Kyle Risdell

That is the number of job openings across this economy in December.

That's from the latest job openings and labor turnover survey.

The fewest openings since back in September of 2020.

Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman is on the labor market beat for us today.

Wall Street today, as I said, traders did not much like what they were seeing.

We will have the details when we do the numbers.

The marketplace acronym of the day is SLOOS.

S-L-O-O-S.

Much as I would like to be able to claim it for ourselves, we cannot.

It comes to us from the Federal Reserve, which once a quarter does a survey of loan officers across the country.

Senior loan officers, to be precise, seeking their opinions on how things are going.

Let's see if you can put two and two together here.

It is the Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey, SLOOS.

Anyway, the Fed wants to know what kind of loan demand they are seeing, what their lending standards are, that kind of thing.

The most recent version came out this week covering Q4 of last year.

And this time around, the central bank asked some questions trying to get a better understanding of how those loan officers are feeling about lending to companies that are exposed to artificial intelligence.

Marketplace's Justin Ho made some calls to find out for himself.

Data from the Federal Communications Commission tells us that in the year 2000, there were more than 2 million payphones distributed across this economy.

By 2016, we were down to 100,000, after which the FCC stopped even keeping count.

But just because traditional payphones have been disappearing doesn't mean the need for some kind of public telephone access has disappeared, too.