Axios

Investors drove Johnson & Johnson's stock up earlier this week after the company announced a proposed settlement with people accusing its talc-based baby powder of causing cancer — but it's far from a done deal yet.

Why it matters: Tens of thousands of alleged victims and families — whose claims mostly involved ovarian cancer — are hoping for compensation for their suffering.

Millennial homeowners outnumbered millennial renters for the first time last year, despite creeping interest rates and a tight real estate market.

Driving the news: Nearly 52% of the first generation to grow up in the Internet age ​​— people born from 1981 to 1996 — were homeowners in 2022, making the largest ownership gains of any generation in the last five years, according to a new RentCafe report.

Abundant jobs. More people working. Inflationary pressure fading. That represents the dream scenario for the U.S. labor market.

• It is also the picture painted by the March jobs numbers out Friday morning.

Why it matters: If America's labor market were to remain healthy while coming into a less inflationary balance, it would look an awful lot like what we see in March's payrolls data.

When newsletter platform Substack last month launched a crowdfunding campaign, its writers and fans responded with more than $7.5 million in demand at a $585 million pre-money valuation.

• What none of those new investors knew, however, were Substack's recent financials. They still don't. And won't.

Carbonwave, a Boston-based startup that "upcycles" Sargassum seaweed into biomaterials, raised $5 million in venture capital funding led by an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers.

Why it matters: The largest-ever blob of Sargassum seaweed — brown, oily and often pungent — is currently floating toward Florida's west coast, with its outer edges already washing up on local beaches.

The U.S. labor market continues to add jobs at a strong pace: Payrolls rose by 236,000 in March, while the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5%, the lowest level in over a half-century, the Labor Department said on Friday.

Why it matters: Employers still have plenty of demand for workers, despite aggressive efforts from the Federal Reserve to cool off the economy.

Americans, men especially, are working fewer hours now than they did before the pandemic, according to a new paper presented at Brookings last week.

Why it matters: The research suggests that the decline in hours has something to do with a shift in attitudes toward work over the past few years, with more people reevaluating their work-life balance in favor of the life part.

Bankruptcy filings by U.S. companies are finally starting to tick up convincingly.

Why it matters: It’s the fated result of the Fed’s rate-hike campaign. When money gets more expensive and lenders get pickier, the number of companies cut off from rescue capital soon rises.

Sales of matzo wildly peaked last year — unsurprisingly — at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover, according to data from Instacart.

Zoom in: Observers eat matzo, an unleavened bread, to mark the exodus of ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.