Evelyn Reynolds

The company’s renewed interest comes after the Biden administration blocked Nippon Steel from acquiring the onetime American powerhouse.A possible new takeover bid for U.S. Steel emerged on Monday, teeing up more turmoil over the once-dominant company’s future after President Biden’s decision to block its acquisition by a Japanese company.Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive of an American competitor, Cleveland-Cliffs, said his company had “an All-American solution to save the United States Steel Corporation,” stressing that acquiring U.S. Steel was a matter of “when,” not “if.” But he offered no details of the bidding plans.The renewed expression of interest from Cleveland-Cliffs comes less than two weeks after Mr. Biden blocked a $14 billion takeover of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, arguing that the sale posed a threat to national security. Cleveland-Cliffs tried to buy U.S. Steel in 2023, an offer that was rejected in favor of Nippon’s higher bid.CNBC reported on Monday morning that Cleveland-Cliffs would seek to take over U.S. Steel and sell off its subsidiary, Big River Steel, to Nucor, another American producer. But Mr. Goncalves, at a news conference later in the day, would not confirm any partnership with Nucor on a bid.U.S. Steel and Nucor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Investors seemed pleased by the potential bid, sending shares of U.S. Steel up as much as 10 percent on Monday when CNBC reported the potential offer. Shares of U.S. Steel finished about 6 percent higher on Monday but are down 23 percent over the past year, including Monday’s spike.But the fate of Nippon’s proposed takeover remains in limbo. U.S. Steel and Nippon sued the United States government last week in the hopes of reviving their merger, accusing Mr. Biden and other senior administration officials of corrupting the review process for political gain and blocking the deal under false pretenses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The march higher in U.K. government bond yields since the Labour government presented its debut budget plan in October has sparked concern, as borrowing costs rose to breached numerous decade highs.
Economists at research group Capital Economics said gilts may be trapped in a “vicious circle,” in which “the rise in U.K. yields puts a strain on public finances, therefore calling for an even bigger tightening of fiscal policy, but in turn putting additional strain on the economy.”

The march higher in U.K. government bond yields since the launch of the Labour government’s debut budget plan in October sparked widespread concern last week, as borrowing costs rose to breach numerous decade highs.
The prospect of public spending cuts or further tax rises came into focus last week, as 30-year gilt yields hit their highest level since 1998. Despite initially falling after Labour’s election victory in July, 2-year gilt yields have also climbed back above 4.5%, while the 10-year yield reached levels not seen since 2008.

Waning investor confidence in the U.K. was particularly highlighted by a concurrent fall in sterling, which on Friday hit its lowest level against the U.S. dollar since November 2023.

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Borrowing costs are also rising in the euro area and the U.S., and economists point out that the U.K. is being weighed on by external factors including the return of Donald Trump to the White House and expectations for broadly higher interest rates than previously expected this year.
But the surge in U.K. yields is nonetheless a major headache for the U.K. government, which has pledged to reboot economic growth while ensuring debt declines as a share of the economy within five years. U.K. public sector net debt currently stands at nearly 100% of GDP.
“The rise in gilt yields has a self-reinforcing feedback loop through the U.K.’s debt sustainability, by increasing borrowing costs used for budgeting purposes,” ING Senior European Rates Strategist Michiel Tukker said in a Friday note.
Tukker cited analysis by the independent Office of Budget Responsibility which indicates that the recent rise in yields — if sustained — would wipe out the government’s estimated headroom of £9.9 billion ($12.1 billion) for meeting its self-declared fiscal rules. Those regulations commit Labour to covering day-to-day government spending with revenues, as well as a goal of moving toward a decline in the U.K.’s debt to GDP ratio on a longer timeframe.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said Friday there is a “knife edge,” chance of the U.K. achieving the former fiscal rule, but that Finance Minister Rachel Reeves could “get lucky.”
She otherwise faces an “unenviable set of options,” said IFS Associate Director Ben Zaranko, including bringing forward upcoming changes to how debt is calculated to free up more headroom, paring back current spending plans and announcing more tax rises, which could be conditional on changes within the coming years. The minister could also opt to do nothing and break her rule.
Economists Ruth Gregory and Hubert de Barochez at research group Capital Economics also said U.K. gilts may be trapped in a “vicious circle,” in which “the rise in U.K. yields puts a strain on public finances, therefore calling for an even bigger tightening of fiscal policy, but in turn putting additional strain on the economy.”

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Pound vs dollar.

Bank of America Global Research strategists on Friday said that it was unlikely Labour would breach its rules and would instead announce further fiscal consolidation — measures to reduce public debt, generally public spending cuts or tax hikes — in the spring or earlier.
That would potentially be achieved through spending cuts, they added, coming off the back of the £40 billion in tax hikes that Labour announced in October.
A Treasury spokesperson told CNBC: “This Government’s commitment to fiscal rules and sound public finances is non-negotiable.”
“The Chancellor has already shown that tough decisions on spending will be taken, with the spending review to root out waste ongoing. And over the coming weeks and months, the Chancellor will leave no stone unturned in her determination to deliver economic growth and fight for working people.”

UK in ‘slow growth trap’ — but not a mini-budget crisis

Former U.K. Finance Minister Vince Cable told CNBC on Friday that higher bond yields were being seen in many countries and were not an “emergency panic situation” — but that markets had realized Britain was stuck in a “slow growth trap.”
“We’ve been there for many years, since the Financial Crisis, then Brexit, then a problem with Covid[-19] and Ukraine war, and we’re stuck with relatively high inflation, very slow growth, and so the markets are marking the U.K. down, relatively speaking. But this is not a panic situation, it’s not a crisis of the old-style balance of payment sell-off situation,” Cable said.
Labour should have gone for a broader range of tax rises rather than focusing on a hike in National Insurance — a levy on wages — which has been slammed by the U.K. business community, Cable said. However, he added that the market has broader concerns over U.K. growth and the global economic picture, which is clouded by external factors, such as the weaker Chinese outlook.

Britain’s economy flatlined in the third quarter, revised figures show

Cable also downplayed comparisons with the U.K. mini-budget crisis in 2022, when then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s announcement of sweeping tax cuts triggered massive volatility in the bond market.
“The Truss moment was a prime minister just taking a reckless leap into the dark with a big increase in the budget deficit on the assumption this will somehow trigger economic growth. Well, that clearly isn’t what’s happened this time. The argument is about whether they’ve done enough tightening and whether they’ve done it in the right way, but it’s a different kind of problem,” Cable told CNBC.
That sentiment was broadly reflected in wider analysis. Bank of America strategists called comparisons with the mini-budget “overblown,” noting that the bar for the Bank of England to intervene in the gilt market, as it did at the time, was high.
Capital Economics said last week’s higher gilt yields were an economic headwind but not a crisis, with smaller and slower moves than after the mini-budget. David Brooks, head of policy at consultancy Broadstone, said there did not appear to be any “systemic issues at play” in the liability-driven investment (LDI) funds, which were the biggest concern back in 2022. More

Health care and government were the two sectors that saw the most job growth in both 2024 and 2023.
But a second Trump administration may pose risks to growth in both areas.
Conversely, Trump’s proposed tariffs could boost lagging sectors, such as manufacturing.

Shapecharge | E+ | Getty Images

The labor market may be poised for dislocation with President-elect Donald Trump set to take office for the second time later this month.
For the past two years, health care has dominated all other industries in terms of growth, aided partly by Covid-related spending. The health care and social assistance sectors added 902,000 jobs in 2024, according to Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost as many as the 966,000 jobs they created in 2023.

The government sector came in a distant second, creating some 440,000 jobs in 2024, down from 709,000 in 2023.
Part of the growth in health care jobs is also tied to rising population and a burgeoning number of retirees, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

“Healthcare and social insurance has been rising gangbusters for years now,” Gould told CNBC in a Friday interview. “Some of that is an aging population, some of it is just population growth.”
Looming change
But that could change in a second Trump administration, especially if it brings mass deportations and a renewed debate over foreign labor visas. Immigrants accounted for nearly 18% of health care workers in 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“There’s already such high demand there and if we have mass deportations, that’s certainly going to come at a cost for the services that can be provided in those sectors,” Gould said. “You could then have shortages that could lead to more inflation because you’re going to have employers trying to beat out each other to try to get the fewer workers that there might be, and that could cause problems in the macroeconomy.”

The government sector has been the second-fastest growing sector the past two years. Much of that growth has happened at the state level, Gould said. The state-level government workforce grew at a faster pace than local last year, while the federal government employee base rose at roughly the national rate.

But, as with health care, the government sector could see workforce reductions under President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a strictly advisory body headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that aims to slash government spending.
“If you get rid of that kind of a policy at the federal level, you’re going to lose lots of highly productive workers, and so that could be a detriment to the services that they provide and obviously to the overall economy,” Gould said. “Unemployment can go up … So many things can happen if you damage that vital federal workforce, and if there’s less funding at the same local level that can be problematic as well.”
Manufacturing growth — maybe
Conversely, a Trump administration may prove positive for sectors such as manufacturing and mining and logging, the two groups that saw the weakest job creation in 2024. Trump’s proposed tariffs could boost growth in these industries, but Gould said it’s impossible to predict by how much.
With concerns around sticky inflation looming into the new year, Gould said that the focus on the labor economy moving forward should be the share of corporate sector income that goes to workers versus profits, which she said is still “very, very low.”
“When workers have money in their pockets and they spend it on goods and services, that drives the production of goods and the provision of services,” she said. “Even though we’ve seen productivity growth and we’ve had inflation come down, there is just a lot more room for wages to rise without putting upward pressure on inflation.” More

The unemployment rate slipped to 5.4% for Black women last month, reflecting an improvement from November’s rate of 5.9%.
Hispanic men also saw an improvement in the jobless rate in December, as it slipped to 4.0%.
Overall, the jobless rate inched lower in December to 4.1%, reflecting a resilient labor market.

A jobseeker holds flyers during the New York Public Library’s annual Bronx Job Fair & Expo at the the Bronx Library Center in the Bronx borough of New York, on Sept. 6, 2024.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The unemployment rate fell for Black women in December, following an alarming increase in the figure for November.
Overall, nonfarm payrolls grew much more than expected in December, rising 256,000 in the month and topping economists’ prediction for a gain of 155,000, per Dow Jones. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% in a sign of a resilient labor market. The data fueled the belief that the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates much less than anticipated this year.

For Black women, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.4% in December. That is down from 5.9% in November, when the jobless rate rose nearly a percentage point for the cohort. The labor force participation rate, which tracks the population employed or seeking work, inched up to 62.4%.
Among Black workers overall, the unemployment rate also declined in December, slipping to 6.1%. That compares to a rate of 6.4% in November and 5.7% in October.
“There were some concerns about the Black unemployment rate going up,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, referring to November’s uptick. “It’s still significantly higher than for other groups — and that’s still a concern — but nothing in this report jumps out as particularly problematic.”

Black men also made strides, with the jobless rate declining to 5.6% in December from 6% a month earlier. The labor force participation rate for the cohort inched lower to 68.2% last month from 68.7%.
Hispanic men also saw their unemployment rate improve in December, ticking down to 4% from 4.4% as the labor force participation improved.

Though the unemployment rate among Hispanic women inched up to 5.3% last month from 5.2%, Gould noted that this shift is within the margin of error. “There’s a lot of volatility with the data,” she said. “I would say that things mostly held steady.”
By comparison, the jobless rate fell to 3.6% in December among white workers overall. That’s down from 3.8%. Among white men, the unemployment rate slipped to 3.3% last month from 3.5%, but the figure held steady at 3.4% for white women.

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A December gain of 256,000 blew past forecasts, and unemployment fell to 4.2 percent. But markets recoiled as interest rate cuts seemed more distant.Employers stuck the landing in 2024, finishing the year with a bounce of hiring after a summer slowdown and an autumn marred by disruption.The economy added 256,000 jobs in December, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The number handily beat expectations after two years of cooling in the labor market, and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent, which is very healthy by historical standards.The strong result — unclouded by the labor strikes and destructive storms of previous months — may signal renewed vigor after months of reserve among both workers and businesses. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent from November, or 3.9 percent over the previous year, running well above inflation.“This employment report really crushes all expectations,” said Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at BMO Capital Markets. “It kind of wipes out the summer slump in payrolls we saw from June to August before the big Fed rate cut in September.”The apparent turnaround in employment growth, however, dampens chances of further interest rate cuts in the coming months. Investors already expect Federal Reserve officials to hold steady at their meeting in late January. For monetary policymakers, the robust growth means that additional easing could reignite prices and stymie progress on inflation.“The Fed is like, ‘We think this is a good labor market, we want to keep it that way, we don’t want it cooling further,’” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. “What they haven’t said is, ‘We want to heat the labor market back up.’”Unemployment rate More

Nonfarm payrolls growth came in much higher than expected for December.
Gains in employment took place in several different areas of the economy, with health care and social assistance leading for a third straight month.
Retail jobs in December rebounded from large declines in November.

Getty Images

December’s job report marked yet another month of stronger-than-expected growth, with gains coming from many different parts of the U.S. economy.
Last month, health-care and social assistance jobs saw the largest gains for a third consecutive month, adding 69,500 to payrolls, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Including private education, as some economists do, the health-care group’s growth would have risen by 80,000.

Retail trade, which added 43,400 jobs, and leisure and hospitality, up 43,000, scored the second- and third-largest increases last month. Retail trade jobs are in or outside a store, from infomercials to street vendors to vending machines, can sell to consumers or other businesses and involve after-sale services, such as repair and installation, the BLS says.
Government jobs rounded out the top four, posting growth of 33,000 in December.

“Recently, job growth has been very narrowly concentrated in government and health care,” Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told CNBC. “Now, it seems like perhaps it’s broadening out.”
Retail growth, a sharp turnaround from steep losses in November, was bolstered by employment increases across key categories. Notably, clothing, clothing accessories, shoe and jewelry retailers saw an increase of 23,000 positions, while general merchandise retailers and health- and personal-care retailers grew by 13,000 and 7,000 jobs, respectively, according to BLS data.
That rise is “not just a blip,” Pollak said, adding that it reflects other data that shows an improving backdrop in the sector.

For instance, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ December Texas Retail Outlook Survey showed an acceleration in retail sales activity. The sales index, which measures state retail activity, hit its highest level since late 2021.
“Retailers are more upbeat on 2025 and on the backs of a strong consumer,” Pollak said. “We’ll probably see more movement in the housing market coming soon.”
In contrast to the strength in retail trade, manufacturing – which saw sizable growth in November – led the declines for December, losing 13,000 jobs.
Additionally, mining and logging, and wholesale trade reversed course last month from November. After seeing slight increases two months ago, mining and logging employment dropped by 3,000, while wholesale trade slumped even more, losing 3,500 positions.
Professional and business services, plus financial activities continued to be bright spots. Those two groups were among the nine in 13 sectors that added jobs last month.
“We’re seeing improvement in total vehicle sales, Americans are making big ticket purchases again, [and] businesses are buying vehicles too,” Pollak said. “These trends have been picking up over the last few months; they were taking a while to filter into the labor market, but this report suggests … perhaps a recovery is starting to take hold.”

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Nonfarm payrolls surged by 256,000 for the month, up from 212,000 in November and above the 155,000 forecast.
The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%, one-tenth of a point below expectations. A broader jobless measure moved down to 7.5%, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point and the lowest since June 2024.
Average hourly earnings increased 0.3% on the month, which was in line with forecasts, but the 12-month gain of 3.9% was slightly below the outlook.
Stock market futures plunged after the report while Treasury yields soared as traders price in a lower probability of Fed rate cuts this year.

Job growth was much stronger than expected in December, likely providing the Federal Reserve less incentive to cut interest rates this year.
Nonfarm payrolls surged by 256,000 for the month, up from 212,000 in November and above the 155,000 forecast from the Dow Jones consensus, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%, one-tenth of a point below expectations. An alternative measure that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons moved down to 7.5%, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point and the lowest since June 2024.
Stocks plunged plunged after the report while Treasury yields soared as traders price in a lower probability of Fed rate cuts this year.
“This is a hot report,” said Dan North, senior economist for North America at Allianz Trade. “You have to think that [Fed Chair] Jerome Powell is breathing a sigh of relief in the sense that his job just got a little bit easier. Inflation hasn’t been moving anywhere for months, so there’s no incentive to cut rates. Now you get this [jobs report] so you don’t need to cut rates to stimulate the economy.”
The report brings to a close a year in which employment grew each month, though inconsistently and at times raising questions over whether a recession loomed. However, the final two months showed a labor market still operating at strength as the Fed contemplates its next moves on monetary policy.

One area that Fed officials have stressed to not be a source of inflation is the labor market, and wages grew slightly less than expected.

Average hourly earnings increased 0.3% on the month, which was in line with forecasts, but the 12-month gain of 3.9% was slightly below the outlook and indicative that wage inflation at least is becoming less of a factor. The average workweek again held steady at 34.3 hours.
“You’re never going to hear me complain that we got 250,000 jobs,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “I think it’s a strong jobs report. It makes me further comfortable that the job market is stabilizing at something like the full employment rate.”

Job growth came from the familiar sources of health care (up 46,000), leisure and hospitality (43,000), and government (33,000).
Retail also saw a sizeable gain, up 43,000 after losing 29,000 in November heading into the holiday shopping season. The sector saw payroll growth of 2.2 million for the full year, down sharply from the 3 million gain in 2023.
Revisions for prior months were less substantial than has been the recent trend. The October count saw an upward change of 7,000 to 43,000, while the November number was cut by 15,000 from the prior estimate.
At their December meeting, Fed officials deemed the labor market mostly healthy though slowing. The Fed voted at the meeting to lower its key borrowing rate by a quarter percentage point while indicating a slower pace of reductions ahead.
Markets expect the Fed to hold pat at the meeting later this month, with futures pricing after the jobs report swinging to the expectation of just one cut this year. The market-implied probability of a single cut increased to 68.5% after the jobs report, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge.

Goolsbee said he still expects rate cuts this year as long as the data flow stays consistent.
“The surprisingly strong jobs report certainly isn’t going to make the Fed less hawkish,” said Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. “All eyes will now turn to next week’s inflation data, but even a downside surprise in those numbers probably won’t be enough to get the Fed to cut rates any time soon.”
Central bankers have expressed concern lately with the pace of inflation, which has held above the Fed’s 2% target largely because of stubbornly high housing costs as well as some goods prices.
The household report, which the BLS uses to calculate the unemployment rate, presented an even stronger jobs picture. That count increased by 478,000 on the month , as the labor force grew by 243,000 and the share of working age people either holding jobs or looking for employment held steady at 62.5%.
Full-time employment increased by 87,000, while part-time workers surged by 247,000. The level of unemployed workers fell by 235,000.
The duration of unemployment edged higher to 23.7 weeks, the highest level since April 2022. However, those reporting out of work for 27 weeks or more declined to 1.55 million, down 103,000.

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Every year, retailers race to hire workers to staff their stores and distribution centers to meet the demand that comes with millions of Americans shopping for Christmas and other winter holidays.This seasonal hiring is often seen as a measure of the health of the retail industry and the U.S. economy more broadly.On Wednesday, November data released by the Labor Department showed that seasonal hiring in 2024 in the retail trade sector was lower than a year earlier. But that may also reflect changes in how companies go about it.The struggle to hire workers as the economy reopened in late 2020 and early 2021 led several retailers to start spreading out their hiring throughout the year, relying less on bringing on help rapidly in the weeks immediately before the holiday shopping season. Other retailers have said that they focus on offering their current workers more shifts before hiring seasonal workers.Ahead of the 2024 holiday shopping season, major retailers like Target and Bath & Body Works said they expected their hiring of seasonal workers to be on a par with the year before. Macy’s said it aimed to hire 31,500 workers, slightly down from its target in 2023. Amazon said in October that it would hire 250,000 people to support its fulfillment and transportation operations, in line with its goal from the previous year. At Amazon, the jobs included full-time, part-time and seasonal positions.For retailers, seasonal hiring does not take place just within stores. During the Covid pandemic, as a response to the boom in e-commerce shopping, retailers increasingly focused on hiring people to work within distribution centers that handled online orders.Seasonal hiring has implications beyond December, as many retailers convert a certain percentage of temporary workers to permanent positions. Gap Inc., which also owns Banana Republic and Athleta, said one in 10 of its seasonal workers in 2024 was hired into a full-time position. More than half of Target’s seasonal workers were hired for full-time positions after the 2023 holiday shopping season. More