(NEW YORK) — In a sea of quality job candidates, you need to make sure your resume is up to snuff and easily skimmable for recruiters to quickly decide to pull yours from the pile.
It can take just six seconds to make an impression with your resume, according to The Wall Street Journal, which spoke to a career coach executive.
ABC News Chief Business Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis shared a few tips that can help make your resume stand out:
Change the bio paragraph into a punchy headline
First, Jarvis suggested swapping that professional statement for a one-line headline.
The days of including a short paragraph to summarize your experience, skills and achievements are gone. Instead, create a headline that will match the role you are applying for.
In the past, a resume might have included something that looks like this: “Sales manager with a decade of experience. … Eager for an opportunity to bring my experience leading a team and launching successful campaigns to market a valuable product.”
The new update for a similar resume should simply state: “Senior software sales manager.”
Trim your work experience
For applicants with a range of work experience, think about altering it for the job you’re applying for and cut out any irrelevant experience to help give hiring managers a clearer understanding of how you’ll fit into the job.
Jarvis explained that you don’t need to pack your resume with every job you’ve ever had, but focus on relevant work history. Customize your resume a bit for the job you’re seeking. Pointing out twists and turns in a career can make some experts think you might be overqualified, which can exclude you early on. Make the resume make sense to help get your foot in the door to sell yourself.
Basic do’s and don’ts to keep in mind
Do: Update your LinkedIn profile.
Do: Brush up on your interview skills.
Do: Take advantage of LinkedIn features and make sure you’re active on the site. For example, Jarvis suggested changing key words in your profile every two weeks to prompt the algorithm to scan your profile and thus help keep you at the top of searches.
Don’t: Experts warn against using the “open to work” banner to avoid discrimination against people between jobs.
Don’t: Use ChatGPT or artificial intelligence to write your resume.
(NEW YORK) — The collapse of First Republic Bank on Monday left it under control of the U.S. government, which quickly sold the bank to JPMorgan Chase. The move aimed to shore up the financial system after a cascade of major bank failures.
JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, retained the majority of First Republic’s assets and all of its deposits, JPMorgan Chase said on Monday. In turn, the deal fully protects depositors at First Republic, who immediately became customers of JPMorgan Chase.
To achieve the rescue, however, a federal agency provided $50 billion in financing to JPMorgan Chase, setting off questions about whether the government had orchestrated a bank bailout.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, President Joe Biden applauded the government effort and assured that the move would not require taxpayer support.
“Regulators have taken action to facilitate the sale of First Republic Bank and ensure that all depositors are protected and the taxpayers are not on the hook,” Biden said.
“These actions are going to make sure that the banking system is safe and sound,” he added.
Here’s what to know about the rescue of First Republic and whether it’s a bailout:
Is the First Republic rescue a bailout?
First Republic, the nation’s 14th-largest bank, fell into financial turmoil because it specialized in long-term mortgage loans to affluent clients.
As interest rates rose rapidly over the past year, the mortgage loans and other investments lost value, leaving the bank with losses on a sizable portion of its balance sheet.
After the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last month, panicked depositors withdrew a significant share of the bank’s funds in part because many of the customers held deposits that exceeded the limit covered by federal insurance.
If the bank had failed without a buyer, the remaining uninsured depositors may have lost their funds.
JPMorgan Chase on Monday agreed to acquire all of the bank’s $103.9 billion in deposits as well as the majority of its $229.1 billion in assets, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a federal agency.
As part of the deal, the FDIC provided $50 billion in financing to JPMorgan Chase, the bank said on Monday. Ultimately, the final cost to the FDIC will be approximately $13 billion, the agency said.
The financing from the FDIC qualifies as a bailout since it marks the transfer of funds from the U.S. government to JPMorgan Chase as a condition of the sale of First Republic, some experts told ABC News.
“The biggest fear is banking runs and lost confidence — that is why the FDIC had to act quickly,” said Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at broker OANDA. “I would consider that a bailout.”
“The focus is to make sure the bank failure doesn’t significantly lead to a crisis,” he added.
Anat Admati, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, echoed the sentiment, noting that the FDIC appears to have helped ease the acquisition of First Republic.
“This seems to be more that guaranteeing deposits, and then it becomes something that I would consider a bailout,” Admati told ABC News.
In backstopping First Republic customers, however, the FDIC ultimately carried out its mandate of guaranteeing depositors, even if by indirect means, Morris Pearl, a former managing director at asset manager BlackRock, told ABC News.
“It depends on your definition of the word ‘bailout,'” Pearl said. “It’s kind of like if you damage your car, the insurance company might pay to repair the car or they might say this car is beyond hope and we’ll give you money to buy a new car.”
JPMorgan Chase said the government chose it as a buyer because the bank’s bid gave the FDIC more favorable terms than rival offers.
“Our financial strength, capabilities and business model allowed us to develop a bid to execute the transaction in a way to minimize costs to the Deposit Insurance Fund,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in a statement.
Will the sale of First Republic cost U.S. taxpayers?
The government funds required for the sale of First Republic will come out of the Deposit Insurance Fund, a pool of billions of dollars kept in case the government needs to cover insured depositors after a bank failure, the FDIC said.
The Deposit Insurance Fund receives funding from banks, which pay insurance premiums in order to receive protection from the U.S. government and offer that guarantee for customers. The agency also derives income from investments made with the insurance revenue.
In turn, the bailout of First Republic will not draw on individual taxpayers, since the funds do not come from taxes levied on everyday Americans.
If the banking panic continues to spread, the federal government may have to take further action that draws on the Deposit Insurance Fund, potentially exhausting the fund and calling on taxpayers to supplement it with additional money.
For now, however, such an outcome appears remote. At the end of last year, the Deposit Insurance Fund held $128.2 billion, according to a quarterly report.
(LOS ANGELES) — Unions representing thousands of Hollywood movie and television writers voted last month to authorize a strike when their contracts run out at midnight on Tuesday.
The WGA called for a strike effective 12:01 a.m. PST on Tuesday.
Now, the time is here, with writers demanding that studios pay them accordingly as shifts in streaming have changed the way shows are made and monetized.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement on Monday night that its negotiations with the Writers Guild of America “concluded without an agreement today.”
“The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry, and to avoid hardship to the thousands of employees who depend upon the industry for their livelihoods,” the AMPTP statement read, in part.
The current television landscape is vastly different than it was in 2007.
Since the rise of streaming, viewers are much less tied to linear TV lineups, and that will dampen the immediate effect on scripted shows.
Mega-studios now have much more content in the pipeline for distribution across multiple platforms, meaning there would not be such an immediate drought of scripted TV.
Late-night TV, on the other hand, will once again be the quickest area to be impacted. If no agreement is reached, you can say goodbye to the remainder of the current season of Saturday Night Live, and daily late-night hosts will have to decide if they will remain in production without their writers like they did in 2007.
“It may be a long time before viewers really feel the impact of a strike if it were to go on for many weeks,” Cynthia Littleton, co-editor-in-chief at Variety, told ABC News, adding that Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services have “such vast libraries of shows.”
Helping soften the blow of this strike is the timing, as many traditional TV programs have already wrapped up shooting their seasons and broadcast networks are gearing up for a summer of game shows and reality TV.
New experimentation in programming
Media companies are already experimenting with different types of shows across linear, streaming and cable, and a writers’ strike will only hasten those companies’ plans, according to Littleton.
“Those companies will have every incentive to look across their vast array of content assets and say, ‘Well, I have a big hole to fill on ABC at nine o’clock on Thursdays. What if I tried this show?’ And I think that you could, if there is a prolonged strike, you could see that will absolutely accelerate more of that experimentation that is already happening,” she said.
How writers are compensated as TV seasons get shorter and shorter is an issue at hand
The age of television, where networks were previously giving television series’ 22 episodes a season, has changed, according to entertainment attorney Jonathan Handel.
“Streaming series are 10, eight, sometimes even six or even four episodes and that has affected cable television as well,” Handel told ABC News. “It’s affected network television as well. The number of episodes produced in aggregate per year in this business has actually declined.”
“In effect, people are — especially writers — are hired by the series, but they’re paid by the episode,” he added. “So, when you’ve got more people sharing a pie that in some ways is smaller, you have a structural pressure that is very hard to relieve, on the labor market.”
A writer strike could cost the economy billions of dollars
Of course, the broader economic impact in Los Angeles, as well as New York, Georgia and New Mexico, among other cities, will be enormous.
With productions shut down, people well beyond writers — from anyone involved in productions to restaurants near studios — will be feeling the pinch as the strike moves on.
The most recent full-fledged strike took place in 2007 and cost the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion.
“The economic impact of the last writers’ strike, 15 years ago, was about $200 million or more a day,” Handel said.
Those costs factored in a lot of people who were not able to pay their mortgages and rent, bought less food, and spent less on discretionary items, according to Handel.
“The impact today — with inflation and the degree of connectedness to the economy — would no doubt be significantly larger than that,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — First Republic Bank has become the third bank to fail in recent months and the giant JPMorgan Chase will assume all of its assets, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The FDIC said the deal avoids the agency having to use its emergency powers and would minimize disruptions for customers. It comes in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank shortly thereafter.
Under the deal JPMorgan Chase is set to take on “all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank” after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) confirmed that the troubled bank had collapsed on Monday.
“JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association submitted a bid for all of First Republic Bank’s deposits. As part of the transaction, First Republic Bank’s 84 offices in eight states will reopen as branches of JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, today during normal business hours,” the FDIC said in a statement obtained by ABC News. “All depositors of First Republic Bank will become depositors of JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, and will have full access to all of their deposits.”
First Republic Bank is the third major U.S. bank to collapse in recent months.
“As of April 13, 2023, First Republic Bank had approximately $229.1 billion in total assets and $103.9 billion in total deposits,” the FDIC said. “In addition to assuming all of the deposits, JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, agreed to purchase substantially all of First Republic Bank’s assets.”
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March and Signature Bank shortly after that prompted widespread fears of a wider banking crisis that could affect the global economy.
The FDIC added that avoiding a takeover by the agency would “minimize disruptions for loan customers.”
Jonathan McKernan from the FDIC Board of Directors released a statement early Monday regarding First Republic Bank’s collapse.
“I am pleased we were able to deal with First Republic’s failure without using the FDIC’s emergency powers. It is a grave and unfortunate event when the FDIC uses these emergency powers,” said McKernan. “Any decision to use the FDIC’s emergency powers should be approached skeptically, taking into account the unique facts and circumstances of the time, and with careful attention to the implications for the future.”
ABC News’ Victoria Arancio contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Turmoil in the financial system returned this week as shares of First Republic Bank, the nation’s 14th-largest lender, plummeted more than 75%.
The selloff took hold after the bank revealed that depositors had fled en masse last month after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest U.S. bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.
The ongoing distress at First Republic rekindled questions about whether the banking industry has regained solid footing or teeters on the brink of wider failure.
While the financial system remains under stress, experts said, the current unrest is unlikely to pose a systemic risk, since the damage is contained within a relatively narrow group of banks vulnerable to high interest rates and depositor panic.
Still, the ultimate outcome is difficult to predict, in part because the extent of the fallout depends on how depositors respond to the possible failure of additional banks, such as First Republic, some experts said.
Here’s what’s happening in the banking industry right now, and whether the crisis has passed, according to experts:
What is happening in the banking system right now?
Many of the forces behind the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, experts said, continue to put pressure on the banking system: high interest rates, concern among uninsured depositors and the potential for social media chatter that escalates panic.
As the Fed aggressively raised interest rates over the past year, the spike dropped the value of Silicon Valley Bank’s Treasury bonds and mortgage bonds, punching a hole in its balance sheet.
Because Silicon Valley Bank served a relatively concentrated group of tech startups and venture firms, many of whom held uninsured deposits, a disclosure last month of the bank’s financial losses sparked a panic that quickly escalated into an old-fashioned bank run.
First Republic, which specialized in long-term mortgage loans to affluent homebuyers, faced the same exposure to high interest rates and fear among depositors with uninsured deposits, experts said.
“First Republic is basically the same story,” Steven Kelly, a researcher at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, told ABC News.
However, an additional source of pressure arose in the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank: a shift of deposits out of small banks and into large ones, experts said.
Over the week following Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, small banks lost $108 billion in deposits, Federal Reserve data showed.
Meanwhile, deposits to the nation’s 25 biggest banks increased by $120 billion over that week, the data said.
“The deposit flight away from the small- and medium-sized banks means that the funding model for a lot of these banks is going to be under huge pressure,” Huw Roberts, the head of analytics at Quant Insight, told ABC News.
Is the financial system under systemic threat?
The ongoing turmoil is unlikely to threaten the wider banking system because the risk of collapse remains limited to a specific set of banks that failed to adequately protect their balance sheets, experts said.
“SVB was an extreme example. First Republic is an extreme case,” William Chittenden, a professor of finance at Texas State University, told ABC News. “These are banks that played the extremes.”
The fall of Silicon Valley Bank also brought immense stress upon the 29th-largest U.S. bank, Signature Bank, which ultimately collapsed.
“While big, these banks are not representative of where most people bank,” Kelly said. “It’s not a problem that plagues the whole system.”
“This is a crisis of some banks,” Kelly added. “It’s not a crisis of banking.”
Roberts, of Quant Insight, echoed the point: “The immediate systemic risk is gone as far as whole banking system being threatened.”
Still, the possible failure of First Republic and other vulnerable banks could set off a panic with implications that are nearly impossible to predict, some experts said.
At the end of last year, U.S. banks were sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses, or holdings that have fallen in price but have yet to be sold, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found.
“Standing alone, First Republic isn’t presenting a systemic risk,” Joe Lynyak, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney and an expert on bank failures, told ABC News. “But if it creates a chain reaction of other banks with the public reacting the same way, you could end up with that.”
“We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — Kia and Hyundai owners whose cars were damaged or stolen in the wake of a social media video teaching people how to easily steal the cars are now waiting months for repairs after a shortage of parts.
Many of the cars are recovered within a few days after the thieves are done with their joyrides. Often the back window is smashed and the steering column is damaged or destroyed, making those parts the hardest to find.
Stefan Mantyk’s 2018 Kia Rio was stolen in Michigan on Feb. 10. Police recovered the damaged car a week later but he says the vehicle is now sitting at the dealership.
“They had everything else fixed but then they found out that the steering column lock was broken. It turned out that the entire steering column top needed to be replaced,” Mantyk told ABC News.
Gregg Van Slyke, a 76-year-old retiree from Portland, is in a similar situation. His 2012 Hyundai Sonata was stolen early in the morning on Super Bowl Sunday. Police recovered the car later that day but it’s since been parked at the dealership waiting on parts.
States say Kia and Hyundai need to “step up”
Both Mantyk and Van Slyke are victims of the so-called “Kia Challenge” — a viral social media challenge that sparked a surge in thefts of Kia and Hyundai cars across the United States. Thieves targeted certain Kia and Hyundai models manufactured between 2011 and 2022 that lack anti-theft controls. Would-be thieves use screwdrivers and USB cables to steal the vehicles.
Twenty-three states have called on automakers to “take swift and comprehensive action” to curb the rise in thefts. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said there were 6,970 Kia and Hyundai vehicles reported stolen in Milwaukee in 2021, up from a total of 895 in 2020 — a nearly 800% increase. Thefts of the cars declined slightly in 2022.
In Minneapolis, thefts of Kia and Hyundais increased by 836% in 2022 over the previous year. And in St Louis County, thefts surged 1,090% from 2021 to 2022.
Eighteen attorneys general have also called on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to recall some Kia and Hyundai vehicles. “Thefts of these Hyundai and Kia vehicles have led to at least eight deaths, numerous injuries and property damage, and they have diverted significant police and emergency services resources from other priorities,” the agency said.
In response to the thefts, Kia and Hyundai have rolled out a free software upgrades for their vehicles not equipped with immobilizers. The automakers have also been distributing steering wheel locks for local law enforcement to give to drivers.
Victims say there’s no timeline for getting their vehicles fixed
Mantyk said he was able to get a rental car from his insurer after his was stolen. But after 30 days he needed to find another way to get around.
“I’m an independent contractor, so I go from job to job and not having my own vehicle for a while made it very difficult to get to jobs. I had to pass on work,” Mantyk said. “I ended up buying a car for like a thousand bucks just so I could get from point A to point B. I don’t know how reliable it is.”
Van Slyke said he needs to drive to and from doctors’ appointments three times a week. His insurance gave him a rental for just 10 days.
“My insurance rental ran out, so I had to give up that car and then I used Lyft for a while and then I was able to harass my dealership into finally getting the loaner car,” Van Slyke said. “I’m very grateful for that because I have medical appointments that I need to go to and it was getting pretty difficult to get around.”
He added, “The service representative that I’ve been talking to doesn’t know when or if they’ll get a part to replace it, because there’s been so much demand due to the high theft of Hyundais nationwide. So we’re kind of stuck there.”
Both Mantyk and Van Slyke said they have no idea when they’ll get their cars back.
The dealership doesn’t know “when the parts are going to be coming in because Kia corporate doesn’t give them any information as to when they’re getting parts in,” Mantyk said.
Van Slyke said he has since joined a class-action lawsuit against the automakers.
When asked about the parts shortages, Kia told ABC News some of these parts have been out of production for years and supply chain issues have been exacerbating the problem. The company, however, is “doing all we can to assist and working with our dealers to make sure any and all available parts are being redistributed to where needed most.”
Hyundai told ABC News it was “aware of minimal reported instances of some parts on back-order” and it “constantly monitors and proactively manages its parts supply chain to ensure a stable supply of parts delivered to our customers.”
“I don’t know what the future holds for my vehicle”
Mantyk and Van Slyke said they don’t know if they’ll continue to drive their cars once they get them back.
“Once I have my car, what am I supposed to do with it? Because I can’t drive it anywhere less it gets stolen,” Mantyk said.
Mantyk said he’s made three car payments since his Kia was initially stolen.
“My biggest frustration is probably the whole fact that I’m paying on a car that I can’t keep. I can’t sell it because it’ll just get stolen from somebody else,” he said.
Van Slyke said he hopes Hyundai will recall his vehicle and replace the ignition system, saying he’s worried it would get stolen again in the future.
“I believe that if I get the car back again, I will attempt to sell that car and buy a car that’s not so high on the theft list,” Van Slyke said.
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Reserve failed in its role as banking industry watchdog in the run up to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the central bank said on Friday.
The Fed sharply criticized leadership at Silicon Valley Bank for “a textbook case of mismanagement,” but the report also faulted the Fed’s lax oversight and an inability to anticipate the systemic threat posed by the bank’s failure.
“Federal Reserve supervisors failed to take forceful enough action,” said Michael Barr, the central bank’s vice chair for supervision, who wrote the report. “SVB’s failure demonstrates that there are weaknesses in regulation and supervision that must be addressed.”
The collapse last month of Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th largest bank, set off a financial panic that led to the failure two days later of another major lender, Signature Bank.
In response, the U.S. government took rapid and extraordinary steps to protect the financial system.
However, the financial stress continues to weigh on the banking system. Shares in regional lender First Republic Bank plummeted nearly 50% on Tuesday after it revealed that depositors fled en masse amid the crisis last month.
Barr called the report an “unflinching look” at the Fed’s shortcomings in the lead up to the banking crisis, saying that the examination marks the first step in the central bank’s effort to fix its supervision and regulation of banks vulnerable to extreme stress.
“Supervisors did not fully appreciate the extent of the vulnerabilities as Silicon Valley Bank grew in size and complexity,” Barr said.
“When supervisors did identify vulnerabilities, they did not take sufficient steps to ensure that Silicon Valley Bank fixed those problems quickly enough,” Barr added.
(NEW YORK) –The threat of a looming recession has heightened interest in the most commonly used measure of economic health: Gross domestic product, or GDP.
The metric commands attention as an all-in-one report card that signals whether the economy is awash in prosperity, mired in disaster or shuffling forward somewhere between the two.
While imperfect, GDP carries implications for real-world outcomes of everyday people, such as their risk of unemployment or dream of buying a first home, experts said.
Here’s what GDP is, why it matters and what critics says about it, according to experts:
What is GDP?
GDP is a measure of all the goods and services produced in a given economy, ranging from cars built in an auto factory to musicals staged on Broadway.
“It’s the sum of everything the country makes,” Luke Tilley, chief economist at investment firm Wilmington Trust, told ABC News.
“It’s everything from retail goods to services provided, like legal services, haircuts and movies,” he added.
As such, economists often invoke GDP as an indicator of the size and health of an economy, since large, bustling economies deliver greater output than smaller, idle ones.
Similarly, the change in GDP over time provides crucial information about whether an economy is growing or shrinking.
A positive change in GDP indicates that an economy expanded over a particular period, while a drop off in GDP shows that an economy shrank.
For instance, if the GDP for the first three months, or quarter, of the year is larger than the GDP over the ensuing quarter, then growth slowed.
Many observers define a recession through the shorthand metric of two consecutive quarters of decline in a nation’s inflation-adjusted GDP.
“You can tell if the economy is improving or not,” Tilley said. “GDP going up means there’s more likely to be job growth and improved wellbeing.”
Why does GDP matter?
GDP is significant because it offers insight into the bedrock activity level upon which all economic outcomes depend, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
“GDP is the value of all of the things that go into driving incomes and stock prices and home values,” Zandi said. “It’s the fountain of economic growth.”
The presence of such output in turn enables a given material quality of life, said Tilley, of Wilmington Trust.
“It means that there’s more stuff out there for people to avail themselves of,” Tilley said.
“All other things being equal, a country that has a higher GDP is thought to have a better standard of living,” he added.
The trend in GDP also helps workers and consumers gauge the health of the economy, informing decisions about their savings, job prospects and other major life choices, experts said.
“It’s the bottom line for the economy,” Zandi said.
What do critics of GDP say?
Critics of GDP often say that the measure is either too comprehensive to accurately reflect the inner workings of the economy, or not comprehensive enough to account for aspects of life that exist beyond economic output.
Inevitably imprecise, GDP tries to assess value across vast and diverse economic offerings, Zandi said.
“It covers everyone from the person cutting your lawn to the investment banker merging your companies to the automaker making your car,” he said. “It gets pretty complicated, pretty fast.”
“It’s our best attempt at measuring something that’s very difficult to measure,” he added.
On the other hand, some critics point out that the ostensibly comprehensive metric excludes a host of relevant activities.
GDP fails to measure unpaid work such as housework or care for a family member, Nancy Folbre, a professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told ABC News.
On top of that, the data point omits the harmful effects of some economic output, such as environmental degradation, she added.
“Everybody likes a simple scorecard,” Folbre said. “A simple scorecard is misleading.”
(WASHINGTON) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke over the phone with two Russian pranksters falsely posing as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the central bank confirmed to ABC News on Thursday.
The incident, which took place in January, has been referred to law enforcement, a spokesperson for the central bank told ABC News in a statement.
“It was a friendly conversation and took place in a context of our standing in support of the Ukrainian people in this challenging time,” the spokesperson said. “No sensitive or confidential information was discussed.”
The prank call surfaced in a video that appeared on Russian state television, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg first reported on the call.
The video shows Powell answering questions from the caller about his inflation forecast and the Russian central bank, among other topics, the report said, adding that the video spanned several clips that lasted more than 15 minutes combined.
A Fed spokesperson told ABC News that the central bank cannot confirm the accuracy of the video.
“The video appears to have been edited,” the spokesperson said.
News of the call arrives as the Fed has undertaken an aggressive series of rate hikes last seen in the 1980s, carrying out a fight against inflation by slowing the economy and slashing demand.
The policymaking stance holds implications both for the U.S. and global economies.
The alleged pranksters — Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov — have successfully duped multiple foreign leaders into speaking with them over the last several years, according to Bloomberg. They are supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The incident will likely stoke concern about security measures taken at the Fed.
Remarks from Powell and other top officials at the central bank usually draw close scrutiny from investors and business leaders, and sometimes even cause movement in the stock market.
Private meetings with Fed officials, meanwhile, occasionally stir controversy about the possible advantage they provide for participants.
In October, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard prompted backlash for remarks he made about monetary policy and economic performance at an off-the-record event with Citigroup.
