At least 19 million Americans are receiving unemployment checks. "Surging COVID-19 cases and tighter restrictions to contain the spread of the virus were a heavy weight on the job market in December." "Job growth has been decelerating, since the easy part of the recovery in the labor market, recalling workers, has mostly run its course," said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Nonfarm payrolls likely increased by 77,000 jobs last month after rising 245,000 in November, according to a Reuters survey of economists. That would be the smallest gain since the jobs recovery started in May and leave employment roughly 9.763 million jobs below its February peak. There is even a strong possibility that payrolls dropped in December, which would end a seven-month hiring streak. First-time applications for unemployment benefits spiked in mid-December when employers were surveyed for the employment report.Ĭompanies announced a 18.9% surge in layoffs last month, and a measure of service industry employment contracted. ![]() Consumers were also very downbeat in their assessment of the labor market.īut any decline in payrolls will likely not mark the start of job losses. Congress last week approved nearly $900 billion in additional stimulus, which is expected to lift household income and consumer spending. Economists anticipate the Biden administration will provide another package by March and boost infrastructure spending. There is also optimism that the rollout of coronavirus vaccines will be better coordinated under the new government. At Facebook's office in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, a group of critics set up an installation of body bags to protest the issue."Hopefully, we will see better coordination on the vaccination front, but given the indifference to health shown by the population over the past few months, it is hard to see that the virus surge will do anything but get worse before it gets better." "We are in the middle of a slowdown that needs to get through the holiday shutdowns and the virus surge," said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economics in Holland, Pennsylvania. The company, which has long been under fire from lawmakers over misinformation and other abuses on its apps, has also come under renewed scrutiny from President Joe Biden's administration over the handling of false claims about COVID-19. Facebook's market cap hit $1 trillion for the first time last month when the judge threw out the original complaints. 19 to refile its antitrust complaint against the company and from a group of states who said on Wednesday they would appeal the judge's dismissal of their lawsuit. Federal Trade Commission which has until Aug. The company also continues to face pressure from global lawmakers and regulators, including from the U.S. ![]() "This is little more than an ambition for Facebook at the moment.if the idea comes to fruition, it could be a valuable income source." "Facebook has its eye on a sci-fi prize," said Sophie Lund-Yates, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Microsoft (MSFT.O) also dropped the buzzy Silicon Valley term on its earnings call this week, talking about its own plans for the converging digital and physical worlds. Zuckerberg this week announced that Facebook, which has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, was setting up a team to work on building a shared digital world, which he is betting will be the successor to the mobile internet. On a conference call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also focused on another ambition for the company: the "metaverse." Facebook said this month it would invest more than $1 billion to support content creators through the end of 2022. It is also on the offensive to attract top social media personalities and their fans, competing with Alphabet's YouTube and short-video app TikTok, which recently hit 3 billion global downloads. ![]() The push will be key to how Facebook, which hosts more than 1 million online "Shops" on its main app and Instagram, can grow its ad business amid the impact of Apple's changes. The world's largest social network has been ramping up its ecommerce efforts, which are expected to bring additional revenue to the company and make its ad inventory more valuable. Analysts had expected a profit of $3.03 per share. Net income in the second quarter more than doubled to $10.4 billion, or $3.61 per share. "In the third and fourth quarters of 2021, we expect year-over-year total revenue growth rates to decelerate significantly on a sequential basis as we lap periods of increasingly strong growth," Chief Financial Officer Dave Wehner said in the earnings release. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights A Facebook panel is seen during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 20, 2018.
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