• More than a quarter of US metros are still recovering from COVID-era job losses, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported.
• These are chiefly located in Rust Belt states, the South, and Northeast.
• Today's job market amplifies fears of another recession, which some experts say could hit as soon as this year.

As analysts clash over when the next recession will befall the US, large swaths of the country are still bogged down in the previous downturn.

That's as labor markets continue to struggle in more than a quarter of US metros, having never reversed COVID-era job losses, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported this week. 

"More than four years have passed since the onset of the pandemic, which resulted in one of the sharpest and deepest economic downturns in U.S. history," the bank wrote in a blog post, adding: "Many of the places that have not regained the jobs lost were hit particularly hard by the pandemic, leaving a deeper hole to dig out of."

At first glance, it would appear that US labor has won back its strength: By 2022, national employment undid the whopping 15% plummet it suffered two years prior. And today, unemployment remains below 4%.

However, this recovery has been all but even, with certain regions never regaining the jobs they once had. Often, these are metro areas with slow-growth economies, and the lack of workers has only dampened recovery momentum, the Fed said.

Grouped regionally, that includes the Rust Belt area, as well as sectors of the South, the note said. Delayed recoveries can also be found clustered in California, and Hawaii: 

"In fact, employment is still more than 5 percent below pre-pandemic levels in New Orleans, and more than 3 percent below in Honolulu and San Francisco. Likewise, sizable job shortfalls remain in Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh," the Fed wrote.

But this trend is especially distinct in the Northeast, a region that's home to particularly impacted metros. New York City, which suffered as much as 19% job loss, has now just barely regained its employment levels. But the city's service sector continues to lag.

"Some places in upstate New York were hit by a 'triple whammy' of slow growth leading up to the pandemic that has now resumed, a deeper hole when the pandemic hit, and a declining labor force," the bank wrote.

Timing the next recession 

Today, the eroding labor market is sparking renewed downturn fears. Conditions were most recently illustrated by April's jobs report, when added positions came in well below expectations, and unemployment ticked up.

In fact, one veteran analyst is convinced that a downturn is already here, when measured by unemployment's three-month average. By this indicator, a recession started in October, confirmed further by accelerating job erosion, Danielle DiMartino Booth said.

"There's already been 22,000 job loss announcements in the month of May and it's still a fairly young month. So on a seasonal level, we're seeing a major pickup," the QI Research CEO told Bloomberg.

Shrinking labor is also why analyst Frances Donald is betting on a "proper downturn," which will prompt aggressive interest rate cuts.

"Just about everything in the labor market that explains where we are in the labor cycle is pointing to a deterioration," Donald said last Tuesday. "We're not saying it's a big crisis, we're calling for two quarters of negative GDP — Q3 and Q4, could be Q4 and Q1."

But one expert is calling out a crisis. Wall Street veteran Gary Schilling told Business Insider to expect a coming job losses, as layoffs send the unemployment rate up between 5% to 7% this year.

Meanwhile, he warns that any recession would hammer at overconfident investors, sending markets crashing up to 30%.

• Jhonathan Vazquez moved from Houston to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2021.
• The first-generation immigrant was seeking a more affordable cost of living and less traffic.
• Vazquez said he's fallen in love with Tulsa's thriving entrepreneurial scene and arts offerings.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jhonathan Vazquez, 34, the cofounder and COO of Titan Intake, a healthcare referral startup. He moved from Houston, Texas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2021 as part of the latter's incentive program to entice more remote workers.

I'm a first-generation immigrant. My mother came to this country when she was seven months pregnant with me and I was blessed to be born here in the USA. We lived in my aunt's garage for a couple of years until my father was able to get us a small home in Houston.

It was a very humble upbringing. I was the first in my family to have a corporate job.

I met my wife in my early 20s. We moved to downtown Houston. Both of our jobs were in the city, so we lived in a high-rise apartment. But there's a big homelessness issue in Houston, and I wanted something a bit safer for my wife to be able to walk the dogs.

So we moved again, this time to a Houston area called River Roads. I started spending a lot of time commuting to work. We wanted to buy a house in Houston, but finding one that suited our lifestyle that we could also afford would have been tough. We would have had to move outside the city.

During COVID, my wife's company went under. I was working in healthcare doing joint ventures and acquisitions, and my boss allowed me to go completely remote.

My wife found a program called Tulsa Remote, which is a $10,000 stipend to bring remote workers to the city. The goal is also to increase diversity in the city's talent pool.

To be honest, we had never heard much of Tulsa before. The extent of my Tulsa knowledge was when Chandler moved there in a "Friends" episode.

I saw the acceptance rate for the Tulsa Remote program was low, but I figured we had nothing to lose.

I went through the interview process and got accepted.

The Tulsa Remote program wanted people who wanted to be a part of Tulsa's community. It isn't just a stipend. It also sets you up with all these events in the city.

My wife and I love going to the opera, soccer, baseball, and basketball games. When we came and toured Tulsa we saw the city had many things we liked, including museums and a great ballet.

We made the move in January 2021.

The cost of living in Tulsa is ridiculously low. The city is a lot smaller than Houston but still has everything a big city has to offer. And there's no commute. Everything's within 10 to 15 minutes of driving.

One of my favorite things is that Tulsa has all four seasons. In Houston, it's just hot and humid. But here, there's a real winter, summer, spring and fall.

Here in Tulsa, we rent a house with a backyard. We just open the door, and the dogs have a yard. My wife got pregnant two years into our Tulsa journey and had our beautiful daughter. We would have had to move outside the city if we were still in Houston. But in Tulsa, we can afford to stay.

We also pay much less for gas because we don't have to drive 20 miles to get anywhere like we did in Houston. We also have noticed big savings in our housing, too. We're really happy where we're renting, but now that we have our daughter, we're looking to buy a house.

The entrepreneurial community in Tulsa is great.

Tulsa Remote helped set me up with the connections to start my company. About a year and a half after we moved here, I saw something special happening in the entrepreneurship scene and wanted to be a part of it.

I met my company's cofounder, and we started Titan Intake in May 2022. We use AI to automate referrals. We've been able to create something special because of the community that exists here. We raised our friends and family around here in Tulsa. An incubator in the city helped us acquire our first clients.

Since then, the sky has been the limit, and we've continued to grow. Thanks to our app, about 76,000 patients have been seen, and more than 100 doctors use it. We recently closed our pre-seed round of $1.3 million.

Tulsa has a lot of programs to help entrepreneurs with non-dilutive capital, from their first idea to the MVP (minimum viable product) phase. That community is really strong here, especially for minority founders like myself. The community is about collaboration and not competition.

Tulsa is also taking steps to become a thriving tech scene. It was designated a tech hub earlier this year. There are a lot of programs that are trying to push it in that direction.

If people want to start an innovative venture, Tulsa is a great place to do that. The city really helps minority founders get their feet off the ground.

We love it here.

In my wildest dreams I never thought I would live in Tulsa and have a startup and a daughter born here.

I definitely miss the cuisine in Houston. It's so diverse, and things actually stayed open past midnight. I miss my family, too. And we miss the easy access to flights. Now, we have to drive to Dallas when we want to visit my family in Mexico.

But we see ourselves staying in Tulsa for at least five to 10 years. We want to continue to grow here.

• A CNN report exposes alleged abuse of Palestinians at an Israeli Sde Teiman detention center.
• The facility operates under Israel's Unlawful Combatants Law, allowing detention without due process.
• Over 9,000 Palestinians are held in deteriorating conditions since October 7.

An Israeli detention center is subjecting Palestinians to abuse, strapping detainees down to their beds, blindfolding them, and holding them in diapers, a new CNN report alleges.

The Sde Teiman camp in the Negev desert in southern Israel is also a military base. It has been the site of abusive conduct against some of the 70 Palestinian detainees, three Israeli whistleblowers told CNN.

Medical personnel at the facility are alleged to have performed amputations on prisoners due to injuries sustained from prolonged handcuffing, with some procedures carried out by underqualified staff. 

Guards are accused of using excessive force as a form of punishment, while detainees endure routine humiliations, including being attacked by dogs and subjected to aggressive searches, CNN reported.

The Israel Defense Forces detained the prisoners during the on-going invasion of Gaza, that began after Hamas militants surged into southern Israel on October 7 committing massacres and atrocities that left 1,200 people dead, and 230 hostages kidnapped to Gaza. Israel's siege of Gaza that followed has killed 34,000, including thousands of children, says the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.

One whistleblower told CNN that beatings were "not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge. It was punishment for what they did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp."

Guards strip them down of "anything that resembles human beings," a whistleblower said.

In a field hospital, wounded detainees were strapped to beds, dressed in diapers, and fed through straws, CNN reported.

Dr. Mohammed Al-Ran, headed the surgical unit at Gaza's Indonesian hospital, a former prisoner in the Sde Teiman camp, told CNN: "When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement, I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals."

The facility operates under the Unlawful Combatants Law, granting the military broad powers to detain individuals without due process, raising concerns about transparency and accountability.

The law permits the military to detain people for 45 days without an arrest warrant, after which they must be transferred to Israel's formal prison system (IPS).

Satellite images reveal a significant expansion of the Sde Teiman facility since the conflict began.

Accounts of detainee abuse are not unique to the Negev. In November, Business Insider's Alia Shoaib reported on graphic videos appearing to show IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian detainees in the West Bank.

The videos depict IDF soldiers dragging blindfolded and bound Palestinian men on the ground, many half or completely naked.

Last week, a Palestinian doctor died in an Israeli prison after more than four months in detention, Palestinian prisoner associations said, per BBC News.

Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, 50, was the head of orthopedics at al-Shifa Hospital.

Israeli prison authorities said they were investigating the incident. No cause of death was given.

The UN's stance on the treatment of prisoners entails that "all prisoners shall be treated with respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings."

The IDF responded to CNN's report with the following statement: "The IDF ensures proper conduct towards the detainees in custody. Any allegation of misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, MPCID (Military Police Criminal Investigation's Division) investigations are opened when there is suspicion of misconduct justifying such action."

Business Insider contacted the Israeli government for comment.

Currently, over 9,000 Palestinians are being held in conditions that rights groups say have drastically deteriorated since October 7.

• Warren Buffett is building up cash because he can't find anything better, Ted Oakley said.
• Buffett probably cut his Apple stake to reduce his exposure to the "one-trick pony," Oakley said.
• The financial advisor predicted Buffett would pounce on bargains regardless of the market backdrop.

Warren Buffett is stacking up cash because he's battling a bargain drought — and he likely trimmed Apple because he felt overexposed to the iPhone maker, one expert says.

"You do have to watch and see what he's doing," Ted Oakley, the managing partner and founder of Oxbow Advisors, told Business Insider. "The facts are his cash levels keep going higher."

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway cashed in about 13% of its Apple stock last quarter, fueling a $21 billion increase in its pile of cash and Treasurys to a record $189 billion.

"My guess is they're selling more of it because they have a lot of it," Oakley said.

Apple accounted for half of Berkshire's $354 billion stock portfolio at the end of December. It remained its biggest holding with a 40% portfolio share at the end of March.

The computing behemoth is a "big cash generator," but it's essentially a "one-trick pony," Oakley said. "They depend on one product when you get down to it."

Indeed, Apple made $117 billion — or 55% of its net sales — from the iPhone in the six months to April 1, per its latest earnings.

Buffett and his team bought less than $3 billion of stocks in the first three months of this year, even as they sold $20 billion worth, marking their biggest quarter for selling in years.

"Evidently, he doesn't see anything that jumps off the page at him," Oakley said. But he predicted that a lofty market, an uncertain economic outlook, and geopolitical tensions wouldn't stop Buffett and his team from pouncing once they do find value for money.

"When things are cheap, they buy them, and it really doesn't make any difference where the market is," Oakley said, pointing to the raft of lucrative deals that Buffett struck at the height of the financial crisis.

The veteran financial advisor also underscored that Berkshire is pocketing a solid return from owning Treasurys. The Federal Reserve's inflation-busting hikes to interest rates since 2022 have boosted yields on government debt.

However, he echoed Buffett's stated concerns about the national deficit and ballooning debt pile, warning the country is careening toward a point when it won't be able to service the interest on its debt. "Warren Buffett knows that," he said.

Reckless federal spending might also be one driver of "de-dollarization" with countries like China, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia "trying to get away from the dollar," he said.

Oakley sympathized with Buffett's dearth of opportunities. He noted that Oxbow runs stock screens on more than 200 companies that it would like to own, and virtually all of them are expensive now.