Raphael Stevens

The U.S. job market is seeing a low rate of layoffs but also a slow pace of hiring among employers.
That comes amid signs of labor market strength overall: Unemployment is historically low, for example.
This means while employers are holding on to workers, job seekers are having a tough time.

Rudi_suardi | E+ | Getty Images

The U.S. job market has been stagnant of late, a dynamic that contains both good and bad news for U.S. workers.
On the one hand, businesses are holding on to their existing workforce, meaning employees are unlikely to lose their jobs, economists said. But it also may be hard for jobseekers to land a new gig as employers pull back on hiring, economists said.

It’s a “low-hire, low-fire environment,” Bank of America economists wrote in a research note Friday.
“The labor market is currently characterized by a lack of churn: soft hiring and low layoffs,” they said.
That news may be disappointing for many workers: About half, or 51%, of U.S. employees were seeking a new job as of Nov. 1, the highest share since 2015, according to a Gallup poll published Tuesday. Overall job satisfaction has dipped to a record low, it found.

The ‘great resignation’ became the ‘great stay’

By many metrics, the job market is strong for American workers.
The unemployment rate — which was 4.2% in November — is near historical lows dating to the late 1940s. The layoff rate in October was also at its lowest since the early 2000s, when record keeping began, and has hardly budged since 2021.

However, employer hiring in October was sluggish: The hiring rate was at its lowest since 2013. The average duration of unemployment ticked up to 23.7 weeks in November, from 19.5 weeks a year earlier.  
The current lack of dynamism in the job market represents whiplash for many workers, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

Workers quit their jobs at a torrid pace in 2021 and 2022, as the U.S. economy awoke from its pandemic-era hibernation. Job openings ballooned to record highs and businesses competed for labor by raising wages at the fastest clip in decades, incentivizing workers to leave their gigs for better opportunities.
This era, dubbed the “great resignation,” has been replaced by the “great stay,” Pollak said.
This is due to a variety of factors, labor economists said.
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Many businesses were scarred by their recent experience of holding onto workers amid fierce labor competition and have reacted by “labor hoarding,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at the job site Indeed.
Employers have shifted their policies more toward retention and away from recruiting, Pollak said.
The labor market has also gradually cooled.
The U.S. Federal Reserve raised borrowing costs aggressively starting in 2022 to slow the economy and tame inflation, which applied the brakes on the job market. The central bank started cutting interest rates in September, as inflation declined significantly and the labor market flashed some warning signals.

A ‘diverging’ labor market

While strong in the aggregate, the job market is “diverging” for workers, Stahle said.
Overall job growth has been “robust” but the bulk of job gains are occurring in a handful of industries like health care, government, and leisure and hospitality, Stahle said.
Meanwhile, job growth in white-collar fields like software development, marketing, and media and communications “has been very, very slow,” he said. “Right now your experience with the labor market will depend on the type of job you’re doing,” he said.

Hiring may bounce back if the Fed continues to cut interest rates, as employers may be more inclined to invest more in their businesses if borrowing costs are lower, economists said.
In the meantime, “things are going to be a little more competitive than they were a couple years ago,” Stahle said.
Job seekers should be sure to align their resumes with the skills that employers list on job posts, especially since many businesses use “applicant tracking systems” to automatically screen applications, he said.
“People who really want out [of their job] may need to widen their search, expand their parameters, and get a bit uncomfortable and reskill,” Pollak said.
But those with jobs they really like “have unprecedented job security,” she said. More

Donald Trump, a man not renowned for the length of his attention span, likes simple formulas. Scott Bessent, his nominee to be treasury secretary, has one: “3-3-3”. He wants to cut America’s federal budget deficit to 3% of GDP, lift annual economic growth to 3% and boost the country’s oil and gas output by the equivalent of 3m barrels per day (b/d) by 2028, up from 30m in 2024. More

BlackRock expects infrastructure and cybersecurity plays to shine in 2025.
Jay Jacobs, the firm’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, cites the artificial intelligence boom as a major catalyst.

“It’s still very early in the AI adoption cycle,” he told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.
According to Jacobs, AI companies need to build out their data centers. Plus, keeping that data safe is also a sound investment play for the new year.
“If you think about your data, you want to spend more on cybersecurity as it gets more valuable,” he said. “We think this is really going to benefit the cybersecurity [and the] software community which is seeing very rapid revenue growth based off of this AI.”
Jacobs also sees a wider impact in terms of the supporting infrastructure.
“I think what people forget is kind of, magical as technology is, there’s real physical things on the ground that run that technology, whether it’s power, whether it’s data centers and real estate, whether it’s chips. It’s not just something that lives in the ether, in the cloud, there’s real physical things that have to happen, and that means energy, that means more materials like copper, that means more real estate. You really have to think about kind of the physical infrastructure that underlies it,” he added.

So, for Jacobs, the theme is widening one’s investment scope.
“It’s not just about megacap tech names. There’s other semiconductor companies, there’s other data center companies, there’s other software companies that are benefiting from the rise of this theme,” he said.
Jacobs cited BlackRock’s iShares Future AI & Tech ETF (ARTY) and iShares AI Innovation and Tech Active ETF (BAI) as potential ways to benefit from the rise in AI. The iShares Future AI & Tech ETF is up around 13% for the year so far, while the iShares AI Innovation and Tech Active ETF is up around 13% since its Oct. 21 launch as of Friday’s close.

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The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City is forcing companies to rethink the risks in routine aspects of executive responsibilities.
Threats against corporations have been rising for years, but Thompson’s slaying is the highest profile such incident in decades.
If Thompson had had a security detail, several key factors would have been different on his way to his company’s investor event on Wednesday.

Closed circuit screenshots of a person of interest in the UnitedHealthcare CEO killing.
Source: NYPD

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot Wednesday doing something countless other American executives routinely do: Walking unaccompanied to an investor event held by his company.
But Thompson’s death this week in the heart of corporate America’s capital has sent shockwaves throughout the business world, forcing companies to rethink the risks in even the most routine executive responsibilities.

“Everyone’s scrambling to say, ‘Are we safe?'” said Chuck Randolph, chief security officer for Ontic, an Austin, Texas-based provider of threat management software. “This is an inflection point where the idea of executive protection is now raised to the board level. Everyone I know in the industry is feeling this.”
Threats against corporations have been rising for years, fueled in part by the echo chamber of social media and a more polarized political environment, according to security professionals. But the slaying on a Manhattan sidewalk of Thompson, head of the largest private health insurer in the U.S., is the highest profile such incident in decades.
Companies now worry their leaders face greater risk of being targets of violence, especially as they hold more public investor events in New York in the coming weeks.
The gunman is still at large, and his motivation isn’t known. Words written on the shell casings found at the scene may offer hints about what incited the shooter.
One question from security experts not involved in the case was whether the shooter demonstrated grievances against UnitedHealthcare in online forums and searched for information about the investor event. Several health-care companies have reacted by pulling photos of executives from websites, and health insurer Centene made an investor meeting virtual after the killing.

Thompson didn’t have a security detail with him on Wednesday morning, despite known threats against him, according to NYPD officials. None of the executives of UnitedHealth received personal security benefits, according to the company’s filings.

Read more on the Brian Thompson shooting

Cups mark the location of shell casings found at the scene where the CEO of United Healthcare Brian Thompson was reportedly shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan, in New York City, US, December 4, 2024.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

If Thompson had, several key factors would have been different. Personnel would have gone to the hotel before his arrival to detect threats; he also would have been accompanied by armed security who may have used an alternate hotel entrance, said Scott Stewart, a vice president of TorchStone Global.
“This was preventable,” said Stewart, who said he had nearly four decades in the industry.  “I’ve never seen an executive with a comprehensive security program ever be victimized like that.”
Still, before this week’s shocking events, it wasn’t unusual for executives to decline security because of the disruption to their lives, or the image it may give, several security veterans said.
“Not every CEO needs heavy duty protection,” said the security chief of a technology firm who wasn’t given permission to speak to the press. “Senior executives are subject to threats all day long, you need a platform to” examine them and determine whether they are credible and timely, he said.

‘Guns, guards and gates’

Since Thompson’s killing, a wide spectrum of companies have sought extra protection for executives, Matthew Dumpert, managing director at Kroll Enterprise Security Risk Management, told CNBC.
In the coming weeks, there are several financial conferences in New York with CEOs scheduled to attend in person. Until now, the major concern for these events has been disruption by environmental activists or other protestors, said a manager at large bank.
“Everybody is taking a look and thinking through security for their senior people,” said an executive at a major Wall Street firm who declined to be identified out of concern it would draw attention.
Some corporate security veterans vented that they are seen as a cost center whose leaders are “buried too deeply in an organization to be listened to.”
“The bias is, security is a pain in people’s butts, and not that important,” said the person, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly.
“I hope this opens their eyes,” he said. “Risk intel and assessment is important, and security is about much more than just guns, guards and gates.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet, Bertha Coombs and Dan Mangan contributed to this report More

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a complaint against Comerica Bank, accusing it of failing to administer a federal benefits program that uses prepaid debit cards.
The lawsuit claims Comerica Bank “intentionally terminated” more than 24 million customer service calls, charged more than 1 million cardholders ATM fees they didn’t owe and mishandled fraud complaints.
The Direct Express program is a prepaid card that beneficiaries, many of whom are older and disabled, can use to pay for expenses including groceries and gas.

A Comerica Bank sign on a building in Walnut Creek, California, March 30, 2023.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a complaint Friday against Comerica Bank, accusing the regional bank of failing to administer a federal benefits program that uses prepaid debit cards.
The lawsuit claims Comerica Bank “intentionally terminated” more than 24 million customer service calls, charged more than 1 million cardholders ATM fees they didn’t owe and mishandled fraud complaints while providing federal benefits through the Direct Express prepaid debit card program.

“By deliberately disconnecting millions of calls and harvesting illegal junk fees, Comerica boosted its bottom line at the expense of Americans living on a fixed income,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said.
The Direct Express program is a prepaid card that beneficiaries of Social Security and other federal programs can use to pay for expenses including groceries and gas. Comerica has been contracted with the Department of the Treasury since 2008 to administer the program and handle customer service for the millions of Americans using the prepaid card, many of whom are disabled and older and don’t have a bank.
While the Direct Express website advertises 24/7 customer service, the CFPB alleges that “when people had problems with their accounts, it was often impossible to talk to someone who would help.”
Comerica filed an earlier complaint against the CFPB on Nov. 8, arguing the bureau had overreached in its handling of the case and “has failed to acknowledge that, as Financial Agent of the Direct Express program, Comerica generally acted with the oversight and knowledge or approval of the federal government,” the suit reads.
“Throughout the CFPB’s investigation, we have cooperated by sharing information and data to illustrate the unique nature of this program and the fact that we operate with the oversight of the Fiscal Service,” said Louis Mora, Comerica vice president of media relations. “Despite our good faith efforts to provide this critical context, the CFPB has consistently ignored our arguments and documentation.”

“We will continue to vigorously defend our record as the financial agent for the Direct Express program and remain committed to serving our cardholders,” Mora continued.
The CFPB has taken action against banks for mishandling benefits in the past, including in 2022 when the bureau fined Bank of America $100 million for mishandling state unemployment benefits in 2020 and 2021. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also fined the bank $125 million in a separate order.
— NBC News’ Steve Kopack contributed to this report More