How is this going? (December 25-31)
stranded at the airport
Thousands of travelers were stranded at airports across the country during the holidays as Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,900 flights on Monday and about 5,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday, more than 60% of its flight schedule. The outages were the result of staffing shortages and long-standing technical problems exacerbated by fierce winter storms. Many customers said Southwest did little to get them to their destinations. Bob Jordan, the airline’s 10-month-old chief executive, apologized, and the airline said it had called on more than 1,000 company employees to manually schedule crews for new flights. But Southwest’s reputation is in tatters, and the scale of the chaos — which one industry analyst called “the worst round of cancellations for any airline” in recent memory — prompted the Transportation Department to announce it would investigate Southwest. Whether the airline fulfills its obligations to its customers.
humble twitter
As part of a series of drastic cost-cutting measures, Elon Musk dispatched his staff on Christmas Eve to a Sacramento data center, one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities, to disconnect the Servers are vital for a website to run smoothly. (And many users seem to be taking notice.) The company is facing eviction from its Seattle office and has cut security and cleaning services in other departments, with some employees bringing their own toilet paper to the increasingly humble business. gentlemen. After the massive layoffs he made when he first took over the company in late October, Musk has also continued to make smaller layoffs: He says about 2,000 people now work for Twitter, down from the 7,500 he started with. Workers expect more layoffs as companies face a sluggish advertising environment and increased costs, such as Trump’s debt repayment. Musk’s acquisition.
The charges against JP Morgan
The U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general has filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan, accusing the bank of helping conceal convicted financier Jeffrey Epstein’s exploitation of women and girls and continuing to bank him after he pleaded guilty to sex allegations. Service 2008. Epstein was a customer of the bank for 15 years, including five years after his conviction; the bank fired him in 2013. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, said JPMorgan was “indispensable to the operation and concealment of Epstein’s smuggling enterprise” and argued that the bank delayed cutting ties with Epstein. Epstein helped bring about his sexual abuse. Legal filing originated in the Virgin Islands, since Mr. Epstein’s illicit activities at a villa on Little St. Louis Island in the Territory’s James Island, which he owned.
What’s next? (January 1-7)
New Year, New S&P?
We might be able to make decisions for more positive habits in the new year. But will the stock market follow suit? After a tumultuous year with its worst annual performance since 2008, some analysts believe the S&P 500 will start to turn around in 2023. But the predictions, perhaps predictably, were mixed. Some are predicting a deep recession, while others are optimistic that markets will improve thanks to the Fed’s turn, which has aggressively raised interest rates in 2022 but may start to slow as inflation continues to slow . The average forecast for the index is for a year-end finish of 4,009, the most pessimistic outlook in more than two decades, according to Bloomberg. But the forecast range – from a low of 3,400 to a high of 4,500 – represents an unusually wide gulf of opinion.