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A 600-Year-Old Medieval Villa Overlooking Florence Lists for €12 Million

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.”

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The Loneliness of the American Worker

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.

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How an Ex-Teacher Turned a Tiny Pension Into a Giant-Killer

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.”

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The Problem With Behavioural Nudges

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.

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Judge Blocks Effort to Auction Graceland

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.

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Boost for World Economy as U.S., Eurozone Accelerate in Tandem

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.

– Edward Frankl contributed to this story.

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ANGER DOES A LOT MORE DAMAGE TO YOUR BODY THAN YOU REALISE

Anger is bad for your health in more ways than you think.

Getting angry doesn’t just hurt our mental health , it’s also damaging to our hearts, brains and gastrointestinal systems, according to doctors and recent research. Of course, it’s a normal emotion that everyone feels—few of us stay serene when a driver cuts us off or a boss makes us stay late. But getting mad too often or for too long can cause problems.

There are ways to keep your anger from doing too much damage. Techniques like meditation can help, as can learning to express your anger in healthier ways.

One recent study looked at anger’s effects on the heart. It found that anger can raise the risk of heart attacks because it impairs the functioning of blood vessels, according to a May study in the Journal of the American Heart Association .

Researchers examined the impact of three different emotions on the heart: anger, anxiety and sadness. One participant group did a task that made them angry, another did a task that made them anxious, while a third did an exercise designed to induce sadness.

The scientists then tested the functioning of the blood vessels in each participant, using a blood pressure cuff to squeeze and release the blood flow in the arm. Those in the angry group had worse blood flow than those in the others; their blood vessels didn’t dilate as much.

“We speculate over time if you’re getting these chronic insults to your arteries because you get angry a lot, that will leave you at risk for having heart disease ,” says Dr. Daichi Shimbo, a professor of medicine at Columbia University and lead author of the study.

Your gastrointestinal system

Doctors are also gaining a better understanding of how anger affects your GI system.

When someone becomes angry, the body produces numerous proteins and hormones that increase inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation can raise your risk of many diseases.

The body’s sympathetic nervous system—or “fight or flight” system—is also activated, which shunts blood away from the gut to major muscles, says Stephen Lupe, director of behavioural medicine at the Cleveland Clinic’s department of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition. This slows down movement in the GI tract, which can lead to problems like constipation.

In addition, the space in between cells in the lining of the intestines opens up, which allows more food and waste to go in those gaps, creating more inflammation that can fuel symptoms such as stomach pain, bloating or constipation.

Your brain

Anger can harm our cognitive functioning, says Joyce Tam, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. It involves the nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex, the front area of our brain that can affect attention, cognitive control and our ability to regulate emotions.

Anger can trigger the body to release stress hormones into the bloodstream. High levels of stress hormones can damage nerve cells in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, says Tam.

Damage in the prefrontal cortex can affect decision-making, attention and executive function, she adds.

The hippocampus, meanwhile, is the main part of the brain used in memory. So when neurons are damaged, that can disrupt the ability to learn and retain information, says Tam.

What you can do about it

First, figure out if you’re angry too much or too often. There’s no hard and fast rule. But you may have cause for concern if you’re angry for more days than not, or for large portions of the day, says Antonia Seligowski, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who studies the brain-heart connection.

Getting mad briefly is different than experiencing chronic anger, she says.

“If you have an angry conversation every now and again or you get upset every now and again, that’s within the normal human experience,” she says. “When a negative emotion is prolonged, when you’re really having a lot more of it and maybe more intensely, that’s where it’s bad for your health.”

Try mental-health exercises. Her group is looking at whether mental-health treatments, like certain types of talk therapy or breathing exercises, may also be able to improve some of the physical problems caused by anger.

Other doctors recommend anger-management strategies. Hypnosis, meditation and mindfulness can help, says the Cleveland Clinic’s Lupe. So too can changing the way you respond to anger.

Slow down your reactions. Try to notice how you feel and slow down your response, and then learn to express it. You also want to make sure you’re not suppressing the feeling, as that can backfire and exacerbate the emotion.

Instead of yelling at a family member when you’re angry or slamming something down, say, “I am angry because X, Y and Z, and therefore I don’t feel like eating with you or I need a hug or support,” suggests Lupe.

“Slow the process down,” he says.

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Metallica’s European Tour Showcases Renewable-Energy Big Rigs—And Their Limits

Metallica, the band that blazed a trail for thrash metal with rugged guitar riffs and relentless drumbeats, is trying to do something similar for trucks powered by sustainable fuels.

The group, a rock music mainstay since their 1986 hit album “Master of Puppets,” is looking to burnish its bona fides on social issues by using rigs powered by fuels including biomethane and vegetable oil on its European tour this summer.

Working with European truck maker Iveco, the authors of songs including “Battery” and “Fuel” (sample lyric: “Fuel is pumping engines / Burning hard, loose and clean / And I burn, churning my direction / Quench my thirst with gasoline.”) aim to show that sustainable transportation in heavy-duty trucking is possible on European highways dotted with alternative-fuelling stations.

But the trucks’ limitations and the workarounds the band’s logistics providers are undertaking on the meticulously-planned 7,200-mile journey winding through the continent from Sweden to Spain also illustrate how far trucking is from using cleaner fuels in regular operations.

“You have limited options because of the lack of the infrastructure,” said Natasha Highcroft, a director of Suffolk, U.K.-based Transam Trucking, which provides logistics for Metallica and other bands. “We use alternative fuels as and when we can, as much as possible, but until the infrastructure is there it’s very difficult.”

The trucks run on natural gas, vegetable oil, electricity and hydrogen fuel cells, and will be hauling giant video screens, lighting and instruments across nine countries.

The workhorses of Metallica’s tour will be 10 heavy-duty trucks powered by renewable natural gas—such as methane from landfills—and four heavy-duty trucks running on biodiesel or hydrogenated vegetable oil. The trucks, dramatically decked out in Metallica’s fierce logo, can travel about 1,000 miles between refuelling.

Both fuels provide a significant reduction in emissions compared with regular diesel, although emissions experts say they aren’t nearly as clean as battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell technologies.

The tour was due to kick off this week in Munich, Germany, and over the next two months will cover the continent from Italy and Spain in southern Europe to Denmark and Norway. The longest journey between shows, from Warsaw to Madrid, covers almost 1,800 miles.

Iveco, which is providing the eco-friendly trucks for Metallica’s tour, makes both battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell big-rig engines, the types that governments in Europe and the U.S. are trying to press on truckers as soon as possible. But because of the lack of charging and fuelling stations on the long legs between gigs, the battery-electric and hydrogen trucks will be mostly for promotional use at concerts, said Gerrit Marx , chief executive of the Italian truck maker.

Marx said Iveco wants to highlight that renewable natural gas and hydrogenated vegetable oil are “more available and ready” than batteries and hydrogen while also being “way better than fossil diesel.”

Europe has hundreds of liquefied natural gas and hydrogenated vegetable oil, or HVO, refuelling stations. A representative for British energy major Shell , which is working with Iveco on the tour, said Metallica’s low-carbon journey wouldn’t have been possible even a couple of years ago.

Shell says its customers can access HVO in five European countries and renewable natural gas in Germany and in the Netherlands. That means that when low-carbon options aren’t available, the Iveco trucks will be fuelled with regular LNG and the HVO trucks will be fuelled with regular diesel.

A Shell representative said the Metallica tour will buy carbon credits to offset “unavoidable emissions“ generated by the low-emission trucks.

U.S. companies are also using renewable natural gas and biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions. But trucking specialists say the fuels aren’t available in sufficient quantities to power the world’s fleets, which is why regulators are pushing battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Trucking executives say the costs of operating those technologies are double or triple those of diesel and that they aren’t workable in a highly-competitive, low-margin industry like trucking.

Lars Stenqvist , chief technology officer at truck maker Volvo Group , said it is important that high-profile performers like Metallica amplify the capabilities of sustainable fuels.

Truckers will only adopt the technology when customers demand it, he said, so “This is music to my ears.”

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Money Angst? You Might Consider a Financial Therapist

Do you worry a lot about higher food and gas bills? Fight with your spouse over spending splurges? Fear you’ll outlive your savings?

Some people seek to ease such money anxieties by hiring a financial therapist.

The goal of financial therapists ultimately is to help people make good financial decisions, typically by raising their clients’ awareness of how their emotions and unconscious beliefs have affected their sometimes messy experiences with money.

Needs for such help often arise following a job loss, bankruptcy or marital partner’s financial infidelity—when one spouse hides or misrepresents financial information from the other. Even something seemingly positive, such as getting a big inheritance or winning a lottery, can cause financial anxiety.

“Folks are craving help with financial well-being,’’ says Ashley Agnew , president of the Financial Therapy Association, a professional group launched in 2009.

Financial therapists tend to come from mental-health and financial-planning disciplines, and there are signs that their ranks are rising: The Financial Therapy Association has 430 members, up from 225 in 2015. Still, according to the group, fewer than 100 financial therapists have completed its certification process, introduced in 2019. You can be an association member without being certified by it.

The reason for the increased interest is clear: Many Americans are worried about their personal finances. In a survey of about 3,000 U.S. adults conducted last October by Fidelity Investments, more than one-third of respondents said they were in “worse financial shape” than in the previous year. Some 55% of those respondents blamed inflation and cost-of-living increases.

Similarly, 52% of 2,365 Americans polled for Bankrate.com  said money negatively affected their mental health in 2023. That is 10 percentage points higher than in 2022. Financially anxious and stressed individuals are less likely to plan for retirement, prior research has concluded.

Messy divorce

New York advisory firm Francis Financial hired financial therapist Allen Sakon last November to aid individual clients. Many are divorced or widowed women with complicated money problems.

Certain clients “don’t believe they have enough resources, even though objectively they do,” says Sakon, who is a certified financial therapist, financial planner and accountant. Meanwhile, others with limited means mistakenly believe “they can live as extravagantly as they want,’’ she says.

Sakon currently counsels a recently divorced woman who is struggling with her dramatically lower income and the imminent sale of the family’s suburban New York home. “Her world has been turned upside down” by a financially messy divorce, Sakon says.

Though the woman has stressful new money responsibilities, she long avoided financial decisions, according to Sakon. “A money-avoidant grown-up is typically someone who was excluded from money discussions as a child,” she says.

Sakon says she hopes to eventually help this client feel capable of making financial decisions based on her resources and the financial plan that Sakon created for her.

Nate Astle , a certified financial therapist in Kansas City, Mo., met nine times from May 2023 to February 2024 with Andrea and Gianluca Presti , a 30-something Texas couple who were having persistent spats over money. Andrea Presti , an email marketer, says she believed that “if we didn’t go to financial therapy, I was going to question our entire relationship and whether we could continue.”

The wife cites an argument over the possible purchase of an expensive new car to replace their decade-old vehicle as an example of the couple’s financial conflicts. They disagreed over whether to give up a car that still worked well.

The husband, Gianluca Presti, a music producer, says financial therapy taught him and his wife to communicate better through active listening. He says he stopped being the couple’s money gatekeeper, became more open-minded about spending—and agreed to pay up to $45,000 cash for a new car. “We have to be a team if we want to solve financial issues,” he now realises.

Astle helped the Prestis revamp their household budget as well. It now reflects each spouse’s interests by including expenditures, investments and savings.

Astle, who is also a marriage and family therapist, says he has seen his financial-therapy clients more than double to 43 since 2022.

Possible pitfalls

Still, there are possible pitfalls when hiring a financial therapist. One major drawback: Anyone can claim they are qualified to practice financial therapy.

No government agency regulates the young profession. Candidates for certification by the Financial Therapy Association must take online courses designed by the association covering financial and therapeutic techniques, counsel clients for 250 hours and pass a 100-question test. But you can call yourself a financial therapist and not be certified by the association.

Meanwhile, the cost of financial therapy varies widely—from $125 to $350 an hour, Agnew estimates. Insurance rarely covers the tab.

In addition, there is no broad evidence that financial therapy works well. No large-scale studies demonstrating the field’s effectiveness have been conducted.

Another potential downside is that financial therapists with mental-health backgrounds typically lack extensive financial-planning experience—and vice versa. It is wise to interview at least three financial therapists, experts suggest. Then, pick someone who admits the limits of their expertise.

“I am very upfront about my boundaries,” says practitioner Aja Evans , a licensed mental-health counsellor who isn’t certified in financial therapy. Evans adds that she failed the certification test but plans to take it again during 2024—and before she becomes Financial Therapy Association president in January.

She says she feels well-qualified to help clients recognise how their upbringing affects their money beliefs today. “But I am in no shape or form going to be advising you about your investments, money moves or creating a financial plan,” Evans says. For clients who want that assistance, she says, she refers them to certified financial planners and accountants she knows well.

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Wasting Too Much Time on Your Phone? Tips to Regain Control—and Feel Better

We don’t always realise how many hours we’re spending on social media, racking up excessive screen time, and how it’s affecting us. Yet the act of online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry or worse, has become so common, it’s been given a name: doomscrolling .

Even if you’re not ready to delete your social media apps, you can  take control  of how you use them. Instead of simply letting yourself track catastrophes on X, feel FOMO while watching your friends hang out without you on Instagram, compare your bodies to those of dancing TikTokers, or feel professional jealousy toward former co-workers on LinkedIn, try these tips.

Change How You Engage

Michelle Mouhtis, a licensed therapist and social worker based in Red Bank, N.J., who specialises in counselling millennials, says passive scrolling can quickly land you in a “compare and despair” trap.

Her advice: Be more deliberate with your content consumption. Rather than doomscrolling to avoid emotions, or put off sleep, devote screen time to learning a new skill via YouTube, more information about a topic you care about or connecting with a new community.

Curate Your Content

Carefully consider how the accounts you follow affect you. If the content you’re seeing triggers envy or a sense that you don’t measure up, know that most social media apps allow you to mute people and certain topics, stopping them from appearing entirely or a lot less frequently. You don’t even have to unfriend someone to avoid their content.

Track Your Timing

Get familiar with your phone’s “Screen Time” features. Most phones will provide data on how you use them, including the number of times you pick them up each day. Both Apple and Android users can set limits on your screen time for specific apps in the settings.

Although you can override the prompt that pulls the plug and keep scrolling, Mouhtis said the alert still helps. “Having that added step, where you have to manually allow another 15 minutes slows you down.”

Delete, Delete, Delete

Just because you’ve downloaded an app once, doesn’t mean it has to be on your home screen forever. If you find that using any given app at specific times of the year (like the holidays) triggers unhealthy thought loops, delete it from your phone. You can always download it again.

For apps you decide to keep, Mouhtis recommends turning notifications off. Your “likes” will still be there even if you aren’t notified of them in real time. You can also turn off all notifications by using the “Do Not Disturb” function.

Put the Phone Down

Much of social media engagement—Instagram “likes,” LinkedIn shares and the ping of a DM notification—cause our brains to produce dopamine. The chemical is associated with temporary bursts of pleasure, says Mouhtis, unlike serotonin, which is linked to longer-lasting feelings of happiness.

To avoid the chase of that high, take on things that make it physically impossible to scroll. Offline activities like cooking, crocheting, biking and rollerblading suit this purpose, but even an episode of a TV show, Mouhtis points out, ends eventually, unlike your TikTok or Instagram feeds’ infinite scroll.