Fired by the thousands

Unemployment in the US may be low, but the new year has nevertheless been marked by big technology companies slashing employees by the thousands—32,000 to be exact. The 2024 round of mass terminations follows a 2023 during which the tech industry was also heavily engaged in dismissing large numbers of staff. Fear of a recession that never came, pullbacks on pandemic hiring, satisfying activist investors and reallocation of resources toward artificial intelligence have been among the justifications given. Snap became the latest to fire hundreds of workers, having just announced that 540 people, or about 10% of its employees, would lose their jobs. Earlier this month, software company Okta said it would eliminate 7% of its staff, or 400 people. The list goes on, including Big Tech employers like Amazon, Salesforce and Facebook-owner Meta. “I do feel like most of the layoffs have happened, and companies are going to start to rebound,” said Bert Bean, chief executive of staffing company Insight Global. “But it’s still very uncertain.” —David E. Rovella

The ubiquity of layoffs has convinced a generation of American managers that periodic downsizing is necessary—even beneficial—for companies. But it’s not, Sarah Green Carmichael writes in Bloomberg Opinion. Regular layoffs are a widespread yet deeply corrosive business practice. While the people who get fired suffer psychological and financial distress, there also are costs to organizations that regularly lay people off. Managers become lazier about the difficult work of hiring, coaching and giving feedback, she writes. And among layoff survivors, morale and engagement sink and turnover increases. Researchers estimate these effects linger for about three years—when another layoff will likely come along.

Mounting pressure from a top US watchdog is said to have led to New York Community Bancorp’s surprise decision to slash its dividend and stockpile cash in case commercial real estate loans go bad. The drastic financial moves—which triggered a record plunge in the company’s stock and dragged down shares across the industry last week—followed behind-the-scenes conversations with officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In recent months, global regulators and investors have grown more concerned about the declining value of US commercial properties and the inability of some borrowers to refinance—and whether regional lenders may get burned.

Wall Street traders sent bonds and stocks down on Monday with strong economic data reinforcing the view that the US Federal Reserve isn’t ready to call victory over inflation just yet. Treasuries came under renewed pressure on speculation that optimism regarding disinflation may have gone too far. And in another sign that the world’s largest economy remains on solid footing, the Institute for Supply Management’s services gauge hit a four-month high while prices picked up. Here’s your markets wrap.

Los Angeles and the wealthy enclaves of Montecito and Malibu face life-threatening landslides and flash flooding on Monday as an intense atmospheric river inundates Southern California. “We have an atmospheric firehose pointed right at Southern California,” said Ryan Truchelut, president of commercial forecaster WeatherTiger. “Today is really the key day.” Parts of Southern California are facing a “high risk of excessive rainfall,” a prediction the National Weather Service uses sparingly across the US, Truchelut said. An “extremely dangerous situation” is unfolding in those areas, the agency warned.

China is said to be tightening trading restrictions on domestic institutional investors as well as some offshore units as authorities fight to stem a deepening stock rout. Officials this week imposed caps on some brokerages’ cross-border total return swaps with clients, limiting a channel that can be used by China-based investors to short Hong Kong stocks. At the same time, some Chinese brokers that use the channel to buy mainland shares for their offshore units were told not to reduce their positions. Some quantitative hedge funds meanwhile were banned from placing sell orders completely while others were barred from cutting stock positions in their leveraged market-neutral funds. These bets, known as a Direct Market Access strategy, are believed to have amplified the recent selloff in small-cap stocks. China is trying to stabilize markets after shares sank to a five-year low on Friday. The latest moves add to the piecemeal steps policymakers have taken as they struggle to end a three-year rout that’s erased some $7 trillion from the economy.

Excessive speed is a factor in over 12,000 annual deaths in the US, or roughly a third of all automobile crash fatalities. Speeding surged during the pandemic and has lingered in its wake while the traditional array of policy deterrents seem unable to rein in the fastest drivers. So on Jan. 24, California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced a novel bill outlining a different approach—with the help of GPS technology. If it passes, all those lead-foots out there may soon find it almost impossible to drive much faster than the speed limit in the Golden State.

When the richest man in Eastern Europe died in a helicopter crash, hardly anyone knew his wife’s name. Nearly three years later, that’s no longer the case. Renata Kellnerova is now synonymous with the family business—a Prague-based telecommunications, media, financial services and e-commerce empire that employs 61,000 people and operates in 25 countries. In the region, PPF is perhaps best-known as the owner of private TV stations in six countries across Eastern Europe, and of one of the Czech Republic’s largest phone companies. Now Kellnerova is turning her gaze, and her $43 billion empire, toward the West.

In her telling, Sally Nightingale didn’t want to buy Appleby Castle. But her then-husband, who she says “was a castle fanatic,” insisted on it, so in 1997 she found herself the doyenne of one of just a few intact Norman keeps remaining in England. She eventually turned the roughly 29,000-square-foot, 20-bedroom castle into a hotel in 2013, leaving a 7,750-square-foot wing for her private use. Defensive structures on the site date back to the Romans, but the current keep was built a mere nine centuries ago. Now, the castle, keep and outbuildings with 25 acres are on the market for £9.5 million ($12 million).

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