“Much of the lawsuit centers around how Amazon essentially forces third-party sellers who use its Marketplace platform — which accounts for about 60 percent of Amazon’s sales — to purchase additional services from Amazon. Amazon’s critics say the company has gotten greedier over the years, resulting in sellers having to cut their profit margins or raise prices to consumers to account for Amazon’s ever-increasing charges and fees. The FTC says that many sellers pay nearly 50 percent of their revenue to Amazon when all of the fees are combined, and those costs can be passed on to the consumer.
One way it does this, the suit says, is through search ads, which allow sellers to have their products placed prominently in customer searches, above products that organically earned a top spot. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon has increased the number of ads in search results over the years, making sellers feel that the only way potential customers will see their products at all is if they pay Amazon for ads. This makes the shopping experience worse for consumers who have to wade through them to find organic results.
“These ads have been enormously lucrative for Amazon, but shoppers face less relevant results and are steered toward more expensive products, while sellers face an additional set of fees,” Khan said.
The lawsuit also addresses Amazon’s “buy box.” When several sellers offer the same product, Amazon picks which one gets the sale when a customer clicks to make a purchase — whether “add to cart” or “buy now.” That’s the buy box. Everyone else is relegated to an “other sellers” section, which is farther down the page. Most customers don’t bother or even know to check it, which makes that buy box placement crucial for sellers.
But Amazon has certain conditions that make it more likely that the seller will get that buy box — or, if they don’t comply with them, make it impossible to get it at all. Those conditions often mean giving Amazon more money.
Qualifying for Prime is one of them, but sellers pretty much have to use Amazon’s “Fulfilled by Amazon” logistics and shipping service in order to be eligible for it. Amazon has technically allowed sellers to use other fulfillment services, but it’s exceedingly difficult for any third-party fulfillment service to meet Amazon’s requirements, and Amazon closed off enrollment to the Seller Fulfilled Prime option years ago.
A few months ago, however, Amazon announced it would re-open enrollment “later this year.” Notably, it has also changed some of these practices in the European Union recently as part of a settlement to end an antitrust case there, including adding a second buy box and allowing seller-fulfilled Prime.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this; the whims of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party’s hard-core members don’t have to determine whether federal workers get paid or not. Instead, we could eliminate shutdowns altogether using something called an automatic CR.
Usually, when the federal government shuts down or is on the verge of shutting down, the issue is resolved in the short term by passing a “continuing resolution” (or CR): a bill saying, basically, that the government should stay the course and keep spending what it’s been spending, maybe give or take a few minor tweaks. In the average year, CRs fund the government for 137 out of 365 days.
By extension, we could eliminate government shutdowns forever by enacting an automatic CR: a law that says that in the event that Congress fails to authorize funding for the government, things will just keep going along the way they’ve been.”
“China’s economy is out of balance and has been for some time. Investments dominate the country’s economy, far more than consumption — that is, what households are spending. It didn’t matter so much when investment juiced China’s GDP in good times, and indeed, kept China’s economy afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But that investment playbook has been losing its potency. A chunk of investments are unproductive — for example, a shiny new airport is great, but if it sits empty and no one travels through it, that’s not a great return on investment. But whether the airport is busy or a ghost town, it required bonds and loans to build. That produced growth, but it also increased China’s debt, so much so that right now, it’s triple — yep, around 300 percent — the amount of China’s economic output. “That doesn’t really matter until the debt has to be settled. More stimulus simply increases debt and delays the reckoning,” Morgan said.
What that reckoning might look like is hard to answer because the Chinese government and its leader, President Xi Jinping, are not exactly known for transparency. As Morgan sees it, China is dealing with a “slow fizzle.” But how Xi and his government manage that fizzle is far from an easy question for anyone to answer.”
“According to Freddie Mac, the rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has climbed to 7.09 percent, an uptick from the 5.13 percent it was at a year prior.
A mortgage rate is “the interest rate charged for a home loan,” and effectively the monthly cost of borrowing that money. As mortgage rates have gone up, monthly payments have gotten more and more pricey for people looking to purchase a home even if the base price of the house stays the same.
For example, under a 3.22 percent 30-year fixed mortgage rate in January 2022, the monthly payment on a $400,000 house in New York with a 20 percent down payment was $1,716, per a Bankrate calculator. Now, under a 7.09 percent mortgage rate in August 2023, the monthly payment on the same house with the same price would be $2,477.
Such costs have had an impact on the housing market: As mortgage rates have increased, some potential buyers have held off on purchasing houses, while sellers have similarly been less likely to list their property. For current homeowners, there’s a major incentive to wait until rates go down before deciding to re-enter the market and search for their next house.
“These higher mortgage costs are a tremendous barrier to entry for anyone wanting to enter the housing market,” Gregory Daco, the chief economist for Ernst & Young, tells Vox.”
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“One of the biggest factors in the rise in mortgage rates is the Fed’s approach to monetary policy, which includes interest rate hikes aimed at combating inflation.”