#unemployment-insurance

#unemployment-insurance

At least 125 employees, which is more than 20% of the company's workforce, were let go as Underdog shifts away from some of its traditional offerings and leans more heavily into prediction markets. Teams in fraud operations, marketing, customer support, and product were among those affected.

The job market is struggling in the face of so many headwinds. Companies are going to be even more reluctant to hire this spring until the war ends and they can see consumers still spending. It's a tense time for the U.S. economy.

California's booming economy is one of the world's largest, but a peek behind the curtain exposes the forbidding reality of a statewide job market that is ranked as one of the nation's worst. There's no sugarcoating the situation in California. Our economic growth is weak compared to other states, said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Starting this summer, most college programs will have to show that their students earn more than someone with only a high school diploma to avoid being cut off from federal funding, as part of a new accountability measure. Congress created the earnings test known as Do No Harm when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. The Education Department is still working to finalize the regulations that outline how it will work.

On Wednesday, the government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate fell to a still-low 4.3% from 4.4%. However, government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands. That reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, a third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.