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(DETROIT) — The United Auto Workers and Fiat Chrysler reached a tentative agreement Saturday on a new four-year contract, which includes a total of $9 billion in investments but still needs final approval from workers.

Both sides declined to offer details on the deal, but it includes a $9,000 bonus for workers when the agreement is ratified, a promise not to close any factories where vehicles are assembled for the next four years, and a commitment to keep making vehicles at a plant in Belvidere, Illinois, according to a person briefed on the matter. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential.

The UAW-FCA national council will meet Dec. 4 to go over the details of the tentative deal. If adopted, it would go to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' 47,000 union workers, and a vote by hourly and salary workers could begin on Dec. 6.

Fiat Chrysler is the last company to settle on a new contract with the union. GM settled Oct. 31 after a bitter 40-day strike that paralyzed the company's U.S. factories, but Ford reached a deal quickly and settled in mid-November.

Talks have focused on Fiat Chrysler for almost two weeks, and both sides negotiated into the early morning hours earlier this week before taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Illinois factory west of Chicago now makes the Jeep Cherokee small SUV and employs about 3,700 union workers on two shifts.

Of the $9 billion in total investments included in the deal, half were newly announced Saturday, and the other $4.5 billion are investments announced earlier this year.

The $9,000 ratification bonus isn't as much as the $11,000 that GM workers got, but it's equal to the money paid to Ford workers. Both companies gave workers a mix of pay raises and lump-sum payments, ratification bonuses, an end to a two-tier pay scale for full-time workers and a clear path for temporary workers to go full-time.

The union also got commitments for new vehicles to be built at several GM and Ford factories.

Even if union leaders approve the deal, ratification isn't guaranteed. In 2015, workers voted down the first deal reached with Fiat Chrysler but approved a second one.

Fiat Chrysler apparently is agreeing to the "pattern" agreement reached with GM and Ford even though the company's CEO said earlier this month that all of the companies are in different labor circumstances. Following the same deal would cost Fiat Chrysler more because the makeup of its workforce is different. FCA has more temporary workers than either GM or Ford, and it also has more so-called "second tier" workers hired after 2007 who now make less than longtime workers.

The deal with Ford and GM gives pay raises to workers hired after 2007, so they reach top UAW production wages of more than $32 per hour within four years. It also gives temporary workers a path to full-time jobs within three years.

Ford has about 18,500 workers hired after 2007 who will get big pay raises with the new contract, compared with GM's 17,000. Fiat Chrysler has over 20,000 union employees hired after 2007.

In addition, about 11% of Fiat Chrysler's UAW workforce is temporary, while Ford has a cap at 8% and GM is around 7%.

Fiat Chrysler in past years has enjoyed a labor-cost advantage compared with Ford and GM. FCA's labor costs, including wages and benefits, amounted to $55 per hour going into the contract talks, while they were $61 at Ford and $63 at GM, according to the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank. That compares with an average of $50 per hour at U.S. plants owned by foreign-based automakers.

General Motors last week filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against FCA, alleging that the company bribed UAW officials to get more favorable contract terms than GM. Fiat Chrysler has called the lawsuit "meritless."

General Motors alleges that the move, which it contends cost it billions of dollars, was aimed at forcing a merger with Fiat Chrysler that was desperately sought by FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne, who died in 2018. Last month, Fiat Chrysler announced plans to merge with France's PSA, which will create the world's fourth-largest auto company worth $50 billion.

The Fiat Chrysler talks could be complicated by an ongoing federal bribery and embezzlement investigation into some of the UAW's leadership, which started at Fiat Chrysler. Many workers at the company have been suspicious of the union's leadership since the scandal became public in 2017.

Union President Gary Jones, whose home was raided by federal agents and is implicated in the scandal, resigned from the union last week. He has not been charged but has been linked to a plot to embezzle union conference funds to buy expensive cigars, wines, rounds of golf and stays at exclusive villas. Jones lawyer J. Bruce Maffeo says all the expenses were reported in detail and never questioned by the union's accounting department or executive board.

Vice President Rory Gamble, who negotiated the contract with Ford, is now acting president.

(NEW YORK) — This year's Black Friday was the biggest ever for online sales, as fewer people hit the stores and shoppers rang up $7.4 billion in transactions from their phones, computers and tablets.

That's just behind the $7.9 billion haul of last year's Cyber Monday, which holds the one-day record for online sales, according to Adobe Analytics. Adobe measures sales at 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers.

Adobe expects online sales to jump to another record this Cyber Monday with an estimated total of $9.4 billion. Much of the shopping is happening on people's phones, which accounted for 39% of all online sales Friday and 61% of online traffic.

Shoppers have been looking for "Frozen 2" toys in particular. Other top purchases included sports video games and Apple laptops.

All the online shopping may have helped thin the crowd at malls on Black Friday.

Traffic at stores fell 2.1% on Black Friday from a year ago, according to preliminary figures from RetailNext. It tracks in-store activity at tens of thousands of locations, including specialty apparel retailers, big-box stores and mall-based stores. The drop in traffic helped lead to a 1.6% dip in sales.

Online and in-store shopping aren't always completely separate, though. Many people buy things online, only to head to the store to pick them up. Such sales surged 43.2% on Black Friday from a year ago, according to Adobe.

This holiday shopping season may be the most harried in years because it's the shortest since 2013. Thanksgiving this year fell on the last Thursday in November — the latest possible date it could be.

Much is riding on the success of the holiday season's sales. The U.S. economy is still growing steadily, but gains have slowed since its sizzling start to the year. Economists say strong spending by households is helping to bolster growth and make up for weak confidence among businesses given all the uncertainties about the U.S.-China trade war and other factors.

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(NEW YORK) — The mad scramble between Thanksgiving and Christmas just got six days shorter.

Black Friday once again kicks off the start of the holiday shopping season. But with six fewer days than last year, it will be the shortest season since 2013 because Thanksgiving fell on the fourth Thursday in November — the latest possible date it could be. That means customers will have less time to shop and retailers will have less time to woo them.

Adobe Analytics predicts a loss of $1 billion in online revenue from a shortened season. Still, it expects online sales will reach $143.7 billion, up 14.1% from last year's holiday season

The National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, baked the shorter season into its forecast, but it says the real drivers will be the job market. It forecasts that holiday sales will rise between 3.8% and 4.2%, an increase from the disappointing 2.1% growth seen in the November and December 2018 period that came well short of the group's prediction.

Last year's holiday sales were hurt by turmoil over the White House trade policy with China and a delay in data collection by nearly a month because of a government shutdown. This year's holiday forecast is above the average holiday sales growth of 3.7% over the previous five years.

NRF expects online and other non-store sales, which are included in the total, to increase between 11% and 14%, for the holiday period.

Black Friday is expected to once again be the largest shopping day of the season, followed by the last Saturday before Christmas, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks spending across all types of payments including cash and check. Thanksgiving Day isn't even on the top 10 holiday shopping days, according to MasterCard.

The 2019 holiday season will be a good measure of the U.S. economy's health. Many retail CEOs describe their customers has financially healthy, citing moderate wage growth and an unemployment rate hovering near a 50-year low.

"The overall picture is positive," said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultancy. "People are spending out of positive cash flow as opposed to borrowing."

Economic growth has moderated since earlier this year, with growth at just 1.9% in the July-September quarter, down from 3.1% in the first three months of the year. Analysts blame at least part of that on the U.S.-China trade war, which has forced many companies to delay plans to invest and expand.

That's left consumers as the main drivers. So far, Americans have kept up their spending, allaying fears of a recession.

With more holiday deals happening earlier to compensate for the late start, many have already started to shop. More than half of consumers have already started their holiday shopping and nearly a quarter of purchases have already been made, according to the annual survey released by the NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics. The survey of 7,917 adult consumers was conducted Oct. 31 through Nov. 6.

"This is further evidence that the holiday season has grown far beyond the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas," said Matthew Shay, president and CEO of NRF, in a statement.

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(RENO, Nev.) — Wynn Resorts agreed Wednesday to accept $41 million from former CEO and chairman Steve Wynn and insurance carriers as part of a settlement stemming from shareholder lawsuits accusing company directors of failing to disclose the casino mogul's alleged pattern of sexual misconduct.

Neither the company nor its current or former directors or officers were found to have committed any wrongdoing in connection with the pending settlement involving multiple public pension funds, the company said in a statement late Wednesday.

The deal is subject to approval of a judge in Las Vegas.

Wynn would pay $20 million in damages while another $21 million will come from insurance carriers on behalf of current and former employees of Wynn Resorts, the company said.

Wynn has denied all allegations of misconduct. He resigned from the casino company in February 2018.

Wynn Resorts said the settlement reached Wednesday afternoon credits the company with $49 million for changes made since then, including new policies to protect workers and realignment of the board of directors with eight independent members, including four women.

Multiple shareholder lawsuits — consolidated into a single case in Clark County District Court in Las Vegas — were filed in 2018 on behalf of the New York public pension fund and municipal workers and others elsewhere over their investments in Wynn Resorts.

They alleged some officers and directors knew the company's founder and chairman made unwanted sexual advances on employees and pressured them to perform sex acts, but did not disclose the alleged pattern of sexual misconduct.

In addition to The New York State Common Retirement Fund, other plaintiffs included an operating engineers' construction pension fund in Pennsylvania and municipal firefighters in California.

"We filed our lawsuit in response to serious and repeated allegations of sexual misconduct by Steve Wynn and the prior board's alleged failure to stop it," said New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who is in charge of that state's $209 billion retirement fund. He said it holds shares in Wynn Resorts with an estimated value of $23 million.

"We are gratified that the reforms in this agreement and those undertaken following the initiation of our lawsuit will protect Wynn resorts employees and shareholders against future harm," he said Wednesday.

Wynn Resorts owns and operates Wynn Las Vegas, Encore Boston Harbor in Massachusetts, Wynn Macau and Wynn Palace, Cotai in Macau.

Fremont, Wisconsin — For nearly two centuries, the Rieckmann family has raised cows for milk in this muddy patch of land in the middle of Wisconsin. Mary and John Rieckmann, who now run the farm and its 45 cows, have seen all manners of ups and downs — droughts, floods, oversupplies of milk that sent prices tumbling. But they've never seen a crisis quite like this one.

The Rieckmanns are about $300,000 in debt, and bill collectors are hounding them about the feed bill and a repayment for a used tractor they bought to keep the farm going. But it's harder than ever to make any money, much less pay the debt, Mary Rieckmann says, in the yellow-wallpapered kitchen of the sagging farmhouse where she lives with her husband, John, and two of their seven children. The Rieckmanns receive about $16 for every 100 pounds of milk they sell, a 40 percent decrease from six years back. There are weeks where the entire milk check goes towards the $2,100 monthly mortgage payment. Two bill collectors have taken out liens against the farm. "What do you do when you you're up against the wall and you just don't know which way to turn?" Rieckmann says, as her ancient fridge begins to hum. Mary, 79, and John, 80, had hoped to leave the farm to their two sons, age 55 and 50, who still live with them and run the farm. Now they're less focused on their legacy than about making it through the week.

In the American imagination, at least, the family farm still exists as it does on holiday greeting cards: as a picturesque, modestly prosperous expanse that wholesomely fills the space between the urban centers where most of us live. But it has been declining for generations, and the closing days of 2019 find small farms pummeled from every side: a trade war, severe weather associated with climate change, tanking commodity prices related to globalization, political polarization, and corporate farming defined not by a silo and a red barn but technology and the efficiencies of scale. It is the worst crisis in decades. Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies were up 12 percent in the Midwest from July of 2018 to June of 2019; they're up 50 percent in the Northwest. Tens of thousands have simply stopped farming, knowing that reorganization through bankruptcy won't save them. The nation lost more than 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone.

Farm debt, at $416 billion, is at an all-time high. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since since 2013, and lost more than $1,644 this year. Farm loan delinquencies are rising.

Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren't the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they also ejected from their homes and the land that's been in their family for generations. "It hits you so hard when you feel like you're the one who is losing the legacy that your great-grandparents started," said Randy Roecker, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who has struggled with depression and whose neighbor Leon Statz committed suicide last year after financial struggles forced him to sell his 50 dairy cows. Roecker estimates he's losing $30,000 a month.

Even large companies are facing unprecedented challenges; Dean Foods, a global dairy producer that buys milk from thousands of small farmers, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, November 12, and is seeking a sale, a move that could further hamper farmers looking for places to sell their milk.

Farmers have always talked of looming disaster, but the duration and severity of the current crisis suggests an alarming and once unthinkable possibility — that independent farming is no longer a viable livelihood. Small farms, defined as those bringing in less than $350,000 a year before expenses, accounted for just a quarter of food production in 2017, down from nearly half in 1991. In the dairy industry, small farms accounted for just 10 percent of production. The disappearance of the small farm would further hasten the decline of rural America, which has been struggling to maintain an economic base for decades.

"Farm and ranch families are facing a great extinction," says Al Davis, a Nebraska cattle producer and former state senator. "If we lose that rural lifestyle, we have really lost a big part of what made this country great."

A perfect storm of factors has led to the recent crisis in the farm industry. After boom years in the beginning of the 21^st century, prices for commodities like corn, soybeans, milk, and meat started falling in 2013. The reason for these lowered prices are the twin forces upending much of the American economy: technology and globalization. Technology has made farms more efficient than ever before. But economies of scale meant that most of the benefits accrued to corporate farmers, who built up huge holdings as smaller farmers sold out. Even as four million farms disappeared in the United States between 1948 and 2015, total farm output more than doubled. Globalization brought more farmers into the international market for crops, flooding the market with soybeans and corn and cattle and milk, and with increased supply comes lower prices. Global food production has increased 30 percent over the last decade, according to John Newton, the chief economist of the American Farm Bureau. If that's a good thing for feeding the planet, it also reduces what comes back to producers, whose costs don't fall with prices.

President Trump's trade war hasn't helped matters. After the United States slapped tariffs on Chinese goods including steel and aluminum last year, China retaliated with 25 percent tariffs on agricultural imports from the U.S.. China then turned to other countries such as Brazil to replace American soybeans and corn. "This was a market that took years to develop," says Barb Kalbach, a fourth- generation corn and soybean farmer in Iowa, referring to China. "The president has worked very hard to make our markets unstable." Her soybeans are harvested and sitting in a grain elevator as she waits to see if China will buy despite the tariffs. Agricultural exports between January and August this year were down 5 percent, or $5.6 billion dollars, from the same period last year. The Trump administration has made $16 billion in aid available to farmers affected by the trade war, though small farmers complain the bulk of the money has gone to huge producers with large crop losses. Around 40 percent of the $88 billion in farm income expected this year is going to come in the form of federal aid and insurance, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Farm income absent that assistance, at $55 billion, is down 14 percent since last year and is half of what it was in 2013.

Smaller farms have found it especially hard to adapt to these changes, which they blame on government policy and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The government is on the side of big farms, they say, and is ambivalent about whether small farms can succeed. "Get big or get out," Earl Butz, Nixon's secretary of agriculture, infamously told farmers in the 1970s. It's a sentiment that Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary under President Trump, echoed recently. "In America, the big get bigger and the small go out," Perdue said, at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. The number of farms with more than 2,000 acres nearly doubled between 1987 and 2012, according to USDA data. The number of farms with 200 to 999 acres fell over that time period by 44 percent.

Many small American farmers are routinely selling their crops for less than it costs to produce them. "It's very intimidating, you work hard every day, and every day, it seems like you're just always struggling," says Rieckmann.

Prices are so low that farmers like the Rieckmanns are trying to figure out other ways to come up with the money to keep their farm going. But like many other rural areas around the country, their town of Fremont does not have a bustling economy. Both a Kmart and another department store, Shopko, closed in Waupaca county this year, costing dozens of workers their jobs. Mary Rieckmann who will turn 80 in January, got a job delivering newspapers; the family also launched a GoFundMe account. But after Mary crashed her car on a foggy night, her husband and sons convinced her to abandon her paper route. In the past, the family has sold calves to raise extra money, but John recently brought two calves to the stock market and got $20 for one and $30 for another—two years ago, those calves would have brought in $300 to $400 each. "If somebody would have told me 20 years ago what it was going to be like now, I think I would have called him a liar," Rieckmann says.

Heavy rain and unseasonable snow this year have also hurt many Midwestern farmers. This year "has been one of the most significant weather event years," said John Newton, chief economist of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Portions of Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota experienced record flooding this year, with the upper Mississippi River receiving 200 percent more rain and snow than normal. Unusual rain and snow prevented farmers from planting on 19 million acres this year, the most since the USDA began measuring in 2007. Last year, by contrast, weather prevented planting on just 2 million acres.

Mike Rosmann, a clinical psychologist and farmer from Iowa who works with farmers in distress, says that this spring, he got seven calls per week from farmers who were having mental health problems because of their farm's finances. One farmer called Rosmann to say he was considering suicide — floods destroyed the corn he had already harvested and stored in a grain elevator, but neither crop insurance nor flood insurance would cover it, since he had already harvested the crop. "When that farm is lost, it's a huge amount of loss of self," says Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation, which runs a hotline for farmers in danger of losing their farms. John Hanson, who runs an assistance hotline in Nebraska, says that this year he has gotten calls at midnight from desperate farmers, including one sitting in his kitchen with a loaded shotgun and the lights out.

"It's very, very bleak for us, and many farmers I know are in the same boat," said Brenda Cochran, a small dairy farmer in Pennsylvania who says she knows of nine suicides related to low milk prices over the last two years. "It would take a miracle to sustain us for five years." Farm Aid operates a 1-800 hotline for farmers facing crisis, and calls to that hotline were up 109 percent last year from the year before, says Alicia Harvie, director of Farm Aid's Advocacy and Farmer Services. The newest farm bill sets aside $50 million over five years for behavioral health supports for distressed farmers.

Rural America has been shrinking for decades, and the Great Recession accelerated that contraction as rural manufacturing jobs disappeared and people moved to cities and suburbs seeking work. That is indeed where the jobs are. Between 2008 and 2017, metropolitan areas that included central cities of at least 50,000 people accounted for 99 percent of all job and population growth, according to data crunched by David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University. In the Midwest, 81 percent of rural counties saw population declines between 2008 and 2017, and in the Northeast, 85 percent of rural counties shrank over that time period.

Kalbach, the Iowa corn and soybean farmer, says on the square mile of land where she lives, five farm different families used to grow corn, beans, hay, cattle, and pigs. Over the past 15 years, the other four families have given up and moved away. As farmers sold to bigger operations, the local businesses that were dependent on small farmers went belly-up, too. The place where the Kalbachs buy chemicals is now 75 miles away. Her county's lone pharmacy closed earlier this year. There is no longer a local place where she can get farm equipment repaired. "All the thousands of farmers that have left the land—all the businesses have gone with them," she says.

So have the institutions that make a community. Around 4,400 schools in rural districts closed between 2011 and 2015, the most recent year for which there is data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics; suburban districts, by contrast, added roughly 4,000 schools over that same time period. In Wisconsin's dairy country alone, the Antigo School District, in north central Wisconsin, closed three elementary schools this year, and 44 schools have closed since 2018.

"I used to have a lot of neighbors, now I have almost no neighbors," says George Naylor, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer who is trying to transition to organic farming to stay afloat.

Cochran is worried about the future of her rural Pennsylvania community as more farmers give up. Two neighbor farm auctions are scheduled soon. The dairy refrigeration supply business where she buys equipment is on the verge of collapse. Young people, seeing economic despair all around them, get out as quickly as they can. "I see this as a wholesale removal — or extermination — of our rural class," she says.

There's nothing on the horizon to turn around these rural areas. Americans are increasingly concentrating in a few metropolitan areas — by 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. The regions surrounding America's family farms may become the country's next ghost towns. "We have to think about what we really want rural America to look like," says Jim Goodman, president of the National Family Farm Coalition. "Do we want it to be abandoned small towns and farmers who can't make a living, and a lot of really big farms that are polluting the groundwater?" (Large farms, which have more animal waste to deal with because of their size, have been found to pollute groundwater and air.)

Most family farmers seem to agree on what led to their plight: government policy. In the years after the New Deal, they say, the United States set a price floor for farmers, essentially ensuring they received a minimum wage for the crops they produced. But the government began rolling back this policy in the 1970s, and now the global market largely determines the price they get for their crops. Big farms can make do with lower prices for crops by increasing their scale; a few cents per gallon of cow's milk adds up if you have thousands of cows.

Smaller farmers warn that a country without local farmers can create problems in the food supply chain. If one company is providing all the milk or cheese to an entire region, what happens when that plant gets contaminated or a storm isolates it from the rest of the country? "It's an incredibly fragile supply chain, and when it fails, it fails completely," says Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation.

Family farmers say concentrating farmland among a few big companies is akin to feudalism, and un-American. It also diverts whatever profits might come from farming to faraway investors, aggravating the economic and geographic divisions that feed the nation's political divide. "There's a strong reason to be deeply concerned when instead of having 10 mid-sized dairy farms producing income whose owners spend it in town, you replace that with a large farm owned by a set of investors whose profits go running off to New York and Chicago," said Peter Carstensen, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin law school.

Farmers say the best solution is government policy that cracks down on consolidation of the grocery stores and food processing facilities that buy food from farmers. Existing antitrust law would allow the government to prevent big mergers that mean farmers have fewer places to sell their crops and that supplies are more expensive, but those laws go largely unenforced, says Carstensen. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin congressman introduced legislation to put a moratorium on large food and grocery mergers. Farmers are advocating for better antitrust enforcement across the country; in October, cattle ranchers held a 'Rally to Stop the Stealin'!' to urge Congress to protect family farmers from monopoly power, and in Vermont, dairy farmers have filed a lawsuit alleging that a conglomerate of milk buyers conspired to set low prices on milk.

One category of small farmers is thriving in the current marketplace: organic farms who can charge a premium for their crops and who can sell them locally. There were more than 14,000 certified organic farmers in 2016, up 58 percent from 2011. But switching to organic is expensive, and for farmers like the Rieckmanns who are already deeply in debt, not an option. They haven't gotten a cent of aid from the government, Rieckmann says, since the assistance goes to the farms with the most farmland and animals. They're not holding their breath that anything will change. "I sometimes feel," says Mary Rieckmann, "like they're trying to wipe us off the map."

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

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Growing unease about waste has some Americans rethinking wrapping paper.

Gift wrap is still a huge business. U.S. sales of wrapping paper climbed 4% to $8.14 billion last year, according to a recent report by Sundale Research. But sales of reusable gift bags rose faster, the company said. Sundale said it's also closely watching green trends — like furoshiki, the Japanese art of wrapping with fabric — because they could impact gift wrap sales in the coming years.

Marie Wood, a student at Northern Arizona University, started wrapping Christmas gifts in brown paper grocery bags a few years ago when she saw the bags piling up at home.

"It wasn't consciously around environmentalism, but a good way to use these bags that aren't going to get used otherwise," she said.

Now that her parents carry reusable bags to the grocery, the pile is getting smaller. Wood says she might switch to fabric wrapping that she can reuse each year. "I want to change the disposable nature of my wrapping," she said.

Some consumers are ditching wrapping altogether. In a survey released last month, half of U.S. respondents said they will give holiday gifts without wrapping this year to avoid using paper, according to Accenture, a consulting firm. Nearly two-thirds said they would happily receive gifts without wrapping.

Gift wrap companies are taking notice. IG Design Group, a United Kingdom-based maker of stationery and wrapping paper, said earlier this year that it removed glitter from its paper because it's not recyclable.

Paper Source, a Chicago-based chain, introduced a recyclable wrapping paper made out of crushed marble and limestone that uses less water to produce than regular paper. A limited release of the paper sold out before the holidays last year. This year, about one-third of Paper Source's holiday wrapping papers will be stone-based.

"Our customer is more aware of sustainability and their carbon footprint," said Patrick Priore, the chief marketing officer for Paper Source. "We would be foolish not to go in that area."

Here are some wrapping and recycling ideas:

Choose recyclable gift wrap

Papers that contain foil, plastic coating, cellophane and glitter are not recyclable, according to the American Forest and Paper Association. The association says a general rule of thumb is to crumple up the paper; if it stays in a tight ball, it's paper-based and can be recycled. Kula, Hawaii-based Wrappily uses old printing presses to print designs on recyclable newsprint. A three-sheet set of its paper is $10. Hallmark sells a set of four rolls — 35.2 feet in total — for $14.99. Paper Source says its stone paper can be recycled; it costs $9.95 for a 10-foot roll.

Go with gift bags

Westlake, Ohio-based American Greetings says gift bags now make up 30% of its wrapping business. They cost more upfront than many wrapping papers, but they're easy to reuse; just cut off ribbon handles — which aren't recyclable — if you're putting paper gift bags in the recycling bin. Many sizes and varieties of gift bags are available at Etsy.com. Philadelphia-based VZ Wraps sells a set of three cotton wine bags for $13.59. Amazon has a set of five cotton bags for $23.95.

Wrap with fabric

An ancient craft in Japan is gaining converts elsewhere. Ten Thousand Villages, a fair-trade retail chain, sells gift wrap made from saris that are recycled by artisans in Bangladesh. The company says sales have been growing steadily since the wraps were introduced in 2013; so far this year, sales are up 20% over 2018. The 26-square-inch wrap, which comes with instructions, sells for $12.99. Or go even simpler; wrap a gift in a pillowcase or a T-shirt.

Recycle it all

New Jersey-based recycling company TerraCycle promises to recycle everything — including ribbons, bows, tissue paper and wrapping paper with glitter — in its Gift Zero Waste Box. The company sends customers an empty box with a paid return label; once it's full of gift wrap, customers send it back. TerraCycle says it has processes for even hard-to-recycle products like ribbon, which it uses for insulation or melts into plastic pellets. The company says a medium box is the most popular size for family gatherings; it costs $147.

The tiny Baltic state of Latvia, a western member of the NATO alliance nestled against Russia's northern border with Europe, is especially vulnerable to fake news and foreign influence operations. A quarter of its population is Russian-speaking, a legacy of years of Soviet occupation during the 20th-century, and much of its financial sector is dominated by wealthy Russians close to the Kremlin.

On a visit in 2018 I asked Jānis Bērziņš, director of the Center for Security and Strategic Research at Latvia's National Defense Academy, how to parry disinformation. Attackers find fertile terrain for fake news, he said, in "inner socio-cultural decay" and in "the gap between governments and societies, the notion that the political class broke the social contract." The only lasting answer, he said, is to "completely transform the financial model of our economic systems."

That is also sound advice for the United States, and for many western countries suffering what I call the "Finance Curse." This is, despite its forbidding name, an optimistic frame of analysis whose core message – shrink finance, to boost prosperity – opens up a world of democratic space to unblock needed reforms.

"Finance" has two interconnected parts. First, the financial sector itself: banks and insurance firms, along with more esoteric, less regulated players: hedge funds, private equity firms, exchange traded funds, and many more. The second part involves the penetration of financial tools, techniques, motives and institutions into the non-financial economy, from manufacturing to agriculture to tourism.

I first grasped the idea that more finance can make us poorer while spending years living and writing about oil-rich countries in west Africa, which have suffered a so-called "Resource Curse". It's not just that the elites steal the oil money (though there is plenty of that): in many cases their oil wealth seems to have actually impoverished their citizens. It was certainly true when I lived in Angola in the 1990s, amid an oil- and diamond-fueled civil war.

Later, I discovered a 'paradox of poverty from riches' afflicting finance-dominated nations like Britain or the United States too – often for similar reasons.

In both cases, high pay in the dominant sector drains talent from other economic sectors, from government and from civil society. Brilliant people who might have discovered a malaria vaccine or designed effective financial regulations, instead get rich working for an oil company, or trading in risky financial derivatives. Investment is lured away from low-return activities like manufacturing, towards high-return ones, like trading in oil derivatives. When oil, or finance, dominate an economy, government officials turn away from the tough challenges of nation-building and instead jostle to get rich, often via a revolving door of influence between government and the dominant sector. This jostling also promotes corruption, and helps the dominant sector 'capture' policy-making too. Economic volatility, whether via roller-coaster oil prices or from recurrent financial crises, inflicts further damage on other sectors. Large financial inflows from overseas also can harmfully distort price levels and the wider economy – not to mention serving as covert channels for foreign interference.

There are also big differences between finance and oil, of course. One involves that penetration of finance into other economic sectors that I described: academics call it 'financialization.' Its techniques include loading up real companies with debt to boost immediate returns, using tax havens to dodge taxes or regulations, corporations buying their own stock to goose short-term financial returns (and executives' stock options), or amassing monopoly powers to extract wealth from consumers, workers and suppliers, and delivering them up to shareholders. Instead of drilling for oil in the ground, they are drilling into main street businesses and into our pockets. This isn't supporting wealth creation, it's wealth extraction.

To a large degree, the financial hoards amassed by private equity barons, giant agricultural concerns and other winners of financialization are like the over-inflated Hoover-bags of wealth-sucking vacuum cleaners: not a sign of prosperity, but the flip side of extraction elsewhere.

As well as winnowing our populations into losers and winners, this extractive financial system imposes overall economic costs. Research from the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and others, consistently finds the same banana-shaped relationship between the size of a financial sector and long-term economic growth, reproduced in several graphs. The left-hand part of each graph, rising, shows that we need finance: to process payments, channel savings into productive investment, and so on. As these functions develop, economic growth benefits. But there seems to be an optimal size – on one measure, roughly when credit to the private non-financial sector reaches 100 percent of GDP – after which the line curves downwards, and further expansion in finance reduces overall economic growth. The United States and Britain both passed that point in the 1980s: their ratios now each exceed 150 percent. According to a 2016 report for the Roosevelt Institute by Professor Gerald Epstein and Juan Antonio Montecino, oversized finance will have imposed cumulative costs on the United States of $13-23 trillion between 1990 and 2023, worth $100-180,000 per American family.

Had the financial sector been smaller, we'd have been richer.

Millions of voters worry there's a trade off between democracy and economic prosperity: that we can't tax, regulate or police globetrotting big banks or billionaires too hard, or these wealth creators will cut investment or run away to London or Hong Kong. Lobbyists wield such fears to undermine wealth taxes, strong and effective antitrust rules or banking regulations, proper crackdowns on tax havens, and other popular reforms. But popularizing the idea that "too much finance makes us poorer" skewers these arguments, showing that we can breathe life back into democracy. We can tax and regulate the billionaires and hedge fund managers as voters demand – this will shrink their wealth but the flip side is that it will keep wealth in the real economy where it is created – and boost growth overall.

This agenda can appeal across the political spectrum, from left to right. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, are among those who have recently produced trenchant critiques of financialized capitalism. The message is simple: tackle the curse of oversized finance, to boost prosperity, to reduce inequality – and to curb the inner socio-cultural decay that fosters fake news. In this simple, hopeful message lies a winning political formula.

Nestled in an industrial estate near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, Jiamushi Furniture Company has crafted quality wooden furniture since 2002. It's sweeping showroom teems with minimalist Scandinavian, rustic European and ornate Chinese styles, though when it comes to the wood itself, one variety is the undisputed favorite: North American red oak, known for its versatility and distinctive grain.

But there's a problem. The ongoing trade war between Washington and Beijing has roiled markets and upset supply chains the world over, including those of the U.S. hardwood industry, whose primary export destination is China. A sudden increase of tariffs has caused U.S. hardwood exports to China — previously worth $2 billion annually — to plummet while adding 15%-20% to the price of the chairs and tables in Jiamushi's showroom.

"Competition is fierce in this business," Jiamushi's sales rep Mrs Zhang tells TIME. "If we don't use other suppliers from Russia or Malaysia, we'd probably have to give up the hardwood furniture business altogether."

American hardwood exports to China have dropped by almost a third since the trade war began, according to industry figures, threatening jobs primarily in rural communities—such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and North Carolina—that voted for Trump in 2016 and could prove key swing states again in 2020. American hardwood is not listed as an agricultural product, so its producers are not eligible for the same support as farmers who are also feeling the brunt of higher tariffs.

But there is another silent victim of the escalating dispute: the world's forests. The U.S. logging industry is built upon sustainable practices and actually benefits forest health, since skilled loggers only fell trees that have reached their peak of maturity. Once trees reach a certain age, they are more prone to disease or to simply die from old age.

Decaying trees littering the forest floor become tinder for forest fires — which are disastrous for the environment — and crowd out younger saplings, which when given room to grow actually suck in greater quantities of CO2. Through selective felling, "We have more standing timber in the United States today by a large margin than we had 50 years ago," says Nathan Jeppson, CEO of Northwest Hardwoods, the largest lumber producer in the U.S., with annual revenue $600 to $800 million and 1,600 employees.

Before the trade war, U.S. hardwood exports to China were tariff-free; today, species such as North American red oak, the largest single export, are subject to 25% levies with further hikes on the cards. The result is that Northwest Hardwoods' China exports of Oak, Maple, Cherry, Ash, Walnut and Hickory have dwindled from representing around 30% of total revenue to a percentage in the teens today. Compounding the issue, the glut of supply has caused domestic hardwood prices to crater.

"It's kind of like catching a falling knife," Jeppson tells TIME. "The challenge for us as an industry is how to maintain our production, our jobs, in the face of a severely hampered market. The uncertainty around the trade escalation has continued to keep buyers on the sidelines and those in China looking elsewhere for their hardwood needs."

China's own forests have long been decimated, leading to a complete ban on domestic commercial logging in 2017. But the appetite for hardwood in the world's most populous nation keeps growing. While American forests are, on the whole, carefully managed, those of Russia, Southeast Asia and Central Africa enjoy few protections and are blighted by indiscriminate logging.

"Illegal deforestation is especially common in [Russia's] far east and along the Russian-Chinese border," Nikolay Shmatkov, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

The Chinese government has made efforts over the past decade to address its timber supply chain, and sourcing sustainable North American wood had become a point of pride for high-end manufacturers like Jiamushi. But it's an upward battle when much of the world's timber comes from nations with poor governance and the trade war is jeopardizing the economics of sustainable sourcing.

An estimated 80% of the wood entering China from Russia is illegally felled, according to David Gehl, Eurasia programs coordinator for the Washington D.C.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). Recent undercover EIA investigations of Chinese wood exporters in Gabon and the Congo also revealed a high level bribery, tax evasion and sourcing of illegal wood.

"It's a huge issue," says Gehl. "China has long been the world's largest importer of wood, and that just keeps increasing, [including] illegally sourced wood products as well."

Despite ongoing negotiations, the trade war rumbles on with no end in sight. Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping said he was seeking an initial compromise based partly on "equality." Yet only hours later the U.S. president appeared to shoot down those sentiments.

"This can't be like an even deal, because we're starting off on the floor and you're already at the ceiling," Trump told Fox News on Friday. "So we have to have a much better deal."

It's a frustrating picture for both environmentalists and Jeppson, whose seen exports to China drop 40% compared with last year.

"Our products are 100% renewable and our forestry practices are the most sustainable on the planet," he says. "The Chinese like our products, need our product, so we'd like to see those volumes return."

(WASHINGTON) — Federal safety regulators indicated Tuesday that they will keep full control over approvals of each new Boeing 737 Max built since the planes were grounded in March, rather than delegating some of the work to Boeing employees.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it told Boeing on Tuesday that the agency will retain all authority to issue safety certificates for newly manufactured Max planes.

Boeing hasn't stopped producing the Max, although it slowed down the assembly line in April. The FAA's announcement doesn't cover planes that were approved before the Max was grounded following two crashes that killed 346 people.

The FAA decision affects more than 300 finished Max jets currently sitting in storage. Boeing delivered nearly 400 before the Max was grounded.

It is the latest move by the FAA to show its independence from Boeing. Lawmakers have accused the FAA of surrendering too much authority to the aircraft manufacturer in certifying the Max.

Senior FAA officials appeared to know little about a new flight-control system on the plane, which played a role in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The FAA relied on analysis and testing by Boeing employees, whose work was supposed to be overseen by federal inspectors.

Chicago-based Boeing said recently it expects to resume deliveries to airlines in December and gain final FAA approval in January for U.S. airlines to resume using the plane.

That was met, however, with pushback by the FAA. Earlier this month, FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson said, "there is a lot of pressure to return this aircraft to service quickly."

Dickson has refused to publicly set a date for the plane's return, telling FAA employees "to take the time you need and focus solely on safety." Dickson also hasn't said whether the FAA will go along with Boeing's desire to resume Max deliveries to airlines next month, even before the FAA approves a new program for training pilots to fly the planes.

A Boeing spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said Tuesday, "We will continue to work closely with the FAA on the safe return to service of the Max fleet."

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(BEIJING) — Top Chinese and U.S. trade negotiators spoke by phone and agreed to continue to work toward a preliminary agreement for resolving their tariff war, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said Tuesday.

In a brief notice, the ministry said that Vice Premier Liu He and other senior officials spoke with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin early Tuesday Beijing time.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the two sides discussed "solving issues regarding each other's core concerns, reached consensus on properly resolving related issues and agreed to maintain communication on remaining issues in consultations on the Phase 1 deal."

The announcement was not immediately confirmed by the U.S. side. It came after Wall Street stuck new record highs Monday following the announcement by Beijing of new guidelines for the protection of patents and copyrights.

Theft of such intellectual property has been a sore point in the trade war between the world's largest economies, and markets saw China's move as an encouraging sign for negotiations on the first phase of a deal.

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(Bloomberg) — Charles Schwab Corp. agreed to buy TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. in a multibillion-dollar deal that will reshape the retail brokerage business.

Schwab agreed to acquire TD Ameritrade in an all-stock transaction the companies say is valued at $26 billion, or about $48.50 per share — a 19% premium based on Schwab's share price as of close on Nov. 20. TD Ameritrade stockholders will receive 1.0837 Schwab shares for each TD Ameritrade share.

The equity value of the deal is $28.3 billion based on Schwab's closing price of $48.20 on Nov. 22.

Announcement of the deal comes after news of an acquisition broke on Thursday, sending up shares of both firms. Schwab, America's original discount broker, will now have even more sway over the sector it pioneered nearly a half-century ago.

The tie-up creates a mega-firm with $5 trillion in assets — a Goliath that may attract the attention of antitrust regulators, analysts say. Smaller brokerages like E*Trade Financial Corp. will have to contend with a much more formidable competitor.

The combined firm will relocate its headquarters to to Schwab's new campus in Westlake, Texas, according to Monday's statement, though Schwab's San Francisco operations will remain a sizable hub.

Soaring Shares

Shares of TD Ameritrade, an Omaha-based brokerage that's partly owned by Toronto-Dominion Bank, fell less than 1% on Friday after surging 17% the day before as investors learned of a possible deal. Schwab rose less than 1% Friday, after gaining 7.3% the prior day, as investors waited for confirmation.

TD Bank, which holds 43% of TD Ameritrade, will own roughly 13% of the new business. Its voting stake will be limited to 9.9%, with the rest of its position in a non-voting class of stock. The Canadian lender will have two new seats on the combined firm's board, while TD Ameritrade will name a single director.

As a result of the deal, Schwab will see its business add 12 million client accounts, $1.3 trillion in assets, and roughly $5 billion a year in revenue.

Walt Bettinger, Schwab's chief executive officer, said in the statement that the new firm will have "the resources of a large financial services institution that will be uniquely positioned to serve the investment, trading and wealth management needs of investors across every phase of their financial journeys."

Schwab's last month eliminated commissions for U.S. stock trading, forcing other brokerages to follow suit and sweeping away an important revenue stream. Analysts speculated that online brokerages might have to cut deals to survive the increased industry pressure.

TD Ameritrade has relied more on commissions than some competitors, drawing 36% of its net revenue from commissions in 2018, compared to 7% at Schwab.

Founder Charles Schwab hinted he was open to dealmaking in an interview with Bloomberg Radio in October.

"I don't know whether we'll be successful in that pursuit, but in the industry you're going to see more consolidation, more firms getting together," he said. "You just have to have that scale and volume."

If the deal goes through, the combined company will have unparalleled clout as top custody service providers to independent financial advisers. That may give authorities pause, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Kyle Voigt wrote Thursday. He estimates Schwab has about a 50% market share of registered investment adviser custody assets, while TD Ameritrade may have as much as 20%.

The acquisition comes after TD Ameritrade announced in July that CEO Tim Hockey would leave early next year. Hockey denied at the time that his departure had anything to do with a potential deal.

Credit Suisse Securities was Schwab's financial adviser. PJT Partners and Sander O'Neill Partners were financial advisers to TD Ameritrade's board. Davis Polk & Wardwell and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz were legal advisers to Schwab and TD Ameritrade, respectively.

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Victoria's Secret's cancellation of its annual fashion show amid a decline in sales and ratings marks a significant shift in the fashion industry, according to one of the models who has led the charge in criticizing the lingerie company.

"It shows that time is evolving," model Robyn Lawley tells TIME. Last year, Lawley launched a boycott against the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, calling out the brand for its lack of body diversity.

Victoria's Secret has long been criticized for its lack of inclusivity in both the types of models it hires and in the sizes it offers for customers. Newer lingerie brands, like Aerie, ThirdLove, or Rihanna's Savage X Fenty, make a point to be more inclusive of all body types in their marketing. But Victoria's Secret continues to advocate a look that is out of reach for almost everyone but its supermodel "Angels"—thin figures, rock-hard abs and breasts that fit into the brand's famous push-up bras.

"I'm calling them out because I'm 30 and Australian and I don't care anymore. They sell you a fantasy," Lawley says. That fantasy — the idea that a young girl or woman can look like a Victoria's Secret Angel if she, too, bought the same bra the model is wearing — feels dangerous to her. Like many teenagers, Lawley shopped at Victoria's Secret when she was younger, perpetually trying to attain the look the company held up as an ideal. Then, she says, she woke up to reality.

"You see through the bullsh-t when you get older," she says. "They have the power. They should be setting the example on diversity."

What does Victoria's Secret need to do to ensure it thrives? Be more like Rihanna for one, Lawley says.

"Rihanna upscaled it so immensely. I think they learned their lesson," she says. "This is fashion. They have the opportunity to be diverse. They're going to try and rebrand. They need to rebuild."

The rise in criticism for Victoria's Secret's continued focus on what some say are outdated fashion and beauty ideals has led to decline. Sales dropped 7% in the latest quarter, compared to a 2% fall during the same time period last year. The lingerie brand is faltering as fewer and fewer people watch the televised fashion show during the holiday season each year. The New York Times reports that viewership numbers have starkly declined over the last five years — 9.7 million people watched the show in 2013; only 3.3 million tuned in last year.

Lawley says she began her boycott in 2018 after Ed Razek, then-chief marketing officer for L Brands, Victoria's Secret's parent company, said transgender models should not be cast in the fashion show because "the show is a fantasy." Victoria's Secret has since hired the company's first transgender model and made other small steps towards diversity, but it's not enough, according to Lawley.

Industry experts say Victoria's Secret can change by putting an emphasis on its customers, and moving away from the fantasy image that has been an ironclad part of its brand for decades. Representatives for L Brands and Victoria's Secret did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"People want to see more diversity in models and feel out of touch with what Victoria's Secret claims to be," Cora Harrington, the founder of the blog The Lingerie Addict and an expert on the lingerie industry, tells TIME. "Consumers in general have moved on, and the way people want to consume brand advertising is changing."

Harrington says Victoria's Secret can take a number of specific actions to maintain relevance in the coming years, including expanding its size range to include larger cup sizes and bra bands. Victoria's Secret's bra sizes range from 30A to 40DDD, while other companies offer bras sized up to 46DDD, in the case of Savage X Fenty, or 48I, from ThirdLove.

She also recommends retiring—or completely rebranding—the concept of a Victoria's Secret "Angel" and who gets to model for the company. Ultimately, the company's position is focused too heavily on the male gaze, Harrington says. That needs to shift.

"They need to move their branding and communications to talking about how lingerie makes people feel, as opposed to how lingerie makes people look to others," she says.

Among the brands that have been lauded for inclusivity, Rihanna's Savage X Fenty has been credited for redefining what a fashion show can be. Over the last two years, the Savage X Fenty fashion shows have shown such events can be memorable and unique when women's bodies are celebrated and models represent an array of body types and gender identities. For example, at the 2018 show, the model Slick Woods walked the runway while in labor at nine months pregnant.

Consumers want that kind of authenticity, says Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst with the NPD group. He brings up the bra company ThirdLove, which offers half-cup sizing and a wide range of band sizes, as an example.

"They're trying to sell fit, comfort, uniqueness, personalization. The fit that's right for you," he says. "Victoria's Secret cares more about themselves as a brand—they make the mistake of trying to sell Victoria's Secret as the magical formula. But the customer wants a personalized product."

Going forward, Lawley says, Victoria's Secret needs to fully rebuild to make itself relevant to 2019 consumers and concerns. That means committing to body diversity, creating products that are more biodegradable and environmentally friendly.

"I think they can do it," she says. "Every brand can change, every brand can mess up and learn from their mistakes."