Driving the news: Holmes, who was found guilty on Jan. 3, 2022, for defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing company, had booked a one-way ticket to Mexico for later that month, according to prosecutors.
The price of postage stamps increases Sunday for the third time in nearly 17 months. Costs to send a letter by certified mail and insure packages will also increase.
Why it matters: Inflation has pushed prices higher on just about everything and the U.S. Postal Service says the first-class mail increase of about 4.2% will “offset the rise in inflation.”
Mango Markets was a crypto exchange built on the Solana blockchain that looked a lot like the now bankrupt FTX.
Driving the news: The SEC brought charges Friday against Avraham Eisenberg, a trader who exploited the same weakness on Mango Markets that ultimately brought down FTX: a token that was designed to become more valuable the more people used its underlying exchange.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Friday the company is planning to lay off 12,000 people, becoming the latest tech company to slash jobs after rapid expansion during the pandemic.
The big picture: Tech layoffs started soaring late last year, becoming the new normal for an industry that is slowly losing its appeal.
Some of the biggest tech companies in the country have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Why it matters: The continuous layoffs represent a massive fall from grace for Silicon Valley, which seemed on top of the world early last year, Axios’ Ina Fried writes.
Regal Cinemas plans to close 39 movie theaters across the country in February, a move that could save $22 million annually, parent company Cineworld said in bankruptcy court documents.
Why it matters: The movie theater business has been reeling from the pandemic, which cratered attendance, and is also competing with the explosion of streaming services.
It was a busy week for layoffs in corporate America. Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet both announced they would fire tens of thousands of workers (about 5% of each company's global workforce).
Meanwhile, online furniture retailer Wayfair said today it would shed 10% of its workforce (roughly 1,750 employees).
This past Wednesday's action in the economy and markets was less than earth-shaking. But it tells us something important about how the intersection of the economic, political, and financial is changing in 2023.
After surprisingly weak retail sales and industrial production numbers two days ago, stocks fell and bond prices rose. That's what you would expect in normal times, but it reflects a big shift from 2022’s upside-down dynamics.
Vox Media is laying off 7% of its staff, according to a memo sent internally from CEO Jim Bankoff, obtained by Axios. Roughly 1,900 people work at the company, which means about 133 roles will be impacted.
Why it matters: It's the third round of cuts made at Vox Media in the past year.
Because of rising income inequality, the share of Americans' incomes that are subject to the Social Security tax is at a nearly 50-year low, per a new report from the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
Why it matters: The decline translates to billions of dollars lost that could go to shore up Social Security, which is on an unsustainable long-term footing, as Axios Macro's Neil Irwin has written.
Rumors of FTX’s demise may have been exaggerated, with the platform’s new CEO suggesting he may hit the restart button in spite of its stunning collapse.
After bursting out of the gates in early 2023, the market has lost its mojo this week.
Driving the news: Stocks slumped for a third straight session Thursday, as the S&P declined by 0.8%. That put the S&P down 2.5% for the week, on track for the first down week of the year.
Why it matters: It's likely the FTC's ban will get watered down, delayed, or even tossed out in court. Yet the proposal has revealed deep dissatisfaction with noncompetes among American workers, and some employers are taking notice.
DAKAR, Senegal— Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen used her first speech on African soil to take direct aim at Russia — citing the war in Ukraine as the leading cause of African misery — and to call on China to offer debt relief to struggling economies.
Why it matters: Yellen’s ten-day trip is designed to highlight what the U.S. can offer Africa, and not dwell on where other countries fall short. But Russia’s military aggression and China’s unyielding approach to indebted, poor countries, is the unavoidable background music to Yellen’s three-country tour.
Realtors across the country foresee an increasingly buyer-friendly housing market in 2023, a major shift from the frenetic and expensive pandemic-era housing boom.
Driving the news: The housing market has slowed — thanks to mortgage rates hovering around 6%.
Axios polled more than 75 experts across Axios Local cities to find out what's in store for 2023 and found that sellers everywhere will have to put in more work to close the deal as buyers aren't willing to overbid on less-than-perfect homes.
Why it matters: After a decade of consistent growth under co-founder Reed Hasting's leadership as chief executive, the company now must pivot its strategy to take on a more competitive and turbulent streaming landscape.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates defended press freedoms on Thursday after former President Trump called for journalists who reported on the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade to be investigated and possibly jailed.
Driving the news: The Supreme Court said Thursday that its ongoing investigation into the leak to Politico of Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson signaling the end of federal protections on abortion had so far failed to identify the responsible party.
This article originally appeared in Axios Finish Line, our nightly newsletter on life, leadership and wellness.Sign up here.
If you trash a friend, a competitor, a colleague or company to win ... you are losing.
Why it matters: Nothing screams weakness like arguing mainly why someone or something else sucks. It projects the opposite of what you often think and hope.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Thursday that last week's computer system outage that temporarily grounded all U.S. airline departures was caused by the accidental removal of files.
Driving the news: A preliminary review determined that "contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database," the agency said in a statement.
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