A7
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2022
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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.”
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bendbulletin.com/business
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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
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$20.76 -.79
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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.