Evercore ISI founder Roger Altman: Firing of BLS commissioner 'quite disturbing'
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CNBC
11 minutes ago
- CNBC
27-year-old first-grade teacher lived paycheck to paycheck due to impulsive spending: ‘It became so stressful'
Maddie Baker, 27, will be the first to admit she was an impulsive spender when she started teaching kindergarteners six years ago. She bought coffee at least once a day, frequently shopped for new clothes and spent lavishly on vacations she says she "probably had no business going on." "Any day that I had a hard day at teaching, I would immediately go from my job to a store," the now first-grade teacher tells CNBC Make It. "The way I was coping with hard days was by spending money." Baker isn't alone. Almost half of American consumers say they make purchases to boost their mood, according to LendingTree survey data released in July. Emotional spending isn't always bad, either. It can provide temporary comfort or a needed mood boost. However, it can also lead to financial strain. Baker says her impulsive spending got so out of hand, she found herself in "horrible cycles" of living paycheck to paycheck to avoid going into credit card debt. Nationally, almost three-quarters of emotional shoppers admit they've spent more than they intended, and 44% say it's negatively impacted their financial well-being, LendingTree found. It took Baker three years to get her spending under control, she says. Today, she's very intentional with how she spends her money and has even developed new hobbies from habits she's built to save money. "I remember just waking up every single day, and the stress of finances was just really getting me down," says Baker, who was making around $50,000 a year at the time. "It became so stressful." Nearly Baker's entire paycheck would go directly toward paying off her credit card. Because she was paid once a month, that often left her with little to live on — forcing her to rely on the card for new expenses and trapping her in a constant cycle of borrowing from herself. She tried everything to earn extra cash. She tutored kids during her summer breaks, tried selling her clothes and donating her plasma, but none of it seemed to sustain her lifestyle, she says. Baker got her spending under control three years into teaching through a tax refund that allowed her to pay off her credit card bill without using her paycheck. Now, she keeps enough in her checking account to pay her credit card bill every month without having to rely on an incoming paycheck. "It took a total restart and being tired of the cycle I was in, in order to do something about it," she says. Young adults are particularly susceptible to overspending when they're online or bombarded with bad news, Ylva Baeckström, a senior lecturer in finance at King's Business School, said in 2024. Overwhelming feelings can lead to unhealthy spending habits as a way to cope or find relief, Baeckström said. To avoid overspending, "one of the biggest things you can do is take a beat," Keith Barron, a personal finance expert and former head of marketing at Jenius Bank, said in 2024. Rather than heading straight to checkout when shopping online, try adding the item to a wish list and waiting a day or two. This brief delay can help you decide whether you genuinely want or need the item, Barron said. Today, Baker is working toward building an emergency fund and saving for a house, and says she's way more intentional about what she decides to spend money on. On top of learning how to spend less impulsively, she says she's found alternatives to save money and a side hustle creating videos on TikTok to bring in more income. Her silver lining: Many of the activities that started as a way to save have become hobbies as well. She enjoys painting her own nails, making lattes at home and meal prepping to avoid eating out. On TikTok, she earns up to $2,000 a month from sharing videos about her life as a teacher. "All of these things happened because I had the mindset of, 'I need to save more money, and I need to spend less money,'" she says.
Bloomberg
11 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Odd Lots: Bill Beach on How Trump Just Politicized US Economic Data
Late last week, Donald Trump shocked Wall Street by firing Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency responsible for publishing some of America's most important economic data. The firing came after the BLS released a weaker than expected jobs report for July, with just 73,000 new jobs added for the month (compared to forecasts for 103,000). The bureau also revised jobs numbers for the prior two months down by nearly 260,000 jobs. Trump called the data "rigged." But why does the BLS make these revisions, and what does the firing of the BLS chief mean for anyone trying to gauge the direction of the US economy? In this episode, we speak to Bill Beach, a former BLS chief, about the latest drama in US economic statistics.
Yahoo
38 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump has been a loud critic of government data for years. But now he's following through.
The shocking move Friday to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner wasn't the first time we've seen Trump and those in his orbit express their unhappiness with economic data. But it clearly marked an escalation — both in the abrupt dismissal as well as Trump's repeated evidence-free statements that it was because the underlying numbers are "rigged." It's also part of an effort that has spanned Trump's second term to, at the very least, shape how the government's giant and influential stream of data is presented to markets and to the public. The project has long been a mix of both ideology and political expedience. And it is likely to inform the coming pick for a replacement for the now-fired Erika McEntarfer, which Trump says is coming this week, as well as future changes to how the BLS and other government agencies do their work. These past moves by Trump allies have often been to try and showcase less prominent statistics in an effort to make things look a little rosier and — proponents say — offer a more accurate view of the economy from the Republican perspective. But crucially, they add, it is not a direct challenge to the underlying raw data. Trump has clearly muddied all that. Over multiple days of statements, he repeatedly said that the reason he fired McEntarfer was that the numbers she oversaw were "a scam." It also hasn't cheered markets and others that he has been vague on the changes he wants to see going forward. This also comes after years of Trump dismissing economic data when it doesn't suit him. Way back in 2017, then-press secretary Sean Spicer even once responded to good jobs figures by saying they "may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now." But it has mostly been rhetoric in the past. And this recent move to actually fire the workers behind it has clearly worried economic observers that US government data is now on the road to being compromised. Asked on Yahoo Finance Monday if investors have reason to now be wary of government data, TPW Advisory founder Jay Pelosky answered: "100%." "This is just another example of the dismantling of American exceptionalism," he added, saying a premium placed on US markets could now be at jeopardy "because folks feel they can trust the information that comes out of the US government." A focus on 'native born' jobs and private sector GDP Both the employment and gross domestic product (GDP) numbers have long been in GOP sights. On the jobs front: Trump's team has been focused on Bureau of Labor Statistics data looking at the employment status of native-born populations ahead of the overall number that also included foreign-born workers. The statistics for "foreign-born" workers include many naturalized Americans as well as those in the country legally. Vice President JD Vance even touted that aspect of last week's release on Friday afternoon, just hours before Trump declared the entire data set fake. "I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact," Vance wrote early Friday afternoon. "Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy." Trump's top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, added over the weekend on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the president's firing of McEntarfer was more akin to a need for a "fresh set of eyes" at the agency. A similar effort has been mounted in recent months around the data that measures America's economic output. Gross domestic product comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and that wing of the government is overseen by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has made the case that a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending. In March, he told Fox News, "It goes like this ... if the government buys a tank, that's GDP. But paying 1,000 people to think about buying a tank is not GDP. That's wasted money." It is, once again, an effort perhaps not to change the raw data but offer a different way of slicing it. This is underlined by how the government already publishes a figure roughly along the lines of what Lutnick has at times suggested: a total of only private output called Value Added by Private Industries (VAPI). The focus on VAPI was most noticeable this spring when cuts from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were still being promised, and it was a move criticized at the time as simply an effort to sidestep economic pain there. In the months since — with Musk's departure and DOGE promises much less ambitious — the talk of revising GDP counting has faded as well. A more standard massaging of economic data Of course, some efforts by Trump's team also fall into the category of seeming to cherry-pick data to make their stewardship of the economy look better — and that of their political opponents seem worse. That long Washington tradition was seen last week when, on Wednesday, new GDP numbers offered a strong annual headline growth rate of 3% but with underlying economic growth much lower and closer to 1.2%. Trump and his team naturally focused on the higher figure. Then on Thursday, new inflation numbers saw investors focus on an inflation uptick and core prices, with the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge rising 2.8% on an annual basis. Trump and his team instead focused on a lower figure offered by the overall Personal Consumption Expenditures price index only for the second quarter, which rose just 2.1% on an annualized rate. Hassett on Sunday called that "the most important" number. By Friday, perhaps the dour jobs report was too much to be spun with the revisions to prior months' numbers revealing significantly fewer jobs and leading some, like economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, to say that the release showed an economy "on the precipice of recession." Trump then simply declared the data fake and has followed that up with days of charges that the report "was RIGGED" against him. Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices Sign in to access your portfolio
