(NEW YORK) — The U.S. economy grew at a robust pace over three months ending in September, slowing slightly from the previous quarter but continuing to dispel any concern about a possible slowdown. The fresh report marks one of the last major pieces of economic data before the presidential election.
U.S. GDP grew at a 2.8% annualized rate over three months ending in September. That figure fell slightly below economists’ expectations.
Economic growth was fueled by surge in consume spending, an uptick in exports and strong federal government spending, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said.
The new data arrived weeks after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate a half of a percentage point. The landmark decision dialed back a years-long fight against inflation and offered relief for borrowers saddled with high costs.
Inflation has slowed dramatically from a peak of about 9% in 2022, though it remains slightly higher than the Fed’s target of 2%.
Meanwhile, the labor market has proven resilient. Employers hired 254,000 workers in September, far exceeding economist expectations of 150,000 jobs added, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%, hovering near a 50-year low.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate a half of a percentage point on Wednesday in a landmark decision that dials back its years-long fight against inflation and delivers relief for borrowers saddled with high costs.
The central bank’s first rate cut since 2020 came after a recent stretch of data had established the key conditions for a rate cut: falling inflation and slowing job gains.
In theory, lower interest rates help stimulate economic activity and boost employment. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 200 points in the immediate aftermath of the announcement on Wednesday afternoon.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq also climbed following the news.
“The time has come for policy to adjust,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last month at an annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “The direction of travel is clear.”
Inflation has slowed dramatically from a peak of about 9% in 2022, though it remains slightly higher than the Fed’s target of 2%.
Meanwhile, the job market has cooled. A weaker-than-expected jobs report in each of the last two months has stoked concern among some economists.
“We will do everything we can to support a strong labor market as we make further progress toward price stability,” Powell said last month.
Prior to the decision, the chances of a rate cut were are all but certain, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
Market observers, however, were divided over whether the Fed will impose its typical cut of a quarter of a percentage point, or opt for a larger half-point cut. The tool estimated the probability of a half-point cut at 65% and the odds of a quarter-point cut at 35%.
A half-point cut risked overstimulating the economy and rekindling elevated inflation, while a quarter-point cut threatened to delay the type of economic jumpstart that may be required to avert a recession, Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told ABC News in a statement.
“Rarely have market expectations been so torn” on the eve of a rate decision, Shah added.
Borrowers should not expect immediate relief, Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at NerdWallet, told ABC News in a statement prior to the decision.
“This initial rate cut will have little immediate impact,” Renter said. “I anticipate many consumers and business owners will take the beginning of this change in monetary policy as a sign of hope.”
The rate cut on Wednesday would goes into effect less than 50 days before the November election.
The decision deviates from the policy approach taken by the Fed prior to many recent presidential elections, a Reuters analysis found. Policy rates were left unchanged for six to 12 months before the 2020, 2016, 2012 and 2000 U.S. presidential elections, according to Reuters.
To be sure, the Fed says it bases its decisions on economic conditions and operates as an independent government body.
When asked about the 2024 election at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in December, Powell said, “We don’t think about politics.”
This undeveloped property in Randolph, New Jersey, was sold in December 2023, but the owners did not place the land on the market. (Jared Kofsky/ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — When a man claiming to own a vacant Randolph, New Jersey, investment property called real estate agent Lisa Shaw last summer, she thought it would be the start of another typical real estate transaction in the Garden State suburbs.
“He said he had this piece of property for over 25 years in Randolph, even though he had never been to Randolph,” Shaw told ABC News.
She said she asked the man why he wanted to put this land on the market.
“He said, ‘Well, real estate is really high right now.’ He thought he could get the best dollar for it,” Shaw said. “He also told me his wife was ill and he needed the proceeds from that money for his wife’s illness.”
Shaw says she did not realize that not only did the man on the phone not actually own the property in question — but that this one phone call would ultimately connect that vacant lot to an alleged international crime web that authorities say involves fake documents ranging from Canada to Vietnam.
The incident is just the latest example of what the FBI says is a growing and troubling new form of fraud affecting unsuspecting landowners nationwide.
“Who would ever think that somebody would sell your own property from right under your nose, without your knowledge, and be able to dupe the system and everyone involved in that transaction?” Jim Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the FBI for New York, told ABC News Chief Business Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis.
‘No one suspected it’
Shaw, who has been selling properties in and around Randolph for more than two decades, says that after she spoke with the purported property owner, she asked him for documentation.
The man said that he and his wife were Canadian citizens living in England, and he provided a British address and copies of what appeared to be their driver’s licenses from the Canadian province of Ontario.
What Shaw didn’t know was that the property in Randolph was actually owned by a husband and wife from Texas. When the driver’s licenses arrived, they had the names of the real owners — just not their Texas address.
“Everything looked fine,” Shaw said, explaining that she proceeded to put the land up for sale and immediately received around 10 offers.
But the licenses turned out not to be fine. An official with Canada’s Peel Regional Police told ABC News that both identification cards were fake.
Although the licenses contained real addresses in the Toronto area, the owner of the home at one of those addresses told ABC News that she has no idea how her address ended up being listed on the fake identification card, and that she had nothing to do with an attempted property sale in New Jersey. The owner of the home at the British address, an attorney, said the same thing — but he suspected that scammers could have found his home address in England because he used to own property in Florida.
Back when the property in Randolph was getting ready to be sold, Shaw says no one involved detected that this was a scam.
“No one suspected it, not the attorneys, not myself, not the title company,” she said.
When the supposed property owner asked Shaw about the offers that had come in, Shaw said she told him that the highest one was for $140,000, and that he told her to immediately accept the offer.
Sale documents were soon prepared and the man provided paperwork that purportedly showed he had gotten the deed notarized at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam.
In December, the deal closed — all while the real property owners had no clue that the transaction had taken place. The supposed seller asked for the $140,000 payment to be split in half and sent to two different banks, according to Shaw.
But the title company encountered trouble while attempting to submit the second $70,000 payment.
“That set off the red flag,” explained Shaw, who said that the title company was then able to get in touch with the son of the real owners. “We knew it was definitely identity fraud.”
But by that point, it was too late. Shaw said that the initial $70,000 payment had already gone through, and the supposed seller had disappeared.
The buyer that paid $70,000 to the fraudulent seller is still listed in municipal and county tax records as the property’s new owner — but since the original owners did not authorize the sale, it remains unclear what will happen to the land now.
“It was a real shock to find out that people were devious [enough] to do this kind of thing,” Shaw said.
‘A lot of litigation’
ABC News has learned that the FBI is now investigating the alleged scammers who fraudulently sold the lot in Randolph — though the owners of the British and Canadian homes that were used as fake addresses said they have not yet been contacted by American law enforcement authorities. The FBI would not confirm or deny details of the investigation.
Dennehy, who was previously FBI Newark’s Special Agent in Charge, is urging owners of vacant land to remain vigilant and check their property records, as the bureau has reported a 500% increase in vacant land fraud over the last four years.
“It all comes down to due diligence on behalf of the buyer, the real estate agent, the title companies and beyond,” Dennehy said, explaining that scam artists pretend to be real landowners by using publicly accessible property information.
Dennehy cited another New Jersey case in which a property owner found out that her land was fraudulently sold when the new owner showed up with construction equipment.
The FBI is encouraging real estate agents and property owners who suspect fraud to contact authorities before money changes hands.
“It’s probably going to be a whole lot of litigation for many, many months and years to come, if that money is already gone,” Dennehy said. “Technically you’re no longer the owner of the property, so now it has to get into civil lawsuits, a lot of lawyers [with] a lot of litigation involved in order to try to reclaim what’s yours to begin with.”
‘Vacant land is very easy to steal’
As a result of these scams, real estate industry groups in parts of the country with large swaths of vacant land are issuing urgent warnings to their members.
“Vacant land is very easy to steal because not everybody is going to be checking up on a vacant piece of property once a month,” Emily Bowden, executive officer of the Sussex County Association of REALTORS in New Jersey, told ABC News. “Not everyone who owns that land necessarily lives in our area.”
Bowden said real estate agents should try to meet with sellers in person whenever possible, make sure that their mailing addresses line up, and assess how well sellers actually know the lay of the land that they are seeking to put on the market.
A desire to sell a vacant lot as quickly as possible can be suspicious, Bowden said, adding that real estate agents who do not do their due diligence when representing fraudulent sellers could face lawsuits.
Derek Doernbach, who sells properties on the Jersey Shore, says he was contacted by three purported sellers who he believes were actually scammers. He said that, as a result of his suspicions, he declined to list any of the three properties.
According to Doernbach, all of the supposed sellers sent him Canadian driver’s licenses containing the exact same picture and address as the license that was presented to Shaw by the alleged scammer in the Randolph case.
“Without a doubt, this has to be the same people, or it’s just a ring on the dark web that is circulating the same driver’s license around,” Doernbach said.
A year after she was first contacted by the alleged Randolph scammer, Shaw says she wants to make sure other real estate agents remain on the lookout.
“If you have a piece of property that someone wants to sell and it’s vacant property, really, really get your feelers up on that one because there could be a potential fraud,” she said. “It’s a very easy way that they’re doing this, and it’s successful. And nobody knows until after the fact.”
(NEW YORK) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk has kept busy since Election Day, advising President-elect Donald Trump and receiving an appointment to co-lead a new government efficiency commission.
Musk has also found time to promote Trump in scores of posts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which he owns. But such advocacy appears to have driven some X users to seek alternatives.
One such app, Bluesky, has drawn attention as a possible X rival and has amassed a total of 20 million users to date. Its growth accelerated in the aftermath of the election, when Bluesky added one million users in a single week.
Launched by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky has attracted some prominent users in recent days, including comedian Ben Stiller, author Stephen King, and pop star Lizzo.
Here’s what to know about Bluesky, and how to join:
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a text-oriented social media platform on which users can post messages as long as 300 characters. Like X, the messages posted on Bluesky appear on a newsfeed displayed to users. The app is available on iOS and Android.
The platform operates on an open framework, meaning that users can post their messages to a server tailored for specific interests or communities. The system design resembles that which is used on another text-first app, Mastodon, as well as the decentralized platform Discord.
Bluesky began in 2019 as a venture at Twitter overseen by Dorsey, and was launched as an independent company in 2022, the year after he left Twitter.
Development of the site started after a 2020 tweet from Dorsey announcing Twitter’s plans to fund a decentralized social media platform, Bluesky said in a blog post. The eventual leaders at Bluesky were among those who sent direct messages to Dorsey in response to his post, the blog added.
Who owns Bluesky?
The board of directors at Bluesky features Dorsey as well as Jeremie Miller, the founder in the late 1990s of a free instant messaging service called Jabber.
Bluesky’s CEO is Jay Graber, who formerly founded an events-oriented social media site called Happening and worked as a software engineer on a cryptocurrency called Zcash, according to LinkedIn. She also serves on the Bluesky board.
The company is owned by Graber as well as “the Bluesky team,” the Bluesky website says.
While Bluesky has retained a traditional corporate structure featuring a board and chief executive, the company said it aspires to take control of content away from a top-down entity and return it to creators.
“Traditional social networks are often closed platforms with a central authority,” the website says. “There’s a small group of people who control those companies, and they have total control over how users can use the platform and what developers can build.”
Dorsey criticized Musk’s leadership at Twitter on Bluesky last year, saying that things “all went south” at the platform after Musk’s acquisition, CNBC reported.
Is Bluesky a viable alternative to X?
The steady growth of Bluesky has made it a destination for an increasing number of celebrities, elected officials and government entities. But the platform remains much smaller than X or the Meta-owned competitor, Threads.
Bluesky boasts roughly 20 million users, which amounts to less than 10% of the 229 million daily active users disclosed by Twitter in a June 2022 earnings report. X’s user data is no longer publicly available since Musk took the company private.
In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads had exceeded 175 million monthly active users.
How do you join Bluesky?
During Bluesky’s initial years, users could only join the platform if they received an invitation. The policy aimed to limit the app’s user base as it underwent testing.
In February, however, the platform made itself available to all users. Individuals or organizations can navigate to the platform and follow instructions to create an account.
