Chapter 1: What recent labor market data was revealed in the latest JOLTS report?
Feels like it's been a while, so I'm going to say it out loud again, just so we all remember. Stocks go down, too, gang. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Thursday today. This is the 5th of February. Good as always. Stab you long, everybody. The standard caveat applies here. Stock market, economy, not.
Chapter 2: How are unemployment claims trending and what do the numbers indicate?
But stock market vibes? Economy-ish. The major indices today, as you have perhaps seen or already heard, not good in a kind of substantive way. People are a bit wigged out over the big software companies and what AI might do to them. Google, as we mentioned yesterday, is going to spend $175 to $185 billion on AI this year. There is some agita out there about that.
And then there's the labor market, of which we have spoken often recently and about which we have some new numbers today. The first number, that is, is 213,000. That's how many people filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, a not small jump of 22,000 from the week earlier. The next number is six and a half million.
Chapter 3: What sectors are experiencing the highest unemployment rates?
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.
Here's one concern that Mark Hamrick, an economist at Bankrate, has about those 6.5 million job openings.
That's substantially below the total number of unemployed persons that were reported by the Labor Department in the most recent employment report. Hamrick says it's the reverse of a few years ago when there were two job openings for every unemployed worker. So we are seeing, I think, now a bit of a misalignment between the supply and demand.
And some sectors seem to be misaligning faster than others, says Tuan Nguyen, an economist at RSM.
Less demand for professional and business services, for example, which had over a quarter million fewer job openings in December compared to the month before.
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Chapter 4: How is artificial intelligence impacting job openings and hiring practices?
Nguyen says the growth of artificial intelligence could be one explanation.
This might be one of the biggest issues that we are experiencing. The fear of AI eating into profit margins and market share of tech companies that are behind on AI adoption. Some of those companies might be racing to deploy AI rather than bringing on new workers.
Pavlina Chernova, a professor of economics at Bard College, says it's too early to tell how much AI is really to blame here, but the hiring slowdown is starting to take its toll on some groups. The labor market is a very challenging place for young people, for young workers. Their unemployment rates are approaching double digits. Unemployment for Black workers is rising too.
So when you add all of this up together, the conclusion is that the labor market is just not creating enough jobs. And she says the problem doesn't seem to be improving.
Chapter 5: Which demographic groups are most affected by rising unemployment?
The number of workers unemployed for half a year or longer has nearly doubled in the past three years. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.
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.
Chapter 6: What challenges do young workers face in the current job market?
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.
When you ask a lender how they decide whether to make a loan, they'll often bring up the five C's of lending. Character, capacity to repay, capital or financial resources, collateral, and conditions. We're looking at how the loan will be used and external factors like interest rates and trends in the industry.
That's Robert James II, CEO of Carver Financial Corporation, which owns banks in Alabama and Georgia. He says the most important C on that list is character, as in a borrower's credit history.
Chapter 7: How is the U.S. energy capacity expansion compared to China?
But another big one is capacity, whether a borrower will be able to repay a loan today and in the future. And that's where the presence of AI, the threat of AI, or perhaps the opportunity presented by AI starts to impact a business model. Lenders are concerned about whether AI is going to disrupt a borrower's entire industry.
David Schiff with FTI Consulting says a bank might think twice about lending to a company that provides services that AI can provide. There's a threat where customers could substitute and or put pricing pressure on them. On the other hand, Schiff says AI could make some borrowers more attractive to lenders.
A company that can use AI tools might be able to cut costs and pay off its debt more easily. Where there is a lot of underlying expense tied to easily repeatable, digitizable tasks, a lot of banks are looking at that as a cost-save opportunity. Schiff says it can be challenging to figure out whether AI poses an opportunity or a threat.
And it's something that the banks are having to look at and make judgment calls on.
Chapter 8: What innovative solutions are being implemented to address public telephone access?
And at the end of the day, they're making bets. In some cases, banks are betting that their clients won't be affected.
It's a non-factor for my customers.
That's Brad Bolton, CEO of Community Spirit Bank in Red Bay, Alabama. He says his customers include contractors, timber harvesters, farmers, and truckers.
I just don't see that my customer that's hauling dog food or hauling paper out of a paper mill that's a trucker, their lives are not going to be changed by AI.
At least, he says, not within the next five or so years. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace.
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.
The good people at Pew Research... Tell us that 98% of Americans own a cell phone, which tracks, right? But it also means that 2% don't. Eric Kunzman is a photography professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is also the leader of the Good Phone Project. Professor Kunzman, good to have you on, sir. Thank you for having me. Tell me about the Good Phone Project. What does it do?
What do you guys do?
So the Good Phone Project is we're upcycling payphones that we've acquired over the years, and we're providing free phone calls for people up to 20 minutes free, unless it's social services. We really looked at the Rochester demographic, and that's where we're providing those calls. Frontier Communications has ripped out all their payphones nationwide, but especially here in Rochester.
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