What we’re reading (2/7)
“US Jobs Report Today: Employers Added 143,000 Jobs In January, Unemployment Rate At 4%” (USA Today). “Hiring slowed in January as U.S. employers added 143,000 jobs amid the Los Angeles wildfires, frigid weather across much of the nation and uncertainty generated by President Donald Trump’s trade and immigration policies. But payroll gains for the previous two months were revised up by a whopping 100,000, depicting an even more robust picture of the labor market at the end of 2024.”
“The Mood Of The American Consumer Is Souring” (Wall Street Journal). “The Trump bump in consumer confidence is already over. Tariff threats, stock market swings and rapidly reversing executive orders are causing Americans across the political spectrum to feel considerably more pessimistic about the economy than they did before President Trump took office. Consumer sentiment fell about 5% in the University of Michigan’s preliminary February survey of consumers to its lowest reading since July 2024.”
“The Man Who Took On Big Tobacco Has A New Target: Sports Betting” (Time). “America’s burgeoning love affair with sports gambling has come with costs. Calls to problem-gambling hotlines have spiked. Emerging research suggests that sports betting depletes investment accounts of already financially vulnerable households, increases bankruptcy risk, and even contributes to upticks in intimate-partner violence. ‘I am presently, or have recently been, treating divorces, breakups, estrangement from children, criminal charges, incarceration, loss of all savings, foreclosure of homes, end of careers, suicidal ideation, hospitalization for a suicide attempt,’ says PHAI director of gambling policy Harry Levant, a former gambling addict who’s now a clinical gambling-disorder therapist and also testified at that December congressional hearing. ‘The deepest forms of despair.’”
“The Last Days Of American Orange Juice” (The Atlantic). “Citrus greening has no cure: Labs around the country are racing to develop disease-resistant trees, but research is slow because trees take up to eight years to bear fruit, Tripti Vashisth, a citrus expert at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, told me. At the rate trees are dying, a solution is likely to come too late.”
“Yum Bets Big On AI As It Attempts To Move To 100% Digital Sales” (International Business Times). “Chief Financial Officer Chris Turner talked about the company's goal of complete digital sales in the earnings report, saying ‘digital sales up approximately 15% and digital mix surpassing 50%.’ Turner said Yum Brands will be able to do this through, Byte by Yum!, a proprietary software and digital ecosystem that includes AI-driven products for easier operations.”
