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Where new jobs were in 2024, and potential growth areas in a second Trump term

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The labor market may be poised for dislocation with President-elect Donald Trump set to take office for the second time later this month.

For the past two years, health care has dominated all other industries in terms of growth, aided partly by Covid-related spending. The health care and social assistance sectors added 902,000 jobs in 2024, according to Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost as many as the 966,000 jobs they created in 2023.

The government sector came in a distant second, creating some 440,000 jobs in 2024, down from 709,000 in 2023.

Part of the growth in health care jobs is also tied to rising population and a burgeoning number of retirees, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

“Healthcare and social insurance has been rising gangbusters for years now,” Gould told CNBC in a Friday interview. “Some of that is an aging population, some of it is just population growth.”

Looming change

But that could change in a second Trump administration, especially if it brings mass deportations and a renewed debate over foreign labor visas. Immigrants accounted for nearly 18% of health care workers in 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“There’s already such high demand there and if we have mass deportations, that’s certainly going to come at a cost for the services that can be provided in those sectors,” Gould said. “You could then have shortages that could lead to more inflation because you’re going to have employers trying to beat out each other to try to get the fewer workers that there might be, and that could cause problems in the macroeconomy.”

The government sector has been the second-fastest growing sector the past two years. Much of that growth has happened at the state level, Gould said. The state-level government workforce grew at a faster pace than local last year, while the federal government employee base rose at roughly the national rate.

But, as with health care, the government sector could see workforce reductions under President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a strictly advisory body headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that aims to slash government spending.

“If you get rid of that kind of a policy at the federal level, you’re going to lose lots of highly productive workers, and so that could be a detriment to the services that they provide and obviously to the overall economy,” Gould said. “Unemployment can go up … So many things can happen if you damage that vital federal workforce, and if there’s less funding at the same local level that can be problematic as well.”

Manufacturing growth — maybe

Conversely, a Trump administration may prove positive for sectors such as manufacturing and mining and logging, the two groups that saw the weakest job creation in 2024. Trump’s proposed tariffs could boost growth in these industries, but Gould said it’s impossible to predict by how much.

With concerns around sticky inflation looming into the new year, Gould said that the focus on the labor economy moving forward should be the share of corporate sector income that goes to workers versus profits, which she said is still “very, very low.”

“When workers have money in their pockets and they spend it on goods and services, that drives the production of goods and the provision of services,” she said. “Even though we’ve seen productivity growth and we’ve had inflation come down, there is just a lot more room for wages to rise without putting upward pressure on inflation.”

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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