It takes marine pearls about two years to develop in their shells. It took Bonnie Fraker about two seconds to declare why she wouldn’t wear them around her neck. “A pearl necklace makes me look dated,” said the retired Manhattan teacher, 73. “Perhaps there’s such a thing as ‘too classic.’”
Still, pearls persist. Ask Leigh Batnick Plessner, chief creative officer at Catbird, the Brooklyn fine-jewellery label that counts Meghan Markle and Taylor Swift as fans. “Pearl necklaces are still in demand,” she said. “But the appetite has really changed from traditional necklaces to more surprising takes.”
The traditional strand has long signified opulence and power. Julius Caesar commanded that only aristocrats could wear the gem during his reign. Figures as diverse as Marie Antoinette and the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty coveted the strands. In the 20th century, stateswomen like Queen Elizabeth II and Mamie Eisenhower wore them to official events. By the 1980s, punks paired pearls with their spiked collars to subvert yuppie style. Still, pearls were most associated with formidable women like Margaret Thatcher and Barbara Bush, along with the preppy clique in the 1988 film “Heathers.”
Instead of stringing the old-school pearl necklace along, many of today’s brands make pearl chokers, sometimes with smaller “baby” pearls that sit at mid-neck instead of resting on clavicles. Dior’s Couture runway in Paris featured pearl chokers; California designer Sophie Buhai makes hers with a black satin-cotton cord and single central pearl. The style “looks more modern,” said June Ambrose, a creative director and costume designer for stars like Mary J. Blige and Ciara. Ambrose wears pearls from both thrift stores and Valentino.
Also popular: freshwater pearls, uniquely shaped instead of uniformly round. Once considered the messy stepsister of marine pearls, the gems look like smeared blobs of ivory glitter—in other words, odd enough for the fashion world to swoon. “I like the individualism of them,” said Simone Rocha, the designer whose recent couture line for Jean Paul Gaultier included gowns that subbed in strands of iridescent baroque pearls for typical satin straps. Off the runway, some women flaunt them as a way to look sophisticated but not uptight. “They feel a bit more rebellious,” noted Taffy Msipa, 28, an interior creative director in Bath, U.K., who wears her Monica Vinader freshwater pearl necklace with slouchy suits. “I like how they let me look elegant, but elegant in my way.”
There’s also the “half-and-half,” an industry term for a necklace that’s half pearls and half something else. On the recent Cannes red carpet, actress Michelle Yeoh, 69, wore Mikimoto’s version with cultured pearls on one side and a spray of diamonds, inlaid with white gold, on the other.
After Yeoh’s appearance, Instagram fans lauded the look with comments like “Not your grandmama’s pearls!” and “weird but amazing,” while searches for “half and half necklace” spiked 30% on Google Trends. A gold-and-pearl version of the style popped up in the “Mean Girls” movie remake, while pop star Dua Lipa has sported Vivienne Westwood’s pearl-and-rhinestone collar.
Don’t want to part with your classic strand of marine pearls? Dallas-based therapist Katie-Beth Crumrine, 23, had her vintage double-loop necklace shortened to a collar-length one. She wears it with linen Madewell tops and jeans. “It helps elevate my look,” she said. “But isn’t snobby.” Mixing pearls with casual pieces like ceramic beads can also keep them current. Meanwhile, the creative director Ambrose tells famous clientele to pair pearls with minimal makeup, because “a pearl necklace and a bare face is chic; a pearl necklace, a full face of makeup and a red lip is really trying.”
Some modern pearl looks eschew necks altogether. See the pearl-strung friendship bracelets by Vinader, and Rocha’s irregular pearl earrings. (“I like it when they’re kind of odd and not matching,” she said.) According to jewellery designer Plessner, varied interpretations have become the point. “Pearls are kind of like a Rorschach test for your fashion personality,” she explained. “You want to be weird or ethereal or powerful? There’s a pearl look for that.”
Are Pearls Too Old-Fashioned? We Asked NYC Women.
“They’re more classy than old-fashioned. They remind me of Jackie O. But would I wear them right now? No. Maybe when I’m older.” —Brittany Bower, 29, Hospital Nurse
“No! I wear my pearls a lot, actually. I really like the weight of how they feel on my neck.” —Tara Rubin, 69, Casting Director
“Yes, but in a nice way. They remind me of my great grandmother, Nita. She used to wear them. She used to let me play with them, which I loved. I don’t think I’d wear them now, though.” —Sydney Willard, 29, Barista
“Nothing’s old-fashioned in 2024! I would wear pearls today, but, like, with a sweatshirt.” —Asia Harris, 24, Student
“I used to think they were kind of old-fashioned, like in ‘The Crown’, and then I started wearing them to the gym with a black workout tank. I have never felt more like a cool New York girl.” —Tara Strahl, 42, Library Consultant
In San Jose, Calif., a preserved Chihuahua skeleton stands on a bed of fur atop an antique library card catalog. A photo of the dog, Shirley, peers down on the living-room display.
Mari Moore, a 45-year-old paralegal, paid around $6,500 to preserve her dog’s bones, a process called bone articulation, after the rescue dog, who was at least 10 years old, died in 2020.
With a new appreciation for the brevity of life, she and her husband, Kirk Moore, 45, started therapy to improve their relationship after Shirley died.
Mari and Kirk Moore remember their dog, Shirley, with a large photo and a display of her preserved bones. PHOTO: HELYNN OSPINA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“When Shirley passed, our whole lives changed. We really realised that we want to appreciate each other,” she said. Now, they visit the shrine almost daily, especially during fights and difficult days. “It reminds me of real, pure, unconditional love, and it makes me want to be better.”
Mourning owners are memorialising their beloved cats and dogs at a rate not seen in over a century, when Victorian-era pet owners frequently taxidermied deceased companions, said the Moores’ taxidermist, Lauren Kane of Precious Creature Taxidermy in Redlands, Calif.
Lifelike taxidermy and bone articulation can cost thousands of dollars. But urns, some made of bronze or inlaid with ornate mother-of-pearl designs, are a more common and accessible choice for people who want to honour their pets and integrate a memorial into the design of their home, said Tim Murphy, executive director and chief executive of the Casket & Funeral Supply Association of America. The trade organisation supports professionals in funeral services for humans and, increasingly, for pets, he said.
Artist commissions
In 2023, about 33% of funeral homes offered pet-care services, up from 26% in 2021, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, a professional organisation for funeral-services professionals in Brookfield, Wis.
Demand has heightened since the pandemic, when bonds grew stronger as people spent more time at home with their pets, said Donna Shugart-Bethune, executive director of the International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories.
While pet urns usually cost $50 to several hundred dollars, customisation can push the expense into the thousands, said Murphy. Sentimental pet owners frequently commission artists to make custom sculptures of bronze, papier-mâché, wood or pottery as vessels for pet ashes, said Coleen Ellis, the executive director of the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care.
“There is not too much of a limit on what people are willing to spend on their pets. I actually find that people are willing to spend more money on their pets than on their human loved ones,” said Nikki Nordeen of Terrybear, a St. Paul, Minn.-based supplier of memorial items to the funeral industry and pet-loss professionals.
While pet urns are usually smaller and less expensive than those designed for humans, Nordeen said some people are choosing personalised, high-end urns that rival or even exceed the cost of traditional human urns, she said. Without customisation, Terrybear’s pet urns retail for about $50 to $400 compared with an average $120 to $800 for traditional urns, said Nordeen.
Bucket and Mr. Pickles
In Manhattan, Ill., a $250 square wooden urn is disguised as a shadow box, showcasing three photos of a cocker spaniel mix named Bucket, her collar and a tag that identified her as blind.
Kate Becker, a 36-year-old critical care nurse practitioner, and her husband, veterinarian Scott Becker, adopted two dogs—Bucket and Mr. Pickles—in 2014. Four years later, she said they built a house with a light-filled guest bedroom where Scott played guitar to decompress after difficult days.
Kate Becker sits with Bucket’s surviving companion Mr. Pickles (right) and her new rescue dog Sola (left). PHOTO: KEVIN SERNA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
But Kate’s life changed when her husband died of cardiac arrest at age 40 in 2020, and Bucket went into kidney failure and had to be put down a year later.
“Scott and I did not have any children, so my dogs 100% got me through,” she said. “Losing Bucket—that was really hard, especially so soon after Scott passed.”
Kate placed Scott’s urn, a box with a sea-like glass exterior, with Bucket’s urn on a dresser in the guest bedroom, with candles and her late husband’s ball cap.
“I’m grateful that Bucket is still part of my home,” said Kate, who said she limits the special items displayed to maintain an uplifting space for meditations, with Mr. Pickles by her side.
Often, mourning pet owners drape a collar over the urn’s neck and arrange the pet’s favourite toys around it. Designers recommend creating photo walls and using shadow boxes to display fur, whiskers, toys and collars. Plants can be placed near urns to represent the continuation of life in a home after a pet’s death, said interior designer Jeannelly Hartsfield of Ivyleaf Interior in Powder Springs, Ga., who has helped clients create memorial displays in their homes.
Scott had a special relationship with Bucket, Kate said. PHOTO: KEVIN SERNA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ruby-Rue
The cedar wood urn of Ruby, an Australian shepherd-labrador, sits on a table next to Lisa Daoust’s living room fireplace, surrounded by a favourite toy squirrel and dried flowers.
In the corner where Ruby liked to nap, Daoust, a 59-year-old retired teacher in Murietta, Calif., hung a roughly $270 photo designed by EverAfter. The Florida-based company says it shines light through crystals created with a pet’s ashes to generate unique images.
The urn, with a “Ruby-Rue” nickname nameplate by Furever Loved in Lake Elsinore, Calif., was included with the cremation, which cost about $200, she said. Depending on a pet’s size and services included, owners usually pay several hundred dollars for cremation, a fraction of the cost of human cremation.
Daoust rescued Ruby in 2002, two years before she married her husband, retired Department of Defense firefighter Jason Daoust, 51. Ruby saw Daoust through the death of her brother in January 2022 before dying in March 2022, several months before Daoust’s mother-in-law passed away. The combined grief was devastating. But finding ways to honour loved ones has helped her process her loss, she said, adding that she also has memorials for her mother-in-law and brother in her home.
“Our relationships with family and friends are so much deeper now. We don’t criticise, and we don’t judge so easily. Because in a snap, life could be gone,” said Daoust.
People frequently place pet urns in living rooms on shelves or fireplace mantels, where owners can process their pet’s passing by talking about their companion with visitors. Or, owners sometimes place them in the pet’s favourite place to spend time, whether that be in a garden or in a sun puddle in a home office, said Ellis.
The Moores prominently feature mementos in their living room. PHOTO: HELYNN OSPINA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Though interior designers and Feng Shui practitioners generally advise that people keep bedrooms a place to focus on rest, some keep ashes in their bedrooms when their loss is fresh, said Laura Cerrano, founder of Feng Shui Manhattan, a New York City-based consulting firm.
Vivianne Villanueva Dhupa, the former owner of a pet crematory and a pet hospice facility in the San Diego area, says she encourages people to place a memento where they would expect to see their pet.
Mari Moore keeps sentimental objects, like this food bowl, to remind her of her dogs. PHOTO: HELYNN OSPINA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“It helps with the grieving to have something to focus on, because it leaves such a void, physically and emotionally,” she said.
Dhupa has three urns in her own living room. The shelves hold a roughly $125 black ceramic urn for her black cat who died several years ago and a $395 poodle-shaped ceramic urn figurine for a poodle-mix dog who died in September. On a coffee table is a $260 white heart-shaped urn with a decorative gold heart for a Brussels griffon who died in December. She also has several stones etched with her pets’ names in the garden where her dogs liked to play, she said.
Lifelike sculptures
One highly customised urn sits on top of a piano in a Houston living room. The ceramic, 3D-printed sculpture of a dog in a claw-footed tub peers up with timid eyes amid family photos and snapshots of the collie named Darby.
Lauren Shafer, a 40-year-old marketing manager at Lone Star College-Houston North, and her husband James Shafer, a 48-year-old bass player, rescued Darby around 2010. Darby, a quiet dog that tended toward anxiety, jumped into the empty bathtub for safety whenever uncertainty came his way. When Darby died in 2015, they spent about $1,200 for the custom 3D-printed urn by Foreverence, a custom urn design and manufacturing business in the Minneapolis area.
“Splurging on a custom-designed urn is, I’m sure, not something that everybody can do, but it sure helped me to get through it a little bit easier,” said Lauren.
Urn makers add pets’ names, dates, nicknames, poems and other sentiments, which usually costs about $25 depending on the design, said Chris Christian, co-owner of Christian-Sells Funeral Home in Rogersville, Tenn. Unique custom artwork, such as pet-shaped sculptures created by hand or 3D-printed, can cost several thousand dollars.
“People want an urn or memorial item that is representative of how they viewed their pet,” said Nordeen. For her two fluffy, white Samoyeds, she chose urns with a white shimmery finish and paw prints around the sides. It’s a design that typically costs around $180 apiece, plus an additional $120 to be etched with their names, nicknames and the years they were born and died, she said.
Saying goodbye
For Mari Moore, the process is beginning all over again: In January 2024, her other Chihuahua, Laverne, died. But Mari said that this time she is hopeful about her future as an “empty-nester” as she takes on new challenges and carves out new parts of her identity beyond being a “pet mom.” She celebrated Laverne’s life with about 100 friends by hosting a fundraiser with taco and churro trucks for the City of San José Animal Care & Services centre.
The skeleton tribute seemed an appropriate way to remember Shirley because the rescue dog with numerous health issues lost much of her hair by the end of her life, said Mari. But Laverne will be fully taxidermied, positioned as if she is sleeping on a bed. The process will take about two years and will cost over $10,000, but Mari said that for her, it’s worth it to honour her pets.
“Everybody who comes over says, ‘Wow. This is beautiful,’” she said. “I really feel like we did a good job honouring them.”
Nine-hundred eighty-three people applied online for a job posted recently by tech recruiter Rob Tansey. The candidate who got the offer wasn’t one of them.
Tansey, who scouts potential hires for aviation-software maker Veryon, received a half dozen referrals from a woman he knew from past job searches. One of those six quickly became the front-runner. That’s often how Tansey operates: He estimates that just 40% of successful applicants come in cold through his company’s job portal.
“There’s an idealist in me that wants to look at all the résumés,” he says. “The reality is you just can’t.”
Who-you-know networking is back. As the number of job applicants has swelled in recent years, the key to landing a new position often turns on a personal connection that can pluck your résumé out of online obscurity and ensure it’s seen by a real person.
Behind the resurgence: frustration with the digital slog that bogs down U.S. hiring. Many hiring managers and applicants agree that the ease with which job hunters can respond to help-wanted postings has broken the online-application process by creating high volumes of candidates that hiring managers can’t hope to parse through. Meanwhile, applicants say automatic screening tools are shutting them out of opportunities.
Reverting to referrals threatens to undermine corporate diversity efforts, which were supposed to be aided by online applications. Software promised to democratise hiring by reducing human biases, but wider talent pipelines have overwhelmed some employers to the point where they’re reaching for what’s worked in the past.
To promote the use of connections, some employers, like software giant Dassault Systemes , have increased cash rewards for employees whose recommendations lead to hires. Others, including the University of Miami and its health system with 20,000 total employees, have launched new referral-bonus programs. Corporate hiring software can allow companies to identify referred candidates first, boosting those applicants over the competition.
Whether recommendations come from in-house or outside the company, the advantages are significant, according to data compiled by the hiring-software company Greenhouse. For roles that were posted on Greenhouse job boards and filled in the first quarter of this year, applicants with referrals had a 50% chance of advancing past an initial résumé review, compared with 12% odds for other external candidates.
Thirty percent of eventual hires had referrals, even though people with referrals represented just 5% of the applicant pool.
“Candidates are so desperate to get noticed, and they’re asking, ‘What’s the cheat code? What’s the way to get through the filters?’” says Jon Stross, Greenhouse’s co-founder. “Get referred. It really increases your chances of getting through the first filter.”
AI arms race leads to frustration
The renewed reliance on networking comes as applicants and hiring managers are struggling to navigate the software that now dominates recruiting.
Companies are swamped by applicants in part because many job seekers are newly relying on ChatGPT and automated bots to fire off large volumes of résumés, or using other shortcuts like LinkedIn’s “easy apply” button.
Some human-resources professionals lament that cover letters sound eerily similar, as if written by the same nonhuman.
Candidates fume when they click “submit” and don’t hear back—and sometimes even when they do. Amanda Palasciano, in Red Bank, N.J., scored an interview for a senior copy-manager position as she sought a job in advertising. The catch was that her interviewer was an avatar, not a person.
The video call was awkward. Palasciano, 42, had a short window to record her response to each question. She didn’t know where to look. Soon after, she was rejected.
“It put a bad taste in my mouth about the company,” she says. “If that’s how much reliance you put on brand-new tools over people, this isn’t the right place for me.”
She decided to stop applying online and started asking former colleagues about short-term openings , aiming to convert one to a full-time job.
“This front door is locked,” Palasciano says. “We’re going through the back door, or we’re not working.”
Fewer applicants, higher quality
Lindsay Broveleit, a Minneapolis-area vice president at the marketing agency Matato, didn’t bother posting a job listing online when she needed to fill a midlevel role this spring.
She feared that listing the position on LinkedIn or the company’s website would bring throngs of low-quality applications—and she was anxious about how truthful AI-enhanced applications might be.
“A couple of years ago, I would have absolutely pursued more digital channels that are more public-facing,” she says. Not now. “We don’t want that many applicants. We want good ones.”
She thought to tap her and her colleagues’ networks to fill the role, but she soon reconsidered—even those personal channels have become oversaturated with first- and second-degree connections looking for work.
Employees are “inundated with people asking for their help to navigate into open positions,” she says.
She contracted a staffing agency instead.
Whether using agencies or their own employees, more companies are turning to people to vet prospects.
Laserfiche, a maker of content-management software, has a longstanding employee-referral program and a renewed commitment to contact everyone who is recommended by an employee.
The guaranteed outreach does not ensure an offer, says Vice President of People Jenny Bode, but it is a chance for candidates with unconventional backgrounds to make a case for themselves. With about 400 applicants for a typical opening, that’s an opportunity not afforded to everyone.
Bode values referrals partly because one helped bring her to Laserfiche in 2022. She wasn’t even looking for a job when she heard from a former co-worker she’d kept in touch with.
“She reached out to me and said, ‘I have this position. Do you want to interview for it?’” Bode recalls.
Alison Mincey introduced referral bonuses of up to $2,500 when she became chief human resources officer at the University of Miami in 2022. She estimates one in 10 hires now starts with an employee referral. The program, she says, also helps with retention: Employees are more engaged when their input is valued, and newcomers are more likely to stay and thrive when they already know a co-worker.
A flawed but indispensable system
On Greenhouse’s platform, when employees submit referrals, the software prompts them to “consider referring people from underrepresented backgrounds.”
That can be a challenge. People tend to know—and therefore recommend—people like themselves, says Ruth Thomas, chief of research and insights at PayScale, a compensation-management firm. (PayScale itself has lately doubled its usual share of new hires found through referrals, to 30%.)
Referral networks tend to reinforce demographic imbalances . A PayScale survey of 53,000 workers found that white men land more jobs and bigger raises through referrals than others because they are more likely to be connected to corporate decision makers.
Hiring managers might say, “They were in my club at Princeton, and therefore, they’re a good person,” says John Horton, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and co-author of a recent paper on artificial intelligence in hiring. “If people start to retreat away from an open market, and it happens much through who you know and references, that would be bad.”
Cisco Systems is leaning more heavily on referrals for hiring than it has in the past. But the network-equipment company knows the approach can run counter to diversity efforts, so it also launched an effort to hire more people of color and workers without four-year degrees, says Macy Andrews, vice president of employer branding for people and purpose. That hiring initiative looks to identify candidates with transferable skills rather than mandating college. Cisco so far has made over 100 hires through the initiative.
The company is looking to cut through the online-application morass in other ways as well. Cisco recruiters now visit college campuses with preprinted offer letters, so they can snap up students who make strong impressions.
“There is a bigger point here, which is that the process of sending in résumés and having thousands—sometimes millions—to go through isn’t the wave of the future,” she says.
No connection, no luck
Samuel Joynson, of Venice, Fla., launched a thoroughly modern job hunt after he lost his job when his company went through a reorganisation. He enlisted ChatGPT to edit his résumé and draft emails and cover letters.
The language didn’t sound like him—so he changed his approach.
Joynson, 28 years old, switched to writing his own letters and emails, investing about two hours into each application. He also pushed himself to contact everyone he knew at major tech companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft , where he talked to a friend from college. On calls, he asked them about their experiences at the companies, the office environment and remote-work policies.
“I took the approach of making it as human-based as possible,” he says.
Joynson’s old-fashioned strategy paid off. Many conversations led to introductions to other employees within his target companies. He landed a role and started as a senior technical program manager at Microsoft in April.
Francisco Denis recently discovered that connections—or lack thereof—can make all the difference. He says he was a finalist for a project-manager role at Disney but was told by a recruiter that the company decided to hire someone who had worked there in the past and could plug in immediately.
Denis, 40, has applied online for more than 100 jobs this year after moving on from an unsuccessful startup. His efforts have yielded only a handful of interviews, a jarring turn from a couple of years ago, when he was routinely headhunted. He’s pouring energy into networking for the first time in his career, reconnecting with former co-workers at companies he’d like to join. He often shares his résumé and describes his arduous job search to show that he’s not looking for a handout.
Still, even a system that relies on human connections can be gamed. On Fishbowl, an app for workplace venting and career advice, users have started a forum dubbed “Job Referrals!” It has drawn hundreds of thousands of members seeking endorsements from people they don’t know.
“Anyone willing to provide a referral to Amazon ?” one user posted.
In lieu of a handshake or business card, another offered an emoji: “Looking for a referral for Spotify, thanks in advance :).”
Bogus referrals could be win-wins for the people who give and receive them. The applicants gain an edge and, if they’re hired, their sponsors might be entitled to referral bonuses.
The companies that extended the offer? They’re left with one more hiring strategy that can’t be trusted.
Taylor Swift took on the role of preservationist when she bought and restored a Beverly Hills mansion built for movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn—and if she’s looking for a new project, another century-old Goldwyn estate just hit the market asking $3.495 million.
The 1916 Spanish-style villa was built for the Polish-born producer in the Hollywood foothills of Runyon Canyon, a little-known artist enclave with a rich legacy. It was a starter home for Goldwyn, who eventually bought two other properties in Los Angeles as part of the so-called Goldwyn trifecta, according to listing agent Ingrid Sacerio of the Agency, who listed the home last week.
L.A. LIGHT
The two other homes include an Italianate mansion built a couple blocks away by Los Angeles developer E.F. Fuller (it sold in 2022 for $6.4 million), and the grand Georgian Revival mansion in Beverly Hills that Swift bought in 2016 for $25 million before launching a campaign to have it officially landmarked . She still owns the home.
Should Swift (or anyone else) wish to flex their conservation muscles, the Hollywood property already boasts original architectural details, including the windows, interior doors and oak floors throughout. A triptych sculpture from the 1928 “Cleopatra” movie set and other artefacts and fountains dot the landscaped grounds.
L.A. LIGHT
Sacerio said it also has a lucky legacy: Soon after moving in, Goldwyn co-founded MGM and began producing acclaimed films of the 1930s and ’40s, including “Stella Dallas,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “Little Foxes,” and hit musicals such as “Guys and Dolls,” starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, and “Porgy and Bess.”
The neighbourhood “was a magnet for silent movie stars back in the day,” said seller Shel Pink, who is an artist, author of the self-care book “Slow Beauty” and the founder of beauty-product brand SpaRitual. She purchased the house in 2015 with musician Ran Pink. “One of the houses across the street was reputedly owned by one who had parties that lasted for days.”
Pink said the history of the neighbourhood was a significant draw. “Everyone knows about the music scene in Laurel Canyon but not about this little enclave in Runyon Canyon, which has attracted writers like Joan Didion, who rented here in the 1970s, and other creative types over the decades.”
She was also drawn to the house’s Old Hollywood history and its location on the hill. “We are slightly above but not so high that we have to drive down steep, winding roads, so it’s super accessible,” Pink said.
The 3,398-square-foot residence sits on a corner lot and features four bedrooms and three bathrooms. A separate studio with its own entrance is adjacent to the two-car garage at the rear of the property.
L.A. LIGHT
Upstairs, the primary bedroom now incorporates what was once a neighbouring sunroom with a vaulted ceiling and semi-circle, or half-sun, windows; a previous owner added a ceiling-mounted curtain that Pink says can be drawn to block out the morning sun or to keep the sleeping area cool during the day. Two more bedrooms (one en-suite) are on this level.
The fourth bedroom with a walk-in closet on the ground floor is currently used as a den. A designated office overlooks the dining room, which flows into a living room on one side and the kitchen on the other—all enclosed with expansive windows and glass doors, allowing light to flood the interior, Pink said.
L.A. LIGHT
A tall fence surrounds the entire property, which is further protected with double gates—a two-door pedestrian gate along the street and another leading into the porch outside the front door, both customised by the previous owner, Pink said.
The garage’s location at the rear of the property provides additional privacy. “No one ever sees anyone coming and going out of the front gate,” Sacerio said. Instead, they pull into the garage, walk across a pebbled area, up a few steps to a patio with a hot tub, and into the breakfast nook in the kitchen.
A landscaped brick pathway circumnavigates the perimeter of the property, crossing a patio with an outdoor fireplace and ending in steps leading down to a long, narrow pool.
“From the moment you enter the gardens and see the ivy walls, there’s a poetry and a wildness here—I like to say that we have our own mini forest that hugs the home and creates a serene oasis in the middle of an urban environment,” Pink said. “It feels like a secluded retreat. Everyone comments on the beautiful energy and sense of calm as soon as they step inside.”
A 14th-century villa in the hills overlooking Florence, Italy, has hit the market for €12 million (US$13 million).
Surrounded by cypress trees, vineyards and olive groves, the quintessential Tuscan home was built for the Davanzati family—who were powerful bankers, merchants and patrons during the Italian Renaissance who have a museum named after them in the heart of the city. The villa was one of the family’s multiple country retreats, according to Lionard Luxury Real Estate, which brought the home to the market earlier this month.
Courtesy of Lionard
The four-storey, lemon-hued villa boasts more than 16,000 square feet of living space and historic character and charm by the bucket load.
The ballroom has a giant skylight. Courtesy of Lionard
On the ground floor there are a number of reception rooms and open-air living areas, with many of them boasting antique paintings, tapestries and stately fireplaces made of marble or carved stone.
The most “magnificent” room, according to Lionard, is the winter garden hall, a ballroom with stuccos, loggias and towering vaulted ceilings, illuminated by an Art Nouveau skylight.
On the first floor are multiple double bedrooms and an antique library, and the second floor, while in need of renovation, offers the possibility of creating up to 12 en-suite bedrooms. The villa’s tower has a “delightful sitting room and a rooftop terrace offering a breathtaking view of the city of Florence,” the listing said.
The villa has ivy-covered loggias. Courtesy of Lionard
The basement, meanwhile, has a cellar with brick vaults that are perfect for wine lovers. An elevator runs between the levels.
Outside, the grounds have well-kept gardens, rolling lawns, a fountain, ancient wells and ivy-covered loggias.
Mansion Global couldn’t determine who is selling the villa, or when they acquired it.
The property is “an oasis of peace,” the listing said, and “one of the most exclusive historical estates on the hills that surround the city of Florence.”
More Americans are profoundly lonely, and the way they work—more digitally linked but less personally connected—is deepening that sense of isolation.
Nick Skarda , 29 years old, works two jobs in logistics and office administration in San Diego to keep up with his bills. After a couple of years at the logistics job, he has one friend there. He says hi to co-workers at his office job but doesn’t really know any.
“I feel sort of an emptiness or lack of belonging,” he says. Juggling two jobs leaves Skarda exhausted, with little energy or time to grab drinks with co-workers . “It makes it harder to go in and give it your all if you don’t feel like anyone is there rooting for you,” he adds.
Employers and researchers are just beginning to understand how workplace shifts over the past four years are contributing to what the U.S. surgeon general declared a loneliness health epidemic last year. The alienation affects remote and in-person workers alike. Among 1-800-Flowers.com ’s 5,000 hybrid and fully on-site employees, for instance, the most popular community chat group offered by a company mental-health provider is simply called “Loneliness.”
Consider these phenomena of modern work:
It is a marked shift from even a decade ago, when bonds fostered at work helped compensate for declining participation in church , community groups and other social institutions. As the American workday becomes more faceless and scheduled , the number of U.S. adults who call themselves lonely has climbed to 58% from 46% in 2018, according to a recent Cigna poll of 10,000 Americans.
The faceless workday
The disconnection is driving up staff turnover and worker absences, making it a business issue for more employers, executives and researchers say. Cigna, the health-insurance company, estimates that loneliness is costing companies $154 billion a year in absenteeism alone.
“Work is social, it’s a lot more than a paycheck,” says James McCann , founder and chairman of 1-800-Flowers.com.
Earlier this year, 1-800-Flowers.com moved from three days in the office to four to boost a sense of connectivity among workers. It has also begun tapping workers across teams to serve as designated hosts during lunchtime, encouraging people to sit with colleagues they don’t know in common areas and chat, and suggesting conversation topics.
While today’s workers have more ways to connect than ever, “there are only so many memes and jokes you can send over Slack,” says Maëlle Gavet , chief executive of Techstars, a pre-seed fund that has invested in 4,100 startups. “We tend to have more and more people with back-to-back calendars, more meetings and less connections.”
Gavet says that is especially the case for hybrid workers on in-office days, which they tend to use to dash from one meeting to the next.
Paradoxically, meetings can make people feel lonelier—and even more so if the meetings are virtual, behavioural researchers say. A 2023 survey by employee experience and analytics company Perceptyx found people who described themselves as “very lonely” tended to have heavier meeting loads than less-lonely staffers. More than 40% of those people spent more than half their work hours in meetings.
In Cincinnati, Kelly Roehm says she came to chafe at the meetings—sometimes as many as 12—consuming her day after joining a consulting company in 2021. She would often feel her eyes glazing over as she multitasked on other screens.
“It’s like you’re a zombie, there but not there,” says Roehm, who lived 10 minutes from the office but worked mostly remotely because she says few colleagues typically came in. It is a more common setup as companies distribute teams across more locations: At Microsoft , 27% of the company’s teams all worked in the same location last year, compared with 61% in 2019.
She compares that experience with her time more than a decade ago at a company now owned by AstraZeneca . There, she enjoyed lots of social outlets at work: a Weight Watchers group and a lunchtime crochet club.
“Now if I were to think about asking, ‘Hey, do you want to participate in something like this,’ it would just sound weird,” says Roehm, who left this year to focus on her own career-consulting business. “There wasn’t that emotional attachment that made it difficult to say, it’s time to move on.”
The power of small talk
Office chitchat, sometimes an unwanted distraction, seems to provide more benefits than many people realize, says Jessica Methot , an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies social ties at work.
In a study of 100 employees at different workplaces, Methot and fellow researchers surveyed participants at points throughout the day. They found those who had engaged in small talk reported less stress and more positivity toward co-workers.
Even exchanging pleasantries with a co-worker you barely know can help, says Sarah Wright , an associate professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who studies worker loneliness.
“We used to think loneliness has to be overcome by developing meaningful relationships and having that degree of intimacy,” Wright says. “More and more, though, we’re seeing it’s these day-to-day weak ties and frequency of [interactions] with people that matters.”
Such interactions are substantially harder to replicate in a virtual environment. “The default now is, I have to schedule time with you, even if it’s five minutes, instead of just picking up the phone,” says Katie Tyson , president of Hive Brands, an online food retailer founded in 2020 as a fully remote company.
The frictions add up, she says. Last fall, the company added an office in New York where employees voluntarily gather a couple of times a week to foster more cohesion.
Coming to the office, even on a hybrid basis, tends to yield a roughly 20% to 30% boost in serendipitous connections, according to Syndezo, which analysed survey data and email and messaging traffic from more than two dozen large companies.
Yet there are diminishing returns to time in person, says Philip Arkcoll , founder of Worklytics, which analyses workforce data for Fortune 500 companies. Coming in once a month provides a significant boost in ties; two or three times a month adds a little more, Worklytics data show. Once or twice a week results in a smaller increase, though, and working in-person four or five days a week makes almost no difference.
A business priority
Ernst & Young has asked managers to use the first five minutes of team calls to engage in conversation “as real human beings,” says Frank Giampietro , whose title, chief well-being officer for the Americas, was created in 2021 to help support employees during the pandemic.
The professional-services firm is also training employees to spot and reach out to co-workers struggling with issues such as isolation. To date, more than 1,600 employees have taken the training.
One challenge is that American workers have sacrificed connection for productivity, says Julie Rice , co-founder of fitness chain SoulCycle. These days, with more business contacts preferring video calls, she finds breakfast meetings and coffee dates on her calendar have been replaced with Zoom. Though efficient, such video calls are less likely to yield conversations that can turn into useful professional connections or lasting friendships, she says.
“Even people I’m meeting with here in New York, we’ll just Zoom,” she says.
Last year, Rice co-founded Peoplehood, a company that runs “gathers” to improve connectivity and relationship skills, and employers are signing up. One, a beauty-services business with hundreds of field employees who never see each other, asked Peoplehood to host a series of gatherings for workers to meet and share job advice. Another, a marketing company with far-flung employees, requested help after surveys showed staff wanted to feel more connected.
“Whatever relationships we had pre-Covid have sort of run out of gas,” Rice says.
Good luck prodding employees to socialise, though. Nearly all the 150-odd staff at the Pleasanton, Calif., headquarters of Shaklee, the nutrition-supplements company, used to attend annual Earth Day gatherings, which involved community service, lunch and breaking early for the day, says Jonathan Ramot , the company’s North American human-resources director. Office happy hours, bowling outings and “mix and mingles” were also robustly attended.
Now that the workforce has gone remote, last year’s Earth Day event attracted 20 staffers, even though most workers live nearby.
“We have a lot of people asking for in-person events, but when we plan them, they don’t show up,” Ramot says. “Then they complain they’re lonely.”
This past April, Shaklee instead held a mandatory get-together with the chief executive, who had relocated to Florida during the pandemic and was in town. About 100 employees gathered at a brewery for food, drinks and conversation—and no speeches from the bosses.
There was a buzz in the air, Ramot says, as staff hugged and delighted in seeing each other, some for the first time. “People were saying, I miss this,” he says.
Plymouth County is known for Pilgrims, cranberries—and a top-performing pension fund run by a 65-year-old former schoolteacher.
After a decade of mostly ho-hum performance, the $1.4 billion Plymouth County Retirement Association ranked in the top 10% of U.S. pensions over the past three years. Key to that success was an early—and prescient—bet that interest rates would rise. That buoyed the fund through big chunks of the past two years, when climbing rates hammered both stocks and bonds.
Now markets of all kinds have posted a six-month rally , stocks are hitting records and Plymouth risks falling behind again. But Peter Manning, the fund’s director of investments, is sticking to his guns. The hope that rates will fall soon is misplaced, he said. Another downturn could be coming for Wall Street.
And so, to Manning, the best way to enlarge the pension long term is by avoiding big losses, rather than chasing high returns.
“It ain’t about what you make. It’s about what you keep,” he said.
Beating the big guys
The fund, which manages savings for the county’s firefighters, bus drivers and custodians, delivered average annual net returns of 5.7% in the three years ending Dec. 31. That put it ahead of 92% of pensions nationally. The median U.S. public retirement fund returned 3.7% over the same period, according to Investment Metrics, a portfolio analysis provider.
Plymouth County surpassed bigger peers by slashing exposure to Treasurys and public stocks before they tanked in 2022. The fund then reinvested the money in infrastructure, private equity and inflation-protected debt.
While many other public plans have followed suit , the trades were also unusually quick for pension funds, which often change investments incrementally rather than in bold strokes.
“A lot of our clients made moves on the margin,” said Daniel Dynan, a managing principal at Meketa Investment Group, Plymouth County’s investment consultant. “The difference in Plymouth is the magnitude of the change.”
An unlikely trendsetter
With only 10,500 members, the fund is an unlikely trendsetter. U.S. public pensions guarantee retirement and benefit payments to 34 million members nationally, according to data from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank. Plymouth County, which lies south of Boston, encompasses mostly middle-class suburbs, but also some wealthy enclaves and gritty urban areas. It is split between Democratic and Republican voters.
A decade ago, Plymouth County had only about half of the money it needed to make expected payments for its retirees. An accounting change in 2012 drastically widened shortfalls for most public pensions across the country.
At the same time, the board overseeing the fund, which had spent years relying solely on an outside consultant, was dissatisfied with its investment performance. The approach resembled the classic mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds popular with ordinary investors.
“We were doing what everyone else was doing, running a 60-40 portfolio and hoping for the best,” said Tom O’Brien, Plymouth County’s treasurer and chairman of the pension board.
From teacher to investor
The county hired Manning to advise the board on investment strategy in 2012. He had never managed a pension fund before.
“I was a schoolteacher [in the 1980s] in a suburb of Boston and one day, after staring at 20 vacuous stares, I had a talk with my Uncle Bill, a currency trader,” Manning said.
He spent two decades trading commodity futures at his uncle’s brokerage in Boston and stocks at brokerages in Chicago. Then he became a financial adviser to wealthy individuals and families at Merrill Lynch on Cape Cod.
The job at Plymouth County involved a small pay cut, but offered the opportunity to run a nine-figure portfolio for public employees. He got a taste of how painful rising rates could be in May 2013, when comments by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke sent bond prices tumbling in what became known as the “taper tantrum.”
“We lost $20 million in three trading days and it took us 36 months of clipping coupons to make that back,” Manning said. Coupons are the interest payments bondholders receive.
Initially, Manning and O’Brien focused on boosting alternative investments such as private equity and infrastructure, which made up less than 5% of the fund. They were part of a flock of pension funds seeking alternative investments for higher returns .
Plymouth County hired Meketa as a consultant in 2015, and private-equity and infrastructure investments climbed to nearly 15% by 2020, according to fund financial reports. Returns improved.
“They have a level of comfort being different,” said Dynan.
A contrarian call
Markets were on a tear the following year, lifted by the economy’s reopening from the pandemic. But Manning grew concerned in the summer about inflation. While many on Wall Street were calling price increases transitory, he worried inflation would persist, triggering rate increases and declines in stocks and bonds.
“We were going to conferences and being told that inflation was a paper tiger, or ‘this is not your father’s inflation,’” O’Brien said.
Manning consulted Bob Sydow, a high-yield bond fund manager at Mesirow who manages part of the pension’s money. Like Manning, he has worked on Wall Street since the 1980s.
“The money supply grew 43% over 26 months during Covid,” Sydow said. “I called it ‘free-range’ money and I thought it would generate a lot of inflation.”
From October 2021 to February 2022, Plymouth County pension sold about $80 million of its public stocks, or 6% of the fund’s assets, according to an email viewed by The Wall Street Journal. It shifted into real estate and infrastructure as well as short-term and floating-rate debt that is less sensitive to rising rates than traditional bonds, Manning said.
The fund lost 6.5% in 2022 while the median U.S. pension plan lost 14%. That outperformance has helped it stay ahead of other funds, even after it lagged behind the average in 2023.
Now, inflation remains above the Fed’s targets , and analysts’ forecasts for multiple rate cuts this year seem less certain. Plymouth County is keeping its strategy relatively unchanged, betting that rates will remain steady—or even climb.
Many investors are buying back into bonds because yields are at multiyear highs and they expect cuts by the Fed to trigger a rally. Manning takes a different tack. He thinks rates could stay high far longer than the Wall Street consensus, so he is using infrastructure funds to deliver income rather than bonds.
“Why do you have to own bonds at all in 2024?” Manning said. “It’s a legitimate question.”
The concept of nudging has become popular in the past few years—using psychological tactics to subtly steer people toward making better decisions that are aligned with their own interests or societal goals.
Companies and governments are using nudges, for instance, by automatically enrolling people in retirement savings plans instead of having them opt in, or by placing healthier snacks at eye level in a cafeteria or by comparing people’s electricity consumption with their neighbours’.
But as nudges became increasingly popular, we wondered: Can they go the distance? Would they keep people on track beyond the initial push, like actually eating healthier foods or saving more money or reducing their energy use over the long term?
We found that, in many settings, they don’t. Lots of people simply don’t follow through on options they have been nudged to choose—making those nudges less effective than many people believe. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
Other research has shown this effect. In 2012, a team from Cornell University published research showing that more people grabbed healthy snacks—like apples and carrots—when they were placed in contexts that made them more convenient, such as being put at eye level, among other things. The finding got wide attention and helped spread the idea of nudging.
But another aspect of the experiment didn’t get much attention at all. Those Cornell researchers didn’t just measure what went on at the cash register. They also stuck around to see what people did with the food. The nudged people ended up eating the same amount of healthy food as the ones who weren’t nudged—and the extra that was taken because of the nudge was thrown in the garbage. In the end, the effect on consumption of healthy foods was nil.
“For a long time we had always included language in these published studies lamenting the lack of long-term studies to see exactly how long the effects would last,” says one of the researchers, David R. Just, a professor of applied economics at Cornell.
Just adds: “It makes some sense that nudges would be much more effective in the short term than in the long term. Choices like food that are repeated often over time lead to learning, and eventually people are likely to recognise how the environment is interfering with their choices. This may say that nudges are most important in one-time or rare decisions like organ-donor status.”
In the long run
To be sure, sometimes a nudge is better than nothing. Let’s say somebody who wouldn’t otherwise join a gym is nudged into becoming a member. In the end, that person probably won’t use the membership regularly, but might use it occasionally—which is better than not exercising at all. And nudges may be beneficial when people don’t have to follow up on their initial choice, such as a plan that automatically puts a part of each paycheck into a 401(k).
That is only some cases, though. In others, no nudging might actually be better than a nudge. For instance, somebody might want to choose to join a gym, and plans to attend three days a week. But if nudged into the choice, this person might go there much less.
But even when nudges are better than no nudges, we have found that nudges don’t provide nearly as much benefit as initial results indicate—or as much as many nudge proponents are counting on.
We conducted studies on three of the most popular nudge strategies. In one, we gave the participants a chance to sign up with a website to get daily trivia. We described one as a way to have fun, the other as a way to get smarter every day. In reality, everybody was directed to the same site, no matter which option they picked.
When we gave participants one website as a default—in other words, we nudged them to choose it—70% opted for it, compared with 48% who chose the same one when it wasn’t preselected. That’s typically how default nudges work: People are much more inclined to pick the default, which presumably will be the one that is best for them or society.
Next came the important part. We waited. We tracked how often the study participants visited their website membership over eight months. Those who were nudged to choose the default plan visited the site 42% less often than people who chose an identical plan without nudging.
This was true for people nudged with a default option, as well as people nudged with what’s known as a decoy: a deliberate dud that makes another option really shine. In this case, the dud was an offering designed for children. So, in effect, the default and decoy strategies had a positive impact on choice, but not on long-term actions. When we nudged participants into the program, they used it less than they would have at all if they hadn’t been nudged.
Another study that we conducted threw cold water on a nudge known as the compromise effect. Think of Goldilocks choosing a bed: Nudgers know that people make choices in the same way, preferring to avoid extremes. Let’s say a store is trying to boost sales of a product that gets high ratings but is considered too expensive. The store might try to nudge customers by offering another version of the product at an even higher price—so the original looks like a better deal.
In this study, we gave people the option of choosing a plant, and steered some of them toward a compromise option (a plant that wasn’t too flashy or high maintenance). As with the trivia website, everyone ended up getting the same plant, no matter which option they chose. But people who ended up with the plant by way of the compromise effect let theirs die 16% sooner than those who chose without a compromise option. In other words, the people who were nudged into the “Goldilocks” choice weren’t as committed to caring for the plant over the long term.
A better way
Why don’t people follow through on nudged choices? When people are subtly steered toward options, it can feel as if a decision happens on autopilot. This lack of conscious effort might lead people to feel disconnected from their choices, potentially reducing their engagement with them.
This raises all sorts of questions about social programs designed to help people make better choices. Although nudges can be a powerful lever to increase sign-ups, program organisers shouldn’t conflate the popularity of a plan with the amount of people who actually use it. As our studies show, nudges can increase the latter, but decrease the former.
Encouraging individuals to save for retirement through nudges, for instance, may boost initial participation rates but may not translate into sustained engagement or prudent financial habits over time. A nudge might get people to enroll, but it doesn’t make them feel ownership, like the choice was really theirs, so they don’t follow through as much.
In designing nudges, the focus should shift toward helping individuals follow through with their decisions, complementing nudges with strategies that promote sustained engagement and behaviour change. For instance, people get more motivated for tasks when you turn the jobs into games and let them share their achievements on leaderboards. (Think of the popularity of Wordle.) It feels good to have a streak and see how you stack up to others. We might be able to transfer those competitive elements to nudged choices: If you nudge people into saving for retirement, for instance, you could show them how their savings stack up against other people’s each week.
In the end, though, the main takeaway from our research is that nudges may be a great first step. But that’s all they are: a first step. Much of the hard work is what comes next.
A Tennessee judge on Wednesday blocked an allegedly fraudulent attempt to auction off Graceland, the former Memphis home of music legend Elvis Presley and a major tourist destination in the state.
Elvis’s granddaughter, actress Riley Keough , says a company that had planned a Thursday sale was fake and trying to defraud the trust that owns Graceland.
Judge JoeDae Jenkins in Chancery Court in Shelby County, Tenn., granted the injunction to stop the auction, according to a court clerk. The court had granted Keough a temporary restraining order on the sale last week.
The auction was initiated by an entity called Naussany Investments & Private Lending. It had filed a public notice for a foreclosure sale in Tennessee, alleging Lisa Marie Presley , Elvis’s only child, defaulted on a $3.8 million loan it made to her. The group said it now owns Graceland because Presley defaulted on the loan.
Presley, Keough’s mother, controlled the Graceland trust until her death in January 2023 . Keough then took over as trustee.
Lawyers for Keough said Naussany’s loan documents are forgeries, and the firm “appears to be a false entity created for the purpose of defrauding” the trust that owns Graceland, Presley’s heirs or any purchaser of Graceland.
Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages Graceland, has also said Naussany’s claims were fraudulent. “There will be no foreclosure,” said Elvis Presley Enterprises spokeswoman Alicia Dean . “Graceland will continue to operate as it has for the past 42 years.”
Keough’s lawyer declined to comment.
Naussany Investments and Kurt Naussany, named in the complaint as acting on behalf of the entity, couldn’t be reached for comment. A phone number listed in the complaint didn’t work, and emails sent to associated addresses weren’t answered. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t separately find contact information for a Kurt Naussany. A lawyer for the entity couldn’t be identified.
The Graceland complex in Memphis, which includes an exhibition center and a 450-room hotel, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
Elvis bought the property in 1957, when he was 22 and an ascendant star. He died in 1977 at the age of 42 and is buried on the Graceland property. Graceland opened to the public in 1982.
Lisa Marie Presley’s mother, Priscilla Presley , reached a settlement in 2023 with Keough over who would control the trust. The settlement came after Priscilla Presley challenged a 2016 amendment to the trust filed by Lisa Marie Presley that removed her mother as trustee.
Global economic growth is becoming more broad based, with surveys indicating that business activity in both the U.S. and the eurozone gained momentum in May.
The eurozone economy contracted in the second half of 2023 following a surge in energy and food prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent rise in interest rates intended to tame that inflation.
By contrast, the U.S. economy expanded strongly over the same period, opening up an unusually wide growth gap with the eurozone. That gap narrowed as the eurozone returned to growth in the first three months of the year, while the U.S. slowed.
However, surveys released Thursday point to a fresh acceleration in the U.S., even as growth in the eurozone strengthened. That bodes well for a global economy that relied heavily on the U.S. for its dynamism in 2023.
The S&P Global Flash U.S. Composite PMI —which gauges activity in the manufacturing and services sectors—rose to 54.4 in May from 51.3 in April, marking a 25-month high and the first time since the beginning of the year that the index hasn’t slowed. A level over 50 indicates expansion in private-sector activity.
“The data put the U.S. economy back on course for another solid gross domestic product gain in the second quarter,” said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Eurozone business activity in turn increased for the third straight month in May, and at the fastest pace in a year, the surveys suggest. The currency area’s joint composite PMI rose to 52.3 from 51.7.
The uptick was led by powerhouse economy Germany, where continued strength in services and improvement in industry drove activity to its highest level in a year. That helped the manufacturing sector in the bloc as a whole grow closer to recovery, reaching a 15-month peak.
By contrast, surveys of purchasing managers pointed to a slowdown in the U.K. economy following a stronger-than-expected start to the year that saw it outpace the U.S. The survey was released a day after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a surprise election for early July, banking on signs of an improved economic outlook to turn around a large deficit in the opinion polls.
Similar surveys pointed to a further acceleration in India’s rapidly-expanding economy, and to a rebound in Japan, where the economy contracted in the first three months of the year. In Australia, the surveys pointed to a slight slowdown in growth during May.
Businesses reported that they were raising their prices at the slowest pace since November, which should reassure the European Central Bank. However, the eurozone continued to add jobs in May, suggesting that wages might not cool as rapidly as the ECB had hoped.
The ECB released figures Thursday that showed wages negotiated by labor unions in the eurozone were 4.7% higher in the first quarter than a year earlier, a faster increase than the 4.5% recorded in the final three months of 2023
The ECB has signalled it will lower its key interest rate in early June, while the Fed is waiting for evidence that a slowdown in inflation will resume after setbacks this year.
Nevertheless, eurozone businesses and households shouldn’t bank on successive cuts to borrowing costs, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos said. “There is a huge degree of uncertainty,” he said. “We have made no decisions on the number of interest rate cuts or on their size,” he said in an interview published Thursday. “We will see how economic data evolve.”
Continued resilience in the eurozone economy would likely make the ECB more cautious about lowering borrowing costs after its first move, economist Franziska Palmas at Capital Economics wrote in a note. “If the economy continues to hold up well, cuts further ahead may be slower than we had anticipated,” she said.
