Fresh jobs report to offer snapshot of US economy under Trump
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(WASHINGTON) — A fresh jobs report to be released on Friday will offer a snapshot of U.S. economic performance over the first full month under President Donald Trump.
Economists expect employers to have hired 170,000 workers in February. That figure would mark a slight uptick from 143,000 jobs added in January, and it would nearly match the average number of jobs added each month last year.
The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 4%, a historically low reading.
The data release is set to coincide with a turbulent period for U.S. stocks and trade relations in the aftermath of tariffs issued by the Trump administration earlier this week.
Despite the temporary withdrawal of some tariffs on Thursday, stocks dropped as fallout from the policy continued to roil markets.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled about 425 points, or 1%, while the S&P 500 fell 1.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq sank 2.6%.
The tariffs stand among a flurry of economy-related directives issued since Trump took office, including spending cuts and an assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The Trump administration has also terminated tens of thousands of federal employees, though such cuts are not expected to appear in the February report, in part due to the timing of surveys conducted by officials who collect the data.
Meanwhile, the economy is weathering a bout of resurgent inflation that stretches back to the final months of the Biden administration.
Consumer prices rose 3% in January compared to a year ago, registering a percentage point higher than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
Egg prices, a closely watched symbol of rising costs, soared 53% in January compared to a year ago. BIrd flu has decimated the egg supply, lifting prices higher.
In February, a key gauge of consumer confidence registered its largest monthly drop since August 2021, the nonpartisan Conference Board said last month.
The share of consumers who expect a recession within the next year surged to a nine-month high, the data showed. A growing portion of consumers believe the job market will worsen, the stock market will fall and interest rates will rise, the report added.
Still, some measures of consumer sentiment improved. Consumers’ assessment of current business conditions moved higher, while an uptick in purchasing plans for a home extended a monthslong recovery.
Mortgage rates have dropped for seven consecutive weeks, FreddieMac data showed. The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage stands at 6.63%, its lowest level since December.
(NEW YORK) — For the last 130 years, four generations of Ernest Lepore’s family have baked the pastries – cream puffs, cannoli, sfogliatelle – that have come to define Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood, withstanding wars, economic downturns and drastic changes to the neighborhood that his family calls home.
But with the soaring cost of eggs – a staple ingredient in nearly half their products – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Ferrara Bakery to avoid raising their prices.
“We can’t keep passing on costs to our guests,” Ferrara’s president, Ernest Lepore, told ABC News. “As you move closer to Easter, eggs are just growing exponentially in price. I can’t do anything about it.”
Egg prices have skyrocketed over the last year, reaching historic highs, and wholesale shoppers like small businesses were paying over $8 for a dozen eggs last week. According to the latest USDA report, released Friday, the national average wholesale price has dropped slightly to $6.85 per dozen.
However, many grocery stores sell their eggs at a loss to get customers in the door, bringing the average retail price of a dozen eggs to just under $5. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of a dozen eggs at the grocery store reached a record high of $4.95 in January 2025. More, the USDA predicted that prices might increase 40 percent this year, and experts are warning that those prices might stay high even if the supply of eggs in the U.S. rebounds.
But small businesses, unlike grocery shoppers, are tied to the market wholesale price, making these surging costs particularly devastating.
Theodore Karounos, owner of Square Diner in New York’s downtown neighborhood of Tribeca, said that translates into tens of thousands of dollars in additional yearly costs for him.
“If things hold up at this price, and we stay as busy as we were last year, I’ll pay $70,000 more for eggs than I did last year,” he told ABC News. “I can’t just absorb that hit for the next nine months.”
The exorbitant costs are a result of a nationwide shock to supply, brought about by a ravaging outbreak of the avian flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that over 166 million commercial poultry birds have been affected since 2022, when the outbreak began. But the last few months have been especially devastating.
“In just four months, we’ve lost 52 million layers and pullets within our nation’s egg supply, which is vastly different than any other outbreak that we’ve seen in the past.” Karyn Rispoli, managing editor of Expana, a firm that surveys and tracks the price of eggs, told ABC News. “The biggest difference of late is just that it has been more lethal and really devastated our nation’s egg supply.”
The avian flu has wreaked havoc on poultry flocks across the country. As a result, Rispoli says that the nation’s supply of egg-laying hens is at nearly a ten-year low. Once one chicken is infected, farmers are forced to cull the remainder, after which comes the challenge of repopulating their flocks.
But even as the U.S. faces an egg shortage, demand for the commodity remains relatively constant, creating a perfect storm for egg prices to soar. Consequently, those small businesses that rely on eggs, like Ferrara Bakery and Square Diner, are forced to make difficult decisions.
Unlike larger restaurant chains like Denny’s and Waffle House, which have adjusted to the surging costs by adding an egg surcharge to their menu item prices, smaller businesses are less inclined to follow suit, according to Dartmouth College economics professor Bruce Sacerdote.
“In the case of a restaurant, they aren’t necessarily able to pass on the full price increase. We’re not talking about a simple commodity where the markets clear immediately and you just have to pass on the full price increase,” he told ABC News. “Restaurants may be taking a hit to their margins in order to not pass on the full price increase.”
At Tom’s Restaurant on New York City’s Upper West Side – famous as the setting for the fictional Monk’s Café in the TV series “Seinfeld” – the soaring cost of eggs means that co-owner John Ieromonahos is spending an additional $2,000 a week to pay for eggs to continue supplying the restaurant, where approximately 70 percent of their business is breakfast.
“Of course, we don’t want to charge extra to customers,” Ieromonahos said. “This is not our customer’s fault, but I don’t know how long we’re going to last without charging extra.”
At The Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan, owner Philip Binioris told ABC News that he’s trying his best not to pass the higher cost of eggs on to consumers, though he, too, isn’t sure how long he can absorb the increasingly prohibitive cost.
“It’s frustrating. I would like to not raise our prices. I think that we have fair prices, and I like to be able to keep them stable,” he said. “I’m just kind of waiting to see how bad this gets before I make a decision on how I’m going to change prices. It’s tight.”
While consumers, small businesses and their customers continue to shell out more for eggs amid the avian flu outbreak, the nation’s largest producer and distributor of eggs has reported soaring profits.
Cal-Maine Foods, according to SEC filings, saw an over three-fold increase in their gross profits in their fiscal year 2023, at the dawn of the bird flu outbreak. And according to their most recent filing, their gross profits are up 342% through the second quarter of their fiscal year 2025 versus the previous fiscal year.
Rispoli also told ABC News that grocery shoppers could see increased prices even when the egg supply does begin to recover, as grocery stores may seek to recoup lost earnings. She said that happened when egg prices soared at the beginning of the current avian flu outbreak.
“In the aftermath of that, as the market corrected and came down substantially, retailers were then holding shelf prices higher to try and recapture some of the margin that they had previously forfeited,” she said.
Back at Ferrara in Little Italy, Lepore is searching everywhere to find other ways to save money so he doesn’t have to increase their prices. He recently upgraded his building’s cooling system and improved his refrigerators, saving money on electricity in the long term. He also is taking a lesson from his grandparents, who kept the business going through the Great Depression, by baking smaller batches of goods in order to more easily keep product fresh and avoid waste.
“Eggs are determining production,” he said. “As we are going into Easter, I am going to be baking at the last minute not to waste an egg, because there can’t be any left over.”
(NEW YORK) — Facebook plans to replace its fact-checkers with “community notes,” a move that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow the social network to return “to our roots around free expression.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The changes, which will also be in place for Instagram and Threads, will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post.
Meta executives sought in their statements to tie the update to what they described as a sea change in public discourse accompanying the rise of President-elect Donald Trump’s brand of politics.
Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Zuckerberg said.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said.
The decision also follows Zuckerberg recent meeting with Trump at the president-elect’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. And Meta is donating to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, marking a first for the company.
The shift in policy mirrors a series of updates that Elon Musk — a Trump ally — made after purchasing rival social network Twitter, which he’s since rebranded as X.
Kaplan on Tuesday praised the approach Musk has taken, saying X under its new owner has empowered its “community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias,” Kaplan said.
As the company’s fact-checking capabilities have grown, they have expanded “to the point where we are making too many mistakes,” which in turn has frustrated many of the social networks’ users, Kaplan said.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.
ABC News’ Michael Kreisel, Zunaira Zaki and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The stock market climbed to record highs in 2024, extending banner gains achieved the previous year.
The S&P 500 — the index that most people’s 401(k)’s track — climbed nearly 28% this year, as of Monday.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq leapt a staggering 34% over that period; while the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 16%.
Consecutive years of strong stock market performance have posed a quandary for forecasters: Will high stock prices scare off would-be investors in 2025, or will momentum push shares even higher?
Experts have attributed the rise of share prices this year to a set of favorable trends: Solid economic growth, enthusiasm about artificial intelligence and the long-awaited start of interest rate cuts at the Federal Reserve.
Those tail winds are expected to keep pushing stocks skyward in 2025, experts said, but they cautioned about more-than-usual uncertainty that could prevent further gains or even amplify them. The biggest unknown for stocks in 2025, they said: President-elect Donald Trump.
“As we close the books on 2024 and peer into 2025, perhaps the uncertainties this time are of a magnitude beyond the norm,” Kevin Gordon and Liz Ann Sonders, a pair of investment strategists at Charles Schwab, said last week. “Good luck figuring this one out.”
Good news abounded for the stock market this year, in part because the economy defied doomsayers.
The economy continued to grow at a solid clip in 2024, while inflation fell. That performance kept the U.S. on track for a “soft landing,” in which the economy averts a recession while inflation returns to normal.
Gross domestic product grew at a robust 2.8% annualized rate over three months ending in September, the most recent period for which data is available.
“U.S. strength remains undiminished,” Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told ABC News in a statement.
Inflation has slowed dramatically from a peak of more than 9% in June 2022. A months-long stretch of progress earlier this year helped nudge the Federal Reserve toward its first interest rate cuts in four years.
In recent months, the Fed has cut its benchmark rate three-quarters of a percentage point, dialing back its fight against inflation and delivering some relief for borrowers saddled with high costs.
Over time, rate cuts ease the burden on borrowers for everything from home mortgages to credit cards to cars, making it cheaper to get a loan or refinance one. The cuts also boost company valuations, potentially helping fuel returns for stockholders.
The Fed is expected to continue cutting interest rates next year, though a recent bout of stubborn inflation could slow, or even pause, the lowering of rates, experts previously told ABC News.
“Markets expect gradual rate cuts next year, which would imply inflation stays under control, the job market hums along at an acceptable pace, stocks rise, and everybody is happy,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, said in a statement to ABC News.
“Reality isn’t that cut and dry, though,” Cox added.
Some analysts pointed to Trump’s policies as a major source of uncertainty for the nation’s economic performance and, in turn, the stock market.
Trump has vowed to cut taxes for individuals and corporations, which could spur economic growth and raise stock prices, some experts said. However, they added, Trump’s proposed tariffs could hurt some U.S. producers and retailers that depend on imported raw materials, and may cause a resurgence of inflation. As a result, some stocks could suffer.
“The most significant wild card on the table for 2025 will be the potential implementation of tariffs,” David Sekera, chief U.S. market strategist for Morningstar, said earlier this month.
Since 1990, there have been 12 years in which the S&P 500 has gained 20% or more, Cox said. The stock market crossed that threshold last year, and is almost certain to do so when 2024 comes to an end. It will be difficult for the stock market to achieve that feat for a third consecutive year, Cox added.
“If you’re expecting a repeat of 2024, you’re asking a lot of the market gods,” Cox said.
Still, the enticing possibility of another rally will draw investor interest as observers watch for any early signs of sputtering.
“The opportunities for investors are plenty, but so are the obstacles,” Shah said.
