The swipe-fee settlement that could spell trouble for your rewards card
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Good morning. It's Friday, November 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, changes could be coming to your high rewards credit cards, how one of the world's top photojournalists covers combat zones and conflicts, and what happens when the hotel you're staying at goes bankrupt.
But first, after 43 days of shutdown, the government has finally reopened. In some ways, the country is expected to go back to normal pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean it was cost-free. Over a million federal employees were either furloughed or worked without pay. They were expected to return to work as soon as yesterday. It'll take time to clear the bureaucratic backlog on everything from loan applications to unanswered customer calls.
What changes could affect your high rewards credit cards?
Museums will gradually open over the weekend and food stamp payments will go out in full. But again, there might be some delays there in states getting it to recipients. Bloomberg's Congress reporter John Fitzpatrick told his network it takes some effort after President Trump put his pen to paper.
The main impediment to getting things moving is that you have had people sitting at home because they were legally not allowed to work or people not being paid when they were working. And you get a bit of a morale issue and people using their time off to either work a second job or just not show up to a job where they're not getting paid.
Disruptions at airports are expected to linger, and yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced a $10,000 bonus for some TSA officers who were given high-performance reviews by their managers while working through the shutdown. When it comes to the economy, things might not just snap back right away. The Congressional Budget Office says roughly $11 billion in economic activity will be permanently lost as a result of the shutdown.
They have said that if it lasts for six weeks, which is what it basically did, that is expected to reduce annualized growth in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter by 1.5 percentage points.
Harriet Torrey is an economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She says there's expected to be some make-up spending into the first quarter of next year as government workers receive back pay, but not everything will be recovered.
Let's say you're a government worker and you used to go out for dinner every week. If you weren't going out for dinner in the shutdown, you're not suddenly going to go out for like five extra dinners in one week once you get your paycheck that you missed. So there is definitely some spending that is lost and is not recouped.
Meanwhile, the shutdown also created these blind spots in key economic data reporting, as jobs reports from September and October have been stalled. A more complete September jobs report is expected, since most of the work on it was complete before the shutdown began. October, though, is a mystery. The White House initially said numbers for that month might never come out, but later on Thursday said a more scaled-back version could be released.
We probably will get a jobs report talking about payrolls, but it won't include the unemployment rate, which is totally unprecedented.
Tori says that's a crucial missing data point because the unemployment rate can be a telling sign.
There is a lot of interest in whether the slowdown in jobs growth that we're seeing is because of the supply of labor, like the supply of available workers going down, or if it's because of companies wanting to hire less or companies maybe starting to fire people, because those tell very different stories about the economy.
Meanwhile, that data also informs the Federal Reserve as they consider another rate cut next month. Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted at the last meeting that incomplete information could influence their decision and slow down any rate cuts, comparing it to driving in the fog.
When you make a purchase with a credit card, you wouldn't think that the price could be different based on which card you use, or that a business might tell you that they only take a certain kind of Visa or MasterCard, for example.
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