By GRANT PECK, Associated Press

BANGKOK (AP) — The United States, which played a major role in ending border clashes last year between Thailand and Cambodia, will be providing $45 million in aid packages to the two Southeast Asian countries to help ensure regional stability and prosperity, a senior U.S. State Department official said Friday.

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U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Michael DeSombre made the announcement in an online media briefing in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, where he was meeting with senior Thai officials to discuss the implementation of last October’s ceasefire, also known as the Kuala Lumpur Peace Accord.

Longstanding competing claims to territory along the Thai-Cambodian border was the root cause of the fighting.

“The restoration of peace at the Thai-Cambodian border opens new opportunities for the United States to deepen our work with both countries to promote regional stability and advance our interests in a safer, stronger and more prosperous Indo-Pacific,” DeSombre said.

On Saturday, he’s scheduled to hold discussions with top officials from Cambodia in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh.

The United States “will be providing $15 million for border stabilization to help communities recover and to support displaced persons; $10 million in demining and unexploded ordinance clearance operations; and $20 million for initiatives that will help both countries combat scam operations and drug trafficking, among many other programs,” DeSombre said.

Details of the aid packages were still under discussion, he said.

China said it has provided about $2.8 million in emergency humanitarian aid to help Cambodians displaced by the fighting. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said Beijing made the same offer of assistance to Thailand, and that it was under consideration by his government.

The United States and China have competed for influence in Southeast Asia for at least a decade. Cambodia is a close ally of Beijing, and while Thailand has long and close ties with Washington, they are widely seen as loosening in recent years.

The fighting in July and December displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Thailand and Cambodia and killed about 100 soldiers and civilians. Land mines left over from decades of civil war in Cambodia are a continuing problem, while Thailand claims newly laid mines in frontier areas were responsible for wounding its patrolling soldiers in about a dozen incidents last year.

Online scams originating in Southeast Asia, especially from Cambodia and Myanmar, are major transnational crime problems that have swindled billions of dollars from victims around the would.

U.S. assistance to the countries of Southeast Asia and other parts of the world for humanitarian and development programs was severely cut last year when the Trump administration shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Cambodia and Thailand initially clashed for five days in late July before agreeing on a preliminary ceasefire. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim at the time pressed for an unconditional ceasefire, but there was little headway until U.S. President Donald Trump intervened. Trump said that he warned the Thai and Cambodian leaders that Washington wouldn’t move forward with trade agreements if hostilities continued.

The ceasefire was formalized in more detail in October at a regional meeting in Malaysia that Trump attended.

New fighting broke out early last month, but the Thai and Cambodian defense ministers signed a new pact on Dec. 27, vowing to implement the October agreement.

“We are very focused on pursuing peace in and around the world,” DeSombre told journalists. “President Trump is a president of peace, and really believes that peace is critical to economic growth and prosperity.”

By Erin El Issa, NerdWallet

Americans’ financial confidence is strong coming into the new year, but some are feeling more equipped to deal with 2026 obstacles than others.

A recent NerdWallet survey, conducted online by The Harris Poll, found that Americans are more often confident than not about their ability to withstand money misfortune should it occur this year. Over 3 in 5 Americans (62%) say they could financially withstand a 2026 recession, and more than half (55%) think they could withstand income loss in 2026. But digging into the demographics reveals differences across genders.

Men are consistently more likely than women to say they’re confident about their ability to financially withstand these events. For example, 65% of men say if they experienced income loss in 2026, they’d be able to financially cope, compared to just 46% of women.

Why are men more likely to feel confident about their ability to deal with these potential financial black swans? It’s likely due to a combination of factors, including financial literacy and wage gaps, as well as a gender gap in general confidence. A 2025 study by the FINRA foundation found that men score higher on a financial literacy quiz than women, though that gap is narrowing for younger generations. This slight leg up on financial knowledge may lead men to have extra confidence about dealing with money events, even potentially stressful ones.

As for the wage gap, women earned an average of 85% of what men earned in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center. And it’s arguably easier to withstand a financial hiccup or two for those who have more resources to do so.

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A 2022 report on the gender gap in confidence points to another possible reason why men are more self-assured in navigating negative financial events: They appear to have more self confidence in general than women. This doesn’t necessarily mean men will be more likely to successfully cope with these potential events than women. It just means they view themselves — and therefore, perhaps, their ability to financially withstand negative economic and personal financial events — more positively than women view themselves and their abilities.

Regardless of your gender (or confidence level), being able to financially navigate negative money events gets easier when your financial house is in order. For most, this probably means saving for emergencies, paying off debt and investing for the future.

Saving for emergencies: Experts recommend an emergency fund of three to six months worth of expenses, but we all begin somewhere. If you’re starting from scratch, aim for an initial goal of $500 to $1,000, which could cover some basic home or auto repairs, or even a surprise medical bill. Then set the next goal — maybe one month of expenses — and so on.

A fully funded emergency fund will likely take years to amass, but the ability to use it to handle setbacks can be a financial confidence booster.

Paying off debt: High-interest debt is not just costly, it also eats up your budget with monthly payments. Making a debt payoff plan and sticking to it can free up cash and save money in interest costs.

Investing for the future: Once immediate financial priorities are covered, it’s smart to look to the future and start putting away money for your older self. Investing early and regularly can give you confidence that whatever the future holds, whether in 2026 or 2056, you’re doing what you can to financially prepare.

Erin El Issa writes for NerdWallet. Email: erin@nerdwallet.com.

The article Survey: Men More Financially Confident in the New Year originally appeared on NerdWallet.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are ticking higher Friday following a mixed report on the U.S. job market, one that may delay another cut to interest rates by the Federal Reserve but not necessarily slam the door on it.

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The S&P 500 rose 0.2% in early trading and was nearing its all-time high set earlier in the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 147 points, or 0.3%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was virtually unchanged.

Treasury yields were mixed in the bond market after the U.S. Labor Department said employers hired fewer workers in total during December than economists expected, though the unemployment rate improved and was better than expected. It reinforced the belief that the U.S. job market may be in a “ low-hire, low-fire” state.

While the overall data was mixed, the improvement in the unemployment rate was enough to get traders to ratchet back their expectations for a cut to interest rates at the Fed’s next meeting at the end of this month. Traders are now forecasting just a 5% chance of that, down from 11% a day before, according to data from CME Group.

But they’re still forecasting a high likelihood that the Fed will cut at least twice this upcoming year. Whether they’re correct carries high stakes for financial markets. Lower interest rates can goose the economy and push up prices for investments, though they also can worsen inflation at the same time.

“Until the data provide a clearer direction, a divided Fed is likely to stay that way,” according to Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. “Lower rates are likely coming this year, but the markets may have to be patient.”

After the report, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.19%, where it was late Thursday. It tends to track expectations for longer-term economic growth and inflation. But the two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks forecasts for what the Fed will do with short-term interest rates in the near term, ticked up to 3.50% from 3.49%.

On Wall Street, power company Vistra soared 14.6% to help lead the market after signing a 20-year deal to provide electricity to Meta Platforms from three of its nuclear plants. Big Tech companies have been signing a string of such deals to electrify the data centers powering their moves into artificial-intelligence technology.

Oklo jumped 12% after saying it also signed a deal with Meta Platforms that will help it secure nuclear fuel and advance its project to build a facility in Pike County, Ohio.

They helped offset a 1.6% drop for General Motors. The auto giant said it will take a $6 billion hit to its results for the last three months of 2025 related to its pullback from electric vehicles. That’s on top of the $1.6 billion in charges GM took in the prior quarter. Fewer tax incentives and easier fuel-emission regulations have been eating into demand for EVs.

WD-40 tumbled 13.7% after reporting a weaker profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Chief Financial Officer Sara Hyzer said the soft numbers were primarily because of timing issues, not weaker demand from end customers, and the company stood by its financial forecasts for the upcoming year.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia.

The French CAC 40 rose 1%, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6% for two of the world’s bigger gains. In Tokyo, Fast Retailing, the fashion company behind Uniqlo, jumped 10.6% after its quarterly operating profit surged about 34% year-on-year. It revised its full-year forecasts upward.

AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sluggish hiring last month closed out a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even as layoffs and unemployment have also been low.

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Employers added just 50,000 jobs in December, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower.

The data suggests that businesses are reluctant to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many firms hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.

Nearly all the jobs added in December were in the health care and restaurant and hotel industries. Manufacturing, construction and retail companies all shed jobs.

The jobs data are being closely watched on Wall Street and in Washington because they are the first clean readings on the labor market in three months. The government didn’t issue a report in October because of the six-week government shutdown, and November’s data was distorted by the closure, which lasted until Nov. 12.

Still, December’s report caps a year of sluggish hiring, particularly after “liberation day” in April when President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, though many were later delayed or softened. The economy generated an average of 111,000 jobs a month in the first three months of 2025. But that pace dropped to just 11,000 in the three months ended in August, before rebounding slightly to 22,000 in November.

Subdued hiring underscores a key conundrum surrounding the economy as it enters 2026: Growth has picked up to healthy levels, yet hiring has weakened noticeably and the unemployment rate has increased in the last four jobs reports.

Last year, the economy gained just 584,000 jobs, sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024. It’s the smallest annual gain since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020.

Most economists expect hiring will accelerate this year as growth remains solid, and President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation is expected to produce large tax refunds this spring. Yet they acknowledge there are other possibilities: Weak job gains could drag down future growth. Or the economy could keep expanding at a healthy clip, while automation and the spread of artificial intelligence reduces the need for more jobs.

Even the weak 2025 figures are likely to be revised lower in February, when the government completes an annual benchmarking of the jobs figures to an actual count of jobs derived from companies’ unemployment insurance filings. A preliminary estimate of that revision showed it could reduce total jobs as of March 2025 by 911,000.

And last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the government could still be overstating job gains by about 60,000 a month because of shortcomings in how it accounts for new companies as well as those that have gone out of business. The Labor Department is expected to update those methods in its report next month.

With hiring so weak, the Federal Reserve cut its key short-term interest rate three times late last year, in an effort to boost borrowing, spending, and hiring. Yet Powell signaled that the central bank may keep its rate unchanged in the coming months as it evaluates how the economy evolves.

Even with such sluggish job gains, the economy has continued to expand, with growth reaching a 4.3% annual rate in last year’s July-September quarter, the best in two years. Strong consumer spending helped drive the gain. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecasts that growth could slow to a still-solid 2.7% in the final three months of last year.

At the same time, inflation remains elevated, eroding the value of Americans’ paychecks. Consumer prices rose 2.7% in November compared with a year ago, little changed from the beginning of the year and above the Fed’s 2% target.