Latest news with #Stoltzfus
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Part of the community': Migrant workers support region's, nation's agriculture industry
About 700 cows need to be milked three times a day at Pennwood Farms. Hundreds of replacement heifers must be cared for, too. There are also the numerous day-to-day tasks that are required to keep the whole operation running smoothly. And a lot of that work is done by foreign migrant laborers. Faces of Immigration logo Glenn Stoltzfus, who co-owns the business in Berlin with his brothers, said there are usually a half-dozen or so Hispanic laborers employed on the dairy farm. He said they are in the country legally, but that he can 'almost guarantee you' that they are not citizens. 'They do a great job,' Stoltzfus said. 'We were struggling to find people because we milk pretty much around the clock. We're milking 700 cows three times a day, and each shift is anywhere from six to seven hours long, so there's not a whole lot of down time between milkings. 'It became very difficult to find people who were reliable that would do that work on a consistent basis.' Stoltzfus said Oscar, the first migrant laborer who started working on the farm about eight years ago, is still there and is respected as a leader among the workers. Others, mostly family members from Mexico, have come and gone over the years. Whenever a replacement is needed, Stoltzfus said Oscar brings somebody new to the farm. 'It sure has taken a load off of us as far as finding new employees, finding people that are willing to do the work,' Stoltzfus said. 'We haven't looked for an employee for a long time.' Somerset County Farm Bureau Legislative Farm Tour | McWilliams Farm Glenn Stoltzfus, Somerset County Farm Bureau dairy farmer representative, speaks during the Somerset County Farm Bureau Legislative Farm Tour at McWilliams Farm in Somerset County on Friday, August 2, 2024. The current group lives together in a six- bedroom farmhouse. They generally keep to themselves when not working and a language barrier does exist at times. But, as Stoltzfus explained, 'They have become part of the community.' He described them as 'good honest family people like we are.' 'A lot of Hispanic labor' Migrant labor is an integral part of the United States' agriculture industry. Approximately 68% of the nation's 2.4 million farmworkers are foreign-born, with the overwhelming majority coming from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Workers Survey for 2019-20. The same report found that 44% of those migrant farmworkers were undocumented and lacked work authorization. Area students experience hands on Ag education Tommy Nagle, right, and Marty Yahner, talk to eighth-grade students from Cambria Heights about harvesting corn that was planted at Yahner Brothers Farm in the spring in September 2023. Pennsylvania Farm Bureau Vice President Tommy Nagle, a beef cattle farmer from Patton, and Cambria County Farm Bureau President Marty Yahner both pointed to the same reason as to why legal migrant labor is used so prevalently. 'For decades, there has been immigrant Hispanic labor in agriculture in America, all over the nation, because the sad reality is Americans won't do the hard job that it takes in many cases on farms, whether it's picking vegetables in the hot summer sun, or pumpkins, or watermelons in California, or working on a dairy farm, or in a mushroom facility,' Yahner said. 'So yeah, there's a lot of Hispanic labor. That's just a fact. Americans won't do those jobs in many cases for any price, for any pay. It's true.' Nagle described the migrants as 'a reliable workforce.' 'The majority of the agriculture community is in favor of labor like that, just because they're unable to find labor elsewhere,' Nagle said. 'I've talked to several larger dairy farms in the area that are paying a very competitive wage, but they still cannot find a conventional workforce to come and work for that. It is difficult work, very labor-intensive at times. 'They're having a tough time. It doesn't really seem like wages are a motivating factor. It's more of the work that's entailed.' Both Nagle and Yahner said there is not much migrant labor in the region. 'Law-biding citizens' There are, of course, differences between legal migrant workers and undocumented people entering the country. A Pew Research Center report estimated there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2022. The number is likely higher now. President Donald Trump has made issues with undocumented immigration a focal point of his two terms and three campaigns. The number of encounters at the Mexico-United States border has dropped by a large amount since he took office again in January. Most recently, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 7,180 crossings in March, the lowest monthly total on record, compared to a monthly average of 155,000 over the previous four years, according to CBP. Still questions remain about policies going forward, regarding illegal crossings and migrants entering legally to work in agriculture and other jobs. Nagle said there needs to be a 'realistic' plan to meet agriculture's needs. 'As soon as we can have a comprehensive immigration reform out there that puts everyone on the same page and there's a clear vision of what we can do to get workers that would definitely help agriculture,' Nagle said. Stoltzfus said the migrants who work at Penn- wood have not communicated to him any concerns about their residency status. 'I think the administration has pretty much conveyed to the agriculture industry that they're not going to be going after migrant workers or people who work on farms that are law-biding,' he said. 'They're going after the criminals.' Stoltzfus also proposed what he called a 'simple solution' to the overarching issue. 'If someone comes to the border, wants to come in, and wants to work, and has work lined up, give them an ID,' Stoltzfus said. 'They're law-biding citizens. Give them an ID, allow them to come in and work. 'Why is that a problem? Why can't we do that? To me, it seems so simple. But when you get politics involved, whatever, I don't know.'
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Wall Street overhauls S&P 500 price targets as tariff selloff accelerates
Wall Street analysts rushed to overhaul their S&P 500 price targets and U.S. growth estimates over the weekend, following one of the biggest two-day stock collapses on record, as global investors continue to reprice risk assets in the wake of President Donald Trump's new tariff regime. The President, who doubled-down on his tariff strategy in comments to reporters late Sunday and through his Truth Social account on Monday, is preparing to apply an average levy of around 22% on all of the U.S. trading partners worldwide starting Wednesday, April 8. China has hit back with reciprocal tariffs of 34% on U.S. goods, with Trump subsequently threatening to add another 50% duty on China if the country doesn't rescind those retaliatory levies by April 8. The European Union is expected to follow suit in some fashion over the coming days. Analysts are convinced that the hit to global trade, and its ripple effects across various sectors of the global economy, has sharply increased recession risks and will likely pummel U.S. corporate-earnings growth over the coming quarters. Bank of America strategists, lead by Savita Subramanian, lowered their end-of-year price target for the S&P 500 by nearly 1,000 points, to 5,600 points, in a note published Monday. The benchmark is down more than 17.5% from its Feb. 19 peak and has fallen some 13.5% this year. That marks the third worst year-to-date slump of the new century, and compares with a 9.7% gain over the year-earlier period. "We see a wide range of outcomes from here," Subramanian and her team wrote. "A floor of 4,000 on the S&P 500 would represent about a 35% decline, slightly worse than the typical recessionary decline of 30%." "A 7,000 target would represent a rally of 40% from here, roughly half of the post-Covid rally and roughly two-thirds of the post [Great Financial Crisis] rally off the bear market lows," she added. JP Morgan's head of global market strategy, Dubravko Lakos-Bujas, laid out the bank's range of S&P 500 outcomes in a note published Monday, with a bear case target of 4,000 and a bull case target of 4,800. The bank's base case, however, pegs the benchmark at 5,200 points by the end of the year, a modest 2.5% gain from current levels, based on "partial tariff relief" and a 2026 S&P 500 earnings forecast of $280 per Stoltzfus at Oppenheimer cut the firm's 2025 S&P 500 earnings forecast by $10 to $265 per share, compared with the LSEG consensus estimate of $269 per share, as a result of the tariff hit. However, Stoltzfus cut his end-of-year S&P 500 target only to 5,950 points, a solid 17.3% gain from current levels, arguing that "the equity market appears oversold in our view with uncertainty at levels investors find hard to embrace." In the more immediate term, Richard Saperstein, chief investment officer at New York based Treasury Partners, says stocks are unlikely to rebound from their recent collapse until the tariff situation is ultimately resolved. "The swift and sudden stock market decline is a repricing to reflect an impending recession from the burden of tariffs," he said. "The uncertainty of trading partner retaliation is still weighing on the markets and the elevated multiples we saw back in February are correcting to reflect a slower growth environment." On the growth side, Goldman economists, lead by Jan Hatzius, raised their recession risk odds to 45% from 35% following what the team described as "a sharp tightening in financial conditions, foreign consumer boycotts and a continued spike in policy uncertainty that is likely to depress capital spending by more than we had previously assumed. "This baseline forecast still rests on our standing assumption that the effective U.S. tariff rate will rise by 15 percentage points in total, which would now require a large reduction in the tariffs scheduled to take effect on April 9," Hatzius added. Goldman trimmed its fourth-quarter growth forecast to around 0.5%, and sees the Federal Reserve cutting rates at least three times, starting in June, to offset the rising growth risks. Should the economy slide into recession, Goldman sees a full 200 basis points in Fed rate cuts over the next 12 Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Dallas, argues that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell indicated last week that "the bar for the Fed to cut interest rates in response to a tariff-driven market selloff is considerably higher than the bar to respond to a normal economic shock." "The Fed isn't rushing in to cushion the blow of tariffs to the stock market or the broader economy," Adams said of Powell's speech to an event in Virginia last week. "Powell said the Fed is 'well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.'" More Economic Analysis: Gold's price hit a speed bump; where does it go from here? 7 takeaways from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's remarks Retail sales add new complication to Fed rate cut forecasts
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Wall Street stock bulls throw in the towel as tariff market meltdown 'projects negative outcomes to infinity'
Wall Street strategists are abandoning their bullish views on the US stock market in droves as a sell-off in reaction to President Trump's reciprocal tariff announcements has experts rapidly paring forecasts for 2025. On Sunday night, Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus became the latest strategist to cut his year-end S&P 500 target, lowering his forecast for the benchmark index to close this year at 5,950, down from 7,100. Stoltzfus had entered 2025 as the most bullish strategist on Wall Street. "While our expectations are for cooler heads to prevail in the trade negotiation process that's likely to follow last week's tariff regime announcements the market's reactions and percentage of recent declines in some individual stocks (as well as among major equity indices) suggests to us a need to right size expectations in the near term," Stoltzfus wrote. Oppenheimer's call sees the firm join the likes of Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets, Barclays, Evercore ISI, and Yardeni Research in lowering trimming their year-end S&P 500 forecast. With futures tied to the major indexes pointing to a third day of sharp losses ahead of Monday's market open, Stoltzfus noted that a "negative pitch book" has taken hold among investors. That pitch book, Stoltzfus wrote, "seemingly projects negative outcomes to infinity." Julian Emanuel, who leads the equity, derivatives, and quantitative strategy team at Evercore ISI, lowered his year-end S&P 500 target to 5,600 from 6,800 over the weekend after the massive sell-off that has sent the benchmark index down more than 17% from its Feb. 19 record high. Evercore is now one of three equity strategy teams tracked by Yahoo Finance that has flipped from seeing a positive return for the S&P 500 to projecting a negative year for stocks as Trump's hefty tariffs ripple through the stock market. The S&P 500 finished 2024 at 5,881. Policy uncertainty has already raised asset volatility, and Emanuel warns the impacts which have weighed on survey data like consumer confidence could trickle into other economic data points. This would result in either stagflation, where inflation increases and growth slows, or an "outright recession." "Investors, CEOs, and Consumers dislike uncertainty," Emanuel wrote. In a note early Friday morning before China's reciprocal tariffs were announced, RBC Capital Markets head of US equity strategy Lori Calvasina lowered her year-end S&P 500 target to 5,550 from a prior target of 6,200. That target of 6,200 had already been lowered from 6,600 less than a month ago, a sign of how quickly Wall Street has been forced to rip up its playbook as Trump's policy machinations continue to surprise investors. As Calvasina wrote Friday: "Our old bear case for the index this year has become our new base case." Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Yahoo
Pennsylvania woman who sailed on soon-to-be-sunk S.S. United States recalls sneaking with brother up to first class
HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — The S.S. United States's final voyage from Philadelphia to Florida, where (off the coast) it will become the world's largest artificial reef, was delayed again Tuesday because of high winds. And truth be told, Judy Stoltzfus of the Blain area of Perry County would just as soon wait anyway. 'It's almost like a part of us is leaving,' said Stoltzfus, who traveled with her family on the ship in 1956 from New York to Le Havre, France. Stoltzfus, who is 80, and her brother Jim have long followed the histories of the four ships that took them back and forth — twice — to and from Europe when they were children, and Jim texted her when he learned about the ship's likely fate. No one was texting anyone back when the two, as children, were 'sneaking up to first class,' as Stotzfus recalled. 'We were second class. We would sneak up there to watch themovies that first class had, because they were so much better than second class.' Stoltzfus remembers that, and the xylophone-like chimes the cabin stewards would play as they walked down the halls alerting passengers that it was time to head to the dining rooms. And what she remembers most of all was the ship's speed. The S.S. United States had been designed to be converted, if necessary, into a military vessel and was once clocked traveling 38 knots, nearly twice as fast as most cruise ships today. No large oceanliner before or after it traveled as fast, according to various reports. Other ships 'rode the waves,' Stoltzfus recalled. 'This one almost felt like it was cutting through the waves. It was so fast.' 'The fact that it stood out as the fastest and still the record holder was very interesting to me,' said Stoltzfus's son, Jonathan, who lives in Lower Paxton Township, Dauphin County, and saw a story Monday morning on abc27 News Daybreak about how the ship would soon leave Philadelphia. 'And so that's when the thought came to me — yeah, just going to reach out to you guys and and see if I wasn't the only one that shared that sentiment,' Jonathan Stoltzfus said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
