From giving secondhand to no gifts at all, why some parents are changing Christmas traditions

ABC News

(NEW YORK) — As families across the country celebrate this holiday season, some parents are choosing to create new traditions around gift-giving, including forgoing gifts.

For Gabrielle and Carlos Flores, that means not giving any toys to their three young children for Christmas.

“It’s more about the giving aspect of everything and not just the presents,” Gabrielle Flores told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “Let’s build a tradition so when, God forbid we’re not here, they will go and keep these traditions to their kids.”

Gabrielle Flores, of California, went viral when she shared her family’s Christmas plan on Tiktok, writing in a video that she told her children’s grandparents to only give them socks, books and education items for Christmas.

Describing her children’s reaction to knowing there will not be any toys under the Christmas tree this year, Flores said, “I really think they’re learning that Christmas is more of a holiday season about family, about traditions.”

The #NoGiftsChristmas trend is growing on social media and some celebrities, like Drew Barrymore, have said they’re forgoing buying things for their children and opting in for giving experiences.

For other parents, changing Christmas traditions come from not just a desire to help teach their children about materialism but also about protecting the environment.

ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee is no stranger to taking a sustainable approach to shopping, including pledging to not buy any new clothes this year.

This Christmas, she is bringing that approach to gift-giving as a parent.

Zee said she has purchased only secondhand items for her two sons, 7-year-old Adrian and 4-year-old Miles.

“Here’s what I learned about doing secondhand gifts … they don’t have to not be new,” Zee said, pointing to a Nerf toy she plans to give her sons. “It’s probably like years old, but [they] never used it.”

How to explain different types of gift-giving to kids

Liesel B. Clark is the co-founder of the Buy Nothing Project, an online platform that establishes “gift economies” in local communities, allowing members to “gift” free reused or secondhand items to other members, a process known as “freecyling.”

She said that when it comes to secondhand gifts, children often don’t know the difference between something newly bought and something used — it is all new and exciting to them.

“If it’s new to them, they’re generally just as happy,” Clark told GMA. “There are so many families that are letting go of toys and items that their kids have outgrown, and so then that’s a wonderful way to acquire toys that are age-appropriate for your children.”

Ericka Souter, a parenting expert and author of How to Have a Kid and a Life, said there are both pros and cons to changing gift traditions at Christmas.

“Experiences foster more gratitude,” she said of the approach taken by the Flores family and others to gift only experiences. “The memories of an experience live on much longer.”

Souter continued, “Going giftless can have its drawbacks. Your kids may feel cheated out of a really fun holiday. This can be a really tough change for kids to accept.”

Souter said she recommends parents talk with their children ahead of time instead of surprising them with a change on Christmas morning.

“You want to sit them down and have a discussion with them and tell them why you are doing this,” Souter said. “But not only that, you want to tell them how this will work. So it may be that in the morning, instead of opening up a bunch of gifts, they’re going to open up the small box that will reveal what the experiences will be. Or maybe it’ll be that you all discuss a bunch of options, and then you get to pick which one goes first or what you guys do together.”

She continued, “You want to make sure that you still create some sense of mystery and excitement around going giftless.”

Souter said it’s also important to be transparent with relatives and loved ones who may want to give gifts as well.

“If you have grandparents or aunts and uncles who love sending the kids gifts, you really want to let them know the plan,” she said. “Get them on board and also give them parameters about what kinds of experiences they are supposed to give the kids.”

What buying less means for the environment

From Thanksgiving to New Year’s, the average household waste increases by more than 25%, which amounts to around 1 million extra pounds per week, according to Stanford University’s Waste Reduction, Recycling, Composting and Solid Waste Program.

According to a recent report, 5.8 billion tons of returned merchandise ends up in landfills each year and shipping returns back to retailers emit 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Clark, of the Buy Nothing Project, said that by “shopping” in your local community, you not only eliminate the waste of throwing out used items, but you also eliminate the need for packaging, wrapping paper and plastic wrap that inevitably ends up in landfills.

“There are perfectly reusable goods, right in your own community, we can create these circular economies and just keep cycling through a lot of perfectly reusable items over the years,” Clark said.

Clark said each year, for example, she makes multicolored, pillar candles using materials from her neighbors.

“I just ask them for their half-burned candles,” she said. “So that’s literally taking someone’s ‘waste,’ and turning it into something really beautiful that can be reused.”

Tips for parents to gift responsibly

Sustainable gift-giving expert Tracey Lynch, co-author of sustainable gift-giving guide Donum, spoke to Good Morning America about other ways people can reduce waste this holiday season.

She shared some tips for finding the perfect gift, without costing the environment.

Lynch said a lot starts by shifting the mindset around gift-gifting from feeling like an obligatory surprise to valuing a person’s needs and interests.

“Many times we haven’t taken the steps to learn more about the person we’re buying for. It could be our own child. It could be our spouse, it could be our sibling. It could be our parents,” Lynch said. “Our wants and needs change over time, what they may have liked before, they may not like now.”

Lynch said asking what someone wants will reduce the chance of a return.

“Santa wants to know two things. Were you a good boy or girl this year? And what do you want for Christmas?” Lynch said. “Santa’s goal is not to surprise, it is to delight.”

Lastly, Lynch said it’s important to take ownership of how, why and what you buy. She emphasized the danger of thinking of things as “disposable,” even when giving holiday gifts.

“They say, ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ but the thought is not what’s piling up in our landfills,” Lynch said. “So the thought needs to be better. The thought needs to be informed.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Target recalls children’s weighted blankets after 2 kids died

Consumer Product Safety Commission

(NEW YORK) — Target is telling customers to stop using some weighted children’s blankets that were sold in its stores and online after four incidents where children became entrapped, two of which resulted in deaths, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Thursday.

A 4-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl reportedly became entrapped in the cover of Pillowfort Weighted Blankets and died due to asphyxia at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in April, the CPSC said.

Target received two additional reports of children entrapped in the blankets, but those didn’t result in fatalities, according to the agency.

“A young child can become entrapped by unzipping and entering the blanket, posing a risk of death by asphyxiation,” Target said on its website.

Target sold about 204,000 of the $40-blankets from December 2018 through September 2022, CPSC said.

The id numbers to the affected blankets, which can be found on the fabric tag are: 097-02-0140 (Unicorn – White), 097-02-0148 (Space Navy), 097-02-0361(Pink), 097-02-0363 (Blue), 097-02-0364 (Gray), 097-02-1603 (Buffalo Plaid – Red), 097-02-3904 (Blue Constellation) and 097-02-3905 (Unicorn – Pink), according to CPSC.

Customers can log onto target.com for more information about the recall and how to get a refund.

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Amazon and Starbucks workers led a union resurgence in 2022. Will it last?

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

(NEW YORK) — Workers at Amazon and Starbucks astonished allies and adversaries this year, delivering landmark labor victories and helping inspire a resurgence of unionization nationwide.

But labor headway at the two companies has stagnated in recent months, jeopardizing the ultimate success of the campaigns and casting the continued growth of the labor movement into doubt.

The downshift in momentum at Amazon and Starbucks owes primarily to the anti-union postures and deep pockets of the corporations, labor experts told ABC News.

The setbacks could deter workers inside and outside those companies from organizing their workplaces, as they weigh the risks of confronting their bosses against the potential rewards, they said. Still, the labor movement remains galvanized by sky-high prices, a tight jobs market and near-historic public approval that should enable continued growth next year, the experts said.

“The workers are stalled at Amazon and at Starbucks,” Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told ABC News. “The companies have a plethora of legal and administrative techniques at their command, and their greatest weapon is delay.”

Despite the challenges faced by headline-grabbing union campaigns, the surge of U.S. labor organizing will persist, he said.

“Inflation has created real pressure on people and a real sense of collective action,” he said.

In the spring, a worker-led independent group unionized a 6,000-employee Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, the first-ever U.S. union at the company in its history. Since then, however, the Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, has lost two consecutive union elections at other facilities; and certification of the Staten Island victory remains tied up in legal challenges.

“There are going to be ups and downs,” said Seth Goldstein, a lawyer at Julien, Mirer & Singla, who represents the ALU. “It’s a marathon.”

Starbucks workers, meanwhile, unionized more than 260 stores this year but the pace of union elections has fallen significantly and workers have yet to sign a union contract at a single location.

Over the first half of 2022, the National Labor Relations Board received union election petitions from an average of 47 Starbucks stores per month; but over five months ending in November, that election rate dwindled to 11 stores per month, according to data from the NLRB, a federal agency that oversees union elections.

Neither Amazon nor Starbucks responded to a request for comment.

“One of the big effects of Amazon and to some extent Starbucks organizing is it has encouraged other workers to raise their voices and think, ‘oh gee, maybe a union works for us, let’s try to get one,'” Thomas Kochan, a labor researcher and professor emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Institute for Work and Employment Research, told ABC News.

“Workers are now looking around and saying, what’s the use of that?” he added. “If they can’t get a contract why should we go through with all this?”

Defying the apparent loss of momentum at Starbucks and Amazon in recent months, however, a surge in union organizing across the economy has sustained itself.

Over a year-long period ending in September, petitions for union representation jumped 53%, NLRB data showed. Moreover, this year labor unions reached their highest level of public support in the U.S. since 1965, a Gallup poll showed.

The resurgence of union organizing is especially stark in light of a decades-long labor decline that brought the private sector union rate to a record low of about 6% last year, government data showed.

Sara Beth Ryther, an employee at a Trader Joe’s in Minneapolis that unionized in August, said workers at the store draw inspiration from the campaigns at Starbucks stores nearby.

“When we go to Starbucks stores that are unionized around us, we see actions being taken in the workplace and we read about them in the newspaper,” she said. “I think it’s preserving this energy in a way that maybe hasn’t been the case in the past.”

“It’s really important for folks to know how unified many of these labor movements are,” she added.

Across the economy, the sense of company neglect for worker well-being that gave rise to pandemic-era organizing has continued to drive action, Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks employee at a store in Buffalo, New York that organized in December, told ABC News.

Eisen acknowledged setbacks faced by workers nationwide in the Starbucks campaign, citing anti-union efforts undertaken by the company. While those tactics may have dissuaded some workers, they’ve motivated others, she said.

“There’s always a chance some people will say, ‘You know what, this is exhausting and I can’t keep doing this,” said Eisen, a spokesperson for Starbucks Workers United, a labor union. “But I think what we’re seeing is more people willing to fight anyway.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Sam Bankman-Fried lands in US after being extradited from Bahamas

ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Sam Bankman-Fried has landed in the U.S. to face federal charges after agreeing to extradition in a Bahamian court on Wednesday.

The disgraced former CEO was put on a U.S. government plane for a flight to New York. He landed in Westchester County Airport.

“I hereby consent in writing to be extradited without formal extradition proceedings,” Bankman-Fried said in a signed affidavit in the Bahamas earlier Wednesday.

He took the witness stand to confirm his signature and that his decision was voluntary.

“I therefore formally commit you to custody while you await your extradition,” Magistrate Shaka Serville said.

The Bahamian Foreign Ministry said the foreign minister signed the warrant of surrender, which allowed the extradition.

The move came a day after Bankman-Fried signed extradition papers in the Bahamas, where he lived in a multimillion-dollar mansion, after waffling on the decision since his initial court appearance last week.

Bankman-Fried was arrested last week in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors in New York filed an eight-count indictment including allegations of fraud and conspiracy.

He had been expected in court Tuesday but did not appear, even as his lawyers and U.S. consular officials waited for two hours.

At a court hearing last week, Bankman-Fried declined to waive his right to challenge extradition to the U.S. However, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News ahead of a court hearing on Monday that Bankman-Fried had reversed his position and was prepared to waive extradition, setting up a move to custody in the U.S.

At the court hearing on Monday, however, Bankman-Fried did not waive his right to deny extradition as expected, instead asking to see a copy of the U.S. indictment and speak to his New York-based attorney.

Bankman-Fried has been held in the medical ward of the island’s Fox Hill prison, after an application for bail was denied when a judge determined he was too much of a flight risk.

In addition to the criminal charges, Bankman-Fried faces related civil lawsuits from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

There are more than $8 billion in customer losses, said Gretchen Lowe of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency.

Some crypto traders, who deposited their savings on the platform, fear they may never get their money back.

John Ray, the new CEO of FTX, who oversaw the dissolution of Enron, told members of the House last week that FTX lacked corporate controls to an extent he had never witnessed, characterizing the company’s conduct as “old-fashioned embezzlement.”

“I’ve never seen an utter lack of record keeping,” Ray said. “Absolutely no internal controls.”

Bankman-Fried, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in November, denied knowing “there was any improper use of customer funds.”

“I really deeply wish that I had taken like a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on there,” Bankman-Fried told Stephanopoulos. “A lot of people got hurt, and that’s on me.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Does Elon Musk’s resignation from Twitter mean he’ll give up control? Experts weigh in

Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk vowed to resign as the head of Twitter but he will remain a dominant force at the company, some management experts told ABC News.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who owns Twitter, said on Tuesday that he will step down as soon as the company identifies a successor. The move follows a Twitter poll in which a majority of users called on Musk to stop leading the company.

However, he will retain control over the software and server departments, important teams that will grant him significant control over how the social media platform operates.

The authority afforded by ownership of the company, as well as Musk’s longstanding reluctance to delegate key tasks, will result in decisions dictated largely by his preferences, the experts said.

The company, which lacks a board of directors, will likely hire a hand-picked successor with views that align closely with Musk’s and a public profile that is vanishingly small by comparison, they added.

“It will be Elon’s impulse to jump in and say, ‘It’s my money at stake, it’s my reputation at stake — I have to be a part of every decision,” Peter Harms, a professor of management at the University of Alabama who has studied corporate leadership, told ABC News.

“He has shown no inclination to delegate authority with his businesses,” Harms added.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘Window dressing’

Since he acquired Twitter, Musk has made dramatic changes. He fired top executives and cut the company’s 7,500-person workforce in half, while reinstating some formerly suspended accounts such as that belonging to former President Donald Trump.

He also revamped Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, allowing users to access verification if they pay a monthly fee of $8. The service was suspended after it gave rise to a flood of fake accounts impersonating public figures and brands. It has since been relaunched.

In an interview on Twitter Spaces on Tuesday, Musk defended the moves as part of an aggressive effort to rescue Twitter from financial peril, which he described as an “emergency fire drill.”

“That’s the reason for my actions,” he added. “They may seem sometimes spurious or odd or whatever.”

​​Musk, who admitted he overpaid for the platform at the purchasing price of $44 billion, said last month that the company was losing $4 million a day.

In his latest eye-catching move, Musk posted a poll on the platform asking users whether he should resign. The poll ended Monday morning, with 57.5% of voters saying he should step down and 42.5% saying he shouldn’t.

After a day of silence about the results, Musk announced that he would ultimately step down. By retaining control of key product teams, however, Musk will remain heavily involved in overseeing the company, experts said.

“It feels like window dressing,” Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, told ABC News. “He can appear to be responding to the vote to get him out, but I think it’s somewhat disingenuous because he’s going to maintain operational control over a big portion of the business.”

“There’s no question that he will remain the de facto head,” she added. “As far as concerns over decision making and the way he’s shaping the business to reflex his own personal views, it’s unclear what this change will do.”

Growing pressure over losses at Tesla

Musk, who also runs electric vehicle company Tesla, has faced growing pressure to return his focus to the automaker. The company’s stock has fallen 60% this year, as it faces heightened competition and pandemic-induced production challenges.

Musk’s resignation “has become a necessity because of the hemorrhaging at Tesla,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University who convenes gatherings of top CEOs, told ABC News.

While Musk will remain atop Twitter for the foreseeable future, he may end up distancing himself from the company in order to prioritize the comparatively massive automaker, which boasts a market capitalization of nearly $440 billion, Sonnenfeld said.

In fact, Musk tried to avoid taking control of Twitter in the first place. He tried to pull out of the deal to buy the company but went through with the acquisition after Twitter brought a lawsuit forcing the acquisition.

“He became CEO by default because he lost the lawsuit,” said Sonnenfeld, of Yale University. “He didn’t really want to be CEO.”

A potential successor

Despite the need for a steady hand at Tesla, Musk will find it difficult to disengage from day-to-day operations at Twitter, said Harms, of the University of Alabama.

“He’ll struggle to relinquish control,” he said.

A successor, Harms said, would need to implement Musk’s vision for the company and allow Musk to take credit, leaving little opportunity for dissent.

The current dynamic atop Twitter — a visionary leader in need of a logistics-oriented partner — has come about in the industry on multiple occasions, Harms said, pointing to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his then-second-in-command Tim Cook.

In another case, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to handle the company’s advertising business, on which it relies for revenue.

“Elon Musk needs his Tim Cook,” Harms said.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Sam Bankman-Fried agrees to extradition, clearing path for transport to US

ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Sam Bankman-Fried agreed to extradition in a Bahamian court on Wednesday, clearing the way for his transport to the U.S. to face federal charges.

The disgraced former CEO is expected to be put on a U.S. government plane for a flight to New York.

“I hereby consent in writing to be extradited without formal extradition proceedings,” Bankman-Fried said in a signed affidavit.

He took the witness stand to confirm his signature and that his decision was voluntary.

“I therefore formally commit you to custody while you await your extradition,” Magistrate Shaka Serville said.

The move came a day after Bankman-Fried signed extradition papers in the Bahamas, where he lived in a multimillion-dollar mansion, after waffling on the decision since his initial court appearance last week.

Bankman-Fried was arrested last week in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors in New York filed an eight-count indictment including allegations of fraud and conspiracy.

He had been expected in court Tuesday but did not appear, even as his lawyers and U.S. consular officials waited for two hours.

At a court hearing last week, Bankman-Fried declined to waive his right to challenge extradition to the U.S. However, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News ahead of a court hearing on Monday that Bankman-Fried had reversed his position and was prepared to waive extradition, setting up a move to custody in the U.S.

At the court hearing on Monday, however, Bankman-Fried did not waive his right to deny extradition as expected, instead asking to see a copy of the U.S. indictment and speak to his New York-based attorney.

Bankman-Fried has been held in the medical ward of the island’s Fox Hill prison, after an application for bail was denied when a judge determined he was too much of a flight risk.

In addition to the criminal charges, Bankman-Fried faces related civil lawsuits from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

There are more than $8 billion in customer losses, said Gretchen Lowe of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency.

Some crypto traders, who deposited their savings on the platform, fear they may never get their money back.

John Ray, the new CEO of FTX, who oversaw the dissolution of Enron, told members of the House last week that FTX lacked corporate controls to an extent he had never witnessed, characterizing the company’s conduct as “old-fashioned embezzlement.”

“I’ve never seen an utter lack of record keeping,” Ray said. “Absolutely no internal controls.”

Bankman-Fried, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in November, denied knowing “there was any improper use of customer funds.”

“I really deeply wish that I had taken like a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on there,” Bankman-Fried told Stephanopoulos. “A lot of people got hurt, and that’s on me.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Why recession fears are growing and what a downturn could look like

Anton Petrus/Getty Images

(NEW YORK) — Recession fears are growing, even as households strained by inflation begin to find some relief.

The dynamic captures the confusing state of the U.S. economy, as the Federal Reserve aggressively fights inflation with interest rate hikes that aim to slash prices by slowing demand and risking a recession. In fixing one problem, the central bank may create another.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg on Tuesday placed the chances of a recession in 2023 at 70%, marking a 10-percentage-point increase from October. The projections arrived days after the latest rate hike from the Fed, which sent the stock market tumbling.

Persistent inflation has prompted the Fed to sustain ongoing rate hikes and imperil the economy, rather than risk deeply entrenched price increases that could prove more difficult to reverse, some experts told ABC News. In turn, the longer the Fed takes an aggressive posture, the more likely that the economy will fall into a recession, they said.

But a potential recession would likely be mild, they added, especially when compared to the pandemic-induced downturn two years ago and the Great Recession, which for many Americans make up their go-to points of reference. Still, for those put out of work by a downturn, the effects would be severe.

Here’s what to know about why recession fears are rising and what a potential recession would look like:

Why recession fears are rising

At the center of the nation’s economic problems is its ongoing bout of near-historic inflation, economists told ABC News.

A government report last week revealed that inflation stood at 7.1% in November compared with a year prior, continuing a months-long decline from a 40-year record reached over the summer. However, inflation remains at a level more than triple the Fed’s target rate of 2%.

In response, the Fed has continued a series of interest rate hikes. The Fed last week raised its benchmark interest rate 0.5%, slowing down from a set of jumbo-sized hikes in recent months, but projecting a policy of rising rates that won’t reverse until 2024.

The ongoing rate hikes will clog the borrowing and spending that makes up the lifeblood of the economy, likely causing job losses, Christian Lundblad, a professor of finance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, told ABC News.

“The Fed is probably going to have to keep interest rates elevated for longer,” Lundblad said. “That makes it more difficult for households to borrow for a car or a mortgage, and makes it more difficult for firms to borrow to take on new projects.”

“There’s a pretty good consensus among economists, market participants and others, that the Fed is going to keep interest rates elevated in order to slow down the inflation pressures we’re seeing and that it will have no choice but to create a recession,” he added.

For its part, the Fed acknowledges that rate hikes will cause job losses but says it’s trying to avert a recession. Such a policy outcome is known as a “soft landing,” in which the Fed slows the economy and brings down inflation, while preventing the U.S. from entering a recession.

Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said last week that the prospects for a soft landing remain unclear.

“I don’t think anyone knows whether we’re going to have a recession or not, and if we do, whether it’s going to be a deep one or not,” Powell said. “It’s not knowable.”

However, some economists think the U.S. will likely avert a recession altogether.

Recession fears “are not particularly warranted,” Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, told ABC News.

He attributed sky-high prices to supply chain disruptions, such as pandemic-induced bottlenecks and the Russia-Ukraine war, which he said will ultimately alleviate. In turn, global supply will come back into balance with demand and bring down prices, easing the task presented before the Fed, he added.

What a recession could look like

A recession in the coming months would likely be mild, especially compared with recent downturns that have sent the unemployment rate above 10%, some economists told ABC News.

Lundblad, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said a recession could take hold as soon as early next year, disrupting the post-COVID recovery while averting a deep pull back.

“The run-of-the-mill recession in U.S. history is very different from the last couple we’ve experienced, whether the Great Recession or COVID,” Lundblad said.

“It’s not going to be a massive financial crisis but it will be different from the growth we’ve seen for the last couple years digging out of COVID,” he added.

Since World War II, recessions have lasted an average of about 11 months, personal finance outlet Kiplinger found. Far exceeding that norm, the Great Recession lasted 18 months, which Lundblad called “incredibly unusual.”

Still, millions of Americans could be put out of work. Job losses forecasted by the Fed in September would raise the unemployment rate from its current level of 3.7% to 4.4% by the end of 2023. That outcome would add an estimated 1.2 million unemployed people, according to Omair Sharif, the founder of research firm Inflation Insights.

Those job losses will disproportionately fall on some of the most vulnerable workers, including minorities and less-educated employees, according to economists and studies of past downturns.

People are justifiably nervous about the murky outlook for the economy, Kathryn Anne Edwards, an adjunct labor economist at the RAND Corporation, told ABC News.

“It’s a very unique time right now for our economy and it’s not as predictable as it has been in the past,” she said. “We’re coming out of an every-hundred-year event of the pandemic and we backed into a once-every-40 year event of inflation.”

“It’s unsettling,” she added.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Elon Musk says he’ll resign as head of Twitter

CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images

(NEW YORK) — After polling Twitter users, Elon Musk on Tuesday night said he will resign as head of the social media platform.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams,” he tweeted.

Musk polled Twitter users Sunday night on whether he should step down as head of the company.

The poll ended Monday morning, with 57.5% of voters saying he should step down and 42.5% saying he shouldn’t.

“I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk had pledged Sunday night.

“As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it,” he also tweeted Sunday, later adding: “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

Musk, who acquired Twitter in October, helms electric carmaker Tesla and spacecraft company SpaceX. He said on Sunday that he has not selected a successor for the top position at the social media platform.

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive,” Musk said.

ABC News’ Max Zahn contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Elon Musk remains silent about Twitter poll calling for his resignation

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk has stayed silent on the results of a poll completed more than a day ago in which Twitter users voted for him to resign as the head of the platform. He pledged to abide by the outcome of the poll when he posted it.

Musk, who also runs electric vehicle maker Tesla, polled Twitter users Sunday night on whether he should step down as the leader of the social media platform.

The poll ended Monday morning, with 57.5% of voters saying he should step down and 42.5% saying he shouldn’t.

While remaining mum about the poll results since Monday morning, Musk has tweeted more than 10 times, including a criticism of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., over a public letter she wrote to Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm expressing concern about his ability to effectively lead the carmaker and Twitter at the same time.

Musk said on Sunday, prior to the poll ending, that he has not selected a successor for the top position at the social media platform.

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive,” Musk tweeted.

“As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it,” he also tweeted Sunday, later adding, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

The poll garnered nearly 15 million votes, roughly the same amount as a previous poll in which Musk asked users last month whether he should let former President Donald Trump back on the platform.

A user noted in a tweet that the poll regarding Musk’s leadership of Twitter received far fewer “likes” than the poll over Trump’s status, raising the possibility that bots played a larger role in the vote over Musk’s leadership. In response, Musk tweeted, “interesting.”

An individual also posted a message advocating that future polls over Twitter policy be restricted to users of the platform’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, which costs $8 month. “We actually have skin in the game,” the user said.Musk agreed, saying in reply, “Twitter will make that change.”

Since he acquired Twitter in October, Musk has posted a flurry of controversial messages that have drawn attention to the platform.

Last week, he posted a viral tweet that called for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease, to be prosecuted. In early November, he called on voters to cast their ballot for Republican candidates for Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, using his company to forward a partisan political objective.

Musk, who said he overpaid for the platform at the purchasing price of $44 billion, faces pressure to boost the company’s revenue. Last month, he said that the company was losing $4 million a day.

The company relies almost entirely on advertising revenue, which depends on the number of users on the platform.

Before he acquired Twitter, Musk told reporters at the Met Gala in May that “he wants a much bigger percentage of the country to be on it, engaging in dialogue.”

Meanwhile, Musk prompted backlash from lawmakers and figures across the political spectrum in response to Twitter suspending the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists who cover Musk at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other prominent outlets.

The journalists were initially suspended on Thursday without warning but Musk later told reporters in a Twitter Spaces interview that the banned accounts had shared real-time location information, an apparent reference to accounts that track the planes of public figures, including Musk.

The suspensions came days after Twitter banned accounts that had shared publicly available information on plane travel. The company imposed a new rule on the same day prohibiting the spread of real-time location information on the platform, after a stalker allegedly followed a car carrying Musk’s son, Musk said.

The reporters’ accounts were later reinstated.

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Cryptocurrency’s wild roller-coaster ride: A look back at 2022

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(NEW YORK) — Cryptocurrency has always been volatile, says one economics expert who spoke with ABC News. But 2022 was a stomach-churning, roller-coaster ride for investors and major players in the market.

The prices of popular cryptocurrencies plummeted throughout 2022. Moreover, some cryptocurrency companies and their founders are facing bankruptcy and even the threat of imprisonment.

Here are some of the events that shook the cryptocurrency world to its core in 2022:

Bitcoin, other currencies plunge

Some experts, including David Yermack, a professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, say crypto’s free fall started after investors began selling off digital assets in response to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes. The market took a nosedive after Celsius Network — a former cryptocurrency lending company — announced it was pausing all withdrawals and transfers between accounts in order to “honor, over time, withdrawal obligations.”

A drop in the crypto market in the first half of a year is not unusual, Yermack told ABC News.

“Cryptocurrency has been volatile throughout its history and has experienced a large number of sharp rises and falls,” Yermack told ABC News.

What really affected the market, he said, was the collapse of TerraUSD, a payment platform for so-called stablecoins.

‘Stablecoins’ take a hit

Stablecoins are a form of digital currency backed by another form of currency like the U.S. dollar or a commodity like gold, according to experts who spoke with ABC News. They are designed to be less volatile than other forms of cryptocurrency. But some of the heaviest-traded stablecoins saw a massive drop in value in 2022.

The most notable hit was the collapse of the Luna token and its associated TerraUSD stablecoin, said Yermack.

TerraUSD’s price “fell from $116 in April to a fraction of a penny” and the company had a market cap of over $40 billion, according to an analysis by CNET.

Yermack summed up why this particular collapse contributed to the crypto market’s crash.

The “Luna token and the TerraUSD stablecoin [were] two assets that were promoted by the same issuer and were linked to one another by a trading algorithm. Many people on the Terra platform had taken out loans in the stablecoin and posted the Luna tokens as collateral. When Luna’s value began to drop in the context of the overall market decline, it impaired the collateral for many of the stablecoin loans. Many of the borrowers, in turn, couldn’t repay these loans because they had used the stablecoins to purchase other investments that had themselves dropped in value. The interconnections among all of these transactions amounted to a ‘death spiral’ that dragged down Luna and TerraUSD simultaneously and had negative effects on many investors’ portfolios,” he said.

Bill Starkov, an NFT and crypto entrepreneur and founder of Apocalyptic Apes, LLC, who is known online as Fity.eth, said Luna’s demise was inevitable.

“If you looked at Luna and you watched it and you understood what it does, it was very inflated. It was very high,” he told ABC News.

Layoffs, bankruptcies plagued some of the most successful crypto companies

This past year saw the downfall of FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms.

After raising multibillion dollars from investors, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, FTX is in bankruptcy, and its 30-year-old founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, stands accused of defrauding investors and has since been arrested. Bankman-Fried faces numerous charges leveled by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which says FTX customer losses total $8 billion.

But FTX was not the only crypto company to crumble in 2022. BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lender, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November.

Kraken, another previously high-valued cryptocurrency exchange and bank, recently announced it was reducing its workforce by 30% to “adapt to current market conditions.”

Crypto outlook for 2023

Cryptocurrency has always been a risky investment, according to economist and stockbroker Peter Schiff.

“I don’t think they have any underlying value,” Schiff, who also hosts The Peter Schiff Show Podcast, said about digital currency.

“There’s no real wealth that’s being created out of crypto,” he said. “Money is just transferring from the people who buy it to the people who sell it. And it’s not even a zero-sum game. It’s a negative game, because there’s so much cost, you know, that’s involved in the process. But it’s unfortunate that so much capital has been wasted and so many companies have been formed around crypto and blockchain. It’s all a complete waste.”

According to Yermack, one shouldn’t confuse crypto for what happened to FTX.

“FTX is an offshore operation run by very inexperienced people who seem to have behaved very badly,” he explained. “The fact that they were trading crypto is a little bit beside the point. They could have been trading real estate or stocks and bonds, or whatever. They had no accounting, no internal controls, they were very irresponsible with the money that was entrusted to them by their customers. But that’s not to say that everyone behaves that way in the crypto universe.”

Starkov said FTX’s crisis is “unfortunate because a lot of people got hurt.” But despite a tumultuous year for cryptocurrency, he says people have made money with crypto and that will keep attracting investors.

“If you look at where people bought [cryptocurrency] in from, they’re still on profit,” he said. “If you bought ETH at $80, $90 or if you bought Bitcoin at $1,000 $2,000, you’re still sitting at $17,000.”

Volatility and uncertainty, he said, is not endemic to cryptocurrency.

“We have the same thing with the stock market. We have the same thing with the real estate market,” he added.

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