked about the impact of the government shutdown, which began on Oct. 1 and has interrupted the distribution of economic data. Powell said the Fed does have access to some data that give it “a picture of what’s going on.” He added that, “If there were a significant or material change in the economy, one way or another, I think we’d pick that up through this.”

    But the Fed chair did acknowledge that the limited data could cause officials to proceed more cautiously heading into its next meeting in mid-December.

    “There’s a possibility that it would make sense to be more cautious about moving (on rates). I’m not committing to that, I’m just saying it’s certainly a possibility that you would say ‘we really can’t see, so let’s slow down.’”

    The Fed typically raises its short term rate to combat inflation, while it cuts rates to encourage borrowing and spending and shore up hiring. Right now it sees risks of both slowing hiring and rising inflation, so it is reducing borrowing costs to support the job market, while still keeping rates high enough to avoid stimulating the economy so much that it worsens inflation.

    Yet Powell suggested the Fed increasingly sees inflation as less of a threat. He noted that excluding the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, inflation is “not so far from our 2% goal.” Inflation has slowed in apartment rents and for many services, such as car insurance. A report released last week showed that inflation remains elevated but isn’t accelerating.

    The government recalled employees to produce the report, despite the shutdown, because it was used to calculate the cost of living adjustment for Social Security.

    At the same time, the economy could be rebounding from a sluggish first half, which could improve job growth in the coming months, Powell said. That would make rate cuts less necessary.

    “For some part of the committee, it’s time to maybe take a step back and see if whether there really are downside risks to the labor market,” Powell said. “Or see whether in fact that the stronger growth that we’re seeing is real.”

    Two of the 12 officials who vote on the Fed’s rate decisions dissented Wednesday, but in different directions. Jeffrey Schmid, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, voted against the move because he preferred no change to the Fed’s rate. Schmid has previously expressed concern that inflation remains too high.

    Fed governor Stephen Miran dissented for the second straight meeting in favor of a half-point cut. Miran was appointed by President Donald Trump just before the central bank’s last meeting in September.

    Trump has repeatedly attacked Powell for not reducing borrowing costs more quickly. In South Korea early Wednesday he repeated his criticisms of the Fed chair.

    “He’s out of there in another couple of months,” Trump said. Powell’s term ends in May. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the administration is considering five people to replace Powell, and will decide by the end of this year.

    The Fed also said Wednesday that it would stop reducing the size of its massive securities holdings, which it accumulated during the pandemic and after the 2008-2009 Great Recession. The change, to take effect Dec. 1, could over time slightly reduce longer-term interest rates on things like mortgages but won’t have much overall impact on consumer borrowing costs.

    Without government data, the economy is harder to track, Powell said. September’s jobs report, scheduled to be released three weeks ago, is still postponed. This month’s hiring figures, to be released Nov. 7, will likely be delayed and may be less comprehensive when finally released. And the White House said last week that October’s inflation report may never be issued at all.

    Before the government shutdown cut off the flow of data, monthly hiring gains had weakened to an average of just 29,000 a month for the previous three months, according to the Labor Department’s data. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.3% in August from 4.2% in July.

    More recently, several large corporations have announced sweeping layoffs, including UPS, Amazon, and Target, which threatens to boost the unemployment rate if it continues. Powell said the Fed is watching the layoff announcements “very carefully.”

    ___

    Associated Press Writer Alex Veiga in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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  • Layoffs are piling up, raising worker anxiety. Here are some companies that have cut jobs recently

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    NEW YORK (AP) — It’s a tough time for the job market.

    Amid wider economic uncertainty, some analysts have said that businesses are at a “no-hire, no fire” standstill. That’s caused many to limit new work to only a few specific roles, if not pause openings entirely. At the same time, some sizeable layoffs have continued to pile up — raising worker anxieties across sectors.

    Some companies have pointed to rising operational costs spanning from President Donald Trump’s barrage of new tariffs and shifts in consumer spending. Others cite corporate restructuring more broadly — or, as seen with big names like Amazon, are redirecting money to artificial intelligence.

    Federal employees have encountered additional doses of uncertainty, impacting worker sentiment around the job market overall. Shortly after Trump returned to office at the start of the year, federal jobs were cut by the thousands. And many workers are now going without pay as the U.S. government shutdown nears its fourth week.

    “A lot of people are looking around, scanning the job environment, scanning the opportunities that are available to them — whether it’s in the public or private sector,” said Jason Schloetzer, professor business administration at Georgetown University’s McDonough School. “And I think there’s a question mark around the long-term stability everywhere.”

    Government hiring data is on hold during the shutdown, but earlier this month a survey by payroll company ADP showed that the private sector lost 32,000 jobs in September.

    Here are some companies that have moved to cut jobs recently.

    General Motors

    General Motors moved to lay off about 1,700 workers across manufacturing sites in Michigan and Ohio on Wednesday, as the auto giant adjusts to slowing demand for electric vehicles.

    Hundreds of additional employees are reportedly slated for “temporary layoffs.” And GM has recently moved to downsize other parts of its workforce, too — including 200 layoffs mostly impacting engineers in Detroit, and other 300 job cuts at a Georgia IT Innovation Center, which it is also shuttering.

    Paramount

    In long-awaited cuts just months after completing its $8 billion merger with Skydance, Paramount is going to lay off about 2,000 employees — about 10% of its workforce.

    Paramount initiated roughly 1,000 of those layoffs on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The rest of the cuts will be made at a later date.

    Amazon

    Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence.

    Amazon said Tuesday that it will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, close to 4% of its workforce, as the online retail giant ramps up spending on AI while trimming costs elsewhere. A letter to employees said most workers would be given 90 days to look for a new position internally.

    CEO Andy Jassy previously said he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the coming years. And he has worked to aggressively cut costs overall since 2021.

    UPS

    United Parcel Service has disclosed about 48,000 job cuts this year as part of turnaround efforts, which arrive amid wider shifts in the company’s shipping outputs.

    In a Tuesday regulatory filing, UPS said it’s cut about 34,000 operational positions — and the company announced another 14,000 role reductions, mostly within management. Combined, that’s much higher than the roughly 20,000 cuts UPS forecast earlier this year.

    Target

    Last week, Target that it would eliminate about 1,800 corporate positions, or about 8% of its corporate workforce globally.

    Target said the cuts were part of wider streamlining efforts — with Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke noting that “too many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions.” The retailer is also looking to rebuild its customer base. Target reported flat or declining comparable sales in nine of the past eleven quarters.

    Nestlé

    In mid-October, Nestlé said it would be cutting 16,000 jobs globally — as part of wider cost cutting aimed at reviving its financial performance.

    The Swiss food giant said the layoffs would take place over the next two years. The cuts arrive as Nestlé and others face headwinds like rising commodity costs and U.S. imposed tariffs. The company announced price hikes over the summer to offset higher coffee and cocoa costs.

    Lufthansa Group

    In September, Lufthansa Group said it would shed 4,000 jobs by 2030 — pointing to the adoption of artificial intelligence, digitalization and consolidating work among member airlines.

    Most of the lost jobs would be in Germany, and the focus would be on administrative rather than operational roles, the company said. The layoff plans arrived even as the company reported strong demand for air travel and predicted stronger profits in years ahead.

    Novo Nordisk

    Also in September, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it would cut 9,000 jobs, about 11% of its workforce.

    Novo Nordisk — which makes drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy — said the layoffs were part of wider restructuring as the company works to sell more obesity and diabetes medications amid rising competition.

    ConocoPhillips

    Oil giant ConocoPhillips has said it plans to lay off up to a quarter of its workforce, as part of broader efforts from the company to cut costs.

    A spokesperson for ConocoPhillips confirmed the layoffs on Sept. 3, noting that 20% to 25% of the company’s employees and contractors would be impacted worldwide. At the time, ConocoPhillips had a total headcount of about 13,000 — or between 2,600 and 3,250 workers. Most reductions were expected to take place before the end of 2025.

    Intel

    Intel has moved to shed thousands of jobs — with the struggling chipmaker working to revive its business as it lags behind rivals like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

    In a July memo to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel expected to end the year with 75,000 “core” workers, excluding subsidiaries, through layoffs and attrition. That’s down from 99,500 core employees reported the end of last year. The company previously announced a 15% workforce reduction.

    Microsoft

    In May, Microsoft began began laying off about 6,000 workers across its workforce. And just months later, the tech giant said it would be cutting 9,000 positions — marking its biggest round of layoffs seen in more than two years.

    The latest job cuts hit Microsoft’s Xbox video game business and other divisions. The company has cited “organizational changes,” with many executives characterizing the layoffs as part of a push to trim management layers. But the labor reductions also arrive as the company spends heavily on AI.

    Procter & Gamble

    In June, Procter & Gamble said it would cut up to 7,000 jobs over the next two years, 6% of the company’s global workforce.

    The maker of Tide detergent and Pampers diapers said the cuts were part of a wider restructuring — also arriving amid tariff pressures. In July, P&G said it would hike prices on about a quarter of its products due to the newly-imposed import taxes, although it’s since said it expects to take less of a hit than previously anticipated for the 2026 fiscal year.

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  • Lawsuit Seeks to Overturn Dallas Ordinances Plaintiffs Say Violate Law Banning Progressive Policies

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    Two years after state lawmakers passed a sweeping law aimed at preventing Texas cities from adopting progressive policies, that law may finally get its first major test.

    Three Dallas residents sued the city in Denton County District Court Wednesday to strike down dozens of local ordinances they allege violate the law, dubbed the “Death Star” law by opponents. The law made it illegal for cities and counties to enact local laws that go further than certain broad areas of state law.

    “Cities don’t get to pick and choose which state laws they follow,” said Matthew Chiarizio, a senior attorney for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the influential conservative think tank, who is representing the plaintiffs. “For too long, Dallas has piled unnecessary and duplicative regulations on its citizens. The Legislature has rightly preempted those rules, and this lawsuit is about protecting Texans’ freedom to live and work without being smothered by layers of needless local regulation.”

    A representative for the city of Dallas declined to comment, citing litigation.

    Some 83 ordinances could be wiped out if a judge sides with the plaintiffs. Among them are a slew of local protections for LGBTQ+ people, rules that city contractors pay employees a living wage and noise regulations for public parks and recreational facilities.

    Dallas officials could also be prevented from regulating ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft that operate at Dallas Love Field Airport, valet parking services and gas drilling and production within city limits.

    State lawmakers passed the legislation in 2023. Gov. Greg Abbott, GOP legislators and business groups had long sought such a measure, which they said was necessary to undo a “patchwork” of local regulations across the state they say burden businesses and hamper the state’s economic growth. The bill’s passage also marked the culmination of Republican lawmakers’ attempts over the last decade to undercut the state’s largest urban areas, often governed by Democrats.

    Critics of the bill countered it would prevent cities and counties from enacting protections for its residents, including water breaks for construction workers and noise regulations.

    Houston, San Antonio and El Paso sued to block the law a month after it passed. A Travis County judge ruled the law unconstitutional in 2023. In July, the Third Court of Appeals overturned that decision and cleared the way for the Dallas lawsuit.

    This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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    Associated Press

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  • “I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy

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    “Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar.

    Courtesy of Astra House

    Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he’s now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in Low Places, are more about his internal life, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering background of China’s economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu’s minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.

    When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frantic energy of parcel sorting do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Yet other elements, like the punishing precarity, the ways profit pressures twist work relationships, or the mundane angst of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu’s direct writing style lays bare how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, are similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.

    Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed writer, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.

    Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?

    Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn’t happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or doing the night shift sorting parcels in Guangdong, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, that was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for ceasing operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we’d already finished delivering all the goods.

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    Xiaowei R. Wang

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  • Casa Bonita actors, cliff divers launch strike during Halloween

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    There will be no cliff divers entertaining guests at Casa Bonita on Halloween as the restaurant’s cast of performers initiates a three-day strike.

    On Wednesday, the Actors’ Equity Association announced that Casa Bonita’s divers, magicians, roving actors and other unionized performers would picket outside the pink palace, at 6715 W. Colfax Ave. in Lakewood, following unsuccessful efforts to bargain their first contract. The strike is scheduled to take place on Oct. 30 through Nov. 1 from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

    Casa Bonita workers voted to unionize in November 2024 as they sought better pay and to establish workplace protections. The restaurant and entertainment venue is a beloved historic landmark and in 2023, reopened under the ownership of locally raised celebrities Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The creators of the “South Park” TV show reportedly spent $40 million reviving the restaurant after purchasing it out of bankruptcy.

    Casa Bonita serves thousands of diners each week and actors previously told The Denver Post there have been numerous incidents involving guests that had staff concerned for their safety.

    The bargaining unit of 57 people has been engaged in negotiations since April, according to the Actors’ Equity Association, and last month, it filed an unfair labor practices charge after performers’ hours were cut to accommodate a Halloween pop-up event.

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    Tiney Ricciardi

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  • Meta shares slide after company projects higher expenses for 2026

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    Meta’s stock slid in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the tech giant posted strong third-quarter results but warned that its expenses will be significantly higher in 2026 than this year.

    Like its rivals, Meta Platforms Inc. has been on an artificial intelligence spending spree and said its costs will grow much faster next year, driven by infrastructure costs and employee compensation as it has hired AI experts at eye-popping compensation levels.

    “Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in priority areas,” Meta said.

    Menlo Park, California-based Meta Platforms Inc. earned $2.71 billion, or $1.05 per share, in the July-September period. Excluding tax-related special expenses, the company would have earned $7.25. Revenue rose 26% to $51.42 billion from $40.59 billion.

    Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $6.72 per share on revenue of $49.51 billion, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet Research.

    Meta’s daily active user base on its apps — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads — was 3.54 billion on average for September, up 8% year-over-year.

    For the current quarter, Meta is forecasting revenue in the range of $56 billion to $59 billion. Analysts are forecasting $57.36 billion for the October-December quarter.

    Despite the stock drop, analysts were less concerned about Meta’s spending spree than shareholders appeared to be.

    “For Meta, advertising is the foundation; AI is the growth engine,” said Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights. “There’s a lot of focus on Meta’s capital expenditures related to AI, which is completely warranted. The spending is absolutely massive. But with 26% growth in revenue in Q3, it’s clear that what Meta is doing to integrate AI into its ad products is working.”

    Andrew Rocco, stock strategist at Zacks Investment Research, said “the quarter was not terrible, and forward statements continue to be positive. Most importantly, management confirmed that they expect ad revenue to remain strong.”

    Meta also cautioned that it is facing a slew of legal and regulatory issues in the U.S. and the European Union that could hurt its bottom line.

    “In the U.S., a number of youth-related trials are scheduled for 2026, and may ultimately result in a material loss,” the company said.

    In the U.S., Meta is facing an antitrust case that’s now awaiting a judge’s decision and could force the company to break off WhatsApp and Instagram, startups Meta bought more than a decade ago that have since grown into social media powerhouses.

    Meta’s shares fell $57.67, or 7.7%, to $694 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed up slightly at $751.67.

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