(NEW YORK) — It’s a monster mash at McDonald’s, with the new limited-edition Happy Meal Boo Buckets making their return to the Golden Arches.
On Oct. 15, the iconic plastic buckets, which make for perfect trick-or-treating vessels, will return to participating McDonald’s restaurants nationwide while supplies last.
The nostalgic pails have a fresh look this year, with new monster designs in four colors: white, orange, green and, for the first time, blue.
McDonald’s lovers also can give their Boo Bucket a custom look with themed stickers like ears, wings and more for a more monstrous vibe.
The Michael Kors Store on Rodeo Drive on Feb. 23, 2017 in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Fg/bauer-griffin/GC Images via Getty Images, FILE)
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Trade Commission is asking a federal judge in New York to block the $8.5 billion merger of Tapestry, the company behind Coach, Kate Spade, and Capri, which controls Michael Kors.
In April, the FTC sued to block the sale, arguing that these brands dominate what’s known as the “accessible luxury” market and that if they combined, consumers would suffer by paying higher prices.
“This has to be the first time the focus of a federal court hearing turned to a $279 Kate Spade tote described as ‘colorful, joyful, feminine, green and white seen on Emily in Paris,” ABC News senior investigative reporter and correspondent Aaron Katersky said on Good Morning America Tuesday.
Tapestry argues the FTC is ignoring the reality of a marketplace, in which consumers have a lot of choices, suggesting it takes a mere stroll through Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s to see Gucci, Kors and Calvin Klein bags fighting for attention.
Michael Kors himself testified last month during a hearing, telling the judge there’s already plenty of competition for handbags, noting that he learned about one brand when he saw a photo of pop superstar Taylor Swift wearing an Aupen bag similar to those made by Kate Spade.
Kors also testified his handbags have “reached a point of brand fatigue” and a lawyer arguing in favor of the merger said it would revitalize the Michael Kors brand, so consumers have yet another choice. The goal, he said, is to sell more handbags to consumers.
The judge took these arguments under advisement and could rule at any time.
(NEW YORK) — Oil prices climbed more than 3% on Tuesday in the immediate aftermath of an Iranian missile attack on Israel.
The spike in prices is expected to push up the price of U.S. gasoline, experts told ABC News.
Drivers could face a price increase of between 10 and 15 cents per gallon, experts estimated. The national average price of a gallon of gas currently stands at $3.20, AAA data showed.
A further escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran could send oil and gas prices significantly higher, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston.
“Clearly this will have a huge impact on gas prices,” Krishnamoorti told ABC News. “There’s no doubt about that.”
Iran said the attack on Tuesday was retaliation for a wave of assassinations carried out by Israel over the last several weeks targeting Hezbollah leaders. Israel will have a “significant response” to Iran’s attack, an Israeli official told ABC News.
While sanctions have constrained Iranian oil output in recent years, the nation asserts control over the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a trading route that facilitates the transport of about 15% of global oil supply.
Passage through the Suez Canal, another important shipping route for crude oil, could be impacted by further attacks, as happened with Yemen-based Houthi attacks on freight ships earlier in the war, Krishnamoorti said.
Despite a recent uptick, the price of oil stands well below a 2022 peak reached when the blazing-hot economic rebound from the pandemic collided with a supply shortage imposed by the Russia-Ukraine war. Gas prices, meanwhile, have plummeted in recent months.
The U.S. set a record for crude oil production in 2023, averaging 12.9 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency.
The surge in U.S. production would help limit the impact of a possible supply disruption, though oil prices are set on a global market, where a major supply shock could not be entirely accounted for with U.S. oil output, Timothy Fitzgerald, a professor of business economics at the University of Tennessee who studies the petroleum industry, told ABC News.
“This is less troubling than it would’ve been a generation ago,” Fitzgerald said. “Today, we export more crude oil than we import.”
If both sides deescalate, the price of crude oil could quickly drop back to where it stood before the Iranian attack on Tuesday, Fitzgerald added.
“There would be no lasting importance of that,” Fitzgerald said.
The rise in oil prices comes at a relatively quiet period in the U.S. gasoline market. Drivers have enjoyed a sharp decline in gasoline prices over recent months, in part due to sluggish demand for gas as the busy summer traveling season has given way to an autumn slowdown.
Still, a regional war in the Middle East could upend the market and spike prices, experts said.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina condemned Iran’s missile attack on Israel, calling it a “breaking point” on Tuesday and urging President Joe Biden’s administration to respond.
Graham called for oil refineries to be “hit and hit hard” and said his prayers are “with the people of Israel.”
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are monitoring the Iranian attack from the White House Situation Room. Biden directed the U.S. military to aid Israel’s defense against Iranian attacks and shoot down missiles.
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin and Jordana Miller contributed to this report.
Downed trees on a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Sept.r 29, 2024, in Rutherfordton, N.C. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Helene flooded properties and devastated buildings in recent days as it tore across a vast stretch from Florida to Tennessee.
Over the coming days and weeks, households will start to rebuild — and the costs will be enormous. Some homeowners will struggle to afford it.
The devastation arrives after years of skyrocketing prices for home and flood insurance that have left some households without coverage and others choosing low-cost plans with weaker policies, experts told ABC News. The increase owes in part to a surge in costs for building materials as well as the risk of more frequent or intense storms posed by climate change, they said.
Homeowners at properties damaged by Helene are likely to see their insurance costs rise even further, imposing financial strain for years to come, the experts added.
“There’s no question that the burden on households’ budgets has increased in recent years,” Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told ABC News. “It has gotten substantially more expensive to live in harm’s way.”
Helene, which made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Big Bend on record.
More than 100 people have been killed by Helene.
Helene dumped more than 30 inches of rain on North Carolina, producing the biggest local flooding in recorded history. The path of the storm’s devastation has spanned more than 600 miles.
Homeowners are set to draw on insurance policies that have become much more expensive in recent years.
In 2023, the nationwide average premium for owner-occupied homeowners insurance climbed about 11%, rising three times more than the overall inflation rate, S&P Global found in January.
Beginning a few years earlier, insurance prices soared even higher for homeowners in the region impacted by Helene. In Florida, the average home insurance price jumped a staggering 43% from January 2018 to December 2023, S&P Global said. Over that same period, the average insurance price for homeowners increased about 36% in North Carolina.
Rising prices leave customers less likely to purchase strong plans with ample benefits in the event of a disaster, Shan Ge, a professor at New York University who studies insurance and climate change, told ABC News.
“With the costs going up, people are getting less insurance and that’s going to be a problem when a disaster like this hits,” Ge said. “The recovery will be slower and the financial effects will be bigger.”
Homeowners insurance sometimes includes separate hurricane insurance, which typically involves an additional deductible paid by the consumer for damage incurred by a hurricane.
Neither homeowners insurance nor hurricane insurance covers flood damage, however. Instead, consumers must purchase flood insurance, but a far lower share of homeowners enrolls in flood coverage than home insurance.
The damage caused by Helene could expose the difficulties caused by that relatively low enrollment rate in flood insurance, Jeff Waters, an analyst at Moody’s Analytics subsidiary RMS, told ABC News.
“With an event like Helene where we are seeing all of the water, there’s likely to be more uninsured losses happening due to water because you don’t have as much take up there as you would on the hurricane policy side of things,” Waters said.
The price of flood insurance has also increased in recent years, and it’s expected to rise at a faster rate for some households going forward as the National Flood Insurance Program puts in place what it has called “Risk Rating 2.0.”
The new approach will set the price of flood insurance based on a calculation of each home’s risk of flooding, altering a previous policy that examined whether a home belonged to a general at-risk area.
Some homes damaged by Helene will face a price crunch as they weather an increase in flood insurance costs, alongside the anticipated increase in homeowners insurance that typically follows a hurricane, some experts said.
“It’s pretty clear in the aftermath of these disasters that homeowners insurance premiums rise a lot,” Ishita Sen, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School who studies home insurance rates, told ABC News.
The prospect of higher insurance costs could prompt difficult choices for homeowners and their communities, said Keys.
“This higher cost of living in disaster-prone areas is hitting households’ pocket books in ways that we haven’t seen,” Keys said. “Eventually it’ll induce substantial chances in these communities, whether that’s deciding where to live or how to build.”
(NEW YORK) — Tens of thousands of U.S. dockworkers are set to walk off the job early Tuesday morning, clogging dozens of ports along the East and Gulf coasts and potentially raising consumer prices ahead of the holiday season.
“Moments ago, the first large-scale eastern dockworker strike in 47 years began at ports from Maine to Texas, including at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement Tuesday.
“In preparation for this moment, New York has been working around the clock to ensure that our grocery stores and medical facilities have the essential products they need,” Hochul added.
In a statement to ABC News early Tuesday, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) confirmed the union’s first coastwide strike in nearly 50 years was underway. The statement said that “tens of thousands of ILA rank-and-file members” started to set up picket lines at shipping ports up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts as of 12:01 am.
“We are prepared to fight as long as necessary, to stay out on strike for whatever period of time it takes, to get the wages and protections against automation our ILA members deserve,” ILA President Harold Daggett said.
The ports account for more than half of the nation’s container imports, facilitating the transport of everything from toys to fresh fruit to nuclear reactors, JPMorgan senior equity analyst Brian Ossenbeck said in a report shared with ABC News.
A prolonged work stoppage of several weeks or months could rekindle inflation for some goods and trigger layoffs at manufacturers as raw materials dry up, experts said.
“A strike would be very, very disruptive,” said Jason Miller, a professor of supply-chain management at Michigan State University who closely tracks imports, told ABC News.
“You can’t take all this freight and either send it to other ports or put it on airplanes,” Miller added. “There is no plan B.”
The ILA, the union representing East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, is seeking higher wages and a ban on the use of some automated equipment.
“ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing,” the ILA told ABC News in a statement on Monday. “Meanwhile, ILA dedicated longshore workers continue to be crippled by inflation due to USMX’s unfair wage packages.”
The U.S. Maritime Alliance, or USMX, an organization bargaining on behalf of the dockworkers’ employers, declined to respond to an ABC News request for comment.
President Joe Biden retains the power to prevent or halt a strike under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Biden on Monday urging the White House to intervene, which it has previously said it will not do. The White House told ABC News in a statement that it has been in contact with both the union and management in recent days.
“This weekend, senior officials have been in touch with USMX representatives urging them to come to a fair agreement fairly and quickly – one that reflects the success of the companies. Senior officials have also been in touch with the ILA to deliver the same message,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said.
A prolonged East Coast and Gulf Coast port strike could moderately increase prices for a range of goods, experts told ABC News. That upward pressure on prices would result from a shortage of products caught up in the supply chain blockage, leaving too many dollars chasing after too few items, they added.
Food products are especially vulnerable to an uptick in prices, since food could spoil if suppliers sent the products ahead of time to minimize the strike impact, as they have done for some other goods, Adam Kamins, a senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
Additionally, a significant share of the nation’s imported auto parts pass through the ports impacted by a potential strike, which could cause an increase in vehicle prices if the strike persists.
Price increases have slowed dramatically from a peak in 2022, but inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%. A strike could prevent further progress, according to Kamins.
“We’re not talking about prices skyrocketing by any means, but I think it halts the momentum we’ve had over the last year or so getting inflation back in the bottle,” he said.
In 2002, a strike among workers at West Coast ports lasted 11 days before then-President George W. Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act and ended the standoff. However, the last time East Coast and Gulf Coast workers went on strike, in 1977, the work stoppage lasted seven weeks.
Tuesday’s potential work stoppage follows high-profile strikes undertaken last year by auto workers as well as Hollywood writers and actors. Most recently, 33,000 Boeing workers walked off the job in early September, demanding better pay and retirement benefits.
“Trade unions all over the country have been going out on strike,” Sriram Narayanan, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told ABC News. “We’re seeing that happen now at the ports.”
Ahead of the historic strike, the president of the Teamsters labor union, Sean O’Brien, released a letter of solidarity to the International Longshoreman’s Association, saying, “The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, including our members in the freight industry, stand in full solidarity with the International Longshoremen’s Association as they fight for a fair and just contract with the ocean carriers represented by USMX.”
“Don’t forget –Teamsters do not cross picket lines. The Teamsters Union is 100 percent committed to standing with our Longshoremen brothers and sisters until they win the contract they deserve,” O’Brien said.
(NEW YORK) — Back in the 1980s, Honda sold a city car in Japan called, appropriately, the Honda City. It would have been a normal hatchback, were it not for what came in the trunk: a Honda motor scooter that drivers could fold up and store in the trunk of the City. It was called the Motocompo, and it was a vehicle that belonged to a sector transportation experts call “micromobility.”
David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, noted that the segment encompasses a range of vehicles.
“Scooters, it can include bikes and e-bikes. Cargo e-bikes sometimes. Where it starts to get a little hazy is when you get into things like mopeds which are a little bit faster. And even golf carts some people group into this category of micromobility,” Zipper told ABC Audio.
The segment has seen an explosion of growth in the last 15 to 20 years, he said. The average price of a new car in the U.S. is just under $48,000, according to recent data from Cox Automotive. And while that’s down slightly from its 2022 peak, for many Americans, it’s still expensive to buy a car. That’s why Zipper said many are now turning to the micromobility sector.
“You’ve seen a variety of different types of innovations and new technologies take hold that have allowed for a lot of different form factors and a lot of different use cases of micromobility,” Zipper said.
Consequently, new companies are emerging to serve the burgeoning market. In an unassuming New York City building across from Brooklyn’s McCarren Park, a startup called Infinite Machine is putting the finishing touches on its take on a micromobility vehicle: an electric scooter called the P1.
The first thing that stands out about the P1 — the company’s first product — is the looks. The scooter has flat, slab-like body panels with sharp edges, all trimmed in black and what looks like stainless steel.
“We were inspired by vehicles like the Delorean and the Cybertruck,” Eddie Cohen, the president of Infinite Machine, said.
He founded the company alongside his brother, CEO Joe Cohen, and the two first unveiled the P1 to the public in 2023.
“Imagine like a Vespa from the future,” Joe Cohen said. “It’s made from aluminum and steel … and it’s super high performance.”
The Cohens told ABC Audio this is the first vehicle in its class to come with Apple CarPlay. The phone-mirroring technology is viewable on a small touchscreen, where riders can also pull up exterior cameras. They’re primarily for “safety and insurance purposes,” Joe Cohen said, but the cameras have other uses.
“If you want to make some content on your ride and record your commute,” he said. “Also when it’s parked if someone screws with your vehicle, you can record that and use that as evidence for the authorities.”
The P1 can go about 60 miles on a charge, according to Infinite Machine. The battery of the P1, which is located in the scooter’s floor, is removable, meaning city dwellers can take it into their homes or apartments to fill up on electricity.
“The power needs for a vehicle like ours are so much lower. You can charge this thing with a normal outlet, you don’t need a special charger. So the question of like infrastructure — charging infrastructure — it’s not relevant for a vehicle like ours,” Joe Cohen said.
Advancements in battery technology are a big reason the micromobility segment is booming, and not just for electric scooters like the P1, Zipper noted.
“Turns out when you stick a battery on a bicycle — it becomes far more useful,” he said.
Electric power allows micromobility vehicles to behave more like traditional cars, according to Zipper.
“Maybe you want to arrive at work without being really sweaty,” he said. “Or you are having some mobility issues and you’re a little bit older and you really value that extra oomph to get up a hill. Maybe you want to be able to power a bicycle with a storage area to bring your kids to school or to get groceries.”
But riding a bike — even an electrically assisted one — in certain big-city environments raises safety concerns.
Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates more than 360,000 injuries related to micromobility devices were treated in emergency rooms across the country between 2017 to 2022. In that timeframe, there were more than 230 deaths, according to the commission.
A micromobility device like a bike or a scooter having to share the road with cars and trucks is “a recipe for in the best case scenario discomfort and in the worst case scenario a crash that could lead to death,” Zipper said.
He suggested the solution is to build out dedicated infrastructure: things like bike lanes that are protected by concrete barriers. It’s something he said many major metropolitan areas are already doing.
“In the last fifteen years or so, you’ve seen a lot of cities in the US, and frankly in other parts of the world too, invest a lot of money and resources in creating safe spaces for people who want to use a scooter, or a bicycle, or any of these other versions of micromobility that we’re talking about,” Zipper said.
But it hasn’t been smooth sailing. Community boards have clashed with homeowners and businesses in cities across the country over the rollout of dedicated bike infrastructure, with detractors angry about losing valuable parking space. In one New York City neighborhood, residents even made lawn signs reading “No Bike Lanes” in big bold letters. Meanwhile, organizations like the NYC E-Vehicle Alliance have cropped up to advocate for micromobility regulation amid rising rates of injuries and deaths.
In the meantime, Joe Cohen of Infinite Machine said at least some of this is going to fall on riders practicing safe driving habits.
“Until our city looks more friendly toward small vehicles like this, we have to just be really aware,” he said. “And our job is to not only design really safe vehicles on the hardware side, but also to educate our riders about how to be defensive and to take their own safety seriously.”
The P1 retails for $10,000 — putting it firmly at the top end of the micromobility market.
“We know we’re more expensive than the competition and we did that intentionally because we did not want to cheap out or value-engineer this product,” Eddie Cohen said.
His brother put it a slightly different way.
“It’s cheaper than the cheapest cars,” Joe Cohen said.
A little lower down on the price ladder is the Motocompacto, an electric scooter Honda unveiled last year that retails for around $1,000. It doesn’t have nearly as much space as the Infinite Machine, and just a fraction of the electric range. But when it’s not being used, it folds up into a briefcase-like shape that can be stowed in the trunk of a car.
(NEW YORK) — Tens of thousands of U.S. dockworkers are set to walk off the job early Tuesday morning, clogging dozens of ports along the East and Gulf coasts and potentially raising consumer prices ahead of the holiday season.
The ports account for more than half of the nation’s container imports, facilitating the transport of everything from toys to fresh fruit to nuclear reactors, JPMorgan senior equity analyst Brian Ossenbeck said in a report shared with ABC News.
A prolonged work stoppage of several weeks or months could rekindle inflation for some goods and trigger layoffs at manufacturers as raw materials dry up, experts said.
“A strike would be very, very disruptive,” said Jason Miller, a professor of supply-chain management at Michigan State University who closely tracks imports, told ABC News.
“You can’t take all this freight and either send it to other ports or put it on airplanes,” Miller added. “There is no plan B.”
The International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA), the union representing East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, is seeking higher wages and a ban on the use of some automated equipment.
“ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing,” the ILA told ABC News in a statement on Monday. “Meanwhile, ILA dedicated longshore workers continue to be crippled by inflation due to USMX’s unfair wage packages.”
The U.S. Maritime Alliance, or USMX, an organization bargaining on behalf of the dockworkers’ employers, declined to respond to an ABC News request for comment.
President Joe Biden retains the power to prevent or halt a strike under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Biden on Monday urging the White House to intervene, which it has previously said it will not do. The White House told ABC News in a statement that it has been in contact with both the union and management in recent days.
“This weekend, senior officials have been in touch with USMX representatives urging them to come to a fair agreement fairly and quickly – one that reflects the success of the companies. Senior officials have also been in touch with the ILA to deliver the same message,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said.
A prolonged East Coast and Gulf Coast port strike could moderately increase prices for a range of goods, experts told ABC News. That upward pressure on prices would result from a shortage of products caught up in the supply chain blockage, leaving too many dollars chasing after too few items, they added.
Food products are especially vulnerable to an uptick in prices, since food could spoil if suppliers sent the products ahead of time to minimize the strike impact, as they have done for some other goods, Adam Kamins, a senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
Additionally, a significant share of the nation’s imported auto parts pass through the ports impacted by a potential strike, which could cause an increase in vehicle prices if the strike persists.
Price increases have slowed dramatically from a peak in 2022, but inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%. A strike could prevent further progress, according to Kamins.
“We’re not talking about prices skyrocketing by any means, but I think it halts the momentum we’ve had over the last year or so getting inflation back in the bottle,” he said.
In 2002, a strike among workers at West Coast ports lasted 11 days before then-President George W. Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act and ended the standoff. However, the last time East Coast and Gulf Coast workers went on strike, in 1977, the work stoppage lasted seven weeks.
Tuesday’s potential work stoppage follows high-profile strikes undertaken last year by auto workers as well as Hollywood writers and actors. Most recently, 33,000 Boeing workers walked off the job in early September, demanding better pay and retirement benefits.
“Trade unions all over the country have been going out on strike,” Sriram Narayanan, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told ABC News. “We’re seeing that happen now at the ports.”
ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze contributed this report.
(NEW YORK) — Tens of thousands of dockworkers are set to strike as soon as Oct. 1, potentially snarling dozens of ports along the East and Gulf coasts with major implications for the U.S. economy.
A shutdown of the ports would cost the economy up to $4.5 billion each day, according to a report from JPMorgan senior equity analyst Brian Ossenbeck.
The East and Gulf Coast ports account for more than half of U.S. container imports, facilitating the transport of everything from toys to fresh fruit to nuclear reactors, Ossenbeck found.
A strike lasting only a handful of days would wreak little damage, but a prolonged work stoppage of several weeks or months could drive up prices for some goods and cause layoffs at manufacturers as raw materials dry up, experts said.
“The supply chain will start to get shocked after a couple of weeks,” Adam Kamins, a senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News. “If it gets beyond that, we’ll start to see some much more signifiant implications.”
The International Longshoreman’s Association, the union representing 45,000 East and Gulf Coast dockworkers, did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment. The U.S. Maritime Alliance, an organization bargaining on behalf of the dockworkers’ employers, declined to respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden retains the power to prevent or halt a strike under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Trade organizations sent a letter to Biden earlier this month urging the White House to intervene.
The White House did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment about the economic implications of a potential strike. In response to a different reporter’s request on Friday for comment, a White House spokesperson said the Biden administration does not intend to intervene but is “monitoring and assessing” ways to address the potential impact of a strike for the nation’s supply chain.
“The president supports collective bargaining and believe it’s the best way for American workers and employers to come to agreement. We continue to encourage the parties to continue negotiating towards an agreement that benefits all sides and prevents any disruption. We’ve never invoked Taft-Hartley to break a strike and are not considering doing so now,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said in part.
Here’s what to know about how a dockworker strike could impact consumers and workers:
Higher inflation
A prolonged East and Gulf Coast port strike could moderately increase prices for a range of goods, experts told ABC News.
That upward pressure on prices would result from a shortage of products caught up in the supply chain blockage, leaving too many dollars chasing after too few items, they added.
Food products are especially vulnerable to an uptick in prices, since food could spoil if suppliers sent the products ahead of time to avert the strike impact as they have done for some other goods, Kamins said.
As much as 75% of the nation’s imported bananas come through ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, threatening the supply of a highly perishable product, Jason Miller, a professor of supply-chain management at Michigan State University, told ABC News.
“It’s simply infeasible to route those bananas through the West Coast ports,” Miller said.
A significant share of the nation’s imported auto parts come through the ports at issue in a potential strike, which could cause an increase in car prices if the strike persists for more than two weeks, Kamins said.
Potential price increases would likely be moderate but may nudge the Federal Reserve to hold off on interest rate cuts expected in the coming months, Kamins added.
“We’re not talking about prices skyrocketing by any means,” Kamins said, but even a few tenths of a percentage point tacked onto the annual inflation rate could scare off the Fed. “If it has an outsized effect on the consumer’s psyche and the Fed’s psyche, that in and of itself creates recession risks,” he said.
Manufacturing disruption and layoffs
A strike lasting a matter of months could cause a shortage of raw materials that brings some manufacturing activity to a halt, leading to layoffs at affected plants as well as in related industries such as shipping and logistics, some experts said.
“If there aren’t shipments to pick up, it would have a boomerang effect across the whole nation,” Bill Stankiewicz, owner of Georgia-based logistics consulting company Savannah Supply Chain, told ABC News.
At the heart of a potential disruption, shortages of parts would prevent manufacturers from assembling and shipping out final products, Miller said. The auto sector would be heavily impacted but the slowdown would affect “all types of industries,” he added.
“If you start having a very extended strike you’ll be looking at temporary layoffs because plants can’t get their parts,” Miller said.
Kamins echoed concern about manufacturing workers. Still, such an outcome would only result from a prolonged strike, he said.
In 2002, a strike among workers at West Coast ports lasted 11-days before then-President George W. Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act and ended the standoff. However, the last time East and Gulf Coast workers went on strike, in 1977, the work stoppage lasted seven weeks.
“Conceivably, some manufacturing workers could be affected,” Kamins said. “That would be many months down the road. I’d be surprised if it gets to that point.”
ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze contributed to this report.
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) — If you’ve opened Instagram over the last few days, you’ve likely seen a post that begins with the words “Goodbye Meta AI.”
The post, most often shared on Instagram stories, features black-and-white text warning of “legal consequences” and the use of artificial intelligence by Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Threads and Facebook.
“If you do not post at least once it will be assumed you are okay with them using your information and photos,” the text reads, in part. “I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.”
Since early September, the message has been shared widely, even though it is a hoax.
More recently, when the message is shared on Instagram stories, it is blocked out by a warning that the message contains “false information.”
The warning directs users to a fact-check on the website LeadStories.com.
“Does posting a statement ensure that users of Meta services will not have their data used in Meta’s artificial intelligence training? No, that’s not true: Posting the viral statement, or any other statement, doesn’t mean that Meta will not use that data for AI training, but users in Europe can object via a form in their account settings,” the fact-check reads. “The statement is an example of “copypasta,” text containing information that’s often not true but which is repeatedly copied and pasted online.”
Meta describes generative AI as, “a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content when a person or business gives it instructions or asks it a question.”
When Meta announced its new generative AI features last year, the company detailed how and why it uses data for AI purposes.
According to the company, it pulls data for AI from users’ public posts, their interactions with AI features and publicly-available information from places like databases and search engines.
“We use public posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram to train generative AI models for these features and for the open-source community,” reads Meta’s public privacy policy. “We don’t use posts or comments with an audience other than Public for these purposes.”
The company does not appear to pull information from data for generative AI from user accounts that are set to private.
Meta did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment.
