Author: openjargon

• Hoping to say goodbye to high credit card late fees?
• You may need to keep dreaming.
• A judge could side with credit card companies trying to stop a new cap on fees at the last minute.

Credit card companies aren't giving up their late fees that easily.

In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced that the federal government had made a new rule capping credit card late fees.

The rule limits fees for a first violation to just $8, a move that the CFPB estimates will save US customers billions.

But the blowback from the credit card industry has been fierce, and they've taken the government to court over it.

This week, a federal judge in Texas is expected to rule on a request to pause the new cap on late fees while a lawsuit is pending, CNBC reported.

If the judge sides with the companies — and the US Chamber of Commerce who joined the lawsuit — the changes to fees wouldn't go into effect.

The cap was set to begin on Tuesday.

Business Insider's Emily Stewart recently warned that it was too early to start celebrating the death of high fees. Despite an election-year push by President Joe Biden to cut down on so-called "junk fees," credit card companies won't go quietly, she wrote.

Even as they fight the rule changes in court, companies will likely just find other ways to make up the money by increasing other fees, Stewart reported.

Matt Schulz, the chief credit analyst at LendingTree, told BI at the time: "I would imagine that we will see other fees increase over the next little while."

One place could be annual fees, which are already rising and could be pushed even higher to sneak them past customers who aren't paying attention to their statements, BI previously reported.

• A hiker discovered the 400-year-old remains of a wealthy man on a glacier in the Swiss Alps.
• Melting ice revealed the mysterious man had traveled with many coins, weapons, and possibly mules.
• The discovery points to an ancient economy supported by dangerous routes through high mountain passes.

The Theodul Glacier was expanding when a mysterious man in thin leather shoes trekked across its surface about 400 years ago.

This field of ice high in the Alps, below the iconic and imposing Matterhorn, formed a treacherous pass between what is now Switzerland and Italy. It was the middle of the Little Ice Age, and more ice was forming along its edges every year.

That had totally changed by 1984. The glacier was retreating, and the leather-shoed man was slowly melting out into the sun when a hiker first stumbled upon his remains.

Slowly, as archaeologists returned to the site through the 1980s and early 90s, the melting glacier revealed a skull with auburn hair clinging to it, several knives, nearly 200 coins, jewelry, glass buttons, bits of silk clothing, a shaving razor, a dagger, a sword, and a pistol scattered across the area.

All these items dated to around 1600 AD. The remains of two mules were also discovered nearby, though it's unclear if they belonged to the man.

At first, archaeologists thought the well-armed man was a mercenary. Upon further inspection, though, that didn't make sense.

"They're not combat weapons. These are fencing weapons. These are ceremonial weapons that the rich had on them," said Pierre-Yves Nicod, a curator at the Valais History Museum in the Swiss Alps. Business Insider spoke with Nicod in French and translated his words into English.

"And then the clothes are not combat clothes. They are also the clothes of a wealthy person, of a gentleman," he added.

The man's bones show no signs of trauma, and clearly he wasn't robbed, so archaeologists believe he must have died by accident, perhaps by falling into a crevasse in the glacier or an unfortunate turn of bad weather.

What was a rich man doing up there on the snow and ice in the first place?

Clues point to an answer: This man may have been part of an ancient economy that spread across the peaks of the Alps. He's a snapshot archaeologists wouldn't have if the mountains weren't changing so drastically.

You see, the mysterious man, his belongings, and the mules were frozen deep in the ice for hundreds of years. Then humans started burning coal, oil, and gas for energy.

How the climate crisis reveals ancient artifacts

For about two centuries now, our use of fossil fuels has been releasing greenhouse gases into the air, mainly carbon dioxide and methane.

As a result, the atmosphere is holding in more heat from the sun, raising the planet's average temperature and causing glaciers like Theodul to melt away.

Receding ice across the planet has revealed mummified mammoths, Ice-Age squirrels, a 46,000-year-old roundworm that came back to life, and ancient human artifacts such as skis, arrows, and other tools.

The new scientific field of glacial archaeology thrives in the Alps. For about four decades, archaeologists have been trekking the glaciers of Switzerland and Italy, retrieving artifacts that are thawing into view.

The problem is that these artifacts aren't surfacing within ancient buried towns or temples.

"It's one of the difficulties of glacial archaeology that we find these objects in the ice, and therefore out of all archaeological context," Nicod said.

In short, it's often hard to know what exactly you've found.

A clue in an old illustration

Though the wealthy traveler's remains surfaced decades ago, archaeologists haven't really understood him until recently.

He wasn't a soldier-for-hire after all, a 2015 paper concluded. He carried a silver pendant engraved with a cross and anointed with wax, possibly from a religious candle.

Fragments of wool and some silk indicate the fine clothes he wore. His weapons were all manufactured in present-day Germany. His coins were mostly minted in northern Italy.

In a 2022 report, Nicod and his colleague Philippe Curdy point to an illustration from 1643 that shows a caravan of merchants ascending to an Alps mountain pass.

"In the background, there are the mountains and then a merchant with all these loads, who has his mules, who's climbing up to the peaks," Nicod says.

The man in the illustration is just like the Theodul traveler. In fact, Nicod added, "he has the same type of clothes with the same type of buttons and the same sword."

The wealthy man in the glacier was a merchant, they believe, representing a remarkable economy that has long persisted between towns separated by 15,000-foot peaks. Throughout the Alps, from ancient times into the modern period, people have braved frozen mountain passes to hawk their wares.

"We see that the passage over the glacier was used all the time — Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman time," local archaeologist Romain Andenmatten told Business Insider. "The simplest way is to go over the glacier."

The Theodul Pass was a common route from the Valais region of modern-day Switzerland to the Aosta Valley of modern-day Italy.

Today, it's a ski slope and occasional archaeological site.

Not everything in the ice is archaeology

Carefully cushioned in custom-cut foam inside a plastic storage bin, the ancient traveler's belongings emit the faint smell of rot, of decaying wood and leather.

Organic materials like this must be retrieved quickly once they're exposed on the ice. Laying in a melty puddle under direct sunlight, they can decompose in just a couple years. Even dried out and stored carefully indoors, the putrid scent gives away their age.

"It smells like the past," Nicod said. "This isn't too bad."

The melting ice yields fouler-smelling findings, like the belongings of a couple who disappeared in the 1940s, Nicod said. Glacier hikers have discovered the bodies of people who went missing still more recently. Sometimes the findings themselves are dangerous. Nicod says people have found undetonated bombs on the ice.

It's not just the Alps. Across the planet, the shifting environments caused by climate change are revealing other terrors that were once buried deep.

Thawing permafrost in Russia released anthrax from a once-frozen reindeer carcass, causing a deadly outbreak in 2016.

Droughts are withering rivers and reservoirs so much that their receding banks have revealed shipwrecks, human remains, Spain's very own Stonehenge, and a couple of once-submerged villages.

Erosion from rising sea levels has exposed Indigenous burial grounds in Florida.

Searching for the next Iceman

Some tragedies melting out of the ice are such ancient history that they only evoke wonder — such as Ötzi the Iceman, one of the most significant archaeological finds ever.

Like the wealthy traveler of Theodul, Ötzi was discovered by a hiker. He had surfaced on a melting glacier on the other side of the Alps, on the border of Italy and Austria, in 1991.

The ice had kept Ötzi mummified since his death in about 3300 BC, making him older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. His impeccably preserved body offers an otherwise impossible glimpse into Neolithic life — everything from his male-pattern balding to his hand-poke tattoos and meaty diet.

Andenmatten is hopeful that the glaciers dwindling away on the Swiss side of the Alps will yield the next Ötzi.

Archaeologists have a unique window into the sheer breadth of humans' footprints on our environments — both the wonder and the terror of our capabilities over the ages. As human-caused climate change devastates mountain glaciers, archaeologists discover more high-altitude feats of ancient human history.

Andenmatten and his colleagues go searching for artifacts in August and September, when the glacier is meltiest and most likely to reveal new objects. But as temperatures rise, the season of ice melt expands and so does their archaeological season.

"The good time slot is every year bigger," Andenmatten said.

• Google is conducting waves of ongoing layoffs intentionally, according to Sundar Pichai. 
• Sundar Pichai said the company is "taking the time to do it correctly and well" in a Bloomberg interview.
• The company started 2024 with thousands of cuts, particularly from engineering and hardware teams.

Google has conducted multiple layoffs this year — and the slow burn is intentional.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang that the company is "taking the time to do it correctly and well."

While Pichai has received criticism of his leadership and the culture around layoffs, he said that as a leader of a large company, he makes "fewer consequential decisions, but they need to be clear."

Pichai said in some cases, Google is simplifying teams, and in others, it's moving people to focus on new areas. The company is also removing some teams entirely to "improve velocity."

Google cut about 12,000 people in 2023 and started off 2024 with thousands more laid off from core engineering and hardware teams.

At the time, Pichai said more layoffs were to come — and they did.

In April, the company laid off more staff from several finance and real estate teams. It also announced it would move roles to Bangalore, Mexico City, and Dublin to build out its "growth hubs."

Google did not respond to a request for comment about the number of roles impacted.

Pichai said in the interview that Google is "reallocating people" to its "highest priorities."

The cuts are an attempt to cut back on costs as it advances AI and ramps up efforts with a series of cloud advancements. Some of these include an Arm-based CPU, the general availability of TPU v5p, the new release of Gemini 1.5, and various changes to Google Workspace.

In his 2023 layoff announcement, Pichai said Google experienced "dramatic growth" over the last two years, which led to hiring "for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

"A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities," a Google spokesperson told BI in April before the latest layoffs were announced.

• Thieves riding e-scooters stole two Bronze Age artifacts from the Ely Museum, police say.
• The stolen items, a gold torc necklace and bracelet, were among the museum's "most prized" objects.
• Cambridgeshire police have released security footage in the hope someone recognizes the thieves.

Authorities are hunting for two people who stole 3,000-year-old gold artifacts from a museum in England.

Cambridgeshire police said in a statement that thieves stole a gold torc necklace and a gold bracelet dating from the Bronze Age from the Ely Museum on Tuesday. Police said the two suspects were riding "e-scooters" at the time of the burglary.

Security camera footage of the break-in obtained by Business Insider shows two people wearing hoods pushing their way through a window before hurrying through the inside of the museum.

Ellie Hughes, the museum's curator, said in a statement that the museum is "devastated" by the loss of the items, which were significant to the "local heritage of the region."

"It is a huge blow after the incredible support from the community in acquiring the torc in 2017," Hughes said. "As a culturally significant object, it cannot be replaced. Our priority now is working with the police to locate the stolen objects."

The torc, a type of rigid necklace described by the museum as its "most prized object," was valued at about 220,000 pounds when the museum acquired it in 2017, according to BBC.

The torc weighs 730 grams and is made up of almost entirely pure gold, the museum says. A metal detectorist found the piece in 2015 while searching in a field. Museum historians believe the torc was buried to hide it from invading enemies or as an offering to a god.

The thieves broke into the museum at about 2 a.m., according to police. Detective Kiri Mazur said police released the footage hoping someone would recognize the two suspects.

"I am very keen to hear from anyone who may be able to provide information or saw two people on e-scooters in the vicinity of the museum, car park and pedestrian walkways at the back of the museum, the council offices, and the Grange Car Park, between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. on Tuesday," Mazur said.

• The percentage of "seriously underwater" mortgages rose in the first quarter. 
• In the US, 2.7% of homes carry a mortgage that's at least 25% more than the market value of the house. 
• That's according to ATTOM, which notes the South has seen a bigger jump in seriously underwater mortgages. 

The percentage of homes in the US that are worth significantly less than the mortgage they secure rose in the first quarter of 2024, according to data from ATTOM. 

The share of "seriously underwater" mortgages — defined as having a balance that's 25% more than the fair market value of the house — edged up from 2.6% to 2.7% nationally in early 2024. That translates to roughly one out of every in 37 homes, the real estate firm said in a report on Wednesday. 

Though the percentage of seriously underwater mortgaged homes rose slightly nationwide, it remains lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Interest rates have been elevated since 2022 as part of the Federal Reserve's effort to bring down inflation. With that effort, mortgage costs have gone up steadily for about two years, with home loan rates peaking last October at 8% while the market went through a particularly sharp bout of volatility. This week, the rate on the 30-year mortgage is hovering at about 7.1%. 

A mortgage can become significantly underwater if a buyer pays much more than what the home may be worth or if they don't have a large equity cushion that can protect against declines in value.  

ATTOM said the South and Midwest regions account for nine out of the 10 states with the highest share of seriously underwater mortgages. 

Zooming in, Kentucky's share of seriously underwater loans spiked to 8.3% from 6.3% in the quarter, with West Virginia rising to 5.4% from 4.4%. Oklahoma climbed to 6.1% from 5.5%, and Arkansas edged up to 5.7% from 5.2%.

Meanwhile, among 107 metropolitan areas with over 500,000 people, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, topped the list with 13.4% of all mortgages seriously underwater. New Orleans followed with 7.3%, trailed by Jackson, Mississippi at 6.5%, Little Rock, Arkansas at 6%, and Syracuse, New York at 5.6%.

• On cross-examination, Stormy Daniels was asked if she supports herself by "making phony sex appear real."
• "The sex is very real," the porn star protested, "just like the sex in that room" with Donald Trump.
• "If that story was not real I would have written it a lot better" quipped Daniels, who also writes and directs.

Stormy Daniels turned her second day of testimony into a tutorial on porn Thursday, insisting that the sex on screen is "very real" — just like the sex she says she had with Donald Trump.

There was one important distinction, the adult-film star suggested: sex with Trump would make a pretty bad porn movie.

"So you have a lot of experience making phony sex appear to be real?" defense lawyer Susan Necheles asked during a fiery morning cross-examination at the ongoing hush money trial in Manhattan.

As questions go, it was a zinger. Implicit in the question was an accusation — that Daniels has made a career out of lying about sex, including about an encounter she says she had with Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006.

But Daniels' answer was a zinger, too.

"Wow," the porn star responded, pausing briefly, then continuing.

"That's not how I'd put it. The sex is very real," she said. "Just like the sex in that room" with Trump.

"That's why it's pornography and not a B-movie," she explained.

The GOP frontrunner sat slouched at the defense table just 20 feet from Daniels, as she went on to suggest that her encounter with Trump would have made a pretty bad porn movie.

Necheles asked Daniels if she had a lot of experience writing porn scripts. Daniels had testified earlier that in addition to starring in some 200 porn flicks and compilations, she's written and directed 70 more.

"I have a lot of experience writing dialogue, not writing sex" she told Necheles. "Pretty sure we all know how to do that" without a script, Daniels quipped.

"If that story was untrue," she added, meaning the story of having sex with Trump, "I would have written it a lot better."

Laughter filled the courtroom, and several jurors smiled.

Earlier Thursday, Daniels was hammered by Necheles about recent tweets in which she referred to the GOP frontrunner as an "orange turd."

Necheles asked Daniels if she's been tweeting about how she's going to be "instrumental in putting President Trump in jail?"

"Show me where it says I'm going to be instrumental in putting President Trump in Jail," Daniels snapped back.

Daniels was shown one of her March tweets that read: "Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down."

The tweet was in response to another tweet that said Trump's ex-personal attorney and former fixer Michael Cohen and Daniels "aka THE HUMAN TOILET" are the prosecution's star witnesses in the trial.

The tweet was then displayed on four large overhead screens in the courtroom — and on the computer monitor directly in front of Trump at the defense table.

"I don't see the word instrumental or jail," Daniels protested.

"What did you mean?" Necheles demanded.

"I don't know what I mean," Daniels answered defiantly.

"Ms. Daniels," Necheles pursued. "I'm asking you if you know what you meant when you said 'flush the orange turd.' You don't want to admit that you meant President Trump?"

"Oh I definitely meant pres— " Daniels then stopped herself before continuing — "Donald Trump."

Daniels' second day on the stand was a hot ticket.

Court officials said the lines to get into court on Thursday morning were the longest they've been since the trial kicked off with jury selection on April 15.

The long lines were not surprising, given the fireworks during her first day on the witness stand Tuesday.

On direct examination Tuesday by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, Daniels described having "brief" sex with Trump in July 2006, in his penthouse suite during a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Daniels made the jarring mention of his not using a condom. When she blurted out the words "missionary position," the defense objected, and the reference was stricken from the record.

The porn star has taunted Trump on Twitter in the past, calling him an "orange turd" and daring him, "Game on, Tiny." But she dropped her typically brash public persona in telling jurors that she felt frightened and ashamed after the encounter.

She also said she came forward with her story 10 years later, on the brink of the 2016 election, because she feared for her safety.

Sure, she wanted money, she conceded. But she also wanted to get out ahead of the story, she said. Getting her name on a non-disclosure contract was one way to "get out in front where you are safe — hide in plain view," Daniels said an attorney advised.

The sparks flew as Necheles began her cross-examination on Tuesday by demanding that Daniels admit she hates Trump. "Yes!" Daniels responded quickly.

The Manhattan district attorney's office alleges that Trump falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to keep her silent about the sex — an accusation Trump vehemently denies.

The payment, delivered by Cohen, was wired to Daniels 11 days before the election, according to prosecutors and records shown as evidence in the trial.

• Wall Street isn't to blame for the non-stop rise in housing prices, according to Capital Economics.
• The research firm said any legislation designed to block hedge funds from buying homes won't lower home prices.
• "Investor purchases make up only a small portion of all home sales," Capital Economics said.

The ongoing rise in home prices shouldn't be blamed on Wall Street, according to a Thursday note from Capital Economics.

The firm highlighted that the growing criticism of institutional investors buying up single-family homes is leading to potential legislation in Congress that would heavily tax hedge funds if they purchase investment properties.

The worry is that a surge in big investors buying up single-family homes is driving up prices, exacerbating a shortage in housing, and preventing younger people from becoming first-time home buyers.

But according to Capital Economics property economist Thomas Ryan, proposed legislation that would prevent Wall Street from buying up homes would do little to curb the record surge in home prices.

"We are skeptical about the effectiveness of such a policy in curbing house prices. That's because investor purchases make up only a small portion of all home sales," Ryan said.

Ryan highlighted that of the 425,000 homes that were sold in June 2022, investors only accounted for 12% of transactions. And most of those investor purchases were concentrated in small "Mom and Pop" investors who rent out a small number of properties close to their primary home.

Those small investors wouldn't be impacted by any legislation from Congress, which means the legislation would do very little to curb home prices.

"Even in 2021-2022, large institutions — defined by Realtor.com as those who have purchased more than 50 homes since 2001 — represented only one-third of all investor purchases, a proportion that has since slipped to 13%. 

To be clear, that's 13% of the 12% of homes that were purchased by investors, not 13% of all homes sold. 

Alternative investment giant Blackstone is one of the biggest institutional buyers of single-family rental homes. They own just over 60,000 homes, or about 0.06% of the 105 million single-family home market in the US. Blackstone says altogether, institutional investors own a collective 0.5% of the US housing market.

Those numbers, which are spread across countless regional housing markets, aren't big enough to have a sizable impact on US housing prices.

Instead, growing demand for homes from millennials and younger generations is driving the demand boom for homes, coupled with not enough homes being built in the decade after the housing market crash. 

"With their small national market share, claims that large institutions inflate house prices seem exaggerated. In our view, lawmakers are looking for a new scapegoat to blame for unaffordable housing. Therefore, even if the bill passes — which is unlikely in itself given other political priorities – it won't do much to lower house prices," Ryan concluded.

• Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a new bundle service. 
• The new bundle will include Disney+, Hulu, and Max. 
• The streaming bundle will become available to viewers this summer. 

Disney Entertainment and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a new streaming bundle service combining Disney+, Hulu, and Max.

The companies unveiled the streaming bundle service on Wednesday in a press release. The move is reminiscent of traditional cable packages, which faltered in recent years as digital options became more available.

The bundle will bring brands like ABC, FX, Food Network, Marvel, HGTV, and CNN together under one roof.

"This incredible new partnership puts subscribers first, giving them access to blockbuster films, originals, and three massive libraries featuring the very best brands and entertainment in streaming today," Joe Earley, president of direct-to-consumer at Disney Entertainment, said in the press release.

The streaming bundle will become available this summer with options for both ad-supported and ad-free plans. A Disney Entertainment and Warner Bros. Discovery representative told Business Insider that more details would be released once the launch date is set.

Disney already offers bundle packages for streamers, including its Disney Bundle Trio Basic plan that combines Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ with ads for $14.99 a month. Prices for the bundle depend on which plan viewers choose.

Disney became enmeshed with Hulu in 2019 when it struck a deal with Comcast to acquire a majority stake in the streaming company, according to CBS News.

Disney then took full control of Hulu in November 2023 after offering Comcast $8.6 billion. At the time, Disney CEO Bob Iger considered Hulu an important part of its efforts to broaden its audience, according to The Wall Street Journal.

More recently, Disney shared details about its streaming app during an earnings report on Tuesday. The company expects Disney + to earn profit for the first time in the fourth quarter. Streaming losses fell to $18 million, which is much less than the $659 million recorded at this time last year.

• JPMorgan's CEO of Asset & Wealth Management, Mary Callahan Erdoes, spoke with BI about AI.
• She believes curiosity is the key trait humans need to harness the potential of AI.
• "It has to be okay to ask the questions," Erdoes said.

JPMorgan's top exec believes a single human trait will define the winners of the AI age.

"Curiosity," Mary Callahan Erdoes, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase's Asset and Wealth Management division, told Business Insider in an interview. "It has to be OK to ask the questions, to not know, to not be afraid, and then to keep going with the questions."

Erdoes spoke Tuesday morning at "Leading with AI," a conference hosted by Harvard's Digital Data Design Institute and Harvard Business School, where the school's alums and leaders in business, technology, and academia discussed the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence. JPMorgan has also partnered with Harvard's Digital Data Design Institute to research ways to leverage the technology across its business.

At JPMorgan, Erdoes said conversations about AI are happening "every day" and that she engages with the technology frequently. She believes successfully implementing AI requires curiosity from employees at all ranks — from managers at the top to workers at the bottom.

"If we can infuse that in all of our people, we will move faster to get to what we all really want to get to," and that's understanding if there are "entirely new products, processes, procedures, solutions for clients," she said.

She said that once people learn to leverage AI, they can "make the gunk go faster" in their jobs and help clients in more complex ways.

The looming threat of AI is that it'll advance to the point where it eliminates some jobs. But Erdoes hopes it will only eliminate "the no-joy" work that "people shouldn't have to do."

"Companies that take their employees through that journey and they combine the human with the AI to augment their job, their joy and the ability to serve the client will be successful," She said.

• Rich Otto, former head of product launches at Tesla, said he resigned last week.
• The executive said the recent Tesla layoffs have thrown the company "out of balance."
• Otto's departure follows six other senior-level Tesla executives leaving in recent weeks.

Tesla keeps shedding executives.

Rich Otto, the former head of product launches at Tesla, said on Wednesday that he'd made the decision to resign last week amid the mass layoffs at the company.

"It's a company I love and that has given me so much, but has also taken its pound of flesh," Otto wrote on LinkedIn. "Great companies are made up of equal parts great people and great products, and the latter are only possible when its people are thriving. The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it's hard to see the long-game. It was time for a change."

Otto worked at Tesla for over six years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He said in the post that there are many things he'll miss about Tesla and he plans to take a break for a while before jumping into another project.

Otto and a spokesperson for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The executive is one of a handful of higher-ups that have left Tesla over the past month. Six other executives, including the senior director of HR and the senior director of Supercharging, have left the carmaker amid the series of layoffs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk kickstarted a series of layoffs on April 15 when he told staff he planned to cut more than 10% of the company's workforce. On Monday, Tesla workers entered their fourth week of layoff notices.

Do you work for Tesla or have insight to share? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at gkay@businessinsider.com