Talk of the Town
(NEW YORK) — Tech giant Amazon said on Wednesday it planned to cut about 16,000 employees as it seeks to “strengthen” its business by reducing “layers” and “bureaucracy” within its workforce.
“The reductions we are making today will impact approximately 16,000 roles across Amazon, and we’re again working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted,” Beth Galetti, a senior vice president, said in an email to staff, according to the company.
Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
(NEW YORK) — Employers hired far more workers than expected in September, defying a sharp slowdown over the summer that appeared to cool off the labor market.
The U.S. added 119,000 jobs in September, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure marked an acceleration from 22,000 jobs added in the previous month, and it exceeded an average of nearly 100,000 jobs added per month over the first half of 2025.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, but it remained at a historically low level.
A stock market selloff over recent days underscored the uncertainty looming over the economy as some investors warned of an AI bubble. Blockbuster earnings unveiled by chip giant Nvidia late Wednesday, however, appeared to defy such concerns.
Still, mass layoffs at corporate giants like Amazon, UPS and Verizon in recent weeks have drawn attention to a sluggish labor market — and stoked fears that job losses may spread.
It is likely too early to panic, however, some economists previously told ABC News. While the layoffs reflect a weakened labor market and AI adoption in some corners of the tech industry, they added, the prospect of wider job losses remains highly uncertain.
Inflation has picked up in recent months while hiring has slowed, posing a risk of an economic double-whammy known as “stagflation.”
Those economic conditions have put the Federal Reserve in a bind, since the central bank must balance a dual mandate to keep inflation under control and maximize employment.
“We have the situation where the risks are to the upside for inflation and to the downside for employment. We have one tool,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., last month. “You can’t address both of those at once.”
Still, Powell said, concern has tilted toward strain in the labor market, prompting the central bank to reduce interest rates a quarter of a percentage point at each of its last two meetings.
“A further reduction of the policy rate in December is not a foregone conclusion — in fact, far from it,” Powell told reporters.
Traders peg the chances interest rates will be left unchanged next month at about 66%, while the odds of a quarter-point rate cut stand at 33%, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said it would not release a full jobs report for the month of October due to lost capacity during the shutdown. Rather, partial jobs data for October will be released as part of the November report, the BLS said.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
(NEW YORK) — Financial results to be released on Wednesday by chipmaking-giant Nvidia will be closely watched as a bellwether for the stock market and the overall economy, which have both come to rely on massive spending on artificial intelligence to propel continued growth.
The latest test for the world’s most valuable company arrives at a fraught moment for markets, which have fallen for four consecutive days over fears of an AI bubble. Nvidia, which makes many of the chips fueling AI products, has suffered a decline of more than 10% over the past two weeks.
As big-tech names spend hundreds of billions on chips and data centers necessary for the energy-intensive technology, the financial benefits remain uncertain. The earnings reported by Nvidia will gauge demand for a key building block of AI, showing whether appetite for the technology remains at a fever pitch.
The results hold major stakes for the U.S. economy, which has shown signs of strain in recent months as hiring has slowed and consumer sentiment has dampened.
The AI spending boom, a lone bright spot, added a 0.5 percentage point boost to annualized gross domestic product growth over the first half of 2025, accounting for about one-third of economic activity, Pantheon Macroeconomics found.
“There is one company in the world that is the foundation for the AI Revolution,” Dan Ives, a managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush, told ABC News in a statement, referring to Nvidia.
Fears of an AI bubble surfaced over the summer ahead of Nvidia’s previous earnings report, but the California-based company defied naysayers.
Nvidia recorded $46.7 billion in sales over three months ending in July, which exceeded analyst expectations of $46.2 billion. The jump in revenue marked 56% growth compared to the same quarter a year earlier.
The company boasts a market cap of $4.5 trillion, making it roughly equivalent to the GDP of Japan or Germany. The company has expanded at a breakneck pace since an AI craze set off by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. The California-based company saw its stock price soar nearly 700% over the ensuing two years.
Alongside continued growth, the company is weathering new challenges. President Donald Trump barred the sale of chips to China earlier this year, before revoking the ban in July. A month later, Trump struck an agreement with Nvidia and its competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that allowed the companies to sell chips in China if they hand over 15% of revenue generated by the exports to the U.S.
Speaking at the White House in August, the president recounted the agreement.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release,'” Trump said.
Earnings released in August said Nvidia did not sell any of its H20 chips in China over the most recent quarter, but the firm did not mention any losses related to the policy. The H20 chip was specifically designed for sale to China.
In recent days, Nvidia announced a large investment in AI, signaling confidence in the outlook of the technology. Nvidia on Tuesday announced a multi-billion dollar partnership with two of its largest counterparts in AI: Microsoft and Anthropic.
Under the terms of the deal, Nvidia and Microsoft agreed to invest $15 billion in Anthropic, a top developer of AI models. Anthropic, meanwhile, vowed to purchase $30 billion of computing infrastructure operated by Microsoft Azure on Nvidia systems.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the opportunity for U.S. companies to extract and sell oil from Venezuela, which holds the largest oil reserves in the world.
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump said on Saturday, just hours after a U.S. military attack removed Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro.
Venezuelan oil, however, will likely provide little relief for gas prices paid by Americans over the coming months, analysts told ABC News. They cited the relatively small amount of oil at stake in the near term and the glut of crude already flooding global markets.
A more substantial amount of oil could be accessed over the coming years, leading to a potentially noticeable decline in prices at the pump, they added. But that outcome remains uncertain, since oil companies face significant political and logistical hurdles in Venezuela, while wider market conditions could shift in the meantime.
“I would not expect to see a sharp drop because of this event,” Richard Joswick, head of near-term oil analysis at S&P Global Commodity Insights, told ABC News.
Oil executives are set to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday to discuss investments in Venezuela, a White House official confirmed to ABC News.
Venezuela boasts the biggest proven oil reserve of any country, amounting to roughly 303 billion barrels or about 17% of the world’s reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, a federal agency.
For decades, however, the nation has struggled to match those holdings with similarly stratospheric output due to lackluster infrastructure and government mismanagement.
Venezuela exported about 749,000 barrels per day last year, totaling less than 1% of global supply, according to data and analytics company Kpler.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump said Venezuela would hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., which in turn would sell them at their market price. The resulting funds — as much as $2.8 billion at current prices — will “benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States,” Trump said.
Trump has not provided details about the timing of such sales.
The plan proposed Tuesday would likely have little or no effect on U.S. gasoline prices, analysts told ABC News. The amount of oil stipulated by Trump is relatively small, making up the equivalent of between one-third and half of the oil consumed worldwide in a single day, according to data compiled by the EIA.
“Short term, I don’t think we’ll see much of an impact,” Tucker Balch, a finance professor at Emory University, told ABC News. “It’s not a lot of oil right now.”
Even more, oil prices are hovering near their lowest levels since 2021, meaning it will prove difficult to bring prices down further anytime soon, analysts added. Low oil prices stem from a glut of oil alongside relatively slow global economic growth, which has constricted demand for fossil fuels.
“There’s an oversupply and weak demand. More crude won’t make a big difference in the overall price,” Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston, told ABC News.
After the military operation, Trump outlined a long-term role for U.S. oil companies in Venezuela, saying the firms would spend money to improve the nation’s infrastructure and output.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said during a press conference on Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
A U.S.-led effort to extract and sell the massive Venezuelan oil reserves could inject a substantial amount of oil into global markets and noticeably reduce gasoline prices, some analysts said.
Venezuelan oil production topped out at 3.5 million barrels per day in the 1990s, Kpler said. A return to that output would amount to about 4% of global oil supply, S&P’s Joswick, adding that the influx could push down gasoline prices.
“Prices are set on the margin and small imbalances in volume can lead to large shifts in prices,” Joswick said.
A long-term venture would encounter challenges, however, some analysts said.
The infrastructure necessary to ramp up oil production would require tens of billions of dollars of investment over several years, while oil companies involved in the effort would face political risks, according to analysts.
Chevron is currently the only U.S. oil firm operating in Venezuela, as part of a joint venture with the country’s state-owned oil outfit.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips stopped doing business in Venezuela in 2007, after former President Hugo Chavez nationalized the sector. Citing the unlawful seizure of assets belonging to the two oil giants, the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment ordered Venezuela to pay the firms billions of dollars. Venezuela has only paid a small share of the debt it owes to ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
The policy approach in Venezuela is uncertain over the coming years, while the same goes for the U.S. as a presidential election approaches in 2028, Krishnamoorti said.
“It’s unlikely the oil companies are going to take the bait to go after some significantly difficult oil to produce in a very uncertain U.S. policy and global policy situation,” Krishnamoorti added.
Joswick noted, however, that possible success in accessing Venezuelan oil over the next few years could be a “big incentive for the continuation of similar policies.”
While touting potential U.S. oil interests in Venezuela, the Trump administration has described the operation as a law enforcement function rather than a military attack.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are among six defendants named in a four-count superseding indictment that accused them of conspiring with violent, dangerous drug traffickers for the last 25 years. Maduro was indicted on related charges in 2020. He has long denied all the allegations, and he pleaded not guilty on Monday. Flores also pleaded not guilty.
So far, the major oil firms have yet to speak publicly about Trump’s plans.
In a previous statement to ABC News, ConocoPhillips said the firm is keeping tabs on the ongoing situation.
“ConocoPhillips is monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments,” the company said.
Chevron said it continues to focus on its current operations.
“Chevron remains focused on the safety and wellbeing of our employees, as well as the integrity of our assets. We continue to operate in full compliance with all relevant laws and regulations,” it said in a statement.
ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.
ABC News’ Mary Bruce contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.