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A7 B USINESS THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2022 q DOW 31,730.30 -103.81 BRIEFING Powell: Recession may be on horizon Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, fresh off winning Senate con- firmation for a second term earlier in the day, acknowledged for the first time Thursday that high infla- tion and economic weakness overseas could Powell thwart his efforts to avoid causing a recession. For weeks, Powell has portrayed the Fed’s drive to raise interest rates as consistent with a so- called “soft landing” for the economy. Under that scenario, the Fed would manage to tighten bor- rowing costs enough to cool the economy and curb inflation without going so far as to tip the economy into recession. But in an interview on NPR’s “Marketplace,” Pow- ell conceded that balanc- ing act — which many economists have said they doubt the Fed can achieve — could be undercut by economic slowdowns in Europe and China. “The question whether we can execute a soft landing or not — it may actually depend on factors that we don’t control,” the Fed chair said. “There are huge events, geopolitical events going on around the world, that are going to play a very important role in the economy in the next year or so.” p bendbulletin.com/business q NASDAQ 11,370.96 +6.73 S&P 500 3,930.08 -5.10 q 30-YR T-BOND 2.99% -.05 p q CRUDE OIL $106.13 +.42 Postal-truck buy under scrutiny A House committee has opened an investiga- tion into the U.S. Postal Service’s $11.3 billion plan to purchase mostly gas-powered mail-deliv- ery trucks, ordering the mail agency to turn over confidential records on their environmental im- pact and costs. Rep. Carolyn B. Malo- ney, D-N.Y., who chairs the powerful House Over- sight and Reform Com- mittee, told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in a letter sent Wednesday night that his agency may have “relied on flawed assumptions” to justify buying a fleet in which only 1 in 10 of the vehi- cles would run on cleaner electric power. The Postal Service has the largest civilian fleet in the federal government and one of the largest in the world; it is crucial to President Joe Biden’s plan to take the entire government fleet electric by 2035. — Bulletin wire reports q SILVER $20.76 -.79 q EURO $1.0371 -.0160 TIKTOK GENERATION Google to remake search services BY MARK BERGEN AND DAVEY ALBA Bloomberg News Alphabet Inc.’s Google un- veiled a series of planned up- grades to its search and maps services revealing the com- pany’s augmented reality am- bitions — and its appeal to a generation of internet users drifting away from the com- pany. The new features include ways for people to search for nearby items using images and identify physical objects with their smartphone cameras. On Google Maps, the company promised a way for people to explore detailed 3D digi- tal models of landmarks and neighborhoods before setting More Information As part of an effort to increase news literacy, Google is expanding a tool it unveiled last year, called “About this Result,” beyond search. Today, the tool is available in English on search results, letting users see a short description of a website, such as its political leaning or its governmental affiliation, before they visit it. Soon, when users view a website on the Google app, they will be able to see information about the source while they’re already on the website. foot in person. Google shared the plans on Wednesday for the first day of its annual I/O developer conference held near its Mountain View, Cali- fornia, headquarters. Google is working to keep its products relevant and growing as users’ needs evolve beyond text. “Search should be some- thing that you can do any- where, in any way you want, using any of your senses,” Pra- bhakar Raghavan, Google’s se- nior vice president and prod- uct chief, said in an interview. Google’s core search adver- tising business has continued to grow steadily during the pandemic, despite recent mid- dling financial results. Yet the I/O announcements underscored nascent threats Google sees to its flagship ser- vices. People in emerging markets are more likely to search with voice features than typing, which has driven Google to invest more in its voice assis- tant feature. And according to Google, younger internet users have started turning to social media apps for both entertainment and information on world events and daily decisions. “They could start at Insta- gram or TikTok to figure out where to go for lunch,” said Raghavan. “We see a tendency — a demand even — to inter- act with the physical world.” TEMP JOBS EVAPORATE Licensed vocational nurse Denise Sal- dana prepares the single-dose John- son & Johnson Janssen COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccine rollout in Los Ange- les in March 2021. Many career nurses turned to travel gigs during the pandemic, when hospitals crowded with COVID-19 patients urgently needed the help. Travel nurses see swift change of fortunes as COVID-19 money runs dry US stocks end mixed Another erratic day of trading on Wall Street ended with an uneven finish for the major stock indexes Thursday, after the market reversed most of an early slide in the fi- nal hour of trading. The S&P 500 closed only 0.1% lower after having been down 1.9% earlier in the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Av- erage fell 0.3%, while the Nasdaq rose 0.1%. Trading on Wall Street has been volatile, with indexes prone to sharp swings from one day to the next, or within a sin- gle day, as investors try to shield their portfolios from the impact of the highest inflation in de- cades and rising inter- est rates as the Federal Reserve moves to tame surging prices. GOLD $1,823.80 -28.80 Frederic J. Brown/Getty Images BY HANNAH NORMAN • Kaiser Health News T iffanie Jones was a few tanks of gas into her drive from Tampa, Fla., to Cheyenne, Wyo., when she found out her travel nurse contract had been canceled. Jones, who has been a nurse for 17 years, caught up with a Facebook group for travel nurses and saw she wasn’t alone. Nurses had reported abruptly losing jobs and seeing their rates slashed as much as 50% midcontract. “One lady packed up her whole family and was canceled during orientation,” she said. Many career nurses like Jones turned to travel gigs during the pandemic, when hospitals crowded with COVID-19 patients urgently needed the help. Some trav- elers — who made double, sometimes triple, what staff registered nurses earned — gathered on TikTok and other social media platforms to cel- ebrate payday, share tips on how to calculate net income from contracts, and boast about how much they were taking home weekly. So great was their good fortune that federal and state lawmakers Temp jobs evaporate When Oregon’s governor declared the pandemic emergency over April 1, state-level COVID-19 relief money evaporated. Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland lost funding for close to 100 travel nurses. considered capping their pay, mobilizing nurses in protest. The tide has swiftly turned. As COVID-19 hospitaliza- tion rates stabilize, at least for now, and federal and state COVID-19 relief funding dries up, travel nurse contracts that were plentiful and lucrative are vanishing. And after the pres- sure cooker of the past two- plus years led to staff turnover and a rash of early retirements, hospitals are focused on re- cruiting full-time nurses. Nationally, demand for reg- istered nurse travelers dropped by a third in the month leading up to April 10, according to data from staffing agency Aya Healthcare, although openings have rebounded slightly. Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Port- land lost funding for close to 100 travel nurses. That, along with lower COVID-19 rates and more full-time hires, has led to “a bursting of the bub- ble,” said Dr. John Hunter, CEO of OHSU Health. The health system had about 50 contractors of all kinds before the pandemic, compared with 450 at its height, when patients, many in need of close monitoring, flooded in and turned the hos- pital’s recovery room into an intensive care unit. “It has been very expensive,” Hunter said. But things are turning around, he said, and in recent weeks, the hospital has negotiated contract rates with its travel nurse agency down as much as 50%. STOCKX | TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT SUIT Nike escalates feud, says site is selling fake shoes BY CHRIS DOLMETSCH Bloomberg Nike escalated its legal bat- tle with sneaker marketplace StockX, saying it purchased four pairs of counterfeit shoes on the platform despite the company’s promises that it is only marketing authentic foot- wear. Nike asked a federal judge to let it add claims of counterfeit- ing and false advertising to the current trademark-infringe- ment lawsuit against StockX. It said it obtained the fake shoes, including a counterfeit Air Jor- dan 1 Retro High OG, from the marketplace between Decem- ber and January. “Those four pairs of coun- terfeit shoes were all purchased within a short two-month pe- AP file Founded in 1964, the company that launched the Nike shoe in the 1970s — and later took the name “Nike” itself — went public in 1980 and became one of Oregon’s best-known brands. riod on StockX’s platform, all had affixed to them StockX’s ‘Verified Authentic’ hangtag, and all came with a paper re- ceipt from StockX in the shoe box stating that the condition of the shoes is ‘100% Authen- tic,’” Nike said in a court filing Tuesday. Nike sued StockX in Febru- ary in federal court in Manhat- tan, accusing the marketplace of “blatantly freeriding” on Nike’s trademarks and good- will with a service called Vault NFTs. StockX argued that its NFTs aren’t digital sneakers but simply listings for physi- cal sneakers that are stored in its vault and can be traded by users. StockX said in a statement Wednesday that it takes cus- tomer protection “extremely seriously” and has invested mil- lions of dollars to “fight the pro- liferation of counterfeit prod- ucts that virtually every global marketplace faces today.” He added, “We have to look at our role in that and make sure we don’t remain stuck in the past when the audience is seeking something beyond.” Google will start letting people use photos and text to- gether in local searches with a new “multisearch” update that taps its computer vision and data resources. This feature identifies prod- ucts nearby, which will likely appeal to marketers that pay for ads in a certain geographic proximity to a user. And Google is expanding the utility of Lens, its feature for identifying objects in the real world, which investors are eager to see contribute more to its e-commerce operations. PORTLAND Online security company lays off staff BY MIKE ROGOWAY The Oregonian PORTLAND — Dozens of Tripwire employees lost their jobs Wednesday, three months after the Portland company’s sale to a Minne- sota business. It’s unclear just how many lost their jobs at the online security company, but newly laid-off Tripwire employees counted at least a few dozen of their col- leagues among those who lost their jobs in Wednes- day’s cuts, including a handful of senior managers and executives. Some said the number of job losses is considerably higher. HelpSystems, the new owner, acknowledged the layoffs but did not say how many people lost their jobs or how many remain from the Tripwire acquisition. It said it has no plans to close Tripwire’s former Portland headquarters but added that most employees prefer to work remotely. “We remain impressed with the strength of the business’ core offerings,” HelpSystems said in a state- ment. “We are confident we have the right organiza- tion in place at Tripwire to rebuild the organization for growth.” Founded in 1997, Trip- wire was among Portland’s most promising technology companies in the years af- ter the dot-com bust. Growth slowed during the Great Recession, though, and Tripwire aban- doned plans for an initial public offering. Instead, Tripwire sold to a private equity firm in 2011, which then sold the Portland company again three years later to a St. Louis company called Belden Inc. HelpSystems paid $350 million for Tripwire in Feb- ruary, about half what the business sold for in 2014. Tripwire had revenues of $107 million in 2021, ac- cording to Belden. The Portland company had 450 employees when it sold in 2014, 250 of them in Oregon. It’s not clear how many Tripwire em- ployed before this week’s layoffs.
