Steward’s former hospitals are proving to be a financial drag on their new operators.Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince who was stripped of his royal titles because of his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.A real estate and an investment management firm are teaming up to build a 438-room hotel in Boston’s Seaport District.
🏥 Health care to the rescue
The Massachusetts job market has been treading water. Without hospitals and other health care providers, it would have drowned.
Local employers shed a total of 4,500 jobs in 2024 and 2025. That’s not a big number in a state with more than 3.7 million workers.
But if you stripped out gains at health care and social assistance employers, job losses would have exceeded 20,000 — or nearly 20 percent of the positions added in the two years before that.
What’s happening: In a rare divergence, hiring in Massachusetts has dried up in many sectors even as the economy expands.
The same disconnect occurred after the 2008–2009 financial crisis and the earlier dot-com bust. But those episodes followed a recession, with employers reluctant to boost payrolls despite rebounding consumer spending, government outlays, and business investment.
Today, the economy has been growing with little interruption since the fall of 2020. Yet employers have hunkered down for a host of reasons, including trade and regulatory policy uncertainty, the looming impact of AI on labor needs, high borrowing costs, and low consumer confidence.
Massachusetts was among the first states to experience this so-called jobless expansion — a dichotomy between weak employment and healthy growth that the country is now facing for the first time since at least World War II.
The US added an anemic 181,000 jobs last year. Without health care and social assistance roles (including social workers, counselors, and personal care aides), employment would have declined by more than a half-million jobs.
Why it matters: Massachusetts has long benefited from an enviable mix of high-paying and often interrelated jobs in health care delivery and medical research; higher education; professional and business services (a sector that includes law, engineering, technology consulting, and biotech); and finance.
But over the past two years, these former economic engines, with the exception of health care and social assistance, saw little or no employment growth.
The professional and business services sector lost 8,000 jobs, mostly scientific and technical workers.Private education shrank by 2,200 jobs. Hiring in the college and university subgroup was positive but slowed dramatically from prior years.Employment in financial activities — including banking, insurance, and real estate leasing — was little changed.
There were modest job gains in a few other sectors, but health care and social assistance was by far the biggest job generator in the state. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual revision of state-level employment data — scheduled for release in April — will likely show jobs losses in Massachusetts were worse than currently reported.
The health sector added 15,600 jobs in 2024–2025, most in direct patient care. It accounted for 17.6 percent of all Massachusetts employment at the end of last year, nearly 3 percentage points above the national average.
The jobless expansion is likely to continue this year, with health care the most notable exception amid strong demand fueled by the escalating needs of aging baby boomers.
“We continue to need more patient-facing staff to care for the growing demand for clinical services, including for an aging population and those with acute care needs,” said Niyum Gandhi, chief financial officer at Mass General Brigham, the state’s largest health system.
A warning: The state’s reliance on a single sector isn’t, well, healthy.
Health care employment has historically been recession-resistant because people always need medical care, but it’s not immune to policy changes. Cuts to Medicaid and reductions in federal health and research spending could undercut the sector’s ability to keep hiring at the current pace. If health care hiring slows and no other sector picks up the slack, the labor market has no fallback.
The deeper concern is what the concentration reveals about the rest of the economy. Employers in other sectors are sitting on their hands. The lack of hiring has helped push the state’s unemployment rate to 4.8 percent in December from 4.1 percent a year earlier.
Some of the hesitation reflects a cyclical downturn in industries such as tech, pharma, and biotech, which went on hiring binges during and after the pandemic. Also at play are uncertainties created by shifting US trade policies, the Trump administration’s campaign to force changes in admissions and hiring in higher education — threatening federal funding cuts — and the rapid acceleration of AI’s capabilities.
“Massachusetts is losing momentum,” said economist Alan Clayton-Matthews, senior contributing editor at MassBenchmarks, a research project at University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Donahue Institute. The shifting economic landscape is “weighing on the psyche of consumers and businesses,” he said.
What’s ahead: Clayton-Matthews said Massachusetts will likely face stiff headwinds from President Trump’s tight restrictions on immigration and mass deportations of people in the country illegally.
Combined with an aging population, employers may struggle to find enough workers if the labor force shrinks as Clayton-Matthews expects.
Final thought: The “Massachusetts Miracle” of the 1980s — when the state transformed from a down-and-out, deindustrialized economy into a technology- and education-driven powerhouse — is ancient history.
Now we’re struggling to keep our head above water. At some point, exhaustion sets in — and a state that has always prided itself on out-thinking its problems will need more than one sector to carry us to shore.
“The worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve System.”
— White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, commenting on a Federal Reserve Bank of New York blog post that found most of President Trump’s tariffs are being paid by US firms and consumers.
Wrong way: The US trade deficit in goods expanded to a record $1.24 trillion in 2025 despite sweeping tariffs imposed by President Trump.
Medical meddling: Regulators’ flip-flop over a potential flu vaccine from Cambridge-based Moderna illustrates a new reality for vaccine makers: Political headwinds are now unavoidable.
Big haul: Boston-based Battery Ventures raised $3.25 billion for its new investment fund — more than all Massachusetts venture capital firms combined last year.
Bricks and mortar: JPMorgan Chase plans to open eight branches in Massachusetts this year, bringing the total to 100.
See you in court: A federal judge rejected Live Nation’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it monopolized the live concert industry.
5.9%
— Oil price increase on the NYMEX this week as the US beefed up its military forces in the Mideast amid a looming showdown with Iran.
Golden years.Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
Forget the tech lords of Silicon Valley or Wall Street’s masters of the universe: Senior citizens own the economy, and it’s a problem.
That’s the assessment of Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal. He explains:
As of the third quarter of last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households, compared with 22% in 2007, according to Federal Reserve data. Their share of net worth — assets minus debts — was 32%, up from 20% two decades earlier.
This is good news: there has never been a better time in America to be old. Yet it also exposes our disjointed national priorities. We keep pouring resources into making the elderly comfortable and happy when the economy’s pressure points lie elsewhere.
The elderly are mostly out of the job market and thus need not worry about being replaced by artificial intelligence. The majority own their homes, often debt-free. Everyone worries about health costs, but the elderly have publicly funded Medicare. None of this is true for young generations.
You can read Ip’s piece here (free link).
📆 On this date in 2014, Facebook (now Meta) said it would acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had 55 employees and more than 450 million monthly users. Today, it has more than 3 billion users.
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Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.