The future of Church of the Ascension after HeleneHarbor Belle residents in Punta Gorda on day 7 with no power after Helene
FORT MYERS BEACH The future of Church of the Ascension after Helene One of the hardest hit churches by Hurricane Ian is on Fort Myers Beach. Church of the Ascension got more water from Helene, but there wasn’t much left to damage.
HARLEM HEIGHTS How were Harlem Heights residents affected by Helene? A community filled with water nearly two years ago is dry two years later, even after the storm surge of Helene, and now residents told us why.
PUNTA GORDA Harbor Belle residents in Punta Gorda on day 7 with no power after Helene Hurricane Helene’s impact on an RV park in Punta Gorda has left the community in the sweltering heat with nowhere else to turn.
Lee County Sheriff implementing new bus stop signs to improve safety The Lee County Sheriff’s Office has installed three bus stop signs throughout Lee County.
NORTH PORT What’s next for the Rapkins? Family sues Heritage Insurance A family is paying for a mess they didn’t ask for or create.
ENGLEWOOD Englewood neighborhood drying out ahead of potential heavy rain Debris on front lawns, homes gutted, and roofs in need of repair. People in one Englewood community say they are not ready for another bout of rain, let alone another tropical storm.
New AirTag tracking law goes into effect This week, a new state law went into effect, cracking down on tracking devices like AirTags and increasing criminal penalties for people who track others without their consent.
Detecting breast cancer with a wearable patch This year, more than 350,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed. Early detection increases survival rates up to 98%
Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office remembers K-9 Scar The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office remembers the life of one of their K9s, Scar.
Hurricane Helene cleanup hotline If you need help cleaning up damage from Hurricane Helene, local volunteers have your back.
PUNTA GORDA New property damage tagging system in Charlotte County after Helene A new tagging system is in place in Charlotte County after Hurricane Helene to communicate property damage assessments more effectively.
Most Wanted Wednesday: Southwest Florida’s most wanted suspects for October 2, 2024 Here are some of Southwest Florida’s most wanted suspects for October 2, 2024.
Naples City Council awards $23.4M for pier rebuild The 136-year-old Naples Pier will undergo a seventh transformation after City Council unanimously approved a nearly $23.46 million construction contract to rebuild the pier after Hurricane Ian destroyed it two years ago.
Collier women arrested for possession of fentanyl Two women have been arrested for possession of fentanyl during a routine traffic stop by deputies.
WASHINGTON (AP) Some of the most notable quotes from the JD Vance-Tim Walz vice presidential debate The first and only vice presidential debate between Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz featured an often orderly, policy-focused and even civil dialogue between the two men seeking to serve as the next president’s second in command.
FORT MYERS BEACH The future of Church of the Ascension after Helene One of the hardest hit churches by Hurricane Ian is on Fort Myers Beach. Church of the Ascension got more water from Helene, but there wasn’t much left to damage.
HARLEM HEIGHTS How were Harlem Heights residents affected by Helene? A community filled with water nearly two years ago is dry two years later, even after the storm surge of Helene, and now residents told us why.
PUNTA GORDA Harbor Belle residents in Punta Gorda on day 7 with no power after Helene Hurricane Helene’s impact on an RV park in Punta Gorda has left the community in the sweltering heat with nowhere else to turn.
Lee County Sheriff implementing new bus stop signs to improve safety The Lee County Sheriff’s Office has installed three bus stop signs throughout Lee County.
NORTH PORT What’s next for the Rapkins? Family sues Heritage Insurance A family is paying for a mess they didn’t ask for or create.
ENGLEWOOD Englewood neighborhood drying out ahead of potential heavy rain Debris on front lawns, homes gutted, and roofs in need of repair. People in one Englewood community say they are not ready for another bout of rain, let alone another tropical storm.
New AirTag tracking law goes into effect This week, a new state law went into effect, cracking down on tracking devices like AirTags and increasing criminal penalties for people who track others without their consent.
Detecting breast cancer with a wearable patch This year, more than 350,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed. Early detection increases survival rates up to 98%
Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office remembers K-9 Scar The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office remembers the life of one of their K9s, Scar.
Hurricane Helene cleanup hotline If you need help cleaning up damage from Hurricane Helene, local volunteers have your back.
PUNTA GORDA New property damage tagging system in Charlotte County after Helene A new tagging system is in place in Charlotte County after Hurricane Helene to communicate property damage assessments more effectively.
Most Wanted Wednesday: Southwest Florida’s most wanted suspects for October 2, 2024 Here are some of Southwest Florida’s most wanted suspects for October 2, 2024.
Naples City Council awards $23.4M for pier rebuild The 136-year-old Naples Pier will undergo a seventh transformation after City Council unanimously approved a nearly $23.46 million construction contract to rebuild the pier after Hurricane Ian destroyed it two years ago.
Collier women arrested for possession of fentanyl Two women have been arrested for possession of fentanyl during a routine traffic stop by deputies.
WASHINGTON (AP) Some of the most notable quotes from the JD Vance-Tim Walz vice presidential debate The first and only vice presidential debate between Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz featured an often orderly, policy-focused and even civil dialogue between the two men seeking to serve as the next president’s second in command.
Wallace Reid purchases fuel for the vehicle he drives to make a living using ride-share apps, Wednesday, June 22, 2022, in the Queens borough of New York. (CREDIT: AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) Furious about surging prices at the gasoline station and the supermarket, many consumers feel they know just where to cast blame: On greedy companies that relentlessly jack up prices and pocket the profits. Responding to that sentiment, the Democratic-led House of Representatives last month passed on a party-line vote — most Democrats for, all Republicans against — a bill designed to crack down on alleged price gouging by energy producers. Likewise, Britain last month announced plans to impose a temporary 25% windfall tax on oil and gas company profits and to funnel the proceeds to financially struggling households. Yet for all the public’s resentment, most economists say corporate price gouging is, at most, one of many causes of runaway inflation — and not the primary one. “There are much more plausible candidates for what’s going on,” said Jose Azar an economist at Spain’s University of Navarra. They include Supply disruptions at factories, ports, and freight yards. Worker shortages. President Joe Biden’s enormous pandemic aid program. COVID 19-caused shutdowns in China. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, not least, a Federal Reserve that kept interest rates ultra-low longer than experts say it should have. Most of all, though, economists say resurgent spending by consumers and governments drove inflation up. The blame game is, if anything, intensifying after the U.S. government reported that inflation hit 8.6% in May from a year earlier, the biggest price spike since 1981. To fight inflation, the Fed is now belatedly tightening credit aggressively. On June 15, it raised its benchmark short-term rate by three-quarters of a point — its largest hike since 1994 — and signaled that more large rate hikes are coming. The Fed hopes to achieve a notoriously difficult “soft landing” — slowing growth enough to curb inflation without causing the economy to slide into recession. For years, inflation had remained at or below the Fed’s 2% annual target, even while unemployment sank to a half-century low. But when the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession with startling speed and strength, the U.S. consumer price index rose steadily — from a 2.6% year-over-year increase in March 2021 to last month’s four-decade high. For a while at least — before profit margins at S&P 500 companies dipped early this year — the inflation surge coincided with swelling corporate earnings. It was easy for consumers to connect the dots: Companies, it seemed, were engaged in price-gouging. This wasn’t just inflation. It was greedflation. Asked to name the culprits behind the spike in gasoline prices, 72% of the 1,055 Americans polled in late April and early May by the Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government blamed profit-seeking corporations, more than the share who pointed to Russia’s war against Ukraine (69%) or Biden (58%) or pandemic disruptions (58%). And the verdict was bipartisan: 86% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans blamed corporations for inflated gas prices. “It’s very natural for consumers to see prices rising and get angry about it and then look for someone to blame,” said Christopher Conlon, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business who studies corporate competition. “You and I don’t get to set prices at the supermarket, the gas station, or the car dealership. So people naturally blame corporations, since those are the ones they see raising prices.’’ Yet Conlon and many other economists are reluctant to indict — or to favor punishing — Corporate America. When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business asked economists this month whether they’d support a law to bar big companies from selling their goods or services at an “unconscionably excessive price” during a market shock, 65% said no. Only 5% backed the idea. Just what combination of factors is most responsible for causing prices to soar “is still an open question,” economist Azar acknowledges. COVID-19 and its aftermath have made it hard to assess the state of the economy. Today’s economists have no experience analyzing the financial aftermath of a pandemic. Policymakers and analysts have been repeatedly blindsided by the path the economy has taken since COVID struck in March 2020: They didn’t expect the swift recovery from the downturn, fueled by vast government spending and record-low rates engineered by the Fed and other central banks. Then they were slow to recognize the gathering threat of high inflation pressures, dismissing them at first as merely a temporary consequence of supply disruptions. One aspect of the economy, though, is undisputed: A wave of mergers in recent decades has killed or shrunk competition among airlines, banks, meatpacking companies and many other industries. That consolidation has given the surviving companies the leverage to demand price cuts from suppliers, to hold down workers’ pay and to pass on higher costs to customers who don’t have much choice but to pay up. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have found that less competition made it easier for companies to pass along higher costs to customers, calling it an “amplifying factor” in the resurgence of inflation. Josh Bivens, research director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, has estimated that nearly 54% of the price increases in nonfinancial businesses since mid-2020 can be attributed to “fatter profit margins,” versus just 11% from 1979 through 2019. Bivens conceded that neither corporate greed nor market clout has likely grown significantly in the past two years. But he suggested that during the COVID inflationary spike, companies have redirected how they use their market power: Many have shifted away from pressuring suppliers to cut costs and limiting workers’ pay and have instead boosted prices for customers. In a study of nearly 3,700 companies released last week, the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute concluded that markups and profit margins last year reached their highest level since the 1950s. It also found that companies that had aggressively raised prices before the pandemic were more likely to do so after it struck, “suggesting a role for market power as an explanatory driver of inflation.″ Yet many economists aren’t convinced that corporate greed is the main culprit. Jason Furman, a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, said that some evidence even suggests that monopolies are slower than companies that face stiff competition to raise prices when their own costs rise, “in part because their prices were high to begin with.” Likewise, NYU’s Conlon cites examples where prices have soared in competitive markets. Used cars, for example, are sold in lots across the country and by numerous individuals. Yet average used-car prices have skyrocketed 16% over the past year. Similarly, the average price of major appliances, another market with plenty of competitors, jumped nearly 10% last month from a year earlier. By contrast, the price of alcoholic beverages has risen just 4% from a year ago even though the beer market is dominated by AB-Inbev and spirits by Bacardi and Diageo. “It is hard to imagine that AB-Inbev isn’t as greedy as Maytag,” Conlon said. So what has most driven the inflationary spike? “Demand,” said Furman, now at Harvard University. “Lots of government spending, lots of monetary support — all combined together to support extraordinarily high levels of demand. Supply couldn’t keep up, so prices rose.’’ Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimate that government aid to the economy during the pandemic, which put money in consumers’ pockets to help them endure the crisis and set off a spending spree, has raised inflation by about 3 percentage points since the first half of 2021. In a report released in April, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blamed global supply chain bottlenecks for playing a “significant role” in inflating factory costs. They found that it added a staggering 20 percentage points to wholesale inflation in manufacturing last November, raising it to 30%. Still, even some economists who don’t blame greedflation for the price spike of the past year say they think governments should try to restrict the market power of monopolies, perhaps by blocking mergers that reduce competition. The idea is that more companies vying for the same customers would encourage innovation and makes the economy more productive. Even so, tougher antitrust policies wouldn’t likely do much to slow inflation anytime soon. “I find it helpful to think about competition like diet and exercise,” NYU’s Conlon said. “More competition is a good thing. But, like diet and exercise, the payoffs are long-term. “Right now, the patient is in the emergency room. Sure, diet and exercise are still a good thing. But we need to treat the acute problem of inflation.”