The U.S. labor market bounced back in March, with job creation much stronger than expected though the broader picture of a slow-growth labor market held intact.

Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 178,000 during the month, a reversal from the 133,000 decline in February and better than the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 59,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. February’s number was revised down by 41,000 while January was revised up by 34,000 to 160,000, putting the three-month average around 68,000.

With job creation higher, the unemployment rate edged lower to 4.3%.

As has been the case, health care was responsible for much of the growth, with the sector adding 76,000. A strike at health-care provider Kaiser Permanente in February hit the sector. The BLS said ambulatory health care services rose by 54,000, with 35,000 coming from the strike workers returning.

Construction saw an increase of 26,000, while transportation and warehousing posted a gain of 21,000.

On the downside, the federal government saw a loss of 18,000, while financial activities lost 15,000.

Though the unemployment rate posted a decline, the move largely came from a decline of 396,000 in the labor force. The share of working-age Americans in the labor force fell to 61.9%, its lowest since November 2021.

The survey of households, which is used to compute the unemployment rate, showed 64,000 fewer people holding jobs. An alternative unemployment figure that counts discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons edged up to 8%.

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants, saying the “New Regime leadership knows what has to be done, and has to be done, FAST!” in a Truth Social post.

Trump did not elaborate on what needed to be “done,” but said the U.S. “hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran.”

Hours later, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reportedly claimed that a U.S. F-35 fighter jet was shot down over central Iran. Images of the jet were posted on Telegram, with one photo that appeared to show the words “U.S. Air Forces in Europe” on what appeared to be the tail section of a plane.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees the region, and Iranian authorities did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Trump’s latest threat came a day after a nationwide address in which he said the U.S. military would hit Iran “extremely hard” for the next two or three weeks. He added that the U.S. would “bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”

Hours after his speech, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi struck a defiant tone on X, saying that “there was no oil or gas being pumped in the Middle East back then,” referring to Trump’s stone age remarks.

“Are POTUS and Americans who put him in office sure that they want to turn back the clock?” Araghchi said.

Iran has effectively shut tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil route, after the U.S. and Israel attacked the country on Feb. 28.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to send Iran back to the “stone age” as the war entered its second month and the U.S. military build-up in the Middle East showed no signs of slowing.

Despite reports of overtures from the U.S., including ceasefires and a 15-point peace plan to end the war, Iran has publicly contradicted multiple reports about negotiations with the Trump administration on numerous occasions.

Tehran had described the 15-point proposal as “extremely maximalist and unreasonable,” according to an Al Jazeera report on March 25, citing a high-ranking diplomatic source.

Trump said Wednesday that Iran’s “New Regime President” had asked Washington for a ceasefire, a claim that Tehran has denied. Trump has not specified who the “President” is.

“We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!,” he wrote.

Attacks on power plants could constitute a war crime and violate international law, legal experts said.

In a letter dated Thursday and signed by over 100 law experts, the group said international law prohibits attacks on “objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.”

Trump had also earlier said that he could target water desalination plants in Iran.

The Gulf Cooperation Council on Thursday called on the United Nations Security Council to take “all necessary measures to ensure the immediate cessation of Iranian aggressions against the Council states.”

The six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have come under attack from Iranian missiles and drones as the war entered its second month.

The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said that its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery was hit by drones early on Friday.

Jassim Albudaiwi, Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, said that while the bloc does not seek war, Iran had “exceeded all red lines” and described Tehran’s attacks as “treacherous.”

Bahrain, the current rotating president of the Security Council, has led an effort to pass a U.N. resolution to ​authorize “all necessary means” to protect commercial shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

But the proposal reportedly stalled after veto-wielding Security Council members China, Russia and France objected to the draft resolution, which would have authorized military action against Iran.

Nonfarm payrolls are expected to bounce back — barely — in March as the bar keeps getting lower for what constitutes a healthy labor market.

The U.S. economy is projected to show job gains of 59,000 for the month, an anemic rate by the standards of previous years this decade but enough to keep the unemployment rate at 4.4%.

If the estimate is reasonably accurate, it actually would represent above-trend job growth for a labor market that has created virtually no jobs over the past year.

Immigration restrictions, shifting demographics and geopolitical uncertainty have left companies eager neither to hire nor fire workers en masse, resulting in a static labor market and a series of ho-hum monthly counts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS will release the number Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET, though the stock market will be closed in observance of the Good Friday holiday.

“We have to revise our idea of what a good or bad job number is,” said Guy Berger, chief economist at Homebase, which provides workforce management services for small businesses.

A report like February’s showing job losses “would have been raising alarm bells about the state of the labor market,” he added. “Now we’re like, yeah, that was a very bad report, but it doesn’t freak anybody out about the job market. I didn’t look at that report and say, wow, we’re on the verge of tipping into recession.”

Echoing views expressed by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and other central bankers, Berger said he’s more focused on the unemployment rate as a gauge of labor market stability.

In a recent report, the St. Louis Fed updated previous research on the breakeven level for job growth. The bank’s economists now think that number could be as low as 15,000, with a high end of 87,000.

That’s a steep drop from an estimate as recent as April 2025 that showed the breakeven level at 153,000, and an update in August of that year putting the number between 32,000 to 82,000.

In other words, the labor market needs nowhere near the job growth it required previously to keep the population near full employment.

“Things have been slowly getting worse each for the last few years,” Berger said, but added, “There’s no real sign of us tipping into a recession.”

Some economists on Wall Street disagree. Goldman Sachs, Moody’s Analytics and others in recent days have raised their odds of recession in the next 12 months, with a focus on threats from a slowing jobs picture and surging energy costs.

Earlier this week, BLS data showed that the rate of hiring as a share of the workforce fell to 3.1%, its lowest level since the Covid recession in 2020 and, before that, January 2011.

Still, Homebase’s data is consistent with other indicators, including the ADP private payrolls report for March, showing modest gains in payrolls. February’s loss of 92,000 jobs came in part due to a since-resolved strike at health-care provider Kaiser Permanente that sidelined some 31,000 workers in California and Hawaii.

The sprawling Middle East crisis is expected to spur drivers to abandon traditional internal combustion engine vehicles in favor of EVs, analysts told CNBC, although early evidence suggests this will be a gradual gearshift.

The Iran war has severely disrupted oil exports through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, which typically carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas (LNG). It has underlined the extent to which the world remains deeply reliant on fragile fossil fuel trade routes, while surging oil and gas prices have jolted energy markets and triggered widespread inflation fears.

Various car-selling platforms in the U.S. and Europe have reported a sharp increase in consumer interest for EVs since the war began in late February. The burgeoning trend comes even as a large chunk of the legacy car industry pivots back to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

Autotrader, an online vehicles marketplace, reported on March 26 a 28% jump in inquiries about buying a new EV and a 15% increase in inquiries about buying a used one, since the war in Iran started on Feb. 28. EV specialist Octopus Electric Vehicles said on March 25 it had seen EV leasing inquiries rise 36% since the start of the conflict.

But U.S. automakers Ford Motor, General Motors and Jeep owner Stellantis have all reversed course on EV strategies, booking tens of billions of dollars in combined write-offs and restructuring costs, in part due to lackluster consumer demand and shifting political landscapes.

Steffen Michulski, senior consultant at JATO Dynamics, said that while the situation is still evolving, it was already clear that the fallout from the Iran war could influence EV demand.

Owning a battery electric vehicle (BEV) has become more compelling for drivers covering a lot of mileage, Michulski said, given that a sharp rise in oil prices has made conventional gasoline cars much more expensive.

Switching to an EV may also provide households with an extra layer of energy independence, Michulski said, although he cautioned that it would be important not to “oversimplify” the situation. He pointed out that the overall economic environment may soften if inflation and supply chain costs continue to rise, for example, with these broader pressures impacting all powertrains — electric or combustion.

“To shorten and summarize it: Yes, elevated oil prices and the renewed focus on energy security are likely to provide a mid term boost to BEV demand,” Michulski told CNBC by email.

“But this is best understood as an incremental shift rather than a sudden market wide acceleration. Electricity price risks, technological progress on the combustion side, and general economic uncertainty all act as counterweights,” he added.

An analysis published by Transport & Environment earlier this month found that electric cars were already cutting the European Union’s oil imports, noting that the nearly 8 million EVs in the EU will save the bloc around 46 million barrels of oil in 2025. That’s the equivalent of almost 3 billion euros ($3.45 billion) in avoided oil import costs.

In the context of the Middle East conflict, meanwhile, the analysis said that petrol drivers were expected to be five times more exposed to higher oil prices than EV owners.

Poliscanova said EV growth drivers in Asia, notably Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, which all benefit from affordable models by Chinese car manufacturers, were all likely to see an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels.

“We’re likely to see an even faster shift in some of these economies away from oil, meaning that we in Europe today, still discussing things like biofuels and hybrids, just look really stupid and detached from the reality,” Poliscanova said.

A spokesperson for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, declined to comment.

“The hard part is done,” President Donald Trump said in his address to the nation Wednesday night about the Iran war. The recent jump in gas prices is “short term increase” that should “will rapidly come back down” once the vital Strait of Hormuz is reopened, he said.

But there is reason to worry that the conflict and its economic consequences for Americans may get worse before they get better. If so, Trump will struggle to shake off the damaging political legacy of the war.

In that he would join a long line of U.S. presidents going back to the 1970s who have seen their tenures defined by energy crisis and inflation — the economic scourge Trump has called a “nation-buster.” 

“The oil shock of the ’70s was planted in the maybe subterranean part of our brains,” said Jay Hakes, a presidential historian who led the U.S. Energy Information Administration in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. 

“It was there for a long time because it was just such a jolt. And I think this will be that kind of jolt,” Hakes said.

Gas prices on Tuesday rose above $4 a gallon on average for the first time since the war began. Gas has followed Brent crude prices that have risen 27% since the war began to just over $100 a barrel Wednesday. Oil tankers and other commercial shippers that would normally travel through the narrow Strait of Hormuz off Iran’s southern coast have been idled due to Iran’s threats and attacks. The waterway normally carries 20% of the world’s oil. 

But $4 a gallon gas, painful as it is, may only be the tip of the iceberg. That is clearer in the rest of the world than the U.S., for now. The U.K. is set to receive its last shipment of jet fuel for the foreseeable future this week. Prices of jet fuel worldwide are up 96%, according to Platts data published by the International Air Transport Association. Futures contracts for liquid natural gas in Japan and South Korea are up 43%, according to FactSet data. 

Asia and to a lesser extent Europe are more immediately exposed to disruptions in supply from the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike the U.S. — as Trump has repeatedly pointed out — they buy directly from the Middle East. But all of these commodities are connected through global markets. Disruptions in one part of the world will quickly spread to others. Analysts fear the price of oil could jump above the record near $150 a barrel set in July 2008 during the Great Recession.

So far, the world has benefited from energy supplies that were already in transit when the war began just over a month ago, aided by emergency releases from strategic petroleum reserves. But the world is burning through those supplies. 

“With even the modest estimates we have now, the loss of oil in April will be twice the loss of oil in March,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said on a podcast released Wednesday.

Governments around the world are trying to encourage energy conservation in the face the crisis. A tracker from the IEA shows 26 governments have taken steps such as Pakistan lowering the speed limit.

Trump has taken steps to encourage the market to improve supply but has stopped short of calling on Americans to try to conserve energy. Doing so might call back uncomfortable comparisons to President Jimmy Carter’s attempts after the 1979 crisis, which began with the Iranian Revolution. Ronald Reagan turned Carter’s calls for consumers to limit themselves into a potent political weapon, winning him the presidency the next year. 

And Trump has spent part of his terms in the White House calling for limits on construction of and subsidies for renewable energy production.

The politics of energy have taken a toll on the nation. “We’ve lost our ability to ask the American public to sacrifice,” Hakes said. 

Before Carter, presidents — including Republicans — called on a need for shared sacrifice. President Richard Nixon proposed a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. It was passed into law the next year, but even before that Nixon urged people to slow down, “and they did,” Hakes said. 

“We still had a little bit of the World War II mentality,” Hakes said. 

The energy crises of the 1970s put the nail in the coffin of that mentality. Nixon and Carter struggled to lower prices, and inflation surged. Carter put Paul Volcker in place as Federal Reserve chair to tackle inflation — which he eventually did, but only by raising interest rates high enough to prompt a recession, followed by record-high mortgage rates. Carter, of course, wasn’t re-elected.

Americans’ sense of what government can and should do was permanently changed.

“The failure of the nation’s politicians to address the energy crisis contributed to the erosion of faith that Americans had in their government to solve the problems,” Princeton University historian Meg Jacobs wrote in “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s.”

“If the Vietnam war and Watergate scandal taught Americans that their presidents lied, the energy crisis showed them that their government didn’t work,” Jacobs wrote.

Today, Trump’s premise as president is that government only works when he is in charge. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He has centralized control of the executive branch in the Oval Office, drawing power from cabinet secretaries and agencies that previously operated autonomously. 

The worst-case worries may not come to pass. The U.S. could quickly force Iran to capitulate, and the global economy could heal fast, as it did after the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But if not, Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran may only deepen many Americans’ alienation from their government. And as the sole decider atop the federal bureaucracy, Trump will have a difficult time convincing the public that anyone but him bears responsibility. 

Wartime propaganda has evolved for the social media age, and Iran is now vying with the U.S. to be the world’s biggest keyboard warrior.

As the real-world bombardment in the Middle East continues and casualties mount, both sides in the month-old war are also firing off ironic, pop-culture-steeped memes on the online battlefield. Iran’s new leaders have quickly assumed an online fighting posture, amping up their memes and pointed attacks on the U.S. and Israel.

“What we’re seeing is not just a war of weapons, but it’s also a war of aesthetics,” said Nancy Snow, a professor and author who studies propaganda. “Whoever controls the meme controls the mood.”

Iran’s prime target is President Donald Trump, with state media and top officials alike relentlessly mocking and amplifying criticisms of the U.S. leader.

Top members of Iran’s parliament, its Revolutionary Guard and even its president, Masoud Pezeshkian, have sought to insult or undermine Trump in their messaging. And they’re using the world’s most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, to get the word out.

Among the most striking examples: a series of seemingly AI-generated videos depicting Iranian military successes against the U.S. and Israel in a Legoesque cartoon art style.

One shows a panicked Trump ordering an airstrike after reviewing the “Epstein File” alongside Satan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Another, a rap diss track, calls Trump a “loser” and accuses him of being Netanyahu’s “puppet” over images of stock market sell-offs, missile strikes and coffins.

Those and other messages out of Iran regularly reference Jeffrey Epstein, the late notorious sex offender and former Trump friend at the center of conspiracy theories that the president launched the Iran war to distract the public from headlines about releases of files related to the Epstein investigation.

The plain intent of Iran’s messaging is not just to project defiance and counter U.S. assessments of Tehran’s military weakness, but also to undermine Trump by homing in on some of his biggest political vulnerabilities.

“Iran is blending grievance with meme culture — mixing Epstein, anti-war sentiment and pop visuals to penetrate fragmented Western audiences,” Snow said.

As for why they’re using Legos to convey their message, it may be because of their universal appeal, said Dan Butler, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis who uses the toys in his teaching.

“The same reason it works in education is the reason actors would use it for propaganda: people like Legos and will tune in to watch Lego-based films,” Butler told CNBC in an email.

“In fact if something is violent, using Legos might make people lower their defenses and also be more likely to share the material,” he said.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has melded wartime messaging with internet culture even more literally.

In the early days of the war, official accounts shared videos splicing clips from sports, movies and video games into real footage of military strikes.

The visuals dovetail with the relentlessly bombastic and boastful rhetoric from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have repeatedly trumpeted the “obliteration” of Iran’s military while assuring that the U.S. is rapidly nearing its objectives for victory.

But the White House officials involved in creating the videos say they have proven effective in drawing attention and connecting with young people. One of them told Politico the efforts are meant to tout U.S. troops’ heroic work “in a way that captivates an audience.”

The White House told CNBC it intends to stick with its messaging strategy.

“The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

On the latter metric, the strategy has been a success: Four videos posted on the official White House X account on March 5 and 6 have garnered nearly 100 million impressions as of April 1.

Iran’s goal isn’t to convince or corral its own people — who are reportedly facing extended internet outages — but rather to craft a “response offensive” to undermine the U.S. globally, Stahl said.

“There’s a lot of erosion with regard to potential [U.S.] ally support for this war, and these messages from Iran are playing right into that.”

It’s not all memes and trolling. Iranian officials are also homing in on the war’s destabilizing impact on the global economy and energy prices.

On Monday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. is “in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran.”

The S&P 500 ended the trading day lower while oil prices continued to rise.

Ghalibaf on Tuesday shared a CNN article on Americans struggling with the war-induced spike in U.S. gas prices.

“Sad, but this is what happens when your leaders put others ahead of hard-working and ordinary Americans. It’s not America First anymore … it’s Israel First,” he wrote.

President Donald Trump plans to be at the Supreme Court on Wednesday for oral arguments on whether an executive order of his can upend what has long been the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

Trump would be the first sitting president to attend Supreme Court arguments.

The White House on Tuesday evening issued Trump’s daily schedule for Wednesday, which included him attending the arguments in the birthright citizenship case known as Trump v. Barbara.

“I’m going,” Trump told reporters Tuesday at the White House.

If Trump’s executive order is upheld, it would leave tens of thousands of babies born in the U.S. each month to undocumented immigrants or visitors without American citizenship.

Trump, in his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, signed an executive order saying that 30 days after its effective date, babies born in the U.S. were not entitled to be issued citizenship documents if their parents were illegal immigrants or undocumented workers.

The order contradicted what has, for more than 150 years, been the legal interpretation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as giving automatic citizenship to babies born in the country, regardless of their parents’ status.

That amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Several federal district court judges ruled that Trump’s order violated the Constitution. And two federal circuit courts of appeal upheld injunctions blocking the order from taking effect.

Hello, this is Holly Ellyatt writing to you from London. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.

Global markets will be on tenterhooks today after the White House said that U.S. President Donald Trump will deliver an address “to the nation to provide an important update on Iran” late on Wednesday evening.

The U.S. and Israel’s military operation against Iran is just over a month old but there’s a clear sense that war fatigue could be creeping in at the top, with Trump reportedly telling aides that he was willing to end the war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Speaking of which, the president on Tuesday again lambasted European allies for not getting involved in the U.S.’ war, telling the U.K. and France to “Go get your own oil” from the Iran-blocked maritime passage.

Pace yourselves if you want to listen in to President Trump’s address on Wednesday giving an update on the Iran war — it’s set to take place at 9 p.m. ET — that’s 2 a.m. on Thursday London time.

“We leave because there’s no reason for us to do this,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’ll be ‌leaving very soon.” He also seemed to dismiss the idea of having to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war, signaling that the U.S. could just declare victory and end hostilities.

Global markets certainly like the idea of the war ending sooner rather than later: Asia-Pacific markets rebounded overnight while European bourses look set to rally at the open on Wednesday. U.S. stock futures also ticked higher on hopes that Trump is looking for an off-ramp to the war, which has sent global energy prices rocketing. Crude oil prices once again extended gains overnight.

We’ll have to wait and see what the president says later, but he’ll be mindful that this war has never had much support from U.S. voters and the majority want him to focus on domestic matters — ‘America First,’ remember?

Speaking of voting, the president signed an executive order on Tuesday cracking down on mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in November. The move did not go down well with voting-rights advocates, who warned it could disenfranchise millions of Americans.

It’s April Fool’s Day, so watch out for any news that seems too outlandish – I know, it’s getting harder these days.

— Holly Ellyatt

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