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The state government isn't exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8 billion Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves. In a post on X the day he signed the bill, DeSantis called this "restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots."

So far, the sharp increases in these pandemic-popular segments have been offset by even sharper declines in the cost of categories most affected by covid 19-related travel restrictions, such as international airfare (down 28 percent from February of last year to this January) and spectator sports (down 18 percent).

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Powell and other economists also say it's not useful to compare inflation dynamics of the past with today's. The economy has changed so much since the 1970s and 1980s, they say, with globalization, technology and other forces combining to slow price growth.

A more globalized economy made it harder for businesses to raise wages or prices, since competitors and consumers could easily find a cheaper place to make a good or deliver a service. More advanced technology only quickened that shift.

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For years now, inflation has fallen short of the Fed's 2 percent target, even as the unemployment rate ticked lower and lower after the Great Recession. That reality spurred the Fed to reevaluate the connection between a tight labor market and rising prices. Economists had long believed that, as the labor market tightened and employers raised wages to compete for scarce workers, prices would rise as businesses passed high labor costs onto consumers. But such a relationship largely failed to materialize during the most recent expansion -- the longest in U.S. history.

Britain's services sector -- encompassing not only London's powerful financial industry, but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others -- was largely left out of the 1,246-page deal, despite the sector accounting for 80 percent of British economic activity.

The deal also did little to assuage European migrants, some of whom left Britain during the pandemic and are now struggling to determine whether they need to rush back to establish a right to settle in Britain before the split is finalized on Dec. 31.

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Negotiators have not formally published the voluminous trade deal, though both sides have offered summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens uncertain about some details even as lawmakers in Britain and Europe prepare to vote on it in a matter of days.

But it had long been clear that the agreement would offer the City of London, a hub for international banks, asset managers, insurance firms and hedge funds, few assurances about future trade across the English Channel. Britain sells roughly 30 billion pounds, or $40 billion, of financial services to the European Union each year, profiting from an integrated market that makes it easier in some cases to sell services from one member country to another than it is to sell services from one American state to another.

The new trade deal does smooth the flow of goods across British borders. But it leaves financial firms without the biggest benefit of European Union membership: the ability to easily offer services to clients across the region from a single base. This has long allowed a bank in London to provide loans to a business in Venice, or trade bonds for a company in Madrid.

That loss is especially painful for Britain, which ran a surplus of £18 billion, or $24 billion, on trade in financial and other services with the European Union in 2019, but a deficit of £97 billion, or $129 billion, on trade in goods.

"The result of the deal is that the European Union retains all of its current advantages in trading, particularly with goods, and the U.K. loses all of its current advantages in the trade for services," said Tom Kibasi, the former director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a research institute. "The outcome of this trade negotiation is precisely what happens with most trade deals: The larger party gets what it wants and the smaller party rolls over."

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After Jan. 1, the sale of services, once assured, will hang on patchwork decisions by European regulators about whether Britain's new financial regulations are close enough to their own to be trusted. While London's expertise is difficult to match, putting its financial and service firms in a strong position to weather the storm, some obstacles are inevitable. Already, Britons living in Europe who have bank accounts in Britain have been told their accounts will be closed.

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In announcing the trade deal this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain acknowledged it offered "not as much" access for financial firms "as we would have liked." But he was not as straightforward about the difficulties facing even British retailers under the deal, analysts said.

In promising that there were "no non-tariff barriers" to selling goods after Brexit, he ignored the tens of millions of customs declarations, health assessments and other checks that businesses will now be responsible for.

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Next to a no-deal split, involving enormous logjams at the borders and deep uncertainty for businesses, the agreement was a salve. But even with such a deal, the path forward is uncertain.

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The dollar was on track for its biggest monthly drop in almost a decade...Safe-haven bullion has gained nearly 30% so far this year, propelled by low interest rates globally and widespread stimulus from central banks adding to support for the metal considered a refuge from inflation and currency debasement.

"With policy rates already at or even below the zero bound, support to gold prices will increasingly have to come from higher inflation, in our view," said BofA Global Research, which expects gold to hit $3,000 per ounce in the coming 18 months.

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Silver climbed 4.2% to $24.34 per ounce, on course for a monthly rise of about 33%, its largest on records going back to 1982, supported by investment and industrial demand.

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He ... made another admission about why Republicans refuse to do anything about climate change, which he implicitly acknowledged as a real thing. "We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing." ... They never have a problem with asking poor people, senior citizens, communities of color or anyone who doesn't vote Republican to change their lifestyle dramatically by not having enough to eat, or a roof, or health care...

At the time, the company also slashed its dividend by 36% and disclosed an investigation into its accounting practices by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In the year since, Kraft Heinz has announced further writedowns, scrapped its full-year adjusted earnings outlook, and is still under SEC investigation.

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Brazilian private equity firm 3G and billionaire Warren Buffett engineered the merger of H.J. Heinz and Kraft Foods in 2015, and since that deal the value of Kraft Heinz's stock has sunk about 60%. Under executives installed by 3G, the company made aggressive cuts using a tool called zero-based budgeting (ZBB) that incentivizes managers to meet strict cost targets - critics say this ate in to investment in brands.

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200 billion in U.S. goods over the next two years, as part of the deal. President Donald Trump, who addressed the Davos forum earlier on Tuesday, said the number of purchases could end up closer to $300 billion.

"These are unrealistic numbers, which puts the whole viability of the deal into question," Bown said, adding that the only way to reach these figures is by diverting trade away from other countries, such as soy beans away from Brazil and fish away from Canada.

Among the additional purchases of U.S. goods, China has committed to buy at least $40 billion worth of American farming products. However, a leading commodities expert at Goldman Sachs casted doubts over whether China will manage to do that. Speaking to CNBC earlier this month Jeff Currie said "there is still a lot of uncertainty about how you would achieve $40 (billion) or potentially even $50 billion of agricultural purchases."

Note that in almost every previous, when Trump announced a big "investment" in the US, it either (a) didn't materialize in anywhere near the scale touted, or (b) was simply re-counting some other investment that was already planned or in-process. Thus, this critique is worrying.

The policy seems straightforward, but there is nothing straightforward about the reality of the working poor, a daily life of unreliable transportation, erratic work hours and capricious living arrangements.

Still, what has happened in the nine counties in West Virginia in the last four years does offer at least an indication of how it will play out on a larger scale.

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The most visible impact has been at homeless missions and food pantries, which saw a big spike in demand that has never receded. But the policy change was barely noticeable in the work force, where evidence of some large influx of new workers is hard to discern. This reflects similar findings elsewhere, as states have steadily been reinstating work requirements in the years since the recession, when nearly the whole country waived them.

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Boomers are expected to take a larger share of overall consumer spending in the next five years, rising to 33% of aggregate spending in the U.S. by 2025, according to a report from Visa's analytics division. The same research projects the percentage of aggregate spending from all younger generations to decline.

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``The one thing that I worry about a little bit is that somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of boomers have under-saved for retirement and are going to have no real source of income besides Social Security," Severino said. "So I worry about them being able to spend." 

The two most demographically significant groups of baby boomers then would be the smaller, wealthy cohort that will want luxury versions of whatever travel, leisure, entertainment or retail they pursue and a larger cohort that might have more time than it once did, but no added spending power, Levy said.''

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The bad news is almost everything else. Outside of the power sector, the country's planet-warming pollution continued to grow last year. Almost three decades after climate change first became a political issue, the American economy remains a continent-sized machine that guzzles fossil fuels and excretes money.

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"We see nothing currently planned at the federal or the state level that is going to put the U.S. on track for the Paris Agreement target," Trevor Houser, an author of the report and a partner at the Rhodium Group, told me. "It is still possible to reduce emissions fast enough to meet that target, but it would require a rapid and ambitious change in federal climate policy."

Even as bankruptcy is up 24% in a single year, Trump is telling America's farmers that it's time to buy "much larger tractors" to generate all the grain required by this deal. Trump says that he expects China to buy $50 billion of U.S. agricultural products. That $50 billion figure is one that Trump has deployed before. It's just that the date keeps shifting. And shifting. That number is imaginary, but the exploding farm debt and bankruptcies are very real.

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In fact, Trump's massively hyped trade deal is such a preliminary step that it's not even getting rid of the tariffs he's put in place. The 25% tariff on over $250 billion of Chinese products is untouched, while the 15% tariff that was placed on another $150 billion in goods is dropping to 7.5%. Or, 7.5% higher than they were in September--which is not a great sign that a trade war has "ended."

The new rule would limit states from waiving those standards, instead restricting their use to those areas that have a 6 percent unemployment rate or higher. The national unemployment rate in October was 3.6 percent.

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"This Administration is out of touch with families who are struggling to make ends meet by working seasonal jobs or part time jobs with unreliable hours," Stabenow said. "Seasonal holiday workers, workers in Northern Michigan's tourism industry, and workers with unreliable hours like waiters and waitresses are the kinds of workers hurt by this proposal."

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"There's a reason Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly rejected this callous proposal in the Farm Bill and instead focused on bipartisan job training opportunities that actually help families find good paying jobs," she said.

Hunger advocates have repeatedly emphasized that SNAP is intended to address hunger and not compel people to work. Many also noted that those affected are impoverished, tend to live in rural areas, often face mental health issues and disabilities. Black and Hispanic households, women and LGBTQ people would be disproportionately affected by the change.

Or perhaps not. A new analysis from a prominent group of economic researchers suggests not only that rising prices have been quietly taxing low-income families more heavily than rich ones, but also that, after accounting for that trend, the American poverty rate is significantly higher than the official measures suggest. Call it "inflation inequality," a subtle, pernicious way that the fortunes of the rich and the poor have diverged.

... the London School of Economics found that from 2004 to 2015, the prices of the products purchased by the bottom income quintile increased faster than the prices of the products purchased by the top income quintile. As a result, low-income families experienced an annual rate of inflation conservatively estimated at 0.44 percentage points higher than that of high-income families... such changes compound over time, wedging apart the welfare of struggling households and flourishing ones. Rich families get competitive prices on organic groceries and athleisure and better-and-better electronics; poor families end up paying more for worse-quality alternatives.

Jaravel suggested a mechanism behind the finding: Rising wealth and income inequality mean that richer people have ever more disposable income, creating a market incentive for retailers to cater to the needs of lawyers in Chicago and tech analysts in Boston over child-care workers in the Mississippi Delta and part-time retail workers in California's Central Valley.

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Accounting for differential changes in prices would bump up the 2018 poverty rate by 8 percent--adding 3.2 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, and 836,000 people to the ranks of those in deep poverty. According to standard government measures, the real household income of the bottom quintile fell 1 percent from 2004 to 2018; using the new, inflation-sensitive accounting, it fell more than 7 percent... "It's not just that inflation is not uniform across income groups," says Michael Linden of the Groundwork Collaborative ... "It's that it's not uniform across income groups because of inequality itself."

That increase in traffic has made the interchange of Interstate 95 and New Jersey Route 4, about a half-mile from the George Washington Bridge, the country's most gridlocked stretch of highway for trucks, according to the American Transportation Research Institute.

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As the internet economy grows, so, too, does the importance of what is known as last-mile package delivery -- the final step in the increasingly competitive and costly process of moving items to customers' homes as quickly as possible.

In New York, at least five warehouses, are in the works. Over the summer, Amazon opened a last-mile warehouse in the Bronx and another in Queens. It has also looked at leasing additional facilities for last-mile deliveries in Brooklyn.

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Another multistory warehouse, planned on 18 acres in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is expected to be the country's largest last-mile warehouse, Mr. Hertz said.

Their warehouses in Red Hook, as well as a multistory warehouse to be built in the South Bronx, are going up in Opportunity Zones, which were created as part of the 2017 tax law and offer significant tax benefits to projects in economically distressed areas.

The program has been criticized for giving tax breaks to wealthy people who invest in the zones, while not significantly helping struggling neighborhoods.

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Rafael Salamanca Jr., a City Council member whose district includes the South Bronx, said he had mixed feelings about the area becoming a warehouse hub. While warehouses have provided jobs, and pledges from Amazon to hire local residents, they have also increased the number of diesel-spewing trucks on the roads.

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Andrew Chung, the chief executive of Innovo Property Group, which is building the multistory warehouse in the South Bronx, said the distribution center would have electric charging stations with the goal of eventually shifting to a mostly electric delivery fleet.

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Johnson grudgingly asked for an extension to the deadline late on Saturday night, but EU leaders don't necessarily have to accept it. Some have ruled out giving Britain more time, piling pressure on U.K. lawmakers to accept the current deal. But it's unlikely they would want a no-deal scenario and the potential economic hit it could mean for both sides of the English Channel.

According to CoinShares, the network launches today with more than $20 million in gold held in a Swiss vault to back up its tokens. Each DGLD token is backed by 1/10th troy ounce.

CoinShares chairman Danny Masters said the product's network security is based on the bitcoin state, with DGLD operating as a sidechain of the bitcoin network.