FTX's bankruptcy is "one of costliest Chapter 11 cases in US history," with fees to 12 different firms working on it hitting $950 million, Bloomberg reports. For creditors affected by the crypto exchange's 2022 implosion, the wait won't be in vain: Most of them should be repaid 118% of their losses. FTX's poor record-keeping and lack of corporate governance contributed to the unwieldy cost, but it still pales in comparison with Lehman Brothers' $6 billion bankruptcy case.
The American labor market is in an interesting spot. Unemployment has been ~4% for more than 3 years.
However, hiring rates have slowed to levels we haven't seen since The Great Recession when unemployment was twice as high (!!) which is why things feel off.
Two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time.
It just hasn’t made sense. We’ve seen countless posts from job seekers struggling to land opportunities—despite some of the lowest unemployment rates in decades. What was wrong with these people?
Honestly, nothing. They’ve been caught in the “Big Freeze.”
An eye-opening article from The Atlantic sheds light on what’s really happening beyond the headlines.
According to The Atlantic, we’re experiencing the “Big Freeze” in the Labor Market. Despite a low unemployment rate (~4%), hiring has slowed to levels last seen during the Great Recession. Workers are staying put, and employers are hesitant to hire—particularly in white-collar industries.
Companies, still scarred from the hiring chaos of 2021-2022, have become much more cautious, leading to reduced job mobility.
Trends Over the Next 12-18 Months:
🔹 Hiring Slowdown Until Late 2025 – Economic uncertainty, high interest rates, and inflation concerns will keep hiring sluggish.
🔹 Sectoral Job Growth Disparities – Healthcare and government jobs will grow, while professional services, finance, and tech may continue to struggle.
🔹 Worker Dissatisfaction & Wage Stagnation – Fewer job-switching opportunities will slow wage growth and increase job dissatisfaction.
🔹 Political & Policy-Driven Market Shifts – Uncertainty around trade policies and federal programs may delay hiring until late 2025.
🔹 Potential Recovery if Confidence Improves – If inflation stabilizes and businesses gain clarity post-election, hiring could rebound by late 2025.
For Job Seekers: Don’t Lose Hope! 💡
If you’re struggling to land a job, remember, you’re not alone—but this won’t last forever. The hiring slowdown is about uncertainty, not a lack of talent.
Companies are being cautious, but once inflation stabilizes and the election dust settles, hiring should pick up again.
In the meantime:
✅ Network strategically – Connect with industry professionals and recruiters.
✅ Upskill – Invest in certifications and skills that set you apart.
✅ Stay resilient – The job market will thaw, and those who stay prepared will be the first to seize new opportunities.
🔜 Brighter days are ahead! Keep pushing forward. 💪
Nvidia’s quarterly results signal the AI boom is still booming. Demand remained strong for its chips that power artificial intelligence infrastructure, with sales surging 78% from a year ago to $39.3 billion, a quarterly record. Projected sales are set to rise to $43 billion this quarter. The robust forecast comes as DeepSeek’s low-cost AI model sowed doubts about the necessity for high-end chips. But U.S. tech giants are undeterred, planning to boost AI spending to $300 billion in 2025.
- The company has started shipping its next-generation chips, known as Blackwell, with CEO Jensen Huang describing demand as "amazing." The chips contributed $11 billion in revenue last quarter.
- With a market valuation of $3.2 trillion, Nvidia stands as the world's second most valuable company, behind only Apple.
travel this year is the most expensive it's ever been: the average cost of a trip is $8,306—more than double what we saw in 2019, according to Florida-based travel insurance comparison engine Squaremouth.
The spike is caused by a mix of higher hotel rates, pricey flights, and inflation, but the demand is still high, with 40% of travelers using this break to check off destinations they've had in mind for a long time.
Demand for places like Mexico, Italy, the Bahamas and Japan—an outlier for this spring break season—is driving up the prices. Trips to Japan in March are actually averaging almost $10K!
If you’re looking to save, it's not too late: Travel the first two weeks of March, and consider short-term rentals instead of hotels, where there is more availability. Most of all, skip the most crowded destinations.
Eli Lilly will spend at least $27 billion to build four manufacturing plants in the U.S. to move production back to America. Three of the sites will make active ingredients for drugs, while another facility will boost production for Lilly’s injectable drugs. The Trump administration recently warned drug companies that don’t reshore operations could face tariffs. The new plants, which will create more than 3,000 jobs, will be built over the next five years.
Slack, the workplace messaging platform, experienced an outage Wednesday that disrupted communication for thousands of users. The company said it was "looking into the cause of the issue and working on restoring functionality," according to a status update at 2:05 p.m. EST. As many as 3,000 users reported problems accessing the platform at the peak of the outage, based on data collected by DownDetector. Owned by Salesforce, Slack says it's used by more than 100,000 organizations.
YouTube has surpassed Spotify as the top U.S. podcast platform, attracting more than a billion viewers a month to its video format, according to Bloomberg. After seeing a surge in popularity during the pandemic, YouTube strengthened its efforts, helping podcasters enroll in advertising services and promoting more content to users. In 2022, a time when Spotify was scaling back podcast investments, YouTube also started paying podcasters up to $300,000 to publish videos.
The Trump administration said it is eliminating more than 90% of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall U.S. assistance around the world, putting numbers on its plans to eliminate the majority of U.S. development and humanitarian help abroad.
The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAID projects for advocates to try to save in what are ongoing court battles with the administration.
The Trump administration outlined its plans in both an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press and filings in one of those federal lawsuits Wednesday.
The Supreme Court intervened in that case late Wednesday and temporarily blocked a court order requiring the administration to release billions of dollars in foreign aid by midnight.
Wednesday’s disclosures also give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from U.S. aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of U.S. policy that foreign aid helps U.S. interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.
The memo said officials were “clearing significant waste stemming from decades of institutional drift.” More changes are planned in how USAID and the State Department deliver foreign assistance, it said, “to use taxpayer dollars wisely to advance American interests.”
President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAID projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money.
Trump on Jan. 20 ordered what he said would be a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue, and cut off all foreign assistance funds almost overnight.
The funding freeze has stopped thousands of U.S.-funded programs abroad, and the administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams have pulled the majority of USAID staff off the job through forced leave and firings.
Widely successful USAID programs credited with containing outbreaks of Ebola and other threats and saving more than 20 million lives in Africa through HIV and AIDS treatment are among those still cut off from agency funds, USAID officials and officials with partner organizations say. Meanwhile, formal notifications of program cancellations are rolling out.
In the federal court filings Wednesday, nonprofits owed money on contracts with USAID describe both Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s teams terminating USAID’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review, they say.
“‘There are MANY more terminations coming, so please gear up!’'' a USAID official wrote staff Monday, in an email quoted by lawyers for the nonprofits in the filings.
The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, called the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with the order to lift the funding freeze temporarily.
So did a Democratic lawmaker.
The administration was attempting to “blow through Congress and the courts by announcing the completion of their sham ‘review’ of foreign aid and the immediate termination of thousands of aid programs all over the world,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A coalition representing major U.S. and global businesses and nongovernmental organizations and former officials expressed shock at the move. “The American people deserve a transparent accounting of what will be lost — on counterterror, global health, food security, and competition,” the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition said.
The State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had reviewed the terminations.
In all, the Trump administration said it will eliminate 5,800 of 6,200 multiyear USAID contract awards, for a cut of $54 billion. Another 4,100 of 9,100 State Department grants were being eliminated, for a cut of $4.4 billion.
The State Department memo, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, described the administration as spurred by a federal court order that gave officials until the end of the day Wednesday to lift the Trump administration’s monthlong block on foreign aid funding.
“In response, State and USAID moved rapidly,” targeting USAID and State Department foreign aid programs in vast numbers for contract terminations, the memo said.
After repeated warnings from the federal judge in the case, Trump administration officials also said Wednesday they were finally beginning to send out their first or any payments after more than a month with no known spending. Officials were processing a few million dollars of back payments, officials said, owed to U.S. and international organizations and companies.
However, U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s order to unfreeze billions of dollars by midnight Wednesday will remain on hold until the Supreme Court has a chance to weigh in more fully, according to the brief order signed by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Ali had ordered the federal government to comply with his decision temporarily blocking a freeze on foreign aid, ruling in a lawsuit filed by nonprofit groups and businesses. An appellate panel refused the administration’s request to intervene before the high court weighed in.
The plaintiffs have until noon Friday to respond, Roberts said.
The administration has filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in one other case so far, arguing that a lower court was wrong to reinstate the head of a federal watchdog agency after Trump fired him.