Saturday news bits

A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

Twitter Inc. TWTR -9.67%▼ is freezing most hiring. Amazon.com Inc. recently said it is overstaffed in its warehouses. Uber Technologies Inc. UBER 4.72%▲ told employees to consider hiring a privilege. After years of adding jobs at a rapid pace, some of America’s fastest-growing companies have signaled in recent weeks that they plan to take a more cautious approach to bringing on new workers.

Real world problems have finally crashed the stock market’s party. Soaring inflation, fueled by rising food prices and the war in Ukraine, has prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates significantly for the first time in many years, which has sent stock prices plummeting to earth.

Republican lawmakers have misleadingly suggested that the Biden administration is sending baby formula to undocumented immigrants at the expense of American families amid a national shortage. It is inaccurate to suggest that President Biden is choosing to prioritize the needs of immigrant children over those of American children. Providing food — like formula — and water to migrant children detained at the border is required by a lawsuit settlement, and the Trump administration also adhered to that requirement. And it is unlikely that the amount of formula in stock at detention facilities would meaningfully ease the shortage.

Affirm Holdings Chairman and CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that despite the market’s poor performance this year, U.S. consumers — and Affirm’s customers — are spending healthily.
“The U.S. consumer is alive and well. They’re shopping, they’re buying, they’re paying their loans, at least to Affirm quite well. Generally speaking, things are going according to plan, the upheaval in stock markets does not seem to have an actual impact on our underlying business which is performing really, really well,” Levchin said in an interview on Thursday evening on “Mad Money.”

The annualized real growth in America’s Gross Domestic Product during Trump’s administration was the worst since the Great Depression, according to updated and revised government data. And quarterly GDP data, which only dates back to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency beginning in 1953, puts Trump dead last among the dozen presidents since then, according to Bloomberg.