unemployed

According to market news, the number of planned layoffs in the U.S. surged to 108,435 in January, the highest level since January 2009, representing a month-on-month increase of 205% and a year-on-year increase of 118%. This data contrasts with the still-resilient official non-farm payroll report and is seen as an early signal of a rapid cooling in the labor market.Human resources firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas noted that layoff plans are largely set for the end of 2025, reflecting employers' increasingly pessimistic outlook for 2026. At the same time, the blockchain-based real-time inflation indicator Truflation shows that the U.S. inflation rate has plummeted to below 1%, far lower than the official CPI data. These unofficial indicators collectively suggest that economic growth is slowing, which may prompt the Federal Reserve to shift towards interest rate cuts to support the economy.Analysts have differing expectations regarding the Federal Reserve's subsequent policies. JPMorgan expects interest rates to remain unchanged until 2027, while other banks predict at least two rate cuts this year. Some economists anticipate that Kevin Warsh, the Federal Reserve chair nominee by Trump, may cut rates by 100 basis points before the midterm elections in November.The market believes that a potential shift in monetary policy could provide support for risk assets like Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin has currently fallen nearly 50% from its historical high of over $126,000 last October.

ChainCatcher news, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) tweeted for the first time after two years of silence. In this series of tweets, SBF mainly discussed issues related to layoffs and management:I have a lot of empathy for government employees: I also haven't checked my emails for several (hundred) days. And I can confirm that being unemployed is not as easy as it looks.Firing employees is one of the hardest things in the world to do. It's terrible for everyone involved. My experience is:a) Employees being fired are usually not at faultb) But firing them is often the right decisionMore often than not, the problem is that the company simply doesn't have suitable positions for them.I would say to every person who was laid off: this is also our fault because we didn't provide them with suitable positions, or suitable managers, or a suitable work environment.Maybe at the time, no one was available to manage them. Maybe they were better suited for remote work, but our company adopted face-to-face communication. Maybe they wanted to work on a specific project, but that wasn't what the company needed at the time.Or maybe there were issues within the department they were in.This situation happens frequently. We see competitors hiring 30,000 more employees and then not knowing what to have them do ------ as a result, the entire team is idle all day.We have also experienced this internally, when a manager becomes busy or distracted, half a department can lose direction at the same time.When this happens, it's not the employees' fault. If employers don't know how to organize them, or if no one can manage them effectively, that's not their fault. If internal politics cause their department to lose direction, that's also not their fault.But it makes no sense to leave them there doing nothing.