Amazon's palm-reading payment technology will expand to dozens of Whole Foods locations across California. Shoppers will be able to pay for groceries by scanning the palm of their hand at checkout devices instead of using cash or card, as this is more evidence of the emergence of a cashless society. 

The Verge reported that 65 Whole Foods stores in California would soon get the new payment technology. This is the most extensive rollout by the e-commerce giant since announcing the payment system in 2020. 

The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.

Hiring freezes and layoffs are becoming more common in 2022, as U.S. businesses look to slash costs ahead of a possible recession.

Understandably, this has a lot of people worried. In June 2022, Insight Global found that 78% of American workers fear they will lose their job in the next recession. Additionally, 56% said they aren’t financially prepared, and 54% said they would take a pay cut to avoid being laid off.

In this infographic, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu visualizes major layoffs announced in 2022 by publicly-traded U.S. corporations.

“This really is unprecedented...

In the United States, we are supposed to have civilized transfer of power.  That’s all coming to an end.  I am not being dramatic here.  From a legal perspective, this is completely unprecedented.  The danger of this is once they have done this, if the Republicans are ever allowed to get back into power, they would only end up doing the same thing to the Democrats...

It’s striking a real deathblow to the very idea of a democracy.  We are not, at least we were not until today, someplace like Guatemala where you throw the opposition in jail, kill them or whatever you do.  This is what’s going on.  They are so afraid of Trump running in 2024 that this is just over the top.  Once they did this, there is no end.”

About 18% of Americans now own a video doorbell. That means a significant and growing slice of American neighborhoods are under a form of intermittent surveillance. If the surveillance video and associated data were the exclusive property of individual homeowners, it might not be of much concern. 

However, that's not the case. For example, Ring, the company behind the top-selling brand, maintains a vast database on its users and their cameras. Ring is an Amazon subsidiary, thanks to the tech giant's 2018 purchase of the company for over $1 billion.

Ring says it doesn't sell its customers data, but sometimes it gives it away for free -- to the police. In the first half of 2022 alone, Ring fielded more than 3,500 requests from law enforcement agencies. 

Biden should learn from Harding and his successor President Calvin Coolidge to correct government failures and allow markets to heal so that we can enjoy abundant economic prosperity again.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the U.S. suffered a severe economic downturn. The late economist Milton Friedman described this as one of the most “severe on record.” The depression of 1920-1921 is often forgotten because it was short-lived, but it offers policy lessons that can be applied to our current situation.

Prior to and during the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson led a massive expansion of the federal government, which included the creation of the Federal Reserve and personal income tax system. After the war, markets corrected from those government failures throughout the economy triggering a steep economic downturn.

The business and agriculture sectors were hit particularly hard by the depression of 1920-1921, which led to bankruptcies and farm foreclosures....

By Simon White, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and reporter

Today’s drop in inflation potentially sets the stage for less tightening - or even easing - in the medium term, leading to a resurgence in inflation later in the cycle, eventually requiring a significant re-tightening of monetary conditions. Even if today’s fall in consumer-price inflation means we are over the peak, and it continues to slow, we are still probably only in the first act of a three act play.

The 1970s are an imperfect analogy, but they have one crucial aspect in common with today: the monetization of large fiscal deficits. Runaway inflation is almost always preceded by large government borrowing financed by the central bank.

Let’s break this down. Every national government has “global interests.” Governments naturally do whatever they can to boost dynamics favorable to the state and nation, and obstruct or hinder dynamics injurious to the state or nation.

As a general rule, nations have relatively few levers they can pull to influence global finance, trade, growth, currencies or the geopolitical balance of power.

One such lever is the interest the state pays on its sovereign bonds.

It was seven months ago today, when looking at the latest real-time rent data from the likes of Apartment List and Zillow, we highlighted to readers that the surge in rents has finally peaked as the annual rate of rental increases had capped out at 18% and when Owner-Equivalent Rent - the broadest and most closely watched housing/shelter/rent series in the CPI - was just starting to move higher. This was notable not only because this was around the time the Fed finally realized inflation was not transitory, but also because with its traditional 4-7 month delay, it meant that shelter inflation had already peaked (on an annual basis) and its rate of Y/Y growth was now declining; it also meant that it would take readers of the CPI report - such as the Fed - about 4-7 months to figure out what our readers already knew in January.

This general tactic has not changed since then. Just this month, for example, Vanity Fair referred to the January 6 riots as "Trump's attempted coup" Last month, Vox called it "Trump's cuckoo coup." Moreover, anti-Trump politicians have repeatedly referred to the riot as a coup, and "attempted coup" has become the standard term of choice for the January 6 panel. 

At the time, it was obvious that if the riot was a coup at all, it failed utterly. Thus, the debate is now over whether or not it was an attempted coup. On January 8, 2021, I argued the riot was not an attempted coup. Now, 18 months later, after months of "investigation" and testimony to the January 6 committee, we've learned new details about the events that occurred that day. And now I can say with even more confidence: the January 6 riot was not an attempted coup. 

Update (1700ET): According to Newsweek, the FBI had a 'confidential human source' (a mole) inside Mar-a-Lago, who was "able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents."

Among first-glance takeaways are triumphs by four candidates endorsed by former President Trump and the narrow victory by “squad” honcho Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in her Democratic primary.

Meanwhile, a Minnesota Republican congressional candidate won two races on the same day, and Vermont voters are positioned to elect the state’s first woman to Congress.

A few weeks after Netflix finally surprised with an earnings beat after what seemed like an eternity of misses, moments ago Disney also came out of the Q2 earnings gate blazing, with numbers that smashed expectations (the company added 14.4 million new Disney+ subs, smashing estimates of 9.8 million) and announcing that it is raising the price of its flagship Disney+ streaming service by 38% to $11, part of a plan to generate more revenue for its money-losing online businesses and build on third-quarter results that beat estimates for sales, profit and subscriber growth. Prices for some packages that include Hulu and ESPN+ will also rise. The uber-woke mouse also took a page out of the NFLX playbook and said that on Dec. 8, Disney will introduce an ad-supported version of the flagship streaming service.

Here are the details:

"I am pretty cynical, and hardly antibusiness in general, or private equity in particular," Summers tweeted on Monday, "but I am appalled by the end stages of the Senate bill’s passage."