"For a little while Wednesday afternoon, customers at an ATM in Texas got a curious extra with their cash. Along with a receipt detailing their transaction, they got a little slip of scribbled-on white paper."
"It was a plea for help from the man trapped inside."
Today in 1969, large denomination bills of US Currency, e.g. $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills were officially withdrawn from circulation. While you could use these large bills after July 14, 1969, banks no longer distributed them, in an effort to reduce corruption and illicit uses of large denomination bills.
"The promise of faster economic growth has become a study in the triumph of hope over experience."
"While the June jobs report, coming on Friday, is expected to show that hiring continued at a healthy pace last month, other recent indicators in areas like consumer spending, construction and auto sales have been decidedly less robust."
"As a result, Wall Street forecasters have been busy lowering their growth estimates for the second quarter, which ended last Friday, much as they were forced to do over the first three months of the year. Economic expansion for the full year now appears unlikely to be much greater than 2 percent — about the average for the current recovery, which celebrates its eighth year this month."
"The "gig economy," popularized by the likes of Lyft, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, has for years been promoted as an effective way for Americans to make money on their own terms. But new data show that the majority of workers - 85 percent of them - make less than $500 a month, on average, using those services."
"The home-sharing site Airbnb yielded the highest monthly return to its users, with a median income of $440, more than double the $210 a month earned by the median Lyft driver, according to San Francisco-based loan provider Earnest, which analyzed tens of thousands of loan applications to study the impact of gig-economy jobs. (Earnings on other popular platforms included a monthly median of $40 on craft-selling site Etsy, $70 on delivery app Postmates, $110 on services marketplace TaskRabbit and $155 on ride-sharing app Uber.)"
"In 2016, Donald Trump became the first major-party candidate in more than half a century to advocate a return to the gold standard for the U.S. dollar. My guest, James Ledbetter, says most mainstream economists agree the idea is completely unworkable. But for much of American history, it was an article of faith that real money ought to be gold or at least redeemable for gold or another precious metal."