Lydia DePillis
@lydiadepillis
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Economy reporter @nytimes. Forever asking people to explain things. Tips/praise/etc.: [email protected].
Joined February 2009
Thing that was always true but especially now: If you're someone with visibility into Trump administration economic policy changes and want to tell a reporter without jeopardizing your job, my Signal number is 202-913-3717.
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So Jeff Bezos is putting $2 billion into homelessness and preschool. Laudable. But you have to ask -- is this better than just taxing the wealth of the richest man in the world, and making that money democratically accountable?.
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How did Trent Franks get $5 million, you ask? The @phoenixnewtimes found his net worth, which comes from his shares in an oil company, skyrocketed to $33 million after he voted repeatedly to deregulate the oil industry.
Oh
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This is what it actually means to criminalize abortion. I am not sure America is prepared for the level of invasive policing that women are about to endure. via @jiatolentino
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YIKES: New @ODNIgov @RichardGrenell probably shouldn't even have a security clearance, because he failed to report lobbying work for a corrupt Moldovan politician who's now a fugitive, @iarnsdorf reports.
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Fascinating and weird wrinkle to the wage gap conversation: Single women, married women, and single men all make about the same amount of money. It's MARRIED men who vastly out-earn everybody else.
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WHOA: On her way out, Yellen rips Wells Fargo for consumer abuses, effectively fires 4 board members, and stops the bank from growing larger "until the firm makes sufficient improvements." .
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You've got to be kidding me. Trump plans to close the EPA lab in Houston, one of the US' most contaminated cities:
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!! Study finds that uniform moratoria on evictions and utility shutoffs through November of last year could have saved *164,000* lives lost to COVID-19: If real, that would make reducing housing precarity easily the best public health measure we've got.
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There's been a lot of anecdotal evidence about how tariffs are behind the manufacturing slump. Now the Federal Reserve proves it, finding that the trade war is hurting the sector it was ostensibly supposed to help:
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Ahem. *Personal News*: Friday was my last day at ProPublica. In a couple weeks, I’ll start as an economics reporter at the New York Times, with a team I’ve long admired.
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Department of confused infrastructure policy: White House looks to states to hike taxes for their own improvements, as it pushes a tax bill that punishes local governments for raising more revenue.
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Scandalized by Trump's use of a racist term for a black former White House staffer? Wait till you hear what his administration is doing to fair housing rules, which were put in place to keep wealthy neighborhoods from excluding poor minorities:
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I mean, the Gates put like a half billion dollars into higher education, and had a meaningful impact -- but do we want a couple super wealthy people deciding how people go to school?
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The Post makes clear that when Biden says he was able to work with segregationist senators to "get things done," he means "enlist their help in stopping school integration":
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Cuomo slams the Senate's $2 trillion bill, which has $3.8 billion for New York, which he says will actually end up running a $9-$15 billion deficit because of the coronavirus. The House bill had $17 billion for New York. "We are frugal. I'm telling you these numbers don't work.".
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On work trips, I stay in those clusters of cheap hotels on a road full of Applebees and Jiffy Lubes, with zero thought to how one might navigate on foot. I run in the mornings anyway, on tiny shoulders and abbreviated sidewalks, and despair at America's hatred for pedestrians.
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This is how a 16-year-old migrant boy died in CBP custody. It's not how CBP said he died. And it's one of the many failures that finally pushed the former acting head of CBP to resign. Hell of a thorough investigation here:
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The saddest thing about the Santos story is his belief that the only way he could become a member of Congress was to erase a history of debt, eviction, and modest employment, and instead to invent wealth, success and affiliation with blue-chip companies -- and that he was right.
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Let me get this straight: .- Trump says states should mostly buy their own COVID-19 stuff.- FEMA refuses to centralize purchasing, leaving states to waste time and money bidding against each other.- FEMA then seizes the purchases states DO manage to make .
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For the uninitiated, he's talking about the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule meant to reduce residential racial segregation, which HUD has already suspended and proposed gutting.
At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!.
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I didn't think this could be real, but it apparently is -- Delta is running one of the most aggressive anti-union campaigns I've ever seen, at least judging by their website.
Wow. Delta would give you plenty of time to play video games when they fire you for no good reason because you're an At Will employee. But a union contract protects your paycheck from arbitrary terminations. @AFLCIO @EoinHiggins_
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Just received a notice from Fidelity warning me that they don't necessarily have my best interests at heart when giving investment advice. RIP Fiduciary Rule.
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NEW: By Trump’s own benchmarks, his approach to trade hasn’t worked. Here’s my story about what he set out to do, the guy he chose to do it, the agency that carried it out, and the result so far. It’s the most complex, hard-to-balance piece I’ve ever written. This is why. 1/.
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Wow - Trump approval down nine points in TEXAS since the election. Only rural states holding solid.
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*ahem ahem* *clears throat* *tap tap* . Some personal news: This is my last week at @CNNBusiness! Next week I join @propublica's powerhouse new DC bureau, covering trade and the economy with a 2020 focus. (There's a whole press release about it.)
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Hello world. This is my first day at the NYT covering the economy! I'll be here with your jobs and GDP reports, but also explainers and features about what on earth is going on, and how it's affecting people. Please feel free to reach out anytime: lydia.depillis@nytimes.com.
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It's past 5pm on a Friday, so I've cracked a beer and started reading the reconciliation bill. It starts with the U.S. Forest Service, and I already like this thing
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I must have walked past the @PostalMuseum a zillion times and never noticed the lovely inscription at the top. Would we say the same of the internet today?
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I know both situations are complicated and "but for" hypotheticals are hard to parse, but I'm struck by the similarities between the SVB collapse and the East Palestine train derailment. Both disasters became much more likely/more severe after regulatory rollbacks in 2018.
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NEW from me: The Trump administration has requested to convert dozens of political appointees into career civil service positions this year, allowing them to stay in government after he's gone. We have the documents:
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There's a lot we still don't know about why law enforcement allowed something to happen that D.C. went through decades of security theater to prevent. But it's not because they weren't warned. Quick story with @loganjaffe @iarnsdorf and @davidmcswane:
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How is anything else important when faced with such a photo?
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Catching up on all the crazy stuff my colleagues have been digging into this week. Like this dissection of the way the White House is steering huge no-bid contracts for COVID-19 response outside the normal procurement channels and won't explain why or how:
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If you think this economy is going to get back to good on its own, you're probably in the top 50% of wage earners who've returned to pre-pandemic levels of employment, while the bottom half heads in the opposite direction.
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NEW FROM ME: Twitter and YouTube have kicked Steve Bannon off their platforms. But he continues to reach an audience of millions through podcasts -- in particular, the biggest distributor, Apple. 1/.
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Top headlines this morning: . West braces for another record-breaking heat wave, bringing with it fire, death, and ecological collapse. Billionaire launches self into space, beating other billionaire by about a week.
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While it's gratifying to see high-profile sexual harassers go down, think of the 1000s of women whose bosses don't have a public profile. .
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Here's a quick piece on Wells Fargo winning big from the tax bill, featuring pretty clear evidence from the CEO of what he plans to do with the windfall.
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This @gingerthomp1 piece about how a CPB agent rationalized his job warehousing kids separated from their parents at the border is the most illuminating thing I've read on how good people get caught in the gears of terrible cruelty:
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Happy Saturday. It’s 169 days since the CARES Act passed. As Congress dithers on another relief package, I want to show you what the stimulus has done for people, from the lowest-paid worker to the most profitable Fortune 500 company. It’s time for a trip to Cleveland. (THREAD).
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NEW: As COVID-19 spreads, we’re learning more about the missteps early in the outbreak that could’ve kept it under wraps. One key hindrance: a long, technical document called the EMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION, issued by the Food and Drug Administration on Feb. 4. 1/x.
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The researchers suggest this isn't because having a wife makes men earn more, but rather that high-earning men are more likely to marry. On the flip side, we also know that lower earnings by women are mostly driven by those with kids.
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Maryland couldn't afford a long-planned light rail for inner city Baltimore but Amazon gets literally whatever it wants. Got it.
Maryland’s transportation chief is promising Amazon a “blank check” for any transportation improvements wanted, if it chooses the state’s Washington suburbs for HQ2
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Arthur Brooks is condescending/wrong in so many ways, but most gobsmacking is a denial that poor people work. Hard.
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Ideology that kills: Study finds wide difference in Covid-related deaths between Democrats and Republicans in Ohio and Florida after vaccines were introduced.
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If we bail out the cruise lines before we bail out the transit authorities we are doing it so so wrong.
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Here's what I don't understand about the eviction wave that's underway. Especially in weaker housing markets, where everybody's losing their income, what's the incentive not to work with a tenant? Are landlords sure they can find another?.
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Epidemiologists are getting increasingly dark in their use of analogies for how dangerous these new COVID variants are. (But seriously, always listen to @CarolineYLChen.)
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I’ve been on vacation in Colorado over the past week, and let me tell you how heartbreaking it’s been to see how badly beetle infestations have hurt alpine forests — they’re as bad as ever because of drought and warming winters. Some of these forests are more dead than alive.
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New from me: The $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to keep workers employed. But its power to do so was limited, and gradually got watered down. 1/.
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Kind of astonishing figures here: Tax compliance costs on the order of 1% of GDP, and could be dramatically reduced by pre-populating tax forms with information that the *government already has.* Instead, taxpayers spend $5.1b/year on tax prep services.
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Dave's right. Here are the ones we're tracking.
Another thing Democrats can do with control of the Senate: Rescind last-minute regulations imposed by the Trump administration. Four years ago, Republicans used the Congressional Review Act to unwind a series of Obama admin rules.
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Rode out to the Rockaways today and am not sure I've ever seen a bigger parking lot than the 9,000-car one at Jacob Riis Beach. It's bigger than many neighborhoods. Than most major sporting facilities. Than several of the islands on Jamaica Bay behind it.
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This seems like the biggest deal thing we could be talking about today.
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Two kids separated from their father in Port Arthur. Christus Hospital is trying to find him.
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Great paper in the NBERs today from @davidautor et al. finding that the PPP was: . - Expensive: $170-257K/job-year retained.- Regressive: 3/4 of funds went to top 5th of households.- Badly targeted: 25-34% went to workers who would've otherwise lost jobs .
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Trump talks about storm categories like he talks about his crowd sizes.
Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!.
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Four years ago, I wrote about au pairs suing their host agencies for colluding to keep wages artificially low. Well, they just won a $65.5 million settlement, which is something, even with no admission of guilt.
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In major cities, where their votes didn't count.
The Clinton Campaign must be wondering today: Where were all these folks Nov. 8?.
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In today's WH presser, the new DOD guy in charge of medical supply chain gave no indication that he's planning to make the federal government the central purchaser in order to stop the current crazy 50-state auction, which governors and distributors alike have asked for.
New from me and @lisalsong: Even as they compete with each other for essential medical equipment, governments haven’t been very forthcoming about what they’re paying and to whom. We got a partial price list from New York that provides a small window into the madness. 1/.
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Some cocktail hour thoughts. As a human in the world who pays attention, I carry around a lot of anger. As a journalist trying to remain a trustworthy messenger, I generally keep it under wraps. The more I learn about what transpired on Wednesday, the harder that becomes.
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This is journalism in its highest form: Both a calm, authoritative explanation of a complex and long-running struggle, and a visual scream for someone, SOMEONE, to put a stop to it.
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Behind every tragedy there is a corporate lobby that pushed for regulations that made it more likely, and @RebeccaJBurns_ is an expert at finding them. Wildfires and Big Oil edition:
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I keep thinking about this story as the bill is debated, because it is the purest distillation of what @jayrosen_nyu has called the "savvy style" of political journalism: Avoiding responsibility for having any moral values by reducing policy to a partisan catfight.
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Just a panel of white guys talking about the importance of marriage to help poor people
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There is not red America and blue America. There is Walmart America and Eds & Meds America.
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Oh good, a reckless tweet sewing baseless doubts is now above-the-fold news. #2016
Take an early look at the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
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New from me: Remember spending last year trying to get a PCR test and then waiting days for results? Well, it’s not because rapid antigen tests didn’t exist. They were just muddling their way through a regulatory process designed for something else. 1/
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If the experts say we should close the bars, politicians should have the courage to do it, and set up a relief fund for small businesses. We spent $28 billion bailing out farmers. This is possible.
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We may be officially Transitioning, but the Trump administration is accelerating into overtime, finishing rules that have been in the works for ages and even proposing new ones. We made an app so you can track them all!
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Women are staying home more because of brutally high childcare costs, which sucks for them and for the economy. D.C. shows a way out: Study nearly a decade after all 3-year-olds got free pre-K shows a 10% boost in maternal labor force participation.
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Always bemused by how people think the further an economic situation is away from them, the worse it is, but their own situation is A+ . (2024 poll of small businesses by @NFIB)
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Lots of remarkable things about this jobs report, but I just realized -- I think -- that the labor force participation rate for PRIME AGED WOMEN IS AS HIGH AS IT'S EVER BEEN, at 77.5 percent.
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Amidst *waves hands* everything going on, I have a story today about a longer-running trend: What declining student enrollment means for the hundreds of small towns built around colleges and universities, as those economic anchors lose their grip.
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NEW: With COVID19 exposing America's dependence on supply chains that often end in China, calls are mounting to bring medical manufacturing back onshore. But that’s not the only type of critical good people wish was still made here. Let me tell you about how we lost BATTERIES. 1/.
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Very interesting: The #GoogleWalkout organizers want an employee representative on the company's board of directors. There's a formal system for that in Germany and Liz Warren has a bill that would require it.
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What happens when the nation's biggest e-commerce company demands lightning-fast deliveries from a vast fleet of anonymous drivers for whom it takes no responsibility? . Crashes. Lots and lots of crashes. Big new Amazon investigation from Trish Callahan:
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Forcing your constituents to stay in their dangerous, unhealthy jobs when money is on the table to help them transition to something more sustainable before the whole industry disappears anyway with no support for workers -- because "welfare" -- is. hoo, boy I don't know
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Still baffled as to why this isn't continually the number one thing we're talking about.
2018 is on pace to be the fourth hottest year on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only three other years have been hotter: 2015, 2016 and 2017.
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The astonishing Clarence Thomas reporting this week by @JustinElliott @js_kaplan @Amierjeski--the kind of revelations that bring previously unthinkable change within the realm of possibility--is a reminder of the limits of how such institutions have traditionally been covered.
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The "anti-consumer" rule that 100% of consumer groups pushed for and defended.
We Applaud the Senate Vote to Overturn Anti-Consumer Arbitration Rule
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In 1st COVID task force press conference in months, brought on by surging cases in the Sun Belt, Dr. Fauci says contact tracing isn't working well because people don't want to pick up phone calls from the government. It's even worse in black and brown communities, he says.
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Like, this sentence is hilarious: "You should carefully consider the impact of any fees and compensation when evaluating investment advice that Fidelity, or any financial adviser, provides to you and before you make any investment decision." .Wouldn't you just rather trust them?.
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Anybody know who these guys are, mustering on hains point right now? Military formation, upside down US flags, circular shields?
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Guys, forget trade wars. Longer term, climate change will do much more economic damage than a few tariffs across a broad swath of industries in the US. So says the Richmond Fed:
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Biggest winner from reduction in corporate tax rate is . wait for it . Wells Fargo!
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The investigation my colleagues kicked off today makes concrete something that economists have understood and debated for years: Wealth inequality has actually increased much more than income inequality, and the tax system isn't doing much about it. 1/
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Many Americans would consider light rail to be a valuable neighborhood amenity. Not these suburban Marylanders, who are (wrongfully) blaming it for bringing it in undesirables from Baltimore, and actually asking for stops to be taken out: @lucia_graves.
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Patriot front bumper stickers. Walking towards Jefferson memorial.
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Trump infrastructure plan 2016, Trump infrastructure plan 2017.
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Yes I will be that economics reporter tweeting a fast food sign as anecdotal evidence of tightening labor markets.
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New from me! As the Paycheck Protection Program winds down and more data comes out, a story about how public companies kept money they didn’t need, and how the government let them do it. 1/.
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New from me: By now you probably know that noncompete agreements are all over the place. But they're practically standard in one particular industry: Local broadcast news. And not just for high-paid anchors.
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