(NEW YORK) — Federal prosecutors in New York on Tuesday signaled their intention to hold embattled crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried accountable for alleged campaign finance violations despite dropping the charge last month on a technicality.
Bankman-Fried, the former founder and CEO of cryptocurrency FTX, was slapped with a host of charges last year focused on an alleged multi-billion dollar fraud against company investors, which could land him in prison for decades.
Among those allegations, the charges included campaign finance violations accusing Bankman-Fried of seeking influence in Washington and in state capitals by improperly using customer and investor money to make political donations.
The campaign finance charge was dropped after officials in the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was arrested, said they had not agreed to extradite him based on that count.
In a letter to the judge on Tuesday, however, prosecutors said they intend to file a superseding indictment next week that will seek to incorporate Bankman-Fried’s alleged campaign finance scheme into seven other existing charges.
“The superseding indictment will make clear that Mr. Bankman-Fried remains charged with conducting an illegal campaign finance scheme as part of the fraud and money laundering schemes originally charged,” the letter said.
“The defendant’s use of customer deposits to conduct a political influence campaign was part of the wire fraud scheme charged in the original indictment. And as part of the originally charged money laundering scheme, the defendant also concealed the source of his fraudulent proceeds through political straw donations,” the letter added.
In response to an inquiry from ABC News, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell declined to comment.
Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all charges he faces, including defrauding customers and lenders of FTX. The trial is scheduled for October.
Bankman-Fried stepped down from his role at FTX in November 2022 amid a rapid collapse that ended with the company declaring bankruptcy. Prosecutors charged Bankman-Fried the following month with an array of alleged crimes centered on a scheme to defraud investors.
Soon after, Bankman-Fried agreed to waive his right to deny extradition to the U.S., clearing the way for his trial in U.S. court. Since then, Bankman-Fried has stood under house arrest at his parents’ Palo Alto, California, home as he awaits trial.
Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to 13 charges, including fraud, conspiracy and bribery, after federal prosecutors said he misappropriated billions of dollars from FTX before it went bankrupt.
Prosecutors allege he used the money to cover losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, to buy lavish real estate and to make political donations.
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.”
(NEW YORK) — The Campbell Soup Company is expanding its presence on grocery store shelves with a new deal to acquire Sovos Brands Inc., the maker of Rao’s pasta sauces and noosa yogurt.
At $23 per share, the total enterprise value of the acquisition is approximately $2.7 billion, the companies announced in a joint press release on Monday.
The premium pasta sauces first hit shelves in 1992 to bring home cooks a signature taste of the legendary 10-table New York City restaurant.
The Campbell’s meals and beverages division made the “strategic decision” to add a “high-growth, market-leading premium portfolio” to include more soups, dry pasta, frozen products and yogurts from the brand names Rao’s, Michael Angelo’s and noosa.
Rao’s represented approximately 69% of Sovos Brands, the companies stated, which has had 34.9% organic growth in sales compared to last year.
“We’re thrilled to add the most compelling growth story in the food industry and welcome the talented employees who have built a nearly $1 billion portfolio,” Campbell’s President and CEO Mark Clouse said in a statement. “This acquisition fits perfectly with and accelerates our strategy of focusing on one geography, two divisions and select key categories that we know well.”
In addition to strengthening the meals and beverages division, Clouse said it adds to their “faster-growing and differentiated snacks division.”
Todd Lachman, Founder, President and CEO of Sovos Brands, Inc. called it a “momentous occasion” for the company.
“Our success would not have been possible without the incredibly talented and passionate team at Sovos Brands, which has been instrumental in building one of the fastest-growing food companies of scale in the industry today,” Lachman said. “This transaction is expected to create substantial value for our shareholders, resulting in a 92% increase from our 2021 IPO price.”
Lachman said he’s “confident in Campbell’s ability to continue bringing our products to more households and further building on our track record of growth and success for years to come.”
Steve Taylor/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — While some tech giants neared or imposed widespread layoffs last year, compensation for their CEOs climbed as much as tens of millions of dollars, according to an ABC News analysis of data released by research firm Equilar in May and June.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022, which marked a staggering 3,474% increase from the previous year, making him the nation’s highest-paid CEO, according to Equilar data.
Near the outset of 2023, Alphabet announced plans to lay off 10,000 workers.
At Microsoft, which initiated plans to lay off 10,000 workers in January, CEO Satya Nadella received compensation worth nearly $55 million in 2022 — a 10% jump from the prior year, the data showed.
Meta, Uber and Salesforce are also among more than a dozen tech companies that gave their CEOs a compensation increase last year, despite announcing layoffs at some point since the start of 2022, according to the ABC News analysis of the Equilar data.
Roughly 389,000 tech workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks layoffs. The job cuts have befallen some of the nation’s most well-known and large companies.
Alphabet, Meta, Uber and Salesforce did not respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
The rise of CEO pay amid a cascade of job losses at some household-name tech firms draws attention to the divergent fates of executives and workers in one of the nation’s most lucrative fields, which matches an economy-wide trend of a widening gap between the pay of CEOs and workers, analysts told ABC News.
CEO compensation often includes a base salary and a performance bonus but is typically made up in large part by stock awards that align the CEO primarily with shareholders, analysts added. The incentive structure can push a CEO to safeguard the health of a company but also reward short-term cost cuts that imperil workers, they said.
The disparate outcomes for CEOs and workers at some tech firms heightens an ongoing dispute about whether companies should shift consideration toward other stakeholders beyond investors, such as employees and customers, David Larcker, a professor of accounting, Emeritus, at Stanford University who researches corporate governance, told ABC News
“It’s a huge question,” Larcker said. “From a CEO’s perspective, if you have to shut down something that isn’t profitable, you can obviously increase the stock price and earnings and get a big bonus out of that.”
From workers’ point of view, meanwhile, “companies have a lot to say about how employees are their most important assets and sometimes actions seem a lot more shareholder-friendly,” Larcker added.
To be sure, Equilar calculated the value of CEO compensation packages when they were awarded at the outset of last fiscal year. For many companies, the stock price had dropped by the end of the year, leaving the CEO’s compensation lower than the figure listed by Equilar. The value of Pichai’s compensation package, for instance, fell to about $205 million by the end of fiscal year 2022, according to a follow-up Equilar analysis shared with ABC News.
Under the terms of Pichai’s compensation package, he will not receive the full value unless the company achieves a set of goals, including strong stock performance relative to other large companies, a government filing shows.
Meanwhile, the ultimate value of the compensation package received by Nadella is dependent on a range of company performance metrics that “are intended to be difficult but attainable,” Microsoft told shareholders in December.
Months earlier, in May 2022, Microsoft announced an increase in its budget devoted to pay and stock compensation for employees that year. The company will not provide raises for salaried employees in 2023, according to a company memo first reported by Insider in May.
In response to ABC News’ request for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson noted that the compensation awarded to Nadella last year preceded the layoff plans announced in January.
The vast majority of the compensation awarded to Zuckerberg in 2022 is devoted to his security and use of a private plane, Meta told shareholders. Since 2013, Zuckerberg has received an annual salary of $1.
The value of a stock award made up 70% of the typical compensation package for the 100 highest-paid CEOs last year, Amit Batish, director of content at Equilar, told ABC News. Company performance thresholds often found in CEO compensation packages include stock performance, sales growth and product user totals.
Job losses in the relatively well-paid industry, meanwhile, have coincided with otherwise robust hiring across the economy, which boasts an unemployment rate hovering near a 50-year low.
“Especially in tech, I think it’s a shock to tech workers who have always been in such high demand to be experiencing these layoffs,” Lisa LaViers, a professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business who studies executive pay and its effect on workers, told ABC News.
At tech firms where CEOs received an increase in compensation alongside layoffs, the divergent fortunes likely exacerbated worker dismay, LaViers added.
“If you gave the CEO a large bonus and you laid off a lot of workers, I can’t imagine a scenario under which that wouldn’t upset employees,” she said.
Key attributes of executive and worker compensation complicate the moral outrage, however, LaViers said.
Executive compensation sometimes includes stock options that cannot be sold within a year of when a CEO receives them, meaning that compensation received in a given year does not necessarily equate to money brought in by an executive. Meanwhile, many non-executive level tech employees receive stock options as part of their compensation, tying their income to that of shareholders, she said, though employee stock options are a fraction of what CEOs receive.
Uber, which has laid off hundreds of employees this year, gave CEO Dara Khosrowshahi compensation worth about $24 million in 2022, which amounted to a 22% increase from the previous year, Equilar data showed.
A corporate worker laid off by Uber this year, who requested anonymity for fear of negative consequences if they spoke publicly, described the dynamic of job cuts alongside pay increases as “very frustrating.”
Responding to Khosrowshahi’s push for a “culture change” that focused on the mission-based aspirations of Uber, the laid-off worker asked, “Did Dara really care about doing the right thing?”
“There’s a lot of lip service paid to ‘Oh, we want to have a culture’ but it’s all in the service of profitability,” the laid-off worker added.
After imposing a round of layoffs last month that affected up to 50 employees at Uber’s trucking subsidiary, Uber Freight, a company spokesperson told outlet Freight Waves in a statement: “On the back of efficiency gains realized across the business and to ensure continued alignment between our cost structure and the current market realities, we are reducing the workforce in our Brokerage business across a small number of roles.”
The full compensation package awarded to Khosrowshahi is dependent upon the company’s fulfillment of key objectives, Uber told shareholders.
Similarly, a worker interviewed by ABC News who was laid off this year by data-storage firm Western Digital expressed disappointment after finding out that CEO David Goeckeler received a 42% pay increase in 2022, according to Equilar data.
“I was making money for this guy instead of making money for myself,” said the worker, who requested anonymity due to the terms of a severance agreement. “It’s the sickness of the whole system.”
To receive the full value of his compensation package, Goeckler must achieve a variety of short- and long-term company performance goals, Western Digital told investors.
Western Digital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Larcker, of Stanford University, said that a corporate shift in focus away from shareholders and toward other constituencies could limit instances of egregious divergence between the outcomes of CEOs and workers. Though layoffs, he added, are unavoidable, especially in tech.
“Tech is a risky business,” Larcker said. “But companies can be better off when they change course in a way that doesn’t crush workers.”
(NEW YORK) — Disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried deserves to have his bail revoked and to be detained before he is tried for fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from the collapse of FTX, federal prosecutors in New York said in a new court filing.
Prosecutors balked at Bankman-Fried’s sharing with The New York Times excerpts from the personal documents of Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend, who led his Alameda Research hedge fund and who has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.
Bankman-Fried considered those private writings of Ellison “detrimental to her” and accused him of sharing them with the newspaper “in order to affect the public’s perception of her,” prosecutors said.
The defense accused the government of drawing conclusions “without any evidence whatsoever” and relying “heavily on assumptions, unsupported inferences, and innuendo.”
Prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of witness tampering.
“The record here establishes that the defendant went beyond benignly exercising a constitutional right to speak to the press—he took covert steps intended to improperly discredit a trial witness and taint the jury pool,” prosecutors said. “[T]he Government seeks the only appropriate relief consistent with the defendant’s escalating evasions of his bail conditions: that bail be revoked and the defendant be detained pending trial.”
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to 13 charges, including fraud, conspiracy and bribery, after federal prosecutors said he misappropriated billions of dollars from FTX before it went bankrupt. Prosecutors allege he used the money to cover losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, to buy lavish real estate and to make political donations.
Ellison pleaded guilty in December to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the court documents.
(NEW JERSEY)– The lack of available homes on the market is near historic lows, sparking fierce bidding wars in cities across the country – and prompting many buyers to get creative with their offers.
In June, 1.08 million homes were for sale nationwide, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), down 13.6% from a year ago, when 1.22 million homes were available.
“It’s still a seller’s market, and we won’t see that change anytime soon,” Sarah Drennan, a realtor with Terrie O’Connor Realtors, in northern New Jersey, tells ABC News. “Some of our homes are selling with anywhere from 10 to 50 offers, and within the first week the home is going under contract.”
Housing experts say the biggest challenge for home buyers right now is competition, and cash is still king. One-third of U.S. homebuyers are paying in cash, the highest share in nearly a decade, according to real estate broker Redfin.
Too many buyers chasing too few properties is pushing home prices out of reach for a growing number of Americans. Data compiled by the NAR found roughly one third of homes sold in June sold for above the list price, when the national median sale price was $410,200, the second-highest number on record and 0.9% less than the all-time high from one year ago of $413,800.
Undeterred by the highest mortgage rates in more than a decade, some buyers are finding creative ways to win a home and outmaneuver the competition.
Dylan and Shannon McCarty describe their home search in Ramsey, New Jersey as “brutal.” When their rent in Hoboken, New Jersey went up again in January, the couple decided it was time to stop renting and start building equity in their first home. Yet despite being pre-approved for a mortgage, the McCartys were outbid for five different homes over five months.
For their sixth time, they decided to employ a different tactic and appeal to the sellers’ human side. Shannon McCarty’s best friend happened to know the neighbors of the home they wanted to buy. On the day of the open house, those neighbors walked through the home with the McCartys to give off the “good family vibe” they knew the sellers were interested in.
It also didn’t hurt that the couple bid $50,000 above the asking price, but in this competitive market, they knew even that might not be enough. The McCartys believe what made the difference was writing a “love letter” to the seller.
“We showed them our desire and eagerness to get into the home. We described how we loved the charm of the house and how we would be thrilled if they would select us to move into their home and start our family,” Dylan McCarty says. “There were multiple offers, including some that were all cash, but we were told by our agent that the sellers went with an emotional decision, and they went with us.”
If your persuasive letter-writing skills aren’t quite up to snuff, there are other ways to sweeten your offer. Motivated buyers looking for an advantage are throwing all sorts of extras at sellers, like agreeing to non-refundable deposits. “It shows that you have skin in the game and that you are going to move forward because you don’t want to lose that deposit,” Drennan says.
Additionally, some buyers are limiting their inspections to only structural or environmental issues, or scrapping inspections altogether. Depending on the market, buyers are also waiving home appraisals or agreeing to pay the difference and ‘bridge the gap’ in the event a home is appraised for less than the asking price. Yet another popular strategy is allowing the seller to live in the house rent-free or at a dramatically reduced rate after the closing, to give them time to buy a home for themselves.
The lack of inventory has been made worse by homeowners who are reluctant to sell and part with their low mortgage rates.
With their first baby on the way, Sarah and Ryan Locurto would like a larger home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, but their 2.5% mortgage rate is less than half the current national average, which as of early August is closing is on 7% for a 30-year fixed-rate.
“If we did find something that we loved and we felt like we weren’t overpaying, we would move but, you know, the mortgage rates are a big factor,” Sarah Locurto tells ABC News.
Instead of giving up their low mortgage rate, Drennan says some buyers are pouring the money they would have spent on buying another home into renovations on their current house.
“We’re seeking sellers willing to divorce their current rates,” Drennan says. “You marry your house, but you date your mortgage. You can always refinance for a more attractive rate, which many lenders are doing now, fee-free.”
(NEW YORK) — CVS Health is laying off 5,000 employees as part of an effort to shed costs, the retail and pharmacy chain confirmed on Tuesday.
The layoffs will primarily affect “non-customer facing positions” such as corporate roles, the company said, adding that it does not expect the move to impact brick-and-mortar stores, pharmacies and clinics.
“Our industry is evolving to adapt to new consumer health needs and expectations,” CVS told ABC News in a statement. “As part of an enterprise initiative to reprioritize our investments around care delivery and technology, we must take difficult steps to reduce expenses.”
Laid-off workers will receive severance pay and benefits, the company said, including access to “outplacement services” to help find a job elsewhere.
“We’re committed to supporting impacted colleagues,” the company said.
As of December, CVS employed roughly 300,000 workers worldwide, according to a securities filing. The just-announced layoffs will eliminate less than 2% of the company’s workforce.
The Rhode Island-based company operates more than 9,000 retail locations and 1,100 walk-in medical clinics, the securities filing said. It also owns one of the nation’s largest health insurers, Aetna, as well as the country’s largest pharmacy-benefit manager, CVS Caremark.
The move to slash workers comes as CVS pivots toward expanded healthcare services, and away from the magazine and snack aisles.
In May, the company closed a $10.6 billion acquisition of Oak Street Health, a Chicago-based primary care provider that operates more than 150 healthcare centers in 21 states.
Two months earlier, the company closed an $8 billion deal to acquire Signify Health, a New York-based home healthcare company.
In 2021, CVS announced plans to close roughly 900 stores over the ensuing three years as it evaluated population shifts, consumer buying patterns and projected needs. As part of this “strategic review” of its retail business, the company said it would “reduce store density” in certain locations.
“We do not anticipate there will be any impact to our clients and customers as we remain focused on our mission – continuing to provide the exceptional care and support our customers, patients and communities deserve and depend on,” the company said in Tuesday’s statement.
“Throughout our company’s history, we’ve continuously adapted to market dynamics to lead the industry,” the statement added. “The difficult decision we are making will set the company up for long-term success.”
CVS is set to hold their next quarterly earnings call Wednesday morning. Shares of CVS ticked down 1% in early trading on Tuesday.
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to a 22-year high this week — a milestone that carries major implications for the finances of everyday people, experts told ABC News.
The move escalated an aggressive series of rate hikes that has helped dramatically reduce inflation from a peak last summer.
But the historically high interest rates are bad news for borrowers, who will face even higher costs for things like car loans to credit card debt to mortgages.
The high interest rates do deliver benefits for savers, however, who stand to gain from an uptick in the interest yielded by accounts held at banks as well as bonds and high-yield savings accounts.
“It depends what side of the ledger you find yourself on,” James Cox, a financial advisor and managing partner of Virginia-based Harris Financial Group, told ABC News.
“If you’re a saver and you have money in the bank, this is fantastic,” he added. “For people who borrow money, it’s way more expensive.”
Here’s what to know about how the sky-high interest rates affect people’s personal finances:
What do historically high interest rates mean for borrowers?
The high interest rates make borrowing more expensive.
So any purchase that requires a loan — for a home, car, or higher education — could be affected. Credit card rates are also highly sensitive to Federal Reserve moves, so card holders should expect even higher payments. As of Wednesday, average credit card interest rates stood at a staggering 20.5%, Bankrate data showed.
“Borrowers are negatively affected,” Christine Benz, the director of personal finance at Morningstar. “Higher rates mean higher interest payments on loans.”
Mortgages, for instance, show how much more costly borrowing has become.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage reached more than 7% in October, achieving heights last seen more than 20 years ago, Freddie Mac data showed. The rate has fallen slightly below 7% but remains highly elevated, Freddie Mac said on Thursday.
At the start of 2022, by comparison, the mortgage rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage stood at 3.22%.
For homebuyers, each single percentage point increase in a mortgage rate can add thousands or tens of thousands in additional costs each year, depending on the price of the house, according to Rocket Mortgage.
However, the jump in interest rates comes with a silver lining: The elevated cost of loans should slash demand and cut home prices, Benz said.
“We haven’t seen it yet but there might be a chilling effect on home prices,” she said, citing a supply shortage that she believes could slacken over time.
What does the elevated interest rate mean for savers?
As much as high interest rates hammer borrowers, they benefit savers.
“If you’re a saver right now, it’s pretty darn good,” Derek Horstmeyer, a finance professor at George Mason University’s School of Business, told ABC News.
The yields on savings accounts have climbed as the Federal Reserve has lifted its interest rates, since banks accrue additional revenue in a high-interest rate environment and pass along some of that income to depositors.
Meanwhile, an array of high-yield savings accounts has emerged as firms seek to entice depositors with high returns.
The average annual yield on a savings account has more than doubled since April but still stands at just 0.52%, meaning that a typical customer earns a fraction of a percentage point of interest each year for his or her savings deposit, Bankrate data showed.
High-yield savings accounts, however, offer customers as much as about 5% annual percentage yield, a Bankrate analysis said.
Moreover, the simultaneous presence of high interest rates alongside declining inflation means that savers can avoid the elevated consumer prices that previously ate away at savings, said Cox, of Harris Financial Group.
“It’s massively beneficial,” Cox said, noting his expectation that inflation will continue to fall. “It only gets better from here.”
(NEW YORK) — Anheuser-Busch plans to lay off hundreds of corporate employees, a company spokesperson told ABC News on Thursday.
The layoffs come months after a product endorsement from Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, in April set off a consumer boycott among conservatives that hammered sales.
The layoffs will affect “less than 2%” of the company’s U.S. employees, the company said. That figure amounts to roughly 380 workers, since the company’s website says it employs a total of about 19,000 U.S.-based workers.
The layoffs will affect workers “across every corporate function” but will not impact frontline workers, such as warehouse staff, drivers and salespeople, the company spokesperson said.
“Today we took the very difficult but necessary decision to eliminate a number of positions across our corporate organization,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth said in a statement to ABC News. “While we never take these decisions lightly, we want to ensure that our organization continues to be set for future long-term success.”
The layoffs were originally reported by CNN and the Wall Street Journal.
Sales of Bud Light across the U.S. fell for at least six weeks after the start of the boycott, according to data from Bump Williams Consulting and Nielsen NIQ reviewed by ABC News. For instance, sales dropped nearly 26% over the week ending on May 20, the data showed.
Last month, Modelo overtook Bud Light as the top-selling beer in the U.S.
The stock price of Anheuser-Busch InBev has fallen nearly 12% since the start of the boycott in early April. Over that period, the S&P 500 has risen by nearly 12%.
In response to declining sales, the company provided financial support for tens of thousands of frontline workers at independent distributors, Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris said on an earnings call in May.
After the initial boycott, Anheuser-Busch InBev posted a statement in April from CEO Brendan Whitworth on its website.
“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Whitworth said. “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
The company placed two executives who oversaw the endorsement of Mulvaney’s Instagram post on leave, the Wall Street Journal reported in April.
The response drew sharp criticism from some LGBTQ advocates who considered it a capitulation to the backlash. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, suspended the company’s Corporate Equality Index score, USA Today reported. Previously, the company scored 100, the top rating.
(NEW YORK) — U.S. economic growth accelerated over three months ending in June, blowing past economist expectations and rebuking concern about a possible recession.
The U.S. gross domestic product grew by a 2.4% annualized rate to finish the first half of 2023, according to government data released Thursday.
The results mark an advance from the 2% annualized GDP growth recorded over the previous quarter. That growth showed a cooling from the 2.6% growth displayed in the quarter before that.
The finding of 2.4% annualized growth over the three months ending in June demonstrates that economic growth has accelerated over that period, dispelling concern among some about a fast-approaching recession.
The heightened growth stems from an increase in consumer and government spending, as well as a jump in business investment in inventory, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the federal agency that releases the GDP data.
A decrease in exports and home investment detracted from the GDP growth, the agency said.
Personal income — an overall measure of a variety of incomes such as wages and rental payments — grew at a slower pace than it had in the previous quarter, the data showed. The personal saving rate, however, inched upward from the previous quarter.
Fears of a recession have cast a thundercloud over the economy for many months but forecasters sun-kissed by falling inflation and a robust jobs market have grown optimistic about the U.S. averting a downturn.
Many observers define a recession through the shorthand metric of two consecutive quarters of shrinking in a nation’s GDP.
The GDP data released on Thursday arrives a day after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.25%, bringing its benchmark rate to a 22-year high of between 5.25% and 5.5%.
Economists surveyed by Bloomberg, however, think the move constitutes the central bank’s final rate increase of an aggressive series that began in March 2022.
For more than a year, the Federal Reserve has aimed to roll back inflation through interest rate hikes that typically slow the economy and slash consumer demand. The approach, however, risks tipping the economy into a downturn.
The policy appears to have succeeded in cooling prices. Inflation has fallen significantly from a peak last summer but remains one percentage point above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
Some key economic indicators, meanwhile, have sustained robust performance. A jobs report earlier this month showed that the labor market cooled, but still grew at a solid clip in June, adding 209,000 jobs.
“The U.S. economy has actually been quite resilient,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said late last month in Sentra, Portugal, at a conference organized by the European Central Bank.
Nearly three-quarters of forecasters surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics said that the probability of the U.S. entering a recession in the next 12 months is 50% or less, the organization announced on Monday.
On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund released fresh projections showing an improved outlook for the global and U.S. economy. The organization said it expects the U.S. economy to grow 1.8% this year, a revision upward from a previous estimate released in April.
“The global economy continues to gradually recover from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it is not yet out of the woods,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, IMF chief economist and research department director, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
(NEW YORK) — United Airlines announced Thursday that it is the first U.S. airline to add Braille to its aircraft cabin interiors.
The airline has about a dozen planes outfitted with Braille already, and plans to add Braille to its entire mainline fleet of more than 900 planes by 2026. The Braille will help blind and visually impaired people identify row numbers and seat assignments, and will be located in the lavatory as well.
“One of the things you want to do with all your customers is allow them to be as self-sufficient as possible,” said Linda Jojo, United’s executive vice president and chief customer officer. “This is one of the ways that our vision-impaired customers can navigate themselves to the right row in the right seat, without asking for help.”
The addition of Braille is part of the United NEXT plan, which involves purchasing more planes and upgrading the interiors of the existing fleet. The Braille is being added when the planes go in to be retrofitted.
For blind customers, the flying experience can be difficult. Dan Spoone, the interim executive director of the American Council of the Blind, is blind and said the challenges range from locating the call button and the overhead light to dealing with the lavatory.
“By God, those flush buttons are on a different spot in every different model of aircraft,” said Spoone.
Chris Danielsen, the director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind, is blind as well, and says when the cabin crew states that passengers must comply with lighted signs, placards and crewmember instructions, he’s unable to see signs or placards and has to only rely on what the crew says.
“It’s an important paradigm shift,” said Danielsen. “The flying experience is so full of visual signs and indicators.”
United has included the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind in its accessibility efforts — not only with Braille, but also exploring the use of other tactile navigation aids in the cabin, and in the development of United’s accessible in-flight entertainment and mobile app that work with screen reader technology.
Jojo said that the airline would welcome input from customers about how the Braille is working for them and that United will incorporate the feedback as the retrofits continue.
“This is an excellent step for United,” said Spoone. “We want to travel and be independent and go where we want to go and visit our families and go on vacations… There’s just a lot of opportunity to improve accessibility through the whole path from the time your Uber drops you off at the airport til you get on the plane and get to your destination.”
