But so far, despite persistently elevated inflation, rising interest rates and slowing consumer spending, a true recession has yet to appear. In December, the U.S. economy added 233,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate to pre-pandemic lows of 3.5%. Moody Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said on Sunday that he believes the strong jobs report is evidence that a recession may not be so inevitable after all.

The deeper I look into the bowels of last weeks job market data, the more I think we can skirt a recession, the veteran economist wrote in a Sunday Twitter thread. 

Zandi noted that the unemployment rate remains near a half-century low and argued that the wage pressures that have helped exacerbate inflation in the U.S. over the past year are relenting.

Throughout 2022, the Fed has been on a mission to ensure a soft landing for the U.S. economywhere inflation is tamed without sparking a recession. The problem is that in order to reduce inflation, which reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, the central bank needs to cool the labor market. To do that, officials have embarked on the most aggressive interest rate hiking cycle in 40 years, leaving the stock market in shambles and the housing market ailing. 

But so far, the unemployment rate has actually dropped slightly from 3.6% to 3.5% since the Feds first rate hike in March 2022and wages have been rising too rapidly for the central banks liking as well. 

In Fed Chair Jerome Powells Nov. 30 speech at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Washington, D.C., he made it clear that wage growth needs to come down sharply to fight inflation.

Wage growth remains well above levels that would be consistent with 2% inflation over time. Despite some promising developments, we have a long way to go in restoring price stability, he said.

But the latest jobs report revealed that average hourly earnings rose just 0.3% in December. Thats not exactly the sharp drop that Powell was looking for, but its a step in the right direction.

Avg hourly earnings growth has definitively rolled over, Moodys Mark Zandi said of the data Sunday. This wage measure has its measurement issues, and it is surely overstating the case, but it is making a strong case that workers are moderating their wage demands.

Zandi believes that the U.S. economy could end up in a type of Goldilocks scenario where the unemployment rate remains low, but inflation still falls back to the Feds target rate. He said that businesses dont want to lay off workers outside of tech, pointing to corporations recent issues in finding and retaining employees and low initial unemployment insurance claims as evidence, which means the labor market should remain strong.

But at the same time, wage growth should slow, because businesses have found new ways to reduce costs, Zandi said.

They are pulling back on hiringcutting workers hours, which are about as low as theyve been in over a decade. And they are cutting their temp help workers, he noted, arguing these actions have created slack in the labor market, which is weighing on wage growth. 

This mix of falling wage growth and sustained low levels of unemployment may allow U.S. inflation to fall without the need for a recession, according to the economist.

Recession seems unlikely if wage growth and inflation subside without lots of layoffs. Layoffs seem a necessary condition for a downturn. Its only when workers worry that they will lose their jobs that they panic, ramp up saving and slash spending, and the economy falters, he wrote.

But Rick Rieder, BlackRocks chief investment officer of Global Fixed Income, told Fortune on Friday that while the labor market is softening, he still believes that the unemployment rate will need to rise for inflation to drop back to the Feds 2% target rate. 

We think durably lower levels of inflation would have to coincide with slower demand for employment (and consequently wages), before the FOMC would be ready to relent on tightening policy, he said, referencing the Federal Open Market Committee that sets U.S. monetary policy.

Because of this, Rieder said that the Fed is not ready to stop hiking interest rates just yet, and he believes the path to a soft landing will be more difficult than most imagine.

Creating balance and not overtightening, reducing inflation with blunt tools, which only impact parts of todays modern economy, is in itself a balancing act that even the most decorated Olympian would envy, he said. Policymakers ability to stick this landing for the economy and markets is still very much up in the air.

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The U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics predicted that between 2021 and 2031, 131,000 new jobs would be created in the sector and thats after the 110,000 new openings which would have been created by people retiring from their roles.

On top of that, the average lawyer in the U.S. takes home $36,670 more than the median salary across all other sectors with a pay packet of $82,430.

And yet this week even more legal experts will be on the hunt for a new role after Goodwin Procter announced it was axing associates, professional track attorneys, paralegals, science advisors and employees in its global operations team.

In a memo seen by Fortune, Goodwins chairman Rob Insolia and managing partner Mark Bettencourt said it was a difficult decision which had not been made lightly.

It comes after a raft of job cuts in the industry late last year.

Bloomberg Law reported in November that Cooley LLP was letting go 78 attorneys and 72 paralegals and business personnel across the US, while Kirkland and Ellis laid off between 20 and 25 corporate associates in Texas in the same month.

Goodwin and Cooley both blamed decreasing client demand with key markets such as housing and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) slowing down.

The memo from Goodwin added: For the last several months, our clients have encountered macro-economic headwinds. With the continuing slowdown in the global economy, we too have experienced a slowdown in demand.

While overall we remain busy, demand has dropped from its extraordinary heights of the past several years. This is true not only for our firm, but for the legal industry overall.

According to data from analytics company FactSet, M&A activity in the U.S. decreased in the vast majority of sectors for the three months to November 2022, when compared to the same three-month period in 2021.

The sectors which saw the largest drop in activity included finance and technology.

Meanwhile, the housing market has similarly been pushed to the brink, having entered four months of home price decline after 124 consecutive months of growth.

Is now a good time to be a lawyer?

News of further layoffs was not a surprise to New York-based legal recruitment specialist Alice Thomson, a senior consultant at Robert Walters.

She said: There are two reasons for job cuts. The first is rebalancing the workforce and the second is preparing for an economic downturn.

I work very closely with the technology sector and that saw a huge amount of activity during the pandemic which may now be needing to be equalized. Likewise, the economic outlook is predicting a recession in early 2023 and this could be boards trying to prepare for that.

Having said that, the legal profession is still a really solid career choice and this could represent an opportunity for smaller firms to attract talent who have been let go at bigger firms.

The wages can also be astronomical in the legal profession especially in the U.S. when compared to Australia and the UK. Thats particularly for specialized attorneys such as data privacy, entertainment or artificial intelligence.

Likewise having seen the California Privacy Rights Act come into force on January 1 and federal laws turning to look at AI, it seems compliance isnt going anywhere.

However the slow down in major areas of the legal sector are going to trickle through the global economy warned Peter Talibart, co-head of the international employment law practice at Chicago-based Seyfarth Shaw.

He said: This is not simply a U.S. issue or a legal services issue. It is a global one.

Any economic downturn will inevitably also hit the legal services sector. However many international law firms have practice areas that are both cyclical and counter-cyclical, so those differing components of the practice become busier to support that which is less so.

We all hope that any downturn is short lived. Everyone has been through a lot these past few years, no business wants to have to restructure at this stage.

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A once-every-four-years scientific assessment found recovery in progress, more than 35 years after every nation in the world agreed to stop producing chemicals that chomp on the layer of ozone in Earths atmosphere that shields the planet from harmful radiation linked to skin cancer, cataracts and crop damage.

In the upper stratosphere and in the ozone hole we see things getting better, said Paul Newman, co-chair of the scientific assessment.

The progress is slow, according to the report presented Monday at the American Meteorological Society convention in Denver. The global average amount of ozone 18 miles (30 kilometers) high in the atmosphere wont be back to 1980 pre-thinning levels until about 2040, the report said. And it wont be back to normal in the Arctic until 2045.

Antarctica, where its so thin theres an annual giant gaping hole in the layer, wont be fully fixed until 2066, the report said.

Scientists and environmental advocates across the world have long hailed the efforts to heal the ozone hole springing out of a 1987 agreement called the Montreal Protocol that banned a class of chemicals often used in refrigerants and aerosols as one of the biggest ecological victories for humanity.

Ozone action sets a precedent for climate action. Our success in phasing out ozone-eating chemicals shows us what can and must be done as a matter of urgency to transition away from fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gases and so limit temperature increase, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Signs of healing were reported four years ago but were slight and more preliminary. Those numbers of recovery have solidified a lot, Newman said.

The two chief chemicals that munch away at ozone are in lower levels in the atmosphere, said Newman, chief Earth scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. Chlorine levels are down 11.5% since they peaked in 1993 and bromine, which is more efficient at eating ozone but is at lower levels in the air, dropped 14.5% since its 1999 peak, the report said.

That bromine and chlorine levels stopped growing and is coming down is a real testament to the effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol, Newman said.

There has been a sea change in the way our society deals with ozone depleting substances, said scientific panel co-chair David W. Fahey, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations chemical sciences lab.

Decades ago, people could go into a store and buy a can of refrigerants that eat away at the ozone, punch a hole in it and pollute the atmosphere, Fahey said. Now, not only are the substances banned but they are no longer much in peoples homes or cars, replaced by cleaner chemicals.

Natural weather patterns in the Antarctic also affect ozone hole levels, which peak in the fall. And the past couple years, the holes have been a bit bigger because of that but the overall trend is one of healing, Newman said.

This is saving 2 million people every year from skin cancer, United Nations Environment Programme Director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press earlier this year in an email.

A few years ago emissions of one of the banned chemicals, chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11), stopped shrinking and was rising. Rogue emissions were spotted in part of China but now have gone back down to where they are expected, Newman said.

A third generation of those chemicals, called HFC, was banned a few years ago not because it would eat at the ozone layer but because it is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. The new report says that the ban would avoid 0.5 to 0.9 degrees (0.3 to 0.5 degrees Celsius) of additional warming.

The report also warned that efforts to artificially cool the planet by putting aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight would thin the ozone layer by as much as 20% in Antarctica.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about APs climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Employers have historically turned to noncompetes to reduce turnover and keep workers from fleeing to competition, as demonstrated by a study from the Economic Policy Institute that found 30% of U.S. employers had all of their employees sign noncompetesand nearly 50% of employers had some of their employees enter noncompete agreements. Of course, for workers with intimate knowledge of trade secrets like proprietary technology or convoluted recipes, it would make sense that employers should on a case-by-case basis cement confidentiality provisions.

However, the vast majority of workers should have the chance to take skills accumulated over a long career and move on to better opportunities for themselves and their families. There is a multitude of reasons that workers may want to move on and up: a toxic boss, a cross-country move, an unsatisfactory salary, a workplace scandal, or needing more flexibility after having a child. Whether someone is writing code or cutting hair, they shouldnt have to be indentured to the same employer for years, without the ability to move on as external factors change the conditions of their lives.

In many ways, the FTCs rule mirrors the cultural desires of a workforce that does not want to be locked into one workplace forever, and it speaks to the needs of those who want to move into more independent, flexible, or lucrative forms of work. Millennials and Gen Zers have a reputation for job-hopping, and are far more likely to change jobs frequently than Boomers, according to LinkedIn data from early 2022. That same study found that some 25% of Gen Zers say they hope or plan to leave their employers within the following six months. This cohort will make up a third of U.S. labor by 2030. And according to a study by freelance platform Upwork, a record 60 million Americans performed freelance work in the past 12 months, representing 39% of the U.S. workforce.

Employers may still bristle at workers who want to contribute their skills to the competitionsbut this is a short-sighted attitude. Employees who are forced to stay at a workplace against their will could end up being a greater productivity drain for the company. Looked at from another angle, wouldnt an employer want to recruit a talented worker from a rival who is mistreated, underpaid, or dissatisfied, and looking to move on to a better opportunity?

This shift also pushes workplaces and managers to treat their workers with more respect, with an understanding that their workers could have the autonomy to move on to something better. If the employee is a low performer, the employer should not care that they are pursuing rival work; if they are a high performer, that employer should do everything in their power to maintain that competitive labor advantage.

In our work at Lioness, a storytelling platform that often works with whistleblowers, we have seen workers petrified that noncompete clauses could limit them from ever working in their industry again. One example involved noncompetes at a yoga studio, where yoga teachers were technically prohibited from working at other yoga studios despite facing bullying, harassment, and unpaid wages at their own studio. When workplaces do this, they are essentially telling individuals they must face legal ruin if they ever bring their skills elsewhere.

In an era of quiet quitting and resignations, its clear that workers are demanding novel ways to improve their earnings and quality of life. Eliminating noncompete clauses is a win-win for the workers who want more freedom and upward mobility, and the employers who want a greater pool of talent to choose from.

Ariella Steinhorn and Amber Scorah are partners at Lioness.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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