Finance

Many workers say they’d take a pay cut to be able to work from home at least a few days a week, according to academic studies.
They see work-life balance as the biggest advantage of remote work. Others say they feel less connected to co-workers and see fewer opportunities for mentoring.
Employers also get a financial benefit from the arrangement, economists said.

Coroimage | Moment | Getty Images

Many workers value remote work to such a degree that they’d take a pay cut to be able to work from home, even on a part-time basis, studies show.
The prevalence of remote work ballooned during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many experienced telework perhaps for the first time in their careers; employees cite work-life balance as by far the biggest perceived benefit, according to Pew Research Center.

Some researchers have quantified the financial value workers assign to telework.
For example, about 40% of workers say they’d accept a pay cut of at least 5% to keep their remote job, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
About 9% would trade at least 20% of their salaries to preserve telework, said researchers, who polled more than 2,000 workers.

Put another way, workers see the ability to work from home — even two or three days a week — as equivalent to getting a raise, according to Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies workplace management practices.
Data that Bloom has collected in recent years suggests the average worker equates remote work to about an 8% raise, he said.

“That figure seems remarkably stable” over time, Bloom said in an e-mail.
“For some subsets of workers you can find higher numbers,” relative to the pay cut they would accept, Bloom said.
For example, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in January that looked at workers predominantly in the technology field found they’d accept an average 25% pay cut for a job that offers fully or partially remote work.
“The reality is: It is a very attractive feature of a job,” said Zoe Cullen, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, who co-authored the NBER research.  
The paper examined data on almost 1,400 workers from the U.S. tech sector. The average person was 32 years old, and had about seven years of work experience. Researchers gathered data on the job offers individuals receive and the jobs they ultimately choose, with the average gig offering $239,000 a year in total compensation.
More from Personal Finance:What the ‘mother of all trade wars’ can teach about tariffsL.A. wildfire victims face financial anxiety amid recoveryHow to check the status of your federal tax refund
Of course, not all Americans prefer out-of-office work.
About 41% of workers with the ability to telework — but who rarely do — say in-office work helps them feel more connected to co-workers, and 30% think in-person work helps with mentoring opportunities, according to Pew Research Center.
Working from home has also waned from its pandemic-era peak.
Big companies like Amazon, AT&T, Boeing, Dell Technologies, JPMorgan Chase, UPS and The Washington Post have initiated return-to-office mandates for at least some employees.
President Donald Trump also issued an order Jan. 20 to terminate remote work for federal employees and require full-time in-office attendance, with some exceptions.

That said, on a national scale, employers don’t seem to be retrenching en masse, according to labor economists.
The number of paid days worked from home during the workweek has held steady for the past two years, at between 25% and 30% — more than triple the pre-Covid rate, according to WFH Research.
Employees aren’t the only ones who get a benefit: Remote work is also a profitable arrangement for businesses, according to labor economists.
For example, employers may save money on real estate by downsizing office space. They may also hire job candidates from across the country, potentially at a lower relative salary, depending on geography.
Workers with the ability to work from home also tend to quit less frequently, thereby reducing company spending on expensive functions like hiring, recruitment and training, Bloom said. More

Big Tech’s historic gains could be affecting your portfolio’s makeup — especially if your goal is diversification.
Astoria Portfolio Advisors CEO John Davi warns the S&P 500 index tilts too far in favor of the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks: Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Tesla.

“Those Mag Seven stocks are very expensive right now,” Davi said told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “You should rotate your portfolio, and rotate into other things beside ‘Mag Seven’ stocks.”
Davi thinks he has a product to help long-term investors. His firm is behind the Astoria US Equity Weight Quality Kings ETF (ROE). According to the Astoria website, it invests in 100 of the highest quality U.S. large and mid-cap stocks and avoids “concentration risks associated with market-cap weighting.”
“Our marginal contribution to risk and return is a lot higher,” said Davi.
As of Jan. 31, the top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 are mostly big tech. They accounted for about 36% of the index, according to FactSet.
In the Astoria US Equal Weight Quality Kings ETF, each stock is weighted around 1%, according to FactSet. Since the ETF’s launch on July 31, 2023, the fund is up more than 26%. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up 32% in the same period.

VettaFi’s Todd Rosenbluth highlighted ETF options beyond Astoria’s ETF for investors looking to diversify.
“If you wanted a more quality growth or quality filter on the S&P 500, Invesco has an S&P 500 quality ETF, SPHQ. If you wanted something that was more quality and growth and additional filters, American Century has an ETF. The ticker is QGRO. This is an ETF that’s going to filter based on quality and growth characteristics and a few other ones,” the firm’s head of research said. 

Disclaimer More

Amazon signage during the 2024 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 10, 2024.
Bridget Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Check out the companies making headlines in extended trading:
Amazon — The e-commerce giant fell 2% after issuing weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter. Amazon said it forecasts sales in the first quarter between $151 billion and $155.5 billion. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were looking for $158.5 billion. Meanwhile, the company’s fourth-quarter earnings and revenue were above consensus expectations. 

Take-Two Interactive Software — The video game company jumped nearly 7% despite posting fiscal third-quarter revenue of $1.37 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $1.39 billion. Take-Two sees its current-quarter revenue, based on net bookings, coming in between $1.48 billion and $1.58 billion versus the estimated $1.54 billion.
Affirm Holdings — Shares of the payment company jumped more than 9% following a top-line beat for the fiscal second quarter. Affirm reported $866 million in revenues, while analysts expected $807 million, per LSEG. Gross merchandise volume grew 35% year-over-year in the prior quarter.
Pinterest — Shares of the social media company popped 18%. Revenue for the fourth quarter came in at $1.15 billion, slightly ahead of analysts’ estimates of $1.14 billion, per LSEG. Pinterest also said it expects revenue of $837 million to $852 million in the first quarter, while analysts sought $833 million.
Expedia — The stock gained 11% after the company’s fourth-quarter results topped Wall Street expectations. Expedia posted adjusted earnings of $2.39 per share on revenue of $3.18 billion. That is more than the $2.04 per share on $3.07 billion in revenue that analysts had penciled in, according to LSEG. The company also reinstated its quarterly dividend at 40 cents per share.
Bill Holdings — Shares plunged about 32% after the billing software company issued disappointing fiscal third-quarter revenue guidance. Bill Holdings expects for that period to generate revenue between $352.5 million and $357.5 million, below the $360.4 million that analysts surveyed by LSEG were expecting. However, earnings and revenue for the second quarter beat analysts’ expectations.

Fortinet — The cybersecurity stock rallied 11%. Fortinet posted better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter, in addition to strong guidance for the full year. Fortinet sees full-year revenues falling between $6.65 billion and $6.85 billion, topping the $6.63 billion estimate from analysts, per LSEG. 
E.l.f. Beauty — The cosmetics company tumbled 23% after slashing its guidance for the full fiscal year. E.l.f now sees sales ranging from $1.3 billion to $1.31 billion, short of consensus estimates of $1.34 billion, per StreetAccount. Adjusted earnings for the third quarter also narrowly missed expectations, coming in at 74 cents per share versus analysts’ forecast for 75 cents a share, per LSEG.
Monolithic Power Systems — The semiconductor stock soared 16% following strong fourth-quarter results. Monolithic Power Systems reported adjusted earnings of $4.09 per share on revenue of $621.7 million. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had called for earnings of $3.98 per share on $608.1 million in revenue. The company also issued better-than-expected revenue guidance for the current quarter and a $500 million stock repurchase program. Management also increased the quarterly dividend by nearly 25%. — CNBC’s Sean Conlon, Lisa Kailai Han and Darla Mercado contributed reporting. More

The U.S. has used tariffs since its founding in the 18th century.
They were primarily a way to raise revenue in the nation’s early days. Later, tariffs were largely used to restrict imports or as a bargaining chip to reduce trade barriers.
President Donald Trump’s use of the import duties has broken with historical norms, economists and historians said.

Shipping containers are seen at the Port of Montreal in Montreal, Canada, on Feb. 3, 2025. 
Andrej Ivanov | Afp | Getty Images

President Donald Trump imposed broad tariffs on China that took effect Tuesday, while his tariff threats hang over other major trading partners: Canada, the European Union and Mexico.
That may lead some to wonder: How have tariffs been wielded throughout U.S. history, and is Trump’s use of them unusual?

The ‘three Rs’ of tariffs

The U.S. has used tariffs since its founding in the 18th century.
In fact, the Tariff Act of 1789 was among the first bills ever passed by Congress.
Since then, the U.S. has used tariffs to achieve three broad goals, said Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and past president of the Economic History Association.
Irwin calls them the “three Rs”: revenue; restriction, or import barriers to protect domestic industry; and reciprocity, a bargaining chip to cut deals with other countries.

Using tariffs for revenue

Tariffs are taxes on U.S. imports, paid by the entity that’s importing the foreign goods. Those taxes raise revenue to help fund the federal government.

For roughly the first third of the nation’s history — from its founding until the Civil War — the revenue motivation was “paramount” as a driver to impose import duties, Irwin said. The federal government relied on tariffs for about 90% or more of its revenue during that period, he said.

But things changed after the Civil War, Irwin said. The U.S. started to impose other taxes, such as excise taxes, that made the nation less reliant on tariffs.
Tariffs generated about half of federal revenue from about 1860 to 1913, when the income tax was created, Irwin said.
The scale of the government expanded significantly in the 1930s — with the creation of New Deal programs such as Social Security — and later for defense spending during World War II and the Cold War, said Kris James Mitchener, an economics professor at Santa Clara University who studies economic history and political economy.
Today, “tariffs simply cannot raise enough revenue to fund government expenditure,” Mitchener said. “There’s no possible way you could support the size of the U.S. military on tariff revenue.”

Restriction and reciprocity

From the Civil War to the Great Depression, the U.S. primarily used tariffs as a restrictive measure on imports, to insulate the domestic market from foreign competition, Irwin said.
The Tariff Act of 1930, popularly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, levied protective tariffs on about 800 to 900 different types of goods, accounting for about 25% of all goods imported to the U.S., Mitchener said.
The U.S. also used tariffs as a reciprocal bargaining chip.
For example, before the U.S. annexed Hawaii, it signed a free-trade agreement with the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1875. The treaty allowed for duty-free imports of Hawaiian sugar and other agricultural products into the U.S. In exchange, the U.S. got exclusive access to the harbor that would later be known as Pearl Harbor.
The post-Depression, and especially the post-World War II period, became an era of reciprocity, Irwin said.
The U.S. helped create the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which set global rules for trade and ushered in an era of low tariffs.
More from Personal Finance:What the ‘mother of all trade wars’ can teach us about U.S. tariffsCould Trump’s tariffs replace the income tax?Stockpiling ahead of higher tariffs is a big mistake, experts say

How the president’s tariff power grew

U.S. import taxes before the WWII era were pretty high, ranging from 20% to 50%, sometimes even reaching 60%, Irwin said. They have been “very low” since 1950 or so, he said.
The average duty on goods subject to a tariff was about 2% to 4% in the 2010s before Trump’s first term, Mitchener said.
“That’s what President Trump is trying to overturn, this sort of low period of tariffs we’ve had since World War II,” Irwin said.

Before 1934, Congress — not presidents — had power over tariff rates and negotiations, said Andrew Wender Cohen, a history professor at Syracuse University.
But Democrats — then known as the political party of free trade — had an enormous majority around the New Deal era and passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, granting the president the right to negotiate tariffs in certain cases, Cohen said.
“That’s when the president gains a much more substantial authority,” Cohen said.
That power accelerated after 1948 during the “transformation of the whole global economic order,” he said.

Why Trump tariff policy is ‘very unusual,’ economists say

President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 03, 2025. 
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Trump’s use of tariff policy is “very unusual” among modern U.S. presidents, Cohen said.
For one, Trump “likes all three Rs” — revenue, restriction and reciprocity, Irwin said.
On the campaign trail, Trump suggested that tariffs could replace the U.S. income tax to fund the government. He said during his campaign that tariffs would create U.S. factory jobs and has threatened to use them to strong-arm Denmark to give up Greenland.
However, there are trade-offs, Irwin said. Restricting imports somewhat negates tariffs’ ability to raise revenue, because it diminishes the tax base for tariffs, he said. Those additional duties may cause companies to import fewer goods or may push people to buy less, for instance.
“You can’t really achieve all three objectives at the same time,” he said.
Additionally, no previous president has tried to link a U.S. drug crisis to trade policy, as Trump did with fentanyl.
“That’s a novel take,” Mitchener said.

Many presidents have used tariffs. For example, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon applied tariffs to protect the U.S. steel industry, as Trump did in his first term, Irwin said.
“What’s unusual about Trump is, he’s not just picking out particular industries that he thinks are of strategic importance, but he’s blocking imports across the board almost with some of these countries,” Irwin said.  
Trump imposed a 10% additional tariff on all Chinese goods and threatened a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico.
“No president in recent memory has really used tariffs across the board or in a broad-brush way to achieve various objectives,” Irwin said. “They’ve sort of adhered to the rule that we belong to the WTO. That means we keep our tariffs low as long as other countries keep their tariffs low.”

Global trade treaties, such as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump signed in his first term, establish a mechanism for nations to file grievances for alleged unfair trade practices, Cohen said. Nations can generally raise tariffs as a retaliatory measure if trade rules are breached, according to the treaty terms, he said.
Trump’s recent unilateral tariff announcements are unique in this regard, he said.
“I can’t think of any precedent for that,” Cohen said.
“While the executive branch was given much more power since 1934, it’s always been subject to the specific terms of the agreements,” he said. More

Bank shares rose Thursday after the Federal Reserve released parameters for its annual industry stress test showing smaller hypothetical shocks to the U.S. economy than in previous years.
While still challenging, with U.S. joblessness jumping to 10% and a 33% drop in home prices, the 2025 exam has smaller spikes in unemployment and smaller declines in stock and real estate values than previous versions, Jason Goldberg of Barclays said Thursday.
The Fed also said it would soon be taking steps to “reduce the volatility of stress test results and begin to improve model transparency” in the 2025 exam.

Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, on May 1, 2023. 
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Bank shares rose Thursday after the Federal Reserve released parameters for its annual industry stress test showing smaller hypothetical shocks to the U.S. economy than in previous years.
While still challenging, with U.S. joblessness jumping to 10% and a 33% drop in home prices, the 2025 exam has smaller spikes in unemployment and smaller declines in stock and real estate values than previous versions, Jason Goldberg of Barclays said Thursday in a note titled “2025 Stress Test: Scenarios Easier than Past Two Years.”

The Fed will soon take steps to “reduce the volatility of stress test results and begin to improve model transparency” in the 2025 exam, the regulator said in a statement released Wednesday after the close of regular trading.
Shares of Citigroup jumped 2.9% in midday trading, while Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America each rose at least 1.5%. Big banks gained more than smaller lenders, with the KBW Bank Index rising 1.2% compared with the 0.9% gain of the S&P Regional Banking ETF.
The stress test changes bolster the case made by Wall Street analysts that big U.S. banks will face a friendlier regulatory regime under the Trump administration. Since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest U.S. banks have had to undergo annual exams that test their ability to withstand a severe recession while continuing to lend to consumers and businesses.
Banks have complained for years that the annual stress tests were opaque and unfairly administered, and industry trade groups sued the Fed in December over the exam.
By making the latest iteration of the test both less challenging and more predictable, banks could hold smaller capital cushions later this year, according to Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala.

“The 2025 stress test scenario, broadly better vs last year, increases our confidence that banks should begin to see relief on regulatory capital requirements, given our expectations for a shift to a balanced, transparent, and more predictable regulatory regime,” Poonawala wrote Thursday in a note.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO More

Donald Trump’s supporters celebrate him as a man who says what he means and means what he says. The trade crisis he ignited over the past week has provided more proof, if any was needed, that this reputation is undeserved. Yes, Mr Trump has been clear that he loves tariffs, but he is vague and even misleading about what this ardour means in practice. That has made for a remarkably chaotic start to his new administration, with businesses, investors and other governments all trying to figure out exactly what he wants—and most now bracing for more turbulence. More

Ahead of India’s budget on February 1st, Narendra Modi asked Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, to bless the poor and the middle class. The prime minister’s request for divine intervention mingled public spirit with political self-interest: frustration about economic growth and joblessness contributed to Mr Modi’s loss of his outright majority in elections held last year. As it turned out, the middle class, rather than the poor, ended up the real winners of the fiscal statement. Nirmala Sitharaman, Mr Modi’s finance minister, announced tax cuts that were worth around 1trn rupees annually ($12bn, or 0.3% of GDP), which was enough to exempt millions of relatively high-earning Indians from income tax altogether. More

It is hard to avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations. The EU’s statistics bureau titled a recent release—showing no economic growth in the last quarter of 2024—“GDP stable in the euro area”. “Stagnant” would have been more accurate. More