Commentators rightly extol Warren Buffett’s unique leadership, investment acumen and cultural stewardship — qualities that will be missed after Buffett

retires as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A BRK.B at the end of the year, passing the baton to Greg Abel.

But when tributes to Buffett veer into predictions that Berkshire Hathaway’s best days are behind it, they overlook his greatest legacy: an organization designed to outlast him.

As Nvidia Corp. faces more restrictions on sales to China, the company fears missing out on the country’s growing artificial-intelligence market. But one analyst says the chip maker will be fine in the long run because it has ample opportunity to grow sales in other international markets.

Nvidia

NVDA Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a Tuesday CNBC appearance that not being able to sell to China, where he expects the AI market to be worth $50 billion in the next few years, would be a “tremendous loss.”

Once again, DOGE cuts and tariffs did not appear to have any meaningful impact on employment. The economy added 177,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday, more than the 133,000 jobs that had been forecast by economists. The unemployment rate also held steady at 4.2%. That robust result gives the Federal Reserve breathing room to leave interest rates unchanged for now.

Healthcare can help boost the labor market in the short term, but that will be far more difficult in the long term.

Jobs in healthcare were a standout. Healthcare added 51,000 jobs in April, around the same as the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the previous 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, which is about the same as the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the prior 12 months. Last month, there was particularly strong job growth in hospitals (22,000 new jobs) and ambulatory healthcare services (21,000 new jobs).

We can now, perhaps, all shift our anxieties to next month and, while we’re at it, to the ongoing whipsawing of S&P 500 SPX, Nasdaq COMP and Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA. “The April jobs report shows that the labor market was on solid footing as trade war tensions became more disruptive early last month,” Jeff Schulze, head of economic and market strategy at ClearBridge Investments, said in a note.

“The data for this release was collected during the week following Liberation Day, meaning it would be too soon to expect substantial fallout to emerge just as higher tariffs were being implemented,” he added, referring to the sweeping tariffs Trump announced on April 2. “As a result, investors are likely to look through this positive print, viewing it as a ‘calm before the storm.’” 

So what’s going on? On closer inspection, the job gains were concentrated in a few sectors, including healthcare, transportation and warehousing, and leisure and hospitality. “We expect that transportation and warehousing jobs are at risk as the tariff effects kick in,” said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at Mortgage Bankers Association. That leaves healthcare as the great white hope.

It may not come as a surprise that, with a median salary of $126,000, the No. 1 “best job in America” is in healthcare. The U.S. News & World Report ranks nurse practitioner as the best job for 2025. The best-paid 25% in this profession make more than $140,600, while the lowest-paid 25% make almost $107,000. The second-place job was IT manager and the third was physician assistant, another healthcare job.

The ranking uses metrics, gleaned from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, related to future prospects (30%), wage potential (25%), employment (20%), job safety and stability (15%), and work-life balance (10%). Some career qualities, U.S. News & World Report says, are universally desired: “Workers tend to prefer higher salaries, ample job opportunities and avenues for promotion.”

Don’t miss: America’s job market is eerily similar to the 1990s dot-com bubble — and, yes, it’s a worry

About job safety: Healthcare, in particular, is regarded as “recession proof” — as much as any sector can lay claim to such a lofty title. As the April jobs report shows, healthcare jobs are still growing at almost double the rate of jobs overall. This demand is due in part to advances in technology and to a more effective healthcare system. But it’s also due in a large part to an aging population in need of care. 

That adds up to a lot of U.S. jobs growth centered around one industry. “Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009,” according to a report published last month from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries.”

Healthcare is regarded as ‘recession proof,’ as much as any sector can lay claim to such a lofty title.

More than half of industries added jobs in April, with the strongest gains coming from healthcare, said Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab with a focus on the U.S. labor market. Just three industries, he said, have accounted for between 70% and 80% of jobs growth over the last 12 months: healthcare and social assistance, the government and leisure and hospitality. 

Healthcare has been getting back on its feet. The industry started 2020 with 16.5 million jobs and ended up shedding 450,000 jobs by the end of that year, he told MarketWatch. There was significant attrition and burnout during the pandemic. With a return to normalcy in the U.S. economy, healthcare added 33,000 jobs over the course of 2021 and a massive 571,000 in healthcare.

Stahle also notes a labor market in which companies are not letting go of workers but are slow to hire. One industry can help boost the labor market and allay people’s fears of a broader downturn in the short term, but that will be far more difficult in the long term. “You need to have a variety of jobs,” Stahle said. “It’s really hard to imagine a world in which nurse and doctor jobs hold up the entire U.S. economy.”

Related:

Americans are ‘doom buying’ coffee, olive oil and soap. What’s the one thing I should stockpile to avoid tariff price hikes?

The ‘economic blackout’ is a fool’s errand — and gives ‘woke’ a bad name

‘Would you post your DNA on Facebook?’ Why I’d never use 23andMe or any other DNA testing service

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Shares of Wendy’s Co. slumped toward a five-year low Friday, after the fast-food burger chain reported a drop in a key quarterly sales metric for the first time since the height of the COVID pandemic, as struggling U.S. consumers cut back on restaurant visits.

The decline in same-restaurant sales, which are sales of restaurants open at least 15 months, also hurt profitability of Ohio-based Wendy’s

WEN U.S. business, as did higher costs for commodity products and worker pay, which was partially offset by a higher average check.

The week ahead is set to bring a deluge of economic data that has the potential to come in far below expectations and rattle financial-market participants, who have already been through weeks of tariff-driven volatility.

Read: How stock-market investors are navigating the wait for Trump trade deals

On Monday, the Dallas Fed’s survey on the Texas manufacturing outlook, which included questions on the impact of tariffs, revealed that perceptions of broader business conditions worsened notably this month. The general business-activity index fell 20 points to minus 35.8 for its lowest reading since May 2020. The Dallas Fed report wasn’t big enough to move financial markets, but it still offers a potentially ominous sign for investors of what may come this week.

Still ahead over the next handful of trading sessions are consumer-confidence data for April from the Conference Board, which will be released Tuesday, and an advance estimate of first-quarter gross domestic product on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday will be ADP’s report on private-sector hiring for April and the PCE inflation report for March.

April data from S&P Global’s final U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers’ index and the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing PMI will be released on Thursday. And the nonfarm payrolls report for April arrives on Friday.

Bill Adams, chief economist for Comerica Bank in Dallas, expects this week’s data to come in below expectations and to be weighed down by anxiety from businesses and consumers over the economy’s trajectory. He expects nonfarm payroll gains on Friday of only 115,000 for April, down from 228,000 during March and below the 130,000 consensus estimate. Adams also anticipates the consumer-confidence reading will fall to 80 for April from 92.9 in March, which would be below the consensus estimate of 87. Meanwhile, real first-quarter GDP should come in at minus 1.4% versus the 0.2% consensus forecast and the 2.4% increase seen in the final three months of last year, he said.

Given a big increase in anxiety seen by consumers and businesses over the economy in April, “I’m forecasting for that to show across a variety of hard economic indicators in the coming weeks,” Adams said via phone on Monday. “If the economic data comes in worse than expected in the next couple of weeks, then it would be fair to say that forecasters will be pressured to further mark down their outlooks for the year ahead.” Meanwhile, “we are likely in a period of elevated volatility in markets and the question is if a further deterioration in the growth outlook would convince market participants that the Fed will cut rates soon despite inflation pressures.”

Despite implementing a delay on big reciprocal tariffs against most countries until July, President Donald Trump’s trade war has already led to a slump in shipments at U.S. ports, a rising perceived risk of a global recession and surging inflation expectations among most Americans. Heightened worries over supply shortages are coming into focus again as shipping-container traffic between the U.S. and China has plunged. Some people have argued that the damage has already been done in financial markets, by making U.S. assets like the dollar and perhaps stocks less attractive to investors in the long run.

In Adams’ view, “if policy pivots real soon, there’s still a path for the economy to reaccelerate and register decent economic growth in 2025. But if tariff rates stay at present levels, this will cause big disruptions in supply chains and likely a big slowdown in business capital expenditures and hiring this year.”

As of Monday afternoon, U.S. stocks DJIA SPX COMP were lower as investors await a busy week of data and corporate earnings from companies such as Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, Apple Inc. AAPL, Meta Platforms Inc. META. Treasury yields also moved lower after ending Friday’s session with a second week of declines. Separately, fed-funds futures traders were gravitating toward the likelihood of three to five quarter-point interest-rate cuts from the Federal Reserve by year-end.

After a recent bounce that left all three major U.S. stock indexes higher for last week, equities “could be a bit more choppy as the economic and corporate profit weakness starts to materialize,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities for UBS Global Wealth Management. “But we continue to believe President Trump’s most extreme tariff rhetoric is largely a negotiating tactic rather than a landing zone for the ultimate tariff rates.”

Moreover, Lefkowitz wrote in an email, “it should be clear that President Trump is attuned to the market and economic risks from his tariff policies. We therefore think trade frictions will continue to decline, although not in a straight line. Economic and corporate profit growth should rebound next year after the tariff impacts are absorbed. As markets begin to anticipate this, we believe the S&P 500 can rise to 5,800 by year-end.”

The numbers: A surge in Boeing contracts and companies seeking to stock up ahead of the Trump tariffs sent orders for U.S. durable goods soaring in March, but the strength is likely to fade fast as trade wars begin to bite.

Orders for long-lasting goods surged 9.2% last month,

the government said Thursday, marking the biggest advance since last summer.