WSJ What’s News - Why More U.S. Companies Are Pulling Back on Hiring

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

P.M. Edition for Aug. 21. More U.S. companies plan to slow hiring in the second half of the year. Wall Street Journal reporter Ray Smith explains why. And WSJ’s Will Parker joins the show to discuss what an unexpected rise in home sales means for the housing market. Plus, a New York appeals court threw out a $500 million civil fraud penalty against President Trump. WSJ reporter Corinne Ramey unpacks the split decision. Sabrina Siddiqui hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An appeals court throws out a $500 million civil fraud penalty against President Trump. Plus, more U.S. companies plan to slow hiring in the second half of 2025. Companies are saying there's a lot of economic uncertainty out there. You've got this perfect storm of changes this year that has just made them a lot more cautious. And U.S. home sales unexpectedly rose 2% in July. It's Thursday, August 21st. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for the Wall Street Journal, covering for Alex O'Sullough. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

An appeals court throughout a more than $500 million judgment against President Trump and his business empire, paving the way for further proceedings before New York's highest court. today's decision from a five-judge panel provides a significant legal boost for Trump in a case that was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022. Wall Street Journal reporter Corinne Ramey joins me now with the latest. Corinne, this was a sharply divided ruling. What did the justices say? So the justices threw out this massive penalty, this $500 million judgment against Trump.

But the rest of it was pretty complicated. There were three opinions from this court, and the justices essentially, did not reach a majority. And so they were divided on these various issues. What they did find, though, was that Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the case, was within her authority in bringing the case under this broad fraud statute. And they also upheld some business restrictions that the trial judge had imposed on Trump, including restrictions that could make it difficult for Trump's company to borrow money and bar Trump's two eldest sons from running a company in New York State for two years. The way this court ruled on this was highly unusual. Normally, the justices

agree. And this was about as far from agreement as I've ever seen. It was more than 300 pages of the justices writing about the things they disagreed about. How did President Trump react to the decision? And what did we hear from Letitia James? Both sides. celebrated the parts of the ruling that were in their favor. On truth social, Trump praised the court for its courage. And Letitia James noted the fact that the court upheld some business restrictions and also said that her office would appeal to the state's highest court. What happens next? This almost certainly goes to the court of appeals, which is the state's highest court. In fact, this court, this intermediate appeals court, explicitly said that in the decision that even though the justices

couldn't agree on some things. They came together with the goal of not ordering a new trial and sending this back to the trial court, but allowing it to move forward to the high court. And what does this mean for Trump? In the short term, it's certainly good for Trump. I mean, this was a massive financial penalty and it takes this really big headache away for him. In the long term, I think it remains to be seen. We don't know what the high court will do or how they'll come down on this ruling. That was the Wall Street Journal's Corinne Ramey. Thank you, Corinne. Thanks, Sabrina. Sales of existing homes in the U.S. increased unexpectedly in July, raising hopes that the long-stalled housing market may be improving and that activity can gain more momentum in the fall. The National

Association of Uelters, NARS. said today that home sales were up 2% from the prior month to a seasonly adjusted annual rate of 4.01 million. The slight gains surpassed the expectations of economists who had estimated a monthly decrease in sales of 0.5%. Will Parker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, writing about the housing and residential rental market, has the story. Will, what's behind the unexpected pickup in home sales? There's a couple of things going on. Mortgage interest rates, which have been so much higher than what people had been used to for a few years now. They've come down enough to get more people into buying. That's one. And the thing that analysts have also seen is to pick up an

activity from investors who may be buying homes to rent out or those who are buying vacation homes. So those couple of factors gave us a slight increase in sales in July. You reported that the housing market is still depressed. Why is that? Home buying has been held back by really high prices for houses, number one. We had a record in price in June. You have home prices that have gone up 50% in some parts of the country over a span of five years or so. And mortgage interest rates are still quite high in combination with that, at least compared to where they were, say, five years ago. And until either of those two things changes significantly, sales are going to be below where they want. Now, a few things are heading in the right direction for buyers. There's

more inventory, so the number of homes available to buyers when they go out and look, there's more of them. So that's going to help buyers that's going to keep price increases in check to some extent. And some people are hopeful that in the fall, there'll be even more of those homes available and more people can find a home to buy at a price that works for them. So what is the outlook moving forward? It depends a lot on if mortgage interest rates come down any further. They're still right above 6.5%. If they can get down closer to 6, you'd probably see more sales happen. That's a big if. The pricing is still really high. No one is predicting that home prices would fall super meaningfully, right? Maybe you'd get a little bit of a decline, but the ratio of the cost

of a home to people's income is not improved. It's just gotten worse over the last decade or so, and things might get less bad in the near future, but probably not tremendously better. Will Parker is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Thank you, Will. Thank you. News Corp, owner of the journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from NAR. Walmart led U.S. stocks lower today as concerns about the giant retailer's costs overshadowed a strong sales performance. Walmart's quarterly profit missed expectations and the company's CEO warned tariffs will hit second-half results. Ahead of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's highly anticipated Jackson Hole speech tomorrow,

the Dow and NASDA closed down about 0.3% while the S&P 500 ended lower for a fifth consecutive day down 0.4%. U.S. manufacturing is rebounding, but so are price pressures. A flashed purchasing managers index from S&P Global, spanning both manufacturing and services, rose to 55.4. The reading suggests overall activity continued to expand and at a quicker clip. Manufacturing activity hit the highest in more than three years, nearing the threshold that divides contraction from expansion. The pace of expansion and services slowed slightly. Still, average selling prices rose at their fastest in three years, with tariff cited as the principal cause. Coming up, twice as many employers as last year say they plan to pull back on filling jobs.

What's behind the slowdown? That's after the break. The number of Americans who newly filed for unemployment benefits rose last week, according to the Labor Department, which also said the size of the unemployed population hit a new recent high earlier this month. In the week through August 16th, new jobless claims filings rose to 235.

up from 224,000 a week earlier. Continuing claims, an indicator of the size of the total unemployed population, came in at $1.97 million in the week through August 9th, compared with $1.94 million the previous week. Meanwhile, one in five U.S. employers planned to slow hiring in the second half of 2025 nearly double the rate of companies that anticipated bringing on fewer people at this time last year. That's according to a survey by the conference board, which reflects yet another sign of a weakening U.S. labor market. The report marks the second year in a row that many chief human resource officers polled were planning on fewer new hires. The last time executives were broadly optimistic about hiring was the second quarter of 2023. What's behind the steady decline?

Ray Smith, the Wall Street Journal's reporter covering career and workplace issues, joins me now to discuss. Ray, we've talked about how U.S. jobless claims rose last week. What are businesses saying about the market? Companies are being more cautious. They're saying there's a lot of economic uncertainty out there, such as stop and start tariffs. So they're really taking a pause and wondering how to move forward and not taking any big swings in terms of hiring. You've got this perfect storm of changes this year that has just made them a lot more cautious. And how are they adjusting their behavior? They've been bragging to investors about shrinking their workforces, and they're framing it as this is a way they can be more productive with fewer

employees. That really signals to investors that this company is being smart and strategic rather than it looking like they're being cautious and scared. Novo Nordisk, for example, the company behind Ozempic and Wagovi recently said they'd pause hiring in non-critical areas. Meta, which has been on the hiring blitz for AI workers, is pausing that effort now. So it's big companies as well as smaller companies who are all saying they're slowing hiring. And what do we expect from here? It's sort of a wait-and-see approach from here, to be honest. There's still a lot of economic uncertainty with a stop-and-start tariffs.

And so companies are really waiting for things to settle down before making their next sort of job hiring moves or their next expansion moves. Right now, we're still in sort of this wait-and-see environment. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Ray Smith. Thank you, Ray. Thank you. And finally, in other news, President Trump said today that Ukraine would have to continue attacks on Russia to have any hope of winning the war. The comments on his social media platform, Truth Social, came days after the president hosted two summits designed to end the conflict.

While it wasn't immediately clear what Trump meant by his comments, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said he was simply making an observation. And a former Ukrainian military officer suspected of leading a team that sabotage the Nord Stream Gas Pipelines in 2022 was detained in Italy yesterday under an international arrest warrant. According to investigators and people familiar with the case, the warrant was issued by German prosecutors. The development marks a breakthrough in the international manhunt for the alleged culprits of the attack, which is thought to be among the largest acts of modern-day wartime sabotage. And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon.

Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienname with supervising producer Michael Cosmites. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.