The company said on its website that the root cause of the issue was tied to a function called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Amazon said it was experiencing error rates for multiple AWS services in an availability zone based in Northern Virginia. Patrick Neighorn, a company spokesperson, declined to provide additional details about the outage.

Instant Pot maker files for bankruptcy

The maker of Pyrex glassware and Instant Pot has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the company that was already struggling is stung by inflation, with Americans pulling back on spending.

According to a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas this week, Instant Brands, based outside of Chicago, has more than $500 million in both assets and liabilities.

Inflation has buffeted consumers after a pandemic-fueled binge on goods for the home, but spending has also moved elsewhere as people are again able to travel, or go to restaurants and shows.

And Instant Pots, which became a must-have gadget several years ago, have been disappearing from kitchens.

Sales of “electronic multicooker devices,” most of which are Instant Pots, reached $758 million in 2020, the start of the pandemic. Sales had plunged 50% by last year, to $344 million.

Carlson was ousted from Fox in late April, less than a week after Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to settle an explosive defamation case. The network provided no explanation for the firing, but a wave of reports on damaging text messages and other statements Carlson made during his time at Fox have since piled up.

Since leaving Fox, Carlson kicked off a “Tucker on Twitter” series — arguing that Twitter was “the only” major remaining platform that allows free speech as he denounced news media. The series, which has published two episodes so far, has appeared to escalate contract tensions between Carlson and Fox.

Fox has demanded Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, The New York Times also reported Monday — as the network’s lawyers accuse Carlson of violating his contract, which runs until early 2025 and restricts his ability to appear on other media outlets. Meanwhile, Carlson’s lawyers have said the network breached the contract first.

A spokesperson for Fox News Media and attorneys representing Carlson, Bryan Freedman and Harmeet Dhillon, did not immediately return requests for comments on Tuesday.

“Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election,”

Dhillon said in a statement sent to Axios and the Times. “Tucker will not be silenced by anyone.”

Before his April firing, Carlson was Fox’s top-rated host. His stew of grievances and political theories grew to define the network over recent years and made him an influential, and widely controversial, force in GOP politics.

Carlson has previously come under fire for defending a white-supremacist theory that claims white people are being “replaced” by people of color, as well as spreading misinformation about issues ranging from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Both the consumer price index and the core CPI — which excludes food and energy — decelerated on an annual basis, highlighting inflation’s descent since peaking last year. At 4%, year-over-year inflation is now at its lowest level since March 2021, according to data out Tuesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That said, a key gauge of prices closely watched by the Fed continued to rise at a concerning pace. The core CPI rose 0.4% for a third straight month, in line with estimates. The overall CPI, however, increased a smaller 0.1%, aided by lower gasoline prices.

The outsize increases in core prices were driven mainly by rising rents and by another spike in used car prices. Real-time data suggests that increases in those categories will soon ease and help cool inflation.

“Outside of those two components, the trend has become very encouraging,” Stephen Juneau, an economist at Bank of America, said in a research note. “We should continue to see improvement in core” prices.

The inflation figures come just a day before the Fed is set to make a decision on whether to raise interest rates for an 11th-straight meeting or to pause and further assess economic conditions.

Several policymakers, including Chair Jerome Powell, have signaled they prefer to skip a rate hike at the June 13-14 meeting, while still leaving the door open to future tightening if needed.

Economists generally agree the central bank will leave rates unchanged Wednesday, but the next CPI report due in July will play a key role in determining what the Fed will do at that month’s meeting.

“This is a pretty good print in terms of signaling that we are likely to see the core CPI soften materially starting next month,” Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC, said in a note.

“The way things are going now, I suspect we’ll see a soft core that will tamp down odds of a July hike.”

Excluding housing and energy, service prices climbed 0.2% from a month earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations, which is more consistent with pre-pandemic trends. The metric was up 4.6% from a year earlier, extending a decline since peaking late last year.

The gasoline price index fell 5.6%. Grocery prices edged higher after falling for two straight months, while dining out got more expensive.

Fed officials will want to see expected price declines in rents and used cars actually materialize before they extend any pause in rate increases.

“There’s progress, it’s encouraging,” said Eric Winograd, chief economist at asset manager AllianceBernstein. “I think it’s enough for the Fed to pause tomorrow….But I don’t think it is enough that we can sound the all-clear.”

DeWalt, a Stanley Black & Decker brand, recently launched a pair of tools to make any dad happy. The 20V Max Brushless 1/2-inch Drill/Driver (DCD793) is an amazingly small and powerful cordless tool. It’s built with a more petite body than previous models (about 2 inches shorter) but with 16% more power.

The new light and powerful tool (6.38-by-7.88-by-2.49 inches, 2.38 pounds) is built with an efficient brushless motor and 15 clutch positions, and it’s keyless, so no chuck key needed. It works off a 20V MAX 2.0 Ah rechargeable battery and has easy-to-control variable speeds. An on-tool LED helps light up tough-to-get dark areas.

A more powerful 20V Max Brushless Cordless 1/2-inch Hammer Drill Kit (DCD798) is built with a body over 1 inch shorter in length compared to previous models with 16% more power. If your user drills into concrete, this is what you want. It features a hammer mode for concrete and masonry applications. The hammer drill provides power up to 28,050 beats/blows per minute in hammer mode.

The hammer drill (6.93-by-7.88-by-2.49 inches, 2.49 pounds) works off the same portable battery and without a loading key, and it has a brushless motor and an on-tool LED work light.

Both models have a 0.5-inch ratcheting chuck, produce 404 unit watts out of power, and run up to easy-to-control variable speeds up to 1,650 revolutions per minute.

Both are available as a single tool or in a kit. The kit includes the device, a DeWalt 20V Max 2.0 Ah rechargeable battery, a charger, a belt hook and a bag. The battery and charger are also sold separately. The DCD793 Compact Drill/Driver Kit is currently $99 at Lowes through Aug. 2, and the DCD798 kit is $184.

DeWalt’s 20V Max line, a portable tool collection, has cordless tools for almost any job inside or out and perfect gift choices for future dad gifts. They include saws, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, vacuums, lasers, impact wrenches and more.

www.dewalt.com

Soundcore’s new Motion X600 Bluetooth speaker, called by the company “the world’s first portable high-fidelity speaker,” is Father’s Day-ready, summer-ready, and any music listening at any location-ready.

Dad can take it poolside with its IPX7 water protection, or grab it by the handle and have it play his favorite playlist while tinkering in the garage. Consider it his modern-day boombox. There are no locations it’s limited to, and if you want it to be the life of the party, that’s no problem with its booming 50-watt power, enabling it to provide a room full of sound.

Inside the aluminum speaker is a 6,400 mAh rechargeable battery (USB-C to C charging cable included), suitable for about 12 hours of playtime at half volume. The 5- watt sound comes from a 20-watt left channel, 20-watt right channel, and 10 watts from the sky channel, all covered by a stainless steel grill.

The decorative features are essential, but the sound counts the most, and the Motion X600 doesn’t disappoint. Its clarity at low levels or in room-filling settings provides robust and high-quality sound. Bringing it to the higher volume levels brought both the great sound and very high volume levels, so much so that it had to be lowered a little not to annoy my neighbors during testing.

For those wanting to control the sound with customized settings, the Soundcore app will do that to achieve peak performance. Soundcore states that if you have two Motion X600 speakers, they can be paired simultaneously for authentic stereo sound.

Touch controls are responsive and easy to access across the top. An aux-in port is on the back, and there’s a built-in microphone.

https://us.soundcore.com $199.99, available in polar gray, lunar blue and aurora green

©2023 Gregg Ellman. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumer prices in the United States cooled last month, rising just 0.1% from April to May and extending the past year’s steady easing of inflation. At the same time, some measures of underlying price pressures remained high.

Measured year over year, inflation slowed to just 4% in May — the lowest 12-month figure in over two years and well below April’s 4.9% annual rise. The pullback was driven by tumbling gas prices, a much smaller rise in grocery prices than in previous months and less expensive furniture, air fares and appliances.

Tuesday’s inflation figures from the government arrived one day before the Federal Reserve is expected to leave interest rates alone after imposing 10 straight rate hikes dating back to March 2022. After a two-day meeting, the Fed will likely announce that it’s skipping a rate hike but may hint that it will resume raising rates as soon as July.

Last month’s drop-off in overall inflation isn’t likely to convince the Fed’s policymakers that they’re close to curbing the high inflation that has gripped the nation for two years. The central bank tends to focus most closely on “core” prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are considered better able to capture underlying inflation trends. These prices remain stubbornly high.

Core prices rose a sizable 0.4% from April to May, the sixth straight month of increases at that level or higher. Compared with a year ago, core inflation slipped from 5.5% to 5.3% but is still far above the Fed’s target of 2%.

Yet some positive signs, even in the measures of core prices, suggest that underlying inflation pressures may be receding. The outsize increases in core prices were driven mainly by rising rents and by another spike in used car prices. Real-time data suggests that increases in those categories will soon ease and help cool inflation.

“Outside of those two components, the trend has become very encouraging,” Stephen Juneau, an economist at Bank of America, said in a research note. “We should continue to see improvement in core” prices.

Economists say inflation is being driven by a narrower set of goods and services. Excluding housing costs — which include rents and hotel prices, which jumped last month — prices actually dipped 0.1% from April to May. And they’re up just 2.1% from a year ago.

Rents rose 0.5% from April to May, down from the peak gains of 0.7% to 0.8% last year. Used car prices soared 4.4% just from April to May. Those two factors alone drove four-fifths of the monthly increase in core prices, according to Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. And the government said housing costs made up three-fifths of year-over-year core inflation.

Yet it could take months for rising costs in those areas to ease back to pre-pandemic levels. Fed officials will want to see the expected price declines in rents and used cars actually materialize before they extend any pause in rate increases.

“There’s progress, it’s encouraging,” said Eric Winograd, chief economist at asset manager AllianceBernstein. “I think it’s enough for the Fed to pause tomorrow….But I don’t think it is enough that we can sound the all-clear.”

Outside used cars, prices for goods such as furniture, appliances, and computers were unchanged, an encouraging sign that supply chain backups that sent prices soaring two years ago have largely resolved.

Hal Lawton, CEO of Tractor Supply Co., in Brentwood, Tennessee, which sells items like tractors and outdoor grills, said many of his costs are easing. Substantial reductions in freight prices and moderating wage increases are putting less pressure on him to keep raising prices.

His price increases, Lawton said, have slowed to the mid-single digits, and by year’s end, he predicts they’ll level off to the low single digits.

“You can see it coming down in a sustained way, and I’m feeling very good about that, whether it’s freight, whether it’s wages, whether it’s underlying commodity pressure,” Lawton said. “It gives me a positive outlook on the economy because of that.”

Gas prices, adjusted for seasonal patterns, fell 5.6% from April to May; they’re down nearly 20% from a year ago. And grocery prices ticked up just 0.1%, a relief to consumers, though they’re still 5.8% higher than they were a year ago.

With housing making up such a large proportion of inflation, economists are closely tracking real-time measures of rents in new apartment leases. The government’s measure of rents is now incorporating the sharp increases that occurred in 2021 and 2022 as many people moved to gain more space during the pandemic. But as newer leases with much smaller rent increases feed into the government’s measure, rental costs should drop.

According to ApartmentList, which tracks new leases, average rents nationally rose just 0.9% in May from a year earlier. That’s down from a 17.6% spike in 2021. The decline reflects a jump in the construction of apartment buildings at a time when demand for apartments has slowed.

“If you’re a renter out there, you’ve got a lot more vacant units, nationally speaking,” than at any time since the pandemic, said Rob Warnock, senior research associate at Apartment List.

Still, the stubbornness of underlying inflation reflects a fundamental challenge for the Fed: The economy has steadily defied long-standing forecasts for a recession, dating back more than a year. Instead, businesses have kept hiring at a healthy pace, average paychecks are climbing and workers are freely spending their larger wages.

Though a resilient economy is great for households and businesses, it may also be helping fuel chronically high inflation. Some economists argue that many companies are keeping prices artificially high, more than is needed to cover their own higher costs, to drive profit growth. The nation’s consumers might have to pull back, en masse, before most businesses will reduce prices. In the meantime, steadily robust hiring is allowing Americans, as a whole, to keep spending.

The Fed has raised its benchmark rate by a hefty 5 percentage points over the past 15 months — the fastest pace of rate increases in four decades. Those hikes have led to much higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business borrowing. The Fed’s goal is to slow borrowing and spending, cool the economy and tame inflation — without causing a deep recession. It’s a notoriously difficult task.

There are some signs that the Fed’s efforts are having the desired effect. Inflation is expected to take another big step down in the figures for June that will be reported next month. Price growth could slide as low as 3.2% from a year earlier, according to some economists’ estimates. That would be significantly below inflation’s peak of 9.1% in June 2022, the highest level in four decades.

A sharp decline next month as well would reflect the fact that food and gas prices soared in both May and June last year. As those months drop out of the year-over-year inflation calculations, they are replaced with smaller monthly gains. The effect can sharply lower measures of annual inflation.

___

AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report from New York City.

What is a socially responsible bank?

Corporate social responsibility is the self-regulation that businesses do to help promote a positive impact on environmental or social issues, such as racial equity.

In the banking industry, social responsibility refers to the ways banks can reduce harm or create opportunities for good. For an eco-conscious bank or credit union, that might mean it doesn’t invest in oil pipelines, deforestation or fossil fuels, or it might invest in alternative energy, plant trees or buy carbon offsets. Other banks or credit unions might be committed to equity goals by providing financial literacy programs to their communities or by giving more loans to minority-owned small businesses.

Why does it matter where I put my money?

It’s easy to imagine that the money you keep in your savings account, checking account or certificate of deposit is just waiting for you to use it. But your bank or credit union is using your money behind the scenes to lend to or invest in businesses or other customers. So even if you aren’t directly giving money to an oil refinery or company that’s clearing the Amazon rainforest, your money could still be supporting those initiatives.

There has been a long history of discrimination in the U.S. banking system against people of color, and you can put your money with a bank or credit union that’s working to support these marginalized groups. Elizabeth Vivirito, a financial services consultant who specializes in diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, research, says she has observed more robust changes in the banking industry around racial equity since the murder of Black man George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

“We see more people caring about where their money goes and what it’s funding,” Vivirito says.

How do I know what my bank is investing in?

It can be hard to know what a bank is doing with your money, but there are some ways to tell.

First, look at the bank’s website. Does it make any statements about its DEI goals? Does it explicitly say whether it invests in certain industries? Has the bank gone through any third-party certification processes, such as becoming a certified B Corp or joining 1% for the Planet or the Global Alliance for Banking on Values? These certifications and memberships each have goals and member requirements around sustainability and equity.

Once you’ve looked at the bank’s website, do a web search of the bank plus any keywords that you’d like to investigate, such as “social impact” or “community.” This should help you find specific statements or reports from the bank as well as any news or accountability reports from other sources that are keeping tabs on the bank’s efforts.

Note, too, that some banks are changing; they might be divesting from certain industries or adding programs to help people who have been historically shut out of banking services.

How can I find a socially responsible bank?

First, decide what social responsibility means to you. Do you want a bank committed to fighting climate change? In that case, you may want to choose a bank or credit union that is Fossil Free Certified, a certification from Bank Green. Do you want to combat financial racism and put your money into businesses that promote equity? Vivirito recommends looking into the history of your bank or credit union to see whom it was created to serve and what its mission is.

“The leadership, strategy and language of the institution should represent their community,” Vivirito says.

If you haven’t made any moves to open a new account and you’re looking for a simple way to be more socially conscious with your banking, Kara Pérez, founder of financial education company Bravely Go, says one of the easiest things you can do is move your money from a large national bank to a local credit union, which will use your money to support other local people, programs and businesses.

“Thinking about your money in a bigger picture way can help you make better decisions with it,” Pérez says. “Every dollar has power to shape our world.”

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

More From NerdWallet

WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.

How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.

“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”

The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.

Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.

“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”

Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”

Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.

Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.

The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.

An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.

An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.

The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.

When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.

In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.

“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.

The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.

In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.

“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.

Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.

“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”

A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.

Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.

“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”

In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.

“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”

The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.

“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an interview.

“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.

In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.

Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.

The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.

For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.

“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”

Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.

Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.

Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.

His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.

Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”

Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.

The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.

But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.

Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.

The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.

Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.

The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.

“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”

Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.

Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.

“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.

___

McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Supporters of the new study commissioned by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation say it helps reveal the broader consequences of health inequities and provides motivation for public and private sector leaders to help rectify the disparities. The research also looks to the future of the state’s population, where communities of color are driving growth but are also the ones who are the most heavily impacted by health inequities.

As the next generation rises, the report said, these groups will represent nearly half of the state’s population compared to the less than one-third share they represent today.

“Massachusetts faces a choice to ‘pay now or pay greater later,’ as demonstrated by this report, which highlights the unacceptable cost being paid by communities of color and ultimately borne by businesses and the commonwealth,” the advocacy organization Health Equity Compact said in a statement included with the report.

The authors of the report said it is a “first of its kind” to quantify in economic terms the cost of health inequities for individuals and families, health care providers, employers, public and private sector payers, and the overall Massachusetts economy.

The economic burden associated with health inequities experienced by communities of color in Massachusetts totals nearly $6 billion but could grow to $11.2 billion by 2050 if no action is taken, the report said.

The time to shift from “awareness of the problem to action on solutions” is now after analysis made clear the “staggering economic toll” of health disparities, said Audrey Shelto, president and CEO of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.

“Our commonwealth led the way in expanding health insurance coverage and improving access, and we have a shared responsibility to act similarly to achieve health equity and eliminate health disparities,” Shelto said in a statement.

Populations of color in the state are disproportionately affected by housing instability, food insecurity, environmental toxins and stressors, and higher rates of poverty as a result of longstanding systemic racism in social and economic structures, policies, and practices, the report said.

That has led to less access to health coverage and care and differences in the quality of care received, researchers wrote in the study.

Differences in delivery of care also stem back to “mistrust in the health care system due to historical and systemic racism and experiences of continued lack of respect and breaches of trust reported by many,” the report said.

Researchers found Black and Hispanic/Latino residents report poorer health and mental health statuses than White residents; pregnancy-associated mortality and severe maternal morbidity are higher for Black residents; and higher rates of diabetes and asthma are reported among Black and Hispanic/Latino residents.

Higher rates of disease and disability in a population require more healthcare services to treat those conditions, which means higher healthcare spending, researchers said.

“By computing the gap between health care spending under the current health status for Massachusetts adults and health care spending if populations of color achieved the health equity target health status, we estimated that avoidable health care spending due to health inequities is $1.5 billion each year, or about 2 percent of total Massachusetts annual health spending,” the report said.

Working-age adults who are less healthy tend to work fewer hours, take more sick days, and be less productive on the job, the report said. The analysis compared the productivity of working-age populations of color with their current health status to the same group if they were fully healthy.

“We estimated that health inequities experienced by populations of color today cost Massachusetts $1.4 billion each year in lost labor productivity across industries,” the report said.

The analysis also compared the current mortality rates by race and ethnicity at each with the “health equity targets” for mortality at each age.

“We found that health inequities are estimated to lead to premature death for Massachusetts residents of all ages,” the report said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent letters Monday to PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and LIV CEO Greg Norman spelling out the “serious questions regarding the reasons for and terms behind the announced agreement.”

Blumenthal, who is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he also wanted to hear the tour’s plans to retain its tax-exempt status.

Last week, LIV and the tour stunned the golf world by agreeing to merge the PGA Tour and European tour with the Saudi golf interests, while also dropping all lawsuits between the parties.

The governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which bankrolls LIV, will join the PGA Tour board of directors and lead a new business venture as its chairman. The PGA Tour itself will remain a tax-exempt entity.

It was a move expected to receive scrutiny from federal regulators and lawmakers, and the launch of a Senate investigation is among the first dominoes to fall.

The agreement announced last week was to combine the golf-related businesses of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund — which includes LIV Golf — with those of the PGA Tour and European tour. That would be a new for-profit company still to be named.

Among the uncertainties is how LIV Golf goes forward after 2023. PIF’s governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, is to be chairman of the new venture, with Monahan as CEO and two PGA Tour board members joining them on an executive committee.

In his letters to Monahan and Norman, Blumenthal wrote about the skepticism critics hold over the Saudis’ intent “to use investments in sports to further the Saudi government’s strategic objectives.”

Blumenthal asked for a sweeping set of documents — essentially all communications between LIV and the tour beginning in October 2021 through the present.

The FTC’s Monday filing in a federal court in San Francisco seeks a restraining order and injunction to stop Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of the California gaming company behind hit franchises such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

Microsoft, maker of the Xbox game system, has been struggling to win worldwide approval for the deal with just over a month before the deadline to close it, according to the contract it signed with Activision.

“We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court,” said a statement Monday from Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president. “We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market.”

The FTC already took Microsoft to court to block the merger, but that was before the U.S. agency’s in-house judge in a trial set to start on Aug. 2. That administrative process doesn’t preclude the parties from closing the deal.

The contract between Microsoft and Activision required the deal to close by July 18, but the FTC’s latest action seeks to stop that from happening.

“Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have represented in the past that they cannot close their deal due to antitrust reviews of the transaction in other jurisdictions,” the FTC said in a statement Monday. “But Microsoft and Activision have not provided assurances that they will maintain that position. In light of that, and public reporting that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering closing their deal imminently, we have filed a request for a temporary restraining order to prevent them from closing while review continues.”

Microsoft’s other main obstacle is in the United Kingdom, where antitrust regulators have also taken action to block the acquisition.

The all-cash deal announced in January 2022 has been scrutinized by regulators around the world over fears that it would give Microsoft and its Xbox console control of Activision’s hit franchises and give it an unfair boost in the emerging business of cloud-based game subscriptions. It could be the priciest tech industry merger in history.

Fierce opposition has been driven by rival Sony, which makes the PlayStation gaming system.

Microsoft sought to counter the resistance by striking a deal with Nintendo to license Activision titles like Call of Duty for 10 years and offering the same to Sony if the deal went ahead.

European regulators representing the 27-nation bloc approved the deal last month on condition that Microsoft make some promises meant to boost competition in the cloud-based gaming market. A number of other countries, including China, Japan, Brazil and South Korea, have also approved it.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston said in an order Monday that the injunction he ordered last month will take effect 21 days after he issues a final judgment imposing terms on the airlines. It’s not clear when that will be.

The airlines had faced a deadline next weekend, just 30 days after the judge’s May 19 decision in favor of the U.S. Justice Department, which sued to break up the deal.

American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said last month that his Texas-based airline will appeal the May ruling. New York-based JetBlue has not indicated whether it will appeal.

Wall Street hits 13-month high

Wall Street climbed Monday ahead of a big week for central banks around the world, vaulting the S&P 500 to its highest level in more than a year.

The benchmark index rose 40.07 points, or 0.9%, to 4,338.93 and its highest close since April 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 189.55, or 0.6%, to 34,066.33, while the Nasdaq composite rallied 202.78, or 1.5%, to 13,461.92.

The U.S. stock market has been cruising on hopes the economy may avoid a recession and the Federal Reserve may soon take it easier on its hikes to interest rates. Traders are betting the Fed will hold rates steady at its next meeting, which concludes on Wednesday. That would be the first time it hasn’t hiked rates at a meeting in more than a year.

Investors see high-growth stocks as some of the biggest beneficiaries of lower rates, and they led the market Monday. Tech stocks alone accounted for more than half the S&P 500’s gain, powered by gains of at least 1.5% for both Microsoft and Apple.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of paying underage girls for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York. He was found dead in jail in August of that year, at age 66. A medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court in November sought to hold JPMorgan financially liable for Epstein’s decades-long abuse of teenage girls and young women. A related lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The proposed settlement comes roughly two weeks after JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified in a deposition for the case, where he denied knowing about Epstein and his crimes until the financier was arrested in 2019, according to a transcript of the videotaped deposition released last month.

“We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous, and we believe this settlement is in the best interest of all parties, especially the survivors, who suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of this man,” JPMorgan Chase said in a written statement early Monday.

The proposed settlement, which must still be approved by the judge in the case, totals $290 million, according to lead plaintiff attorney David Boies.

According to the lawsuits, JPMorgan provided Epstein loans and regularly allowed him to withdraw large sums of cash from 1998 through August 2013 even though it was aware of his participation in sex trafficking. The anonymous victim in the suit, referred to as Jane Doe, said she was sexually abused by Epstein from 2006 and 2013.

Also on Monday, a judge ruled in favor of making Doe’s lawsuit into a class-action lawsuit for all victims of Epstein’s sex crimes.

“Money, which for far too long flowed with impunity between Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking enterprise and Wall Street’s leading banks, is decisively being used for good,” said Sigrid McCawley, an attorney for Jane Doe and other Epstein victims, in a prepared statement.

“The settlements signal that financial institutions have an important role to play in spotting and shutting down sex trafficking.”

The bank continued to count Epstein as a client despite the fact that he was arrested and pled guilty in 2008 to sex crimes in Florida.

“Any association with him was a mistake and we regret it,” the bank said in a prepared statement. “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was using our bank in any way to help commit heinous crimes.”

Lawsuits are still pending between the U.S. Virgin Islands and JPMorgan Chase, and the bank is still pursuing its lawsuit against JPMorgan former executive Jes Staley.

Roughly two in three (66%) U.S. adults have a negative view about tipping, according to the survey. Americans said they believe businesses should pay employees better rather than relying so much on tips (41%), they’re annoyed about pre-entered tip screens (32%), they feel that tipping culture has gotten out of control (30%), they’re confused about who and how much to tip (15%), and they would be willing to pay higher prices if we could do away with tipping (16%).

Despite annoyances, people haven’t stopped tipping for everyday services. More than two-fifths (44%) of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants typically tip at least 20%. But when it comes to many tipped services, such as hair stylists, food delivery, taxis and more, everyone approaches tipping differently. Here’s how people feel about tipping in 2023.

Gen Zers and men tip the least of any demographic

The frequency of U.S. adults tipping has declined steadily since 2019, according to Bankrate. In 2023, fewer people say they always tip workers in every category:

Source: CreditCards.com survey, June 16-18, 2021; CreditCards.com survey, May 11-13, 2022; Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

People who dine at sit-down restaurants say they always tip their servers — more frequently than those who use any other kind of service — but that percentage of people fell from 73% in 2022 to 65% in 2023. Over three-fourths (77%) of people who dine at sit-down restaurants always tipped their server in 2019. Similar trends are true for food delivery workers, taxi or rideshare drivers and other tipped services.

Most significantly, the percentage of people who always tip their hair stylists, hairdresser or barber fell from 66% in 2022 to 53% in 2023.

Nearly two in three diners always tip their waiters at sit-down restaurants

Servers and waitstaff at sit-down restaurants are most likely (65%) to always receive a tip from customers of any tipped service, followed by hair stylists. Additionally, 50% of those who use food delivery services, such as meals from restaurants or groceries delivered through apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, will always tip:

Source: Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

People who use home services or repair, who pick up takeout food and who receive furniture or appliance delivery are the least likely to say they always tip: One in ten (10%) of those who use home services or repair always tip, as well as 17% of those who receive furniture or appliance delivery and 13% of those who pick up takeout food.

The tendency to tip differs widely between demographics like age, gender and location. Generally, men are less likely to always tip than women are. Most significantly, 60% of women who go to a hair stylist always tip, compared to 46% of men. Men also tip waiters, food delivery workers and other categories less frequently than women:

—Waiters at sit-down restaurants: 70% of women, 60% of men

—Hair stylists/barbers: 60% of women, 46% of men

—Food delivery workers: 54% of women, 45% of men

—Taxi/rideshare drivers: 45% of women, 36% of men

The tendency to always tip for a service increases as people age. Gen Z is generally the least likely to always tip for a service, while baby boomers are generally the most likely.

The difference between generations is largest for those who go to hairdressers, hair stylists or barbers. Only 24% of Gen Z who go to hair stylists always tip, while nearly three times as many baby boomers (70%) who use the service always tip.

Additionally, Gen Zers are significantly less likely than baby boomers to always tip when they eat at a sit-down restaurant (35% compared to 83%), get food delivery (31% compared to 62%) or use taxis or rideshares (22% compared to 56%).

The only exception in generational trends is for home services or repairs. Gen Z is actually the most likely (15%) to always tip for home service or repairs, a tendency that decreases in every generation. Only 6% of baby boomers who use home services or repairs always tip.

Midwesterners are 16% more likely to always tip at a sit-down restaurant than Southerners or Westerners

The Midwestern stereotype of “Minnesota nice” also applies to their tipping habits. Midwesterners are more likely to always tip for several services than people in other regions.

Most significantly, 77% of Midwesterners who dine at sit-down restaurants always tip, compared to 67% of Northeasterners and 61% of both Southerners and Westerners.

However, Northeasterners say they are likely to always tip in two out of the nine total categories. Over one in three (35%) of Northeasterners who use hotel housekeeping always tip, compared to 23% of Westerners, 20% of Southerners and 19% of Midwesterners.

Similarly, 25% of Northeasterners who use furniture and appliance delivery always tip, compared to 18% of Westerners, 16% of Southerners and 10% of Midwesterners.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans think tipping culture has gotten out of control

Americans can be quite confused about when and how much to tip in 2023. Though more businesses, like coffee shops and food trucks, encourage tipping during payment, not everyone likes being encouraged to tip, especially if the suggestions are a high amount. Around one in three (30%) U.S. adults told Bankrate they think tipping culture has gotten out of control. Older Americans tend to think tipping culture has gotten out of control more frequently than younger generations:

—Gen Z: 22%

—Millennials: 27%

—Gen X: 33%

—Baby boomers: 33%

Tipped workers receive a federal minimum wage of $2.13 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, amid the expectation they’ll make a higher income through tipping. According to Bankrate, two in five (41%) U.S. adults feel businesses should pay their employees better rather than relying so much on tips, the most common negative feeling about tipping.

In total, 66% of people had at least one negative feeling about tipping. Only 7% of people didn’t agree with any statement on tipping:

Source: Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

Pre-entered tipping suggestions were the second-most common negative feeling for Americans. Nearly one in three (32%) of U.S. adults are annoyed by tip suggestions, and 18% said they tend to tip less, or not at all, when they’re presented with the screens. Only 9% say they tip more.

“Inflation and general economic unease seem to be making Americans stingier with their tipping habits, yet we’re confronted with more invitations to tip than ever,” Bankrate Senior Industry Analyst Ted Rossman said. “It’s a fascinating issue with few clear answers. There is one apparent certainty, though: Tipping doesn’t seem likely to leave American society anytime soon.”

Sixteen percent of U.S. adults say they’re willing to pay higher prices if American culture could do away with tipping. Younger Americans are more likely to say they’re willing to pay more: 21% of millennials and 18% of Gen Zers compared to 13% of Gen Xers and 12% of baby boomers.

Other pain points include being confused about who and how much to tip (15%) and saying that they’re tipping less since COVID-19 (9%).

Not all Americans feel negatively about tipping -— many are still tipping well. Nearly one in two (44%) of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants say they typically tip at least 20%. Most commonly, 57% of baby boomers typically tip 20%, followed by 50% of Gen Xers, 34% of millennials and 25% of Gen Zers.

Tipping can be a positive emotion, too: 35% of U.S. adults say they feel good when they leave a generous tip. In contrast to those who have been tipping less since the pandemic, 14% of U.S. adults say they’re tipping more since COVID-19.

Guidelines when deciding how much to tip

Tipping can be confusing; it may seem like the suggested guidelines are always changing. Because tipped workers rely on that money to pay their bills, Rossman suggests tipping 20% as a standard practice. But that can be tricky when you’re paying for inexpensive services, such as a coffee, or if you need to pay more than one worker. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

—In personalized services, tip every worker who helps you. Are you at a hair salon, and two different workers cut and dye your hair? Or did you hire three workers to help you move? If you received individual, personalized service from several people, tip each person to thank them for their skilled work.

—Leave at least a small amount for inexpensive services. You probably don’t need to break out a calculator to figure out how to tip for a coffee. Generally, for services around $5 or less, leaving a dollar or your extra change in a tip jar will be plenty.

—Keep some cash on hand — but you may need to pull up an app. Cash is best for some services like valet parking and hotel housekeeping, where tips typically aren’t suggested when you pay for the service. If you pay for a service that doesn’t allow you to tip at the end, ask the worker if you can tip them through a peer-to-peer payment platform like Venmo or Zelle. Some companies don’t allow their workers to receive tips, but it never hurts to ask.

—2023 survey: Bankrate commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the survey. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,437 U.S. adults. Fieldwork was undertaken May 3-5, 2023.2022 & 2021 surveys: CreditCards.com commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the survey on tipping habits. CreditCards.com is owned by Bankrate’s parent company, Red Ventures.2022: Total sample size was 2,610 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between May 11- 13, 2022.2021: Total sample size was 2,573 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between June 16- 18, 2021. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+). The survey was carried out online and meets rigorous quality standards. It employed a nonprobability-based sample using both quotas upfront during collection and then a weighting scheme on the back end designed and proven to provide nationally representative results.

©2023 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

We asked five money experts to share their best personal finance strategies to help this year’s college grads successfully launch their financial lives. Here’s what they said.

Find your budgeting style

To figure out how to allocate your money toward needs, wants and everything else, Erin Lowry, author of the “Broke Millennial Workbook,” says that instead of following the latest budgeting trend on TikTok, it’s helpful to just sit down with a pen and paper. “Write down what your big expenses are,” she says.

After accounting for large items like rent, car payments and food, you can then see what nonessentials also fit. “You might want to go out to dinner with friends, build up new work attire or adopt a dog,” Lowry says. Writing out the budget helps you figure out what you can afford and when, she adds.

“We conceive of budgets as restrictive things that keep us from having fun, but you should be thinking of it as a way of controlling how your money is spent. If you don’t know, you’ve sacrificed all control,” Lowry says.

Factor in taxes

Melissa Jean-Baptiste, a financial educator and the author of the book “So… This Is Why I’m Broke,” says it’s easy to forget to account for taxes, so you might have less take-home pay than you anticipated. Retirement contributions and other deductions can further lower that amount.

Jean-Baptiste suggests setting aside some time to really understand your first paycheck and all those deductions. “Take yourself on a money date so you understand how much you’re bringing home and how much you have left to save and invest,” she says.

Save smartly

Even if they’re paying off debt, Alex Rezzo, a certified financial planner and the founder of Andante Financial in the Los Angeles area, urges new grads to start saving for retirement right away. “There will always be a more immediate excuse to delay saving for retirement,” he says, but he urges people to find a way to save at least 1% of each paycheck and to increase that amount over time.

He also suggests parking your direct-deposited paycheck funds in an online bank that offers a competitive high-yield account and is backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That way, the money likely will earn more than it would sitting in a traditional bank’s checking or savings account.

Protect your credit

As you build your independent financial life, making at least the minimum payments on your student loan and credit card accounts can help protect your credit. Missing a payment, Lowry says, could damage your credit score. She suggests focusing on paying down any high-interest debt first to reduce the total amount going to interest.

Lowry also suggests freezing or locking your credit, which makes it much harder for identity thieves to apply for new credit in your name. Just remember that if you freeze your credit, you’ll also have to thaw it if you want to apply for credit yourself, she says, adding, “you might want to wait until you’re through a period of time when you’re applying for new accounts.”

Make mistakes and learn from them

Kennedy Reynolds, chief education officer at Acorns, a financial services company, says mistakes are part of the learning process, whether it’s overspending or accruing credit card debt, but the key is to learn from the experience. “If you have debt to pay down, take that paycheck and split it up” toward those bills until they are paid off, she says.

“Try to picture yourself later and know that the choices you’re making now will have a long-term impact,” she adds.

Look beyond your paycheck

Linda Whiteman, a personal finance teacher at Outschool, an online learning platform for kids, teaches her students to think entrepreneurially. After all, she tells them, most millionaires are business owners.

“You don’t have to work for someone,” she says. She asks her students to consider what they can teach others, whether offering piano lessons online or creating digital art. Pursuing additional income streams outside of a paycheck can help grow wealth, she adds.

Jean-Baptiste found success doing exactly that: She used her experience as a teacher to create and sell lesson plans online. “I was bringing in $10,000 a year that I could put toward debt,” she says. Her lesson plans eventually turned into the financial literacy business that she operates today.

Earning additional income outside of a paycheck, she says, “can be a game-changer” — financial wisdom that applies at any age.

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

More From NerdWallet

JPMorgan Chase announced a tentative $290 million settlement Monday with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein who had accused the bank of being the financial conduit that allowed the financier to continue operating a sex trafficking operation.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of paying underage girls for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York. He was found dead in jail in August of that year, at age 66. A medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court in November sought to hold JPMorgan financially liable for Epstein’s decades-long abuse of teenage girls and young women. A related lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The proposed settlement comes roughly two weeks after JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified in a deposition for the case, where he denied knowing about Epstein and his crimes until the financier was arrested in 2019, according to a transcript of the videotaped deposition released last month.

“We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous, and we believe this settlement is in the best interest of all parties, especially the survivors, who suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of this man,” JPMorgan Chase said in a written statement early Monday.

The proposed settlement, which must still be approved by the judge in the case, totals $290 million, according to lead plaintiff attorney David Boies.

According to the lawsuits, JPMorgan provided Epstein loans and regularly allowed him to withdraw large sums of cash from 1998 through August 2013 even though it was aware of his participation in sex trafficking. The anonymous victim in the suit, referred to as Jane Doe, said she was sexually abused by Epstein from 2006 and 2013.

Also on Monday, a judge ruled in favor of making Doe’s lawsuit into a class-action lawsuit for all victims of Epstein’s sex crimes.

“Money, which for far too long flowed with impunity between Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking enterprise and Wall Street’s leading banks, is decisively being used for good,” said Sigrid McCawley, an attorney for Jane Doe and other Epstein victims, in a prepared statement. “The settlements signal that financial institutions have an important role to play in spotting and shutting down sex trafficking.”

The bank continued to count Epstein as a client despite the fact that he was arrested and pled guilty in 2008 to sex crimes in Florida.

“Any association with him was a mistake and we regret it,” the bank said in a prepared statement. “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was using our bank in any way to help commit heinous crimes.”

Both lawsuits were filed after New York state in November enacted a temporary law letting adult victims of sexual abuse to sue others for the abuse they suffered, even if the abuse occurred long ago.

Lawsuits are still pending between the U.S. Virgin Islands and JPMorgan Chase, and the bank is still pursuing its lawsuit against JPMorgan former executive Jes Staley.

The bank has denied the allegations and sued Staley, saying he hid Epstein’s crimes to keep him as a client. Staley left JPMorgan in 2013 to later become CEO of the British bank Barclays. Staley stepped down from that role in 2021 due to his prior relationship with Epstein.

__________________________________________________

AP Writer Michael Hill contributed to this report from Albany. AP Writer Larry Neumeister contributed from New York.

Advancements in technology have always spawned new kinds of jobs while rendering other ones obsolete. Artificial intelligence will be no exception. Right now, we don’t fully know what those jobs will be. But that hasn’t stopped job seekers from trying to find out.

Prognosticators say artificial intelligence will likely have a similar impact on the labor market — and workers want to get in on the ground floor. But it’s clear that even employers don’t know what those jobs are. Not yet, at least.

To be clear, automation and, to a certain extent, AI have been part of the labor market for quite some time. Who among us hasn’t had an infuriating exchange with a chatbot? But interest in employment related to AI has skyrocketed in the past two years. Searches for AI-related jobs on the employment listings website Indeed have increased 8,200% since March 2021, according to the company. But AI-related job postings by employers have only increased 29.8%.

“I think it captures that kind of moment that we’re in right now where there are a lot of new possibilities opening up and there’s a lot of uncertainty about where it’s going,” says Trey Causey, head of AI ethics at Indeed. But, he adds, “The interest is undeniable.”

Workers want to ride the next job wave

Indeed isn’t the only site seeing more searches geared toward AI. Daniel Zhao, lead economist at the job search website Glassdoor, has also seen an uptick, which he says is driven largely by the novelty aspect of AI and the possibilities it holds for workers.

“AI is poised to have a significant impact on the job market, and it doesn’t require being a Ph.D. in computer science in order to actually work at a company that is taking advantage of AI,” says Zhao. “So there are definitely opportunities out there for people who are interested in this space and who feel passionately about the technology.”

It’s no wonder workers are beginning to test the waters of AI, since recent studies have shown that most jobs will likely be impacted by the technology. And that’s pretty much what most workers are counting on. A March 26 report by the investment banking company Goldman Sachs found about two-thirds of all jobs are likely to be impacted by AI in some way. And in an April 20 Pew Research Center report, more than half of Americans surveyed said they would classify the impact of AI on both the workplace and the economy over a 20-year period as “major.”

But don’t fear the robot takeover just yet. The Goldman Sachs report from March also asserted that any displacement caused by AI would likely be offset by the creation of new occupations, which usually happens in the labor market during periods of technological change.

]]> 3091906 2023-06-12T00:34:56+00:00 2023-06-11T12:40:19+00:00 https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/06/11/group-pushes-automatic-crash-alerts-in-cars/ Sun, 11 Jun 2023 19:51:59 +0000 https://www.bostonherald.com/?p=3092106 WASHINGTON — Consumer Reports is launching a campaign to pressure automakers to include free technology in vehicles that calls emergency responders in case of a crash.

Most automakers provide this technology in new vehicles, the safety advocate says, but charge $100 per year or more to enable it.

The effort is aimed at General Motors Co., Stellantis NV, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan Motor Corp., Subaru Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Tesla Inc. — all of which charge for or do not offer automatic crash notification in new vehicles sold in the United States.

“People injured in a crash shouldn’t have critical medical care delayed because they choose not to pay for features like remote start or a mobile hot spot,” said William Wallace, Consumer Reports’ associate director of safety policy. “It’s one thing for automakers to charge extra for conveniences, but this is about safety, and safety isn’t optional.”

Automatic crash notification uses a cell connection (either one built into the vehicle or the driver’s paired cell phone) to alert first responders and provide a location if airbags deploy, helping them reach crashes faster even if the driver is unable to call for help.

The technology has been available and used in the United States since 1996, when OnStar debuted. The European Union has mandated that all new cars sold there include the technology since 2018. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated it could save more than 700 lives a year, according to Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports found that Acura, Audi, BMW, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/LandRover, Mazda, Porsche and Volvo all offer free crash notifications in at least some of their models.

Only Tesla and Fiat, a Stellantis brand, do not offer the technology in the United States.

The Consumer Reports advocacy campaign includes a petition, which has been signed by nearly 28,000 people as of Tuesday, and messaging on social media. The group also plans to circulate its findings with federal and state policymakers and with emergency medical organizations.

“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the seventh entry in the series, took the No. 1 spot in its first weekend in North American theaters with $60.5 million according to studio estimates Sunday.” Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ” wasn’t too far behind, however, with an estimated $55.4 million in its second weekend.

Paramount Pictures released “Rise of the Beasts” in 3,678 locations starting with Thursday previews. Set in 1994, it’s technically a sequel to the 1980s-set “Bumblebee” and a prequel to the other films. With a new cast led by Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback and a new director in Steven Caple Jr., it’s also an attempt to reset and breathe fresh life into the $4.8 billion franchise.

“Rise of the Beasts” also earned $110 million from 68 international markets, giving it a $170.5 million global debut.

Critics didn’t love the movie, but that’s also par for the course for this franchise. Overall, Rotten Tomatoes aggregated a less-than-fresh 52% rating.

“The problem with “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is the same problem faced by all of the installments — balancing the humanity with the metal,” wrote Mark Kennedy in his review.

In fact, the only movie that did get a fresh rating was “Bumblebee,” which also made the least money of all of them. Audiences (62% male) were more positive, giving “Rise of the Beasts” an A- CinemaScore. According to PostTrak surveys, general audiences gave it 4.5 stars out of 5.

While a $60.5 million opening might not seem like enough to support a $200 million production budget, “Rise of the Beasts” is a movie that will make most of its money abroad. Since 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” international ticket sales have accounted for at least 70% of the global box office total. Two of the seven movies, “Dark of the Moon” and “Age of Extinction,” from 2014, made over $1 billion each.

“To have a No. 1 debut is impressive given the formidable competition from ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,’ which had a much stronger opening than anyone anticipated and in its second weekend is a really powerful player,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore.

Sony’s “Spider-Verse” sequel fell about 54%. In just two weeks, it’s already surpassed the total domestic box office of the first film with $225.4 million in ticket sales and become the highest grossing Sony Pictures Animation release. With terrific reviews in its arsenal, “Spider-Verse” is likely destined for a longer life at the box office, too.

Third place went to Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” which earned $23 million in its third weekend, where it’s playing in 4,320 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The live-action movie has made $414.2 million globally to date.

Two other Walt Disney Co. releases rounded out the top five, with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” in fourth with $7 million in its sixth weekend and “The Boogeyman,” in weekend two, in fifth place with $6.9 million.

MediaRadar, a New York-based firm that tracks advertising trends, said TV and digital revenues at the network fell nearly 40% year over year when measuring the first four months of 2023 vs. the same period in 2022.

The firm estimated advertisers spent about $313 million from January through April of 2023 compared to $513 million from January to April of 2022.

This information was released by the firm after Warner Bros. Discovery dropped Chris Licht as chief of CNN following a tumultuous 13-month tenure. MediaRadar did not release comparable figures for other cable networks such as Fox News and MSNBC, but ratings have fallen this year for all three networks.

Ashish Jha to exit White House post

Ashish Jha, the White House’s point person on the COVID-19 response, will depart from the administration next week.

The White House said Jha will return to Brown University, where he had served as the dean of the university’s school of public health before joining the White House as its COVID-19 coordinator in April 2022. His departure comes after the federal government ended its twin national emergencies on the virus earlier this spring.

In a statement announcing Jha’s departure, President Joe Biden said COVID-19 “no longer controls our daily lives.”

“As one of the leading public health experts in America, he has effectively translated and communicated complex scientific challenges into concrete actions that helped save and improve the lives of millions of Americans,” Biden said in the statement announcing Jha’s departure.

A report will be released soon on what investigators found at Norfolk Southern after the Feb. 3 derailment — which prompted the evacuation of half of East Palestine, Ohio — and several other recent derailments. That crash near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border sparked intense interest in railroad safety nationwide and prompted proposed reforms in Congress.

The head of the FRA, Administrator Amit Bose, said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently that in addition to individual reports on Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, the agency will also produce an industrywide report on common issues and trends.

Railroad unions have been raising concerns that operating changes the railroads have made over the past six years have made the trains that haul hazardous materials and goods of all kinds across the country more dangerous.

The unions say the deep staff cuts railroads have made, combined with their increasing reliance on longer trains, have increased the chance of safety problems. They say inspections are being rushed, preventative maintenance may be neglected and overworked employees are more likely to be fatigued.

The railroads have defended their practices and said they haven’t sacrificed safety to become more efficient. The industry also emphasizes that it remains the safest way to transport hazardous materials over land. Norfolk Southern and all the major railroads have announced a number of steps they are taking to improve safety though regulators, and lawmakers have called for them to do more.

Federal regulators have said that safety data hasn’t changed enough to show that the railroads’ new operating model is unsafe. The figures do show that the rate of accidents per every million miles freight trains travel increased from 15.572 to 16.695 over the past decade even though the total number of incidents declined as railroads hauled less freight. The rate of accidents inside railyards also worsened from 11.044 in 2013 to 15.517 last year.

There have also been concerns raised about the safety of today’s long trains that routinely stretch more than two miles. Bose said that the FRA recently warned railroads to be careful about the way they assemble long trains to reduce the risk of derailments.

The freight railroads favor longer trains because they allow them to deliver the same amount of freight with fewer crews and locomotives.

A. Congrats on your first in-person internship! There are several things to keep top of mind:

Build relationships. Although you may have already done this in previous internships through a screen, nothing can replace being in person and making eye contact well, eye to eye (instead of eye to screen to eye).

Arrive on time (better yet, show up a little early), roll up your sleeves, demonstrate a can do attitude. Ask questions, observe, listen, pay attention.

Be proactive — ask your boss to lunch or coffee. Connect with colleagues, both with fellow interns and with other people in your department and other departments you interact with.

Keep in mind even if you don’t love what you do that’s OK — part of the internship experience involves figuring out what types of jobs and companies (and their cultures) you enjoy and which ones you don’t to get more clarity for full-time employment post-graduation.

Most of all, enjoy the process!

Q. You probably get asked this a lot, but I’m looking for a job, applying like crazy and not hearing anything. Crickets. Is my resume going into a black hole? It’s so frustrating. I need a job…now.

A. I’m sorry to hear you’re frustrated. As a former corporate recruiter for many years, I can honestly say your resume is not going into a black hole. Your resume is not only being uploaded into the employer’s applicant tracking system for that specific job, it’s being uploaded to their database overall so its talent acquisition team can source. Essentially, they can find you for jobs you didn’t even apply for.

My next question is, what more are you doing to land a job? Yes, it’s important to apply for a job as soon as you see it posted online but to keep your job search in motion (even when it feels like it’s stalled), you can update your resume. Practice mock interviewing. Conduct informational interviews/networking conversations with former colleagues, bosses and most importantly — people in their network you may not know yet.

Make small tweaks to your resume for each job you pursue (this should only take a few minutes; don’t rush it, but it’s not as labor-intensive as it may sound). You may want to include keywords that aren’t already there. For instance, if you’re pursuing a job in recruiting, but the job description indicates “talent acquisition,” then start referring to it in their lingo on your resume so it is more easily scanned and noticed (and again, if that company builds a pipeline future jobs that haven’t been posted yet, they’re likely going to type words their company uses like talent acquisition over recruiting.

Also, identify the gaps. If the jobs you’re pursuing require a certain skill set or certification, for instance, and you don’t have it, that could be a reason why you’re not getting called for interviews. Start upskilling yourself to fill in those gaps.

Above all, keep going!

Vicki Salemi is a career expert, former corporate recruiter, author, consultant, speaker, and career coach./Tribune News Service

The Justice Department said if the airlines get their wish, travelers would miss out on the benefits of restoring competition between the carriers.

In separate filings, the airlines and the government told a federal judge in Boston how he should carry out his ruling last month to break up the partnership. American’s CEO has said his airline will appeal the verdict.

The Justice Department proposed a final judgment that would order American and JetBlue to end most parts of the deal immediately. The government said the airlines should honor existing tickets to avoid hurting travelers, but then quickly wind down their sharing of airport gates and takeoff and landing slots at key airports.

The airlines want to keep selling tickets on each other’s flights — called code-sharing — and offering reciprocal frequent-flyer benefits because those practices “are common in the airline industry.” American and JetBlue also objected to the Justice Department’s request that they be barred from any deals involving revenue-sharing or coordinating routes with each other for 10 years, and with any other U.S. airline for two years.

The airlines call their partnership in New York and Boston the Northeast Alliance, or NEA.

The Justice Department said that by asking to keep elements of the deal, the airlines are trying “to craft a new ‘NEA Lite’ on the fly.”

The airlines launched their partnership after getting approval from the outgoing Trump administration in January 2021. They argued it helped them compete against Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in the Northeast.

The Biden administration sued the airlines in September 2021, arguing that their deal would reduce competition and raise prices for consumers. After a non-jury trial last fall, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the NEA violated federal antitrust laws.

On Friday, Republicans and Democrats on the House Transportation Committee released a 773-page proposal to reauthorize FAA programs for the next five years.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., described the proposal as a compromise and said many issues could still be fought out when congressional committees begin considering changes in the legislation next week.

The FAA is under fire for a shortage of air traffic controllers, aging technology and close calls between planes. The agency has a new acting administrator with no aviation experience. It has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader for more than a year, since the last one resigned halfway through his term.

One provision of the House bill would let airlines advertise the “base airfare” — excluding taxes and fees — as long as they include a link to the all-in price or disclose it some other way. That would weaken an Obama administration rule that airlines have long fought to kill, and consumer advocates are unhappy about the House move.

“These protections were hard fought and took years to enact,” said William McGee, an aviation expert at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Any consumer can tell you that online airline bookings are confusing enough. The last thing we need is to roll back an existing protection that provides effective transparency.”

The House committee leaders also propose to let people become airline pilots with less time in the cockpit. The bill would not change the requirement for 1,500 hours of training, but it would allow 250 hours — up from the current 100 hours — to occur in simulators rather than flying a plane.

Airlines, particularly the smaller ones that operate regional flights, have long fought against the 1,500-hour rule, which already has exemptions that let military pilots and graduates of some aviation schools qualify with fewer hours. The rule was put in after a 2009 crash that killed 50 people.

Garth Thompson, head of the Air Line Pilots Association unit at United Airlines, said it is “a horrible idea” to weaken the rule.

“That rule, like so many federal aviation regulations, is written in blood, literally,” Thompson said. “That regulation came about because of the Colgan Air crash and other crashes that involved experience issues.”

Asked about changes in airfare advertising and pilot training, Larsen said, “It’s something we can live with.” The change in pilot training rules, he said, is a priority of the Transportation Committee’s Republican chairman, Sam Graves of Missouri, and both sides had to compromise during drafting of the bill.

Elsewhere in the bill, Larsen said, Democrats were able to include provisions they wanted, such as those covering wheelchair accessibility.

The bill also includes provisions aimed at improving airport infrastructure and the supply of sustainable aviation fuel. It would require airline planes to be outfitted with better cockpit voice recorders and, for the first time, cockpit video recorders to improve accident investigations. Pilots have opposed the video recorders.

Some other contentious topics were left out, including raising the mandatory retirement age of 65 for pilots and easing restrictions on flights from Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia.

Nigeria’s Department of State Services said in a statement on Saturday that he was arrested “for some investigative reasons.”

The central bank chief was suspended from office on Friday night and asked to immediately hand over power to his deputy. Emefiele has been investigated in the past for alleged financial crimes although a judge found no evidence to support the allegations. Analysts say his removal from office was expected. They cited some policies he introduced in recent months which were seen as controversial.

Wall Street drifts higher, marking 4th winning week for S&P 500

Stocks drifted higher on Wall Street, giving the S&P 500 its fourth winning week in a row. The benchmark index edged up 0.1% Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eked out a gain of 43 points, also 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2%.

Tesla was at the front of the market, rallying 4.1% after announcing that General Motors electric vehicles will be able to use much of the company’s extensive charging network beginning early next year. Investors are looking ahead to next week’s potentially market-moving events, including the Federal Reserve’s next meeting on interest rates and updates on inflation.

The Friday unveil of the new Mustang Dark Horse-based race car follows Ford’s announcement in February that it will return to Formula One in 2026 in partnership with reigning world champion Red Bull.

The Mustang will enter the GT3 category next year with at least two cars in both IMSA and the World Endurance Championship, and is hopeful to earn an invitation to next year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. The IMSA entries will be a factory Ford Performance program run by Multimatic, and a customer program in WEC with Proton Competition.

Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Associated Press the Mustang will be available to compete in various GT3 series across the globe to customer teams. But more important, Farley said, is the overall rebranding of Ford Performance — done by renowned motorsports designer Troy Lee — that is aimed at making Ford a lifestyle brand with a sporting mindset.

“It’s kind of like the company finding its own, and rediscovering its icons, and doubling down on them,” Farley told the AP. “And then this motorsports activity is getting serious about connecting enthusiast customers with those rediscovered icons. It’s a big switch for the company — this is really about building strong, iconic vehicles with enthusiasts at the center of our marketing.”

Ford last competed in sports car racing in 2019 as part of a three-year program with Chip Ganassi Racing. The team scored the class win at Le Mans in 2016 in a targeted performance aimed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ford snapping Ferrari’s six-year winning streak.

Ford on Friday displayed a Mustang with a Lee-designed livery that showcased the cleaner, simplified look that will soon be featured on all its racing vehicles. The traditional blue oval with Ford Performance in white lettering underneath will now be branded simply FP.

The new mark will be used across car liveries, merchandise and apparel, display assets, parts and accessories and in advertising.

Farley cited Porsche as an automaker that has successfully figured out how to sell cars to consumers and race cars in various series around the world while creating a culture of brand enthusiasts. He believes Ford’s new direction will help the company sell street cars, race cars, boost interest in driving schools, and create a merchandise line that convinces consumers that a stalwart of American automakers is a hip, cool brand.

“We’re going to build a global motorsports business off road and on road,” Farley told the AP, adding that the design of the Mustang is “unapologetically American.”

He lauded the work of Lee, who is considered the top helmet designer among race car drivers.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine inning game, and going to Le Mans is really important,” Farley said. “But for customer cars, getting the graphics right, designing race cars that win at all different levels, and then designing a racing brand for Ford Performance that gets rebranded and elevated is super important.”

He said he’s kept a close eye on how Porsche and Aston Martin have built their motorsports businesses and said Ford will be better.

“We’re going in the exact same direction. We just want to be better than them, that’s all,” Farley said. “Second is the first loser.”

Farley, an avid amateur racer himself, did not travel to Le Mans for the announcement. The race that begins Saturday features an entry from NASCAR and Ford is the reigning Cup Series champion with Joey Logano and Team Penske.

The NASCAR “Garage 56” entry is a collaboration between Hendrick Motorsports, Chevrolet and Goodyear, and is being widely celebrated throughout the industry. Farley did not feel left out of the party in France — a sentiment NASCAR tried to avoid by inviting many of its partners to attend the race so that it wouldn’t seem like a Chevrolet-only celebration.

“They’re going right and I’m going left — that NASCAR thing is a one-year deal, right? It’s Garage 56 and they can have their NASCAR party, but that’s a one-year party,” Farley said. “We won Le Mans outright four times, we won in the GT class, and we’re coming back with Mustang and it’s not a one-year deal.

“So they can get all excited about Garage 56. I almost see that as a marketing exercise for NASCAR, but for me, that’s a science project,” Farley continued. “I don’t live in a world of science projects. I live in the world of building a vital company that everyone is excited about. To do that, we’re not going to do a Garage 56 — I’ve got to beat Porsche and Aston Martin and Ferrari year after year after year.”

The company based in Grapevine, Texas, gave no reason for the dismissal and named Ryan Cohen, the company’s biggest investor, as executive chairman. Cohen sent a cryptic tweet that read “Not for long” around the time the company announced Furlong’s firing.

GameStop said Cohen will oversee investment and management for the company.

Wall Street exits tame bear market

While it seemed scary and interminable, Wall Street’s bear market last year was meeker than most.

After the S&P 500 on Thursday closed at a level more than 20% above where it was in mid-October, Wall Street can give official dates for the birth and death of its last bear market, which is what traders call a long decline of at least 20% for the S&P 500. It started on Jan. 3, 2022, when the S&P 500 set a record high, and ended on Oct. 12, when it bottomed out 25.4% lower.

Worries about the highest inflation in generations drove the drop. More precisely, it was worries about what the Federal Reserve would do to combat high inflation. The Fed furiously jacked rates up to their highest level since 2007, up from virtually zero in about a year. The aim of high interest rates is to lower inflation by slowing the entire economy and dragging down prices for stocks, bonds and other investments.

It’s a feast for the eyes from this tall perch — an unparalleled vantage point with limitless views across the Common and looking out over the Back Bay and the Charles River. During the day, you can see the sun sparkle over the water but when the sun sets over the West-facing windows, it’s a glittering panorama of city lights.

Just under 2,700 square feet are at your disposal here, with three bedrooms each with their own en-suite bath plus a bonus half-bath. There’s a sleek open-concept living and dining space with floor-to-ceiling windows, perfect for hosting, as well as a full-size eat-in kitchen with a breakfast bar and passthrough to the dining room.

From your home base, Boston’s entertainment districts are all within striking distance for dinner or a show. Fitness buffs have access to the Equinox Sports Club, and all Ritz-Carlton Residences benefit from round-the-clock concierge service, doorman, and valet parking — the unit comes with one garage parking space.

On the market for $4,500,000, the sale of the condo is represented by Morgan Franklin and Assoc. at Coldwell Banker Realty, 617-888-5199.

Home Showcase:

Address: 1 Avery Street #28B Boston, MA 02111

Bedrooms: 3

List Price: $4,500,000

Square feet: 2,667

Price per square foot: $1,687

Annual taxes: $42,877 in 2023

Location: Right across from Boston Common.

Built in: 2000

The Appraisal:

Pros:

Central location

Ritz amenities

Cons:

Association fees

Zillow, the country’s largest real estate portal, began offering “natural language” searches on its mobile app to bring up more precise results. Rather than setting filters across a limited set of criteria, like the number of bedrooms and ZIP Code, consumers can speak or type what they want.

For example, a consumer could search for a three-bedroom house with a brick exterior built in the 1950s or 1960s with a large backyard near a public park in Denver.

“Artificial intelligence will have a tremendous benefit to the real estate industry,” said Jasjeet Thind, senior vice president of AI and Analytics at Zillow, on Wednesday.

Zillow has been deploying machine learning and artificial intelligence since 2006 in its Zestimates, which are automated estimates of a home’s value, Jasjeet said. Initial efforts generated a pricing error range of 14%, but that is now down to 2%.

The use of AI has spread into a host of other applications. The pandemic made 3D showing popular, allowing consumers to do virtual walk-throughs of a home online. Zillow takes it a step beyond, using AI to create floor plans and square footage estimates for each room based on photos.

AI will also allow real estate sites to engage with buyers and sellers of homes before they are ready to talk to a broker, answering their questions and boosting their comfort level, said Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM, which maintains large data sets on real estate markets.

He also sees it being increasingly used to help consumers see what a given room might look like with new furniture or different appliances.

ATTOM uses artificial intelligence to generate risk estimates for insurers and lenders, which in turn can help generate more customized insurance premiums, Barber said.

The panelists said it is unlikely AI will eliminate the need for human brokers or the commissions they charge, which can run in the 5% to 6% range for a seller.

But they could reduce the friction or sticking points in real estate transactions, which is a good thing, said William Holmes, head of agent partnerships at Opendoor, a provider of instant offers.

AI, while making great strides, is far from foolproof.

“AI is like an idiot savant. It doesn’t know the truth,” said Glenn Phillips, CEO with Lake Homes Realty, on a different panel on Tuesday.

The models remain highly suggestible and will carry forward the biases of the coders. Bad data results in bad answers. And AI remains prone to hallucinations, or fabricated answers, that sound plausible but have no basis in reality.

And even when AI is working as it should, natural language searches still depend heavily on how well queries are written.

“You won’t be replaced by AI,” Phillips said. “You will be replaced by people who are better at using AI than you are.”

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According to Ryan Lee, the Denver-based founder and CEO of Livvy, seltzers made from a grape base are popular among manufacturers because they add a natural sweetness to the beverages and don’t necessitate the use of artificial flavorings. Livvy, which debuted in July 2022, offers three flavors all made with ginger root, prickly pear root, dandelion root and licorice root extract, plus real fruit juice depending on the flavor.

Last summer, Neilsen reported that hard seltzers accounted for 43% of the dollars spent in the ready-to-drink beverage space. Even though that figure was down about 10% compared to 2021, Lee said the category is still ripe with opportunity.

“Canned wines are still a very low percent of the market,” he said. Many winemakers are watching the explosion in popularity of RTD beverages and seeing an opportunity to attract a younger customer base and stay on trend, he added.

That’s especially true as drinkers increasingly reach for “better for you” beverages. Nielsen reported in May that health and wellness will be among the top decision drivers when it comes to the alcoholic products consumers choose to buy this summer. Drinkers will also be leaning toward more high-end beverages, primarily those made with tequila, and those endorsed by celebrities.

“We’re seeing a trend across the entire U.S. that younger consumers are really focused on more mindful drinking,” said Kevin Webber, CEO of Carboy Winery, which debuted a line of seltzers called Cold Vines in 2021. “We’re seeing people in our tasting rooms start with a glass of wine and then opting for a seltzer because of the lower alcohol.”

At 4% and 5% alcohol-by-volume, respectively, both Livvy and Cold Vines include less than half as much alcohol as a standard glass of wine. Similarly, Piquette made by Palisade’s Sauvage Spectrum winery clocks 6.5% ABV, and Jetway, a line of wine seltzers produced by Western Slope winemaker Ben Parsons, comes in at 5% ABV. The latter also boasts about 100 calories and just five carbs.

Parsons, who created Jetway with The Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., said his goal is to elevate the seltzer category.

“Back (in 2020) White Claw and Truly were dominating, but those products are really just cane sugar thrown in a fermentation vessel to create alcohol and then blended with artificial colors, flavors and ingredients,” said Parsons, who is also proprietor of The Ordinary Fellow winery in Palisade. “The reason we picked wine is obviously my background is in wine, but there’s still a health halo associated with wine.”

The fact these products are canned and carbonated makes them even more crushable during the summer.

“It’s a no-brainer. In summer months, people want to drink something crisper, lighter and more refreshing,” Webber said.

Here’s the skinny on four wine seltzers with local ties to try this summer.

Cold Vines Wine Seltzer

For several years, Carboy Winery has been on a mission to become Colorado’s premiere sparkling wine purveyor and in doing so the company created something of a natural byproduct.

To make sparkling wine, Webber and his team harvest grapes early in the season when they are high in acidity. Those grapes also make an optimal base for seltzer because they are uniquely suited to be watered down and have fruit concentrates added back to them, he said.

Cold Vines comes in four flavors – lemon, black cherry, peach, and watermelon – each clocking 5% ABV. Right now, they’re made exclusively with Colorado grapes though that could change as distribution expands in the future, Webber said.

The seltzers utilize whichever grapes the winery is harvesting to make sparkling wines according to its production schedule, so the exact varietals change throughout the year.

Cold Vines is for sale in four-packs of cans at Carboy’s taprooms in Denver (400 E. 7th Ave.), Littleton (6885 S. Santa Fe Dr.) and Palisade (3572 G Rd.), as well as at Molly’s Spirits. coldvinesseltzer.com

Jetway

Jetway wine seltzers were inspired by The Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s experience globetrotting and craving a bubbly beverage akin to an Aperol spritz, said Parsons, who serves as the company’s chief operating officer.

Hammond and Parsons, who were linked up through friends of friends, developed two unique flavors starting with grapes from a winery in Washington. The rose wine seltzer uses cabernet and syrah grapes plus ginger, yerba mate, peach and orange peel. The white wine seltzer leverages sauvignon blanc grapes alongside ginger, yerba mate, and elderflower. Both are 5% ABV.

The company is working on new recipes, Parsons said, and aspires to open brick-and-mortar Jetway lounges in the future.

Jetway’s rollout began in 2021 in Hammond’s region of residence in Southern California, where Jetway is also available on draft at select bars and restaurants. The beverages made their Colorado debut in 2022 at retail stores along the Front Range. They are also available for purchase online. drinkjetway.com

Livvy

Since launching Livvy in 2022, Lee has been promoting it primarily through word of mouth and guerilla marketing, which is why Denverites may have seen him at city parks offering free samples to locals ages 21 and up.

The 4% ABV seltzer comes is available in three flavors – ginger-peach, prickly pear lemonade and pineapple-hibiscus – and because each recipe leverages extracts like ginger root and licorice root, Lee says they boast antioxidant properties, among other benefits.

That last point is important to Lee, who comes to the seltzer industry after a previous venture developing a supplement for folks like himself who experience alcohol flush reaction.

“I thought it would be great to take some of our knowledge of natural ingredients and put them in into a clean, better-for-you seltzer,” Lee said.

Livvy is available exclusively online in 12-count variety packs that include all three flavors, though Lee hopes to enter retail locations in Colorado soon. drinklivvy.com

Piquette

According to Patric Matysiewski, co-founder and winemaker at Sauvage Spectrum in Palisade, the idea for Piquette came not from trying to compete with seltzer, but from trying to revive an ancient production method also called “piquette.”

Historically, peasants who worked in vineyards were paid in pressed grape skins teeming with residual sugar, which they could take home, soak in water and ferment again naturally, Matysiewski said. He thought he could adopt the technique to recycle grape skins he uses to make white wines and create a new offering.

“Basically, we’re taking rubbish and turning it into a sustainable product. That’s why I really like it,” said Matysiewski, who bills Piquette as a wine spritzer more than a seltzer. (And wouldn’t you know, Nielsen said companies’ commitments to sustainability will play into purchasing decisions this summer.)

Piquette is made from a rotating mix of grape varietals depending on Sauavge Spectrum’s production schedule, but it typically boasts a pink hue, light body and 6.5% ABV.

Piquette is for sale at Sauvage Spectrum’s taprooms in Palisade (676 38 1/4 Rd.) and Ouray (480 Main St.), as well as farmers markets throughout Colorado this summer, including at Union Station in Denver, in the Highlands in Denver and in Vail. sauvagespectrum.com

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And summer travel is only just getting started. In 2019, the Friday before Memorial Day was the third-busiest day at U.S. airports for the entire year, losing only to the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the Sunday after July Fourth. This may indicate that airports could be even busier around Independence Day than Memorial Day weekend.

Making Fourth of July travel predictions is tricky this year because the holiday falls midweek, on a Tuesday. Some folks may take Monday off to enjoy a long weekend, while others may save their vacation time for a different holiday.

With that in mind, here’s some guidance around booking July Fourth weekend air travel and how you might be able to avoid the crowds (and potentially save money on airfare).

The best and worst days to fly July Fourth weekend

TSA collects data daily to capture the number of passengers screened at its U.S. checkpoints. NerdWallet analyzed the past four years of this data for the seven days before and after July Fourth.

In each of the past four years, the Friday before July Fourth was the busiest travel day ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. If that trend continues this year, travelers should expect U.S. airports to be especially full on Friday, June 30.

Are airports busy on July Fourth? The data shows the holiday is the least busy day to fly, with airport crowds averaging just 81% of what they are relative to the busiest travel day.

Based on an average of the past four years, here are the worst days to travel around July Fourth weekend, ranked from most to least crowded.

Pre-holiday:

1. Friday before.
2. Thursday before.
3. Monday before.

Post-holiday:

1. Sunday after.
2. Monday after.
3. Thursday after.

Instead, consider these options. Here’s what the data showed as the best days to travel over July Fourth, ranked from least to most crowded:

Pre-holiday:

1. Saturday before.
2. Tuesday before.
3. Sunday before.

Post-holiday:

1. Saturday after.
2. Friday after.
3. Wednesday after.

The smarter, cheaper Fourth of July travel itinerary

Based on recent historical trends, most people will kick off their Fourth of July weekend as early as possible, jetting off on Friday, June 30 — or even ducking out of the workweek early by departing on Thursday, June 29. Most travelers will likely maximize their weekends, waiting until Sunday, July 9, to fly home.

But following typical July Fourth holiday travel patterns could mean costs in terms of airfare and time spent waiting in line at the airport. Deviate from that schedule to find lighter crowds and perhaps better July Fourth flight deals, too.

Try these travel days instead:

Embrace Saturday travel: Rather than rush out from work on Friday afternoon to jump on a flight, relax at home that evening and depart Saturday morning instead. Simply shifting your trip by one day could likely result in going from one of the busiest to lightest travel days of the July Fourth travel period.

The same goes for traveling back home. While it can be tempting to extend your trip as long as possible before work starts on Monday, skip the Sunday flight and fly home on Saturday instead. Bonus: You’ll give yourself a day at home to rest and recover before you hit the next workweek (how responsible of you).

Fly on July Fourth: If you don’t mind traveling on the holiday, you’re looking at the single emptiest air travel day of the period.

Do one better by flying out early on the holiday. Travel booking app Hopper’s spring 2023 Flight Disruption Outlook found that flights that depart from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. are half as likely to be delayed versus flights with scheduled departure times after 9 a.m.

Plus, a morning flight improves your odds of catching the fireworks at your final destination.

Fly on Wednesday, July 5: Will July 5 be a busy travel day in 2023? Likely no. This year, July 5 falls on a Wednesday, one of the cheapest days to fly year-round. Plus, according to TSA’s data, July 5 has been a consistently light travel day. In 2019, July 5 was the lightest travel day for the week after the holiday (July 5 fell on a Friday that year).

Moreover, for U.S. domestic economy tickets in 2022, Wednesdays were about 22% lower than peak prices on Sundays, according to a NerdWallet analysis of Hopper data.

July Fourth travelers in 2023 can feel confident that a July 5 flight itinerary will afford them cheaper airfare plus less congested airport queues.

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