The United Auto Workers union expanded its strike against Detroit’s Big Three for the second consecutive day as members at a major General Motors manufacturing plant walked off the job.

The union said 5,000 employees from the Arlington Assembly plant in Texas are now on strike. All of GM’s full-size internal combustion SUVs are worked on at that facility, including the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, GMC Yukon and Yukon XL, and Cadillac Escalade and Escalade-V.

The move comes the same day General Motors reported its third-quarter results. The company said the strike has cost it around $800 million in pretax profits and it withdrew its 2023 profit forecast, but its quarterly adjusted earnings and revenue were better than Wall Street analysts had expected.

The expansion of the strike comes one day after 6,800 Stellantis employees walked off the job, shutting down manufacturing at a facility where Ram 1500 trucks are made.

In a statement, GM said it was ‘disappointed’ by the step.

“Last week, we provided a comprehensive offer to the UAW that increased the already substantial and historic offers we have made by approximately 25% in total value,” the company said.

It’s another escalation in the union’s strike against GM, Stellantis and Ford. The union previously ordered a walkout on Oct. 11, when it struck against Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant.

Full-size SUVs and pickup trucks are some of the highest-priced and most profitable products that the Big Three make. They are also some of the most popular vehicles among U.S. consumers.

In the early weeks of the labor stoppage, the UAW had been calling on additional workers to go on strike once per week and was giving the automakers more notice about potential strikes. It also did not strike those truck and SUV plants initially.

The strike is now more than five weeks old, and the union appears to be moving at a faster pace to push the companies to complete a new contract.

Around 45,000 UAW members are now on strike out of a total of 146,000.

They’re seeking annual pay raises of more than 40% over a four-year contract, a shorter workweek, improved pensions for retirees, better health care, cost-of-living adjustments and an end to wage and benefit tiers.

The automakers have offered record contracts with pay increases of around 20%, as well as bonuses and other improved benefits.

The strike began on Sept. 15, after the contract between the union and the Big Three expired. It’s the first time the UAW has gone on strike against all three leading U.S. automakers at the same time.

The United Auto Workers union says it expanded its strike again Monday, as 6,800 people stopped working at a plant that makes Ram 1500 trucks.

That means this expansion of the strike targets one of Stellantis’ most important and profitable vehicles. The union took a similar step with its last walkout, when it shut down a Ford plant in Kentucky where several F-Series Super Duty pickups are made.

The move comes days after UAW President Shawn Fain repeatedly criticized Stellantis, the company that makes Ram, Dodge and Chrysler vehicles. In a Facebook Live broadcast on Friday, he said Stellantis ‘is trying to lowball and undercut us’ with contract proposals that were significantly weaker than those offered by Ford and General Motors.

He also said the company proposed cuts to employees’ medical coverage and to 401(k) contributions, and said Stellantis wanted the right to demand new concessions from workers before the next contract expires.

In a statement on Friday, Stellantis said negotiations with the union have been productive without discussing specifics. After Monday’s strike, however, the company said it was ‘outraged’ by the union’s latest step.

‘Last Thursday morning, Stellantis presented a new, improved offer to the UAW, including 23% wage increases over the life of the contract, nearly a 50% increase in our contributions to the retirement savings plan, and additional job security protections for our employees,’ and said the union had not given it a counter-offer since those latest talks.

The strike at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant on Monday is the latest step in a labor dispute that’s been different from most others in Detroit history. It’s the first contract negotiation since Fain, who was sworn into office in March, was elected union president in an upset over incumbent Ray Curry.

Fain is the first UAW president elected directly by members. He’d run on an anti-corruption platform and used more strident anti-corporate rhetoric than his predecessors.

About 40,000 UAW workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis are now on strike. They’re seeking annual pay raises of more than 40% over a four-year contract, a shorter workweek, improved pensions for retirees, better health care, cost-of-living adjustments and an end to wage tiers.

The automakers have offered record contracts with pay increases of around 20% as well as bonuses and other improved benefits.

The union’s strategy

The strike began Sept. 15, when, for the first time, UAW members simultaneously walked off the job at all three companies.

Since then, the union has employed a phased strategy that it calls a ‘stand up strike,’ where workers at specific manufacturing plants are told to go on strike with about two hours’ notice, making it harder for the automakers to prepare for interruptions in their production and supply lines.

The union has used that approach to play the companies against each other, exempting companies from further strikes when they make more concessions, or, as it did Monday, punishing them with new strikes when it says their offers are insufficient.

It also makes it easier for the union to stay on strike for longer. Like many unions, the UAW provides ‘strike pay’ to people who won’t earn a paycheck because they’ve walked off the job. Members get $100 a day in assistance for each day they’re on strike. That doesn’t make up for all their lost pay.

The union started with more than $800 million in its strike fund, which was enough to provide about 11 weeks of strike pay for all 146,000 members. But more than a month into the strike, it hasn’t had to pay out much of that total.

With 40,000 workers on strike, it is expected that the union will be paying about $20 million a week from that fund.

Making an impact

While the automakers’ bottom lines have taken a hit, the impact on them has also been smaller than it would have been if more workers walked out.

Last week, Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford said the strike is a threat to both his company and the U.S. auto industry.

In remarks that illustrated their differing points of view and rhetorical styles, Ford said in a news conference that ‘this should not be Ford versus the UAW. It should be Ford and the UAW versus Toyota and Honda, Tesla and all the Chinese companies that want to enter our home market.’

Later that day, Fain countered that ‘it’s not the UAW and Ford against foreign automakers. It’s autoworkers everywhere against corporate greed.’

Close to 5,000 employees at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep vehicles, have also been laid off. The automakers have said that’s necessary because there is no work for those people to do, while the union has described it as a pressure tactic.

Auto parts suppliers have reported laying off workers as well.

The current strike is now stretching a bit longer than the 2019 strike that hit General Motors, which lasted 31 days before the two sides reached a tentative contract agreement. Some of the UAW’s past strikes have lasted several months.

CORRECTION (Oct. 23, 2023, 11:40 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of a former UAW president. He is Ray Curry, not Currie.

Prosecutors in the criminal trial against FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried compared one of the defense’s arguments to a scene in the 1994 film “Dumb and Dumber,” in which actor Jim Carrey says IOUs are “as good as money.”

In a written brief on Thursday to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who’s presiding over the Manhattan trial, assistant U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York took issue with several of the jury instructions provided by the defense team.

One specific directive reminded prosecutors of the 29-year-old comedy about two less-than-intelligent friends, played by Carrey and Jeff Daniels, who take a cross-country trip to Colorado to return a briefcase full of money to its owner, though the cash had actually been left as ransom.

“If you find that FTX customers, after depositing funds with FTX, received a credit to transact on the FTX exchange and therefore received the right to withdraw an equivalent amount of funds at a later time upon request, that is insufficient to establish that they were deprived of property,” the jury instruction from the defense says.

Much of the government’s case hinges on billions of dollars that FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, siphoned out of customer accounts and used largely to try and cover up losses at sister hedge fund Alameda Research after cryptocurrency prices plunged. Funds also allegedly went to pay for things such as a $35 million property in the Bahamas and political donations.

Customers were ultimately unable to retrieve much of their money as FTX and Alameda were simultaneously imploding.

The defense, according to prosecutors, is trying to make the claim to the jury that clients still had a credit to the funds they deposited even if the money wasn’t there because it was being used for other things. Prosecutors say the argument is “untethered to the facts of the case” and that a “credit to obtain funds at a later date, if such funds are ultimately available, is clearly not the same, or as valuable, as the money or property itself.”

In a footnote, the prosecution writes, “A popular movie from the 1990s illustrates the point: a briefcase, once filled with money, is not the same as a briefcase later filled with IOUs.” In “Dumb and Dumber,” when the briefcase reaches its owner, it’s filled with paper.

“That’s as good as money, sir,” says Carrey, playing the character Lloyd Christmas.

Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s lead defense attorney, didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Bankman-Fried, 31, faces seven criminal fraud charges tied to the collapse of his crypto empire late last year. Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty, could face life in prison if convicted.

The first three weeks of the trial have been highlighted by testimony from Bankman-Fried’s former close friends, who were also top executives at FTX and Alameda and have since turned on him, some through plea deals with the government. The trial is scheduled to resume late next week and extend into November.

On numerous occasions, Judge Kaplan has called sidebar meetings with the lead government attorneys and Bankman-Fried’s lawyers, to discuss their demeanor in the courtroom. Most recently, on Thursday, Kaplan ripped into lawyers from both sides, in particular telling the prosecution that their latest expert witnesses knew nothing specific about important details and yet called Bankman-Fried’s behavior criminal. Both sides were warned to do better and to communicate more with each other.

Business travel is clawing its way back to 2019 levels as Covid-19 concerns largely recede. But as tighter abortion restrictions and anti-LGBTQ laws proliferate, some employers and event organizers are weighing a new set of threats to employees’ safety outside the office.

Dozens of states have slashed abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and more than 180 bills restricting LGBTQ rights are advancing in statehouses nationwide. Many such moves have drawn criticism on political and civil rights grounds, with companies and event organizers threatening state boycotts akin to the one that led North Carolina to scrap its 2016 anti-transgender bathroom law.

But lately, conservative “anti-woke” messaging has made many companies more hesitant to publicly ally themselves with progressive causes. Some are now taking a quieter approach to mitigating risks, business travel planners and human resources experts say.

“We think critically about who we are sending where and ask employees if they’re comfortable going to a state that has demonstrated they are not inclusive towards people with certain identities,” said Cierra Gross, CEO of Caged Bird HR, a consultancy firm. “We could be putting someone’s physical and psychological safety on the line in some of these states.”

While civil rights groups (and the Canadian government) have issued advisories warning of risks from the legislation, some travel industry groups and local advocates have pushed back against boycotts, arguing they hurt hospitality workers and minority businesses owners and rarely change policies. Last month, California lawmakers voted to repeal a ban on state workers using public funds to travel to 26 states with anti-LGBTQ policies, replacing it with a public awareness campaign.

In an April survey, the expense platform SAP Concur found 82% of LGBTQ+ business travelers had changed accommodations at least once in the past 12 months because they felt unsafe, compared with 70% of U.S. business travelers overall and 53% of those globally.

For many workers, these concerns are nothing new — many have long had to be extra mindful of their safety with little to no employer support. For companies and travel managers, though, there’s now a growing “sense of importance and urgency” to revisit their policies, said Charlie Sultan, president of Concur Travel.

The last time that happened on a broad scale was when Covid-19 hit, pushing business to review the policies supporting what’s known as their “duty of care” to keep employees safe on the job.

While most businesses now have protocols to handle Covid exposures, some are just starting to wrestle with other scenarios: What if a pregnant employee has a medical emergency while traveling in an anti-abortion state? Or a trans employee faces a confrontation someplace without public accommodation protections for gender identity?

Lauren Winans, CEO of Next Level Benefits, an HR consultancy firm, said some of her corporate clients have started maintaining lists of potentially problematic destinations for workers to visit. Others are adopting no-retaliation policies “that allow employees to express concerns, establish boundaries or refuse travel” to certain areas, she said.

The construction bidding platform PlanHub is “thoroughly assessing potential risks tied to the legal and political landscape in various regions,” said Kimberly Rogan, the company’s chief of staff and head of people operations. “We’ve refined our guidelines to inform employees about these factors better and to provide clear instructions on how to navigate them.”

These efforts coincide with a broader post-pandemic focus on mental and physical health and safety, said Daniel Beauchamp, head of global business consulting for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at American Express Global Business Travel.

As those concerns become the “front and center of corporate consciousness,” some U.S. and international employers are taking “a more nuanced” approach to their duty of care, he said.

But HR professionals say few of the businesses taking these steps are broadcasting them publicly, and the shift is far from universal.

Many companies don’t operate extensively across state borders or rely much on business travel. And it’s often impossible to untangle an employer’s duty of care concerns from its political values — which can cut both ways anyhow. Some conservative groups and companies have long asked meeting planners to book gatherings in like-minded states, and vice versa for liberal ones.

Certain areas say they’re seeing pullback due to the new laws even as business travel rebounds.

Between May — the month Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded what critics termed a “Don’t Say Gay” law — and mid-September, more than 17 groups cited “current Florida politics” and safety as reasons for not booking conventions in Greater Fort Lauderdale and Broward County, despite a local reputation for inclusiveness, according to the Visit Lauderdale tourism group.

That list includes the National Sales Network, the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association, the University of Southern Mississippi and others, said Visit Lauderdale CEO Stacy Ritter. She estimated the community has lost out on more than $98 million in revenue.

“This is not an economic issue where you can offer a group more money to help underwrite their conference,” said Ritter. If people feel unwelcome in the state, she said, “there’s very little you can do.”

A spokesperson for DeSantis dismissed concerns about lost business travel as “nonsense,” saying “Florida’s economy is booming,” with the state hosting a quarterly record of nearly 38 million visitors at the start of this year.

U.S. pharmacy chain CVS Health said on Thursday it is pulling some of the most common decongestants with phenylephrine as the only active ingredient from its shelves and will no longer sell them.

The move comes after a panel of advisers to U.S. health regulators raised doubts over the efficacy of the ingredient.

Last month, the panel refused to back the effectiveness of oral over-the-counter medicines made with phenylephrine, adding that no more trials were required to prove otherwise.

CVS said “other oral cough and cold products will continue to be offered to meet consumer needs.”

Phenylephrine was substituted for pseudoephedrine in many non-prescription cold and allergy medicines after the latter was restricted amid reports of abuse.

Phenylephrine is a major component used in some of popular products like Benadryl, Sudafed, GSK’s Advil and Kenvue’s Tylenol.

A tough market for homebuyers keeps getting tougher as the combination of rising prices and climbing mortgage rates makes it even harder to afford a home, new data shows.

In spite of these challenges, people are still buying homes. About 4 million are sold every month. But to a shocking extent, rising mortgage rates and the shortage of homes for sale — which feeds rising prices and bidding wars — has weakened their financial position.

People today are borrowing significantly more money for homes at much higher interest rates than just a few years ago. Overall, a homebuyer’s dollar goes about half as far as it did at the end of 2020.

In December 2020, mortgage rates hit some of their lowest levels ever, with a 30-year fixed available for 2.68%. That was a steep drop from 3.78% a year earlier.

Today, government-backed lender Fannie Mae says the average interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 7.63%.

Prices have shot up as well. The median sale price of a single-family home is above $416,000 as of the second quarter of this year, up from just under $360,000 in late 2020.

By some measures, U.S. home price indexes are at all-time highs.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said that in late 2020, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical, newly sold home was around $1,100 in principal and interest. It’s now about twice that.

The NAR calculates that a buyer today needs to make $107,232 a year to afford that median home. That calculation is based on recent rates for a buyer who makes a 20% down payment and spends 25% of their gross monthly income on housing expenses.

That’s somewhat conservative, as many people devote more than 25% of their budget to those costs. And home prices vary widely across the U.S. But it still shows how much harder it’s getting to afford a house and feel financially secure.

Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“If you don’t make six figures, it’s going to be really tough” to afford a home in many markets, Yun told NBC News.

Figuring out affordability

Another way to measure the change: The NAR also puts out a monthly housing affordability index. A typical reading, Yun said, is 120 — meaning that a person making a median income has enough money to buy a home that’s about 20% above the median price.

That figure has fallen from almost 170 pre-Covid to a preliminary total of 91.7 in August. That’s the lowest reading since October 1985.

According to Yun, part of the problem stems from the housing bust of 2006-08, which kicked off the Great Recession and the global financial crisis. A lot of smaller homebuilders failed, the surviving builders got more conservative, and combined with rising regulatory costs, that has depressed building for a full decade.

That’s one reason there are fewer homes for sale than usual. Another is that, in many cases, people who already own their homes and are paying mortgage rates in the 3% to 4% range don’t want to sell and buy a new home at nearly 8%.

The difference between a monthly mortgage payment at 3% and one at 8% can be staggering. For a median-priced home that costs $416,000 with a 20% down payment, your monthly mortgage with 3% interest is $1,403. At 8% interest it’s $2,441.

Many people are priced out of the housing market, which has also made it more expensive to rent. But there is at least some good news there, according to Yun.

‘Thankfully, on the rental side at least, they are building apartments in many many cities,’ Yun said.

He added that there are some positive signs for homebuilders as well. Stock prices for companies like Toll Brothers and NVR — the parent company of Ryan Homes, NVHomes and Heartland Homes — have skyrocketed in the last year, meaning that investors want to give these companies cash that they can use to build more houses. That won’t solve the affordability problem on its own, but it would likely help.

Spirit Airlines said it is canceling flights so it can inspect 25 of its planes, which will be out of service for several days.

In a statement, the budget airline said it was going to ‘perform a necessary inspection of a small section of 25 of our aircraft.’ Spirit said it was taking that step ‘out of an abundance of caution’ but did not provide further details.

The airline said it would take several days for its network to get back to normal.

The Florida-based airline said it had 202 planes as of Oct. 1. According to the flight tracking website FlightAware, Spirit canceled 98 flights on Friday, or 11% of its scheduled total.

Spirit said people with scheduled flights should monitor their email and the company’s website and app before heading to the airport.

Delta Air Lines is trying to appease flyers who were angry about changes to its loyalty programs.

But the company isn’t undoing the changes it announced last month. Starting next year, rewards will depend on how much money flyers spend on Delta flights instead of how many flights they take or the number of miles they fly. That means customers will have to spend much more money to earn the rewards that come with Medallion status.

However, Delta made it easier to reach those levels than it would have been under the first version of the plan. Whereas Delta had originally proposed requiring people to spend 6,000 ‘qualifying dollars’ to reach the lowest status, Silver, it will now take 5,000.

The current rules have flyers reaching Silver status if they take 30 flights or reach a combination of 3,000 qualifying dollars and points.

Delta says that because it has reduced the mileage thresholds, spending on car rentals and hotels will no longer count toward the spending totals. And spending on basic economy trips will still not count toward Medallion status.

Delta also says it will limit the number of times American Express Platinum Card and Delta Reserve American Express Card users can visit airport lounges, although it eased those limits compared to last month, as well.

The previous changes angered some Delta customers and prompted other brands to announce offers to win away their business. American Airlines also announced changes to its frequent flyer program this year.

More people have achieved frequent flyer statues in recent years as consumers have spent more money on air travel and through co-branded credit cards. That has been costly for airlines, and they’ve started making it harder to earn frequent flyer rewards in response.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged recent signs of cooling inflation, but said Thursday that the slowing in price increases was not enough yet to determine a trend and that the central bank would be “resolute” in its commitment to its 2% mandate.

“Inflation is still too high, and a few months of good data are only the beginning of what it will take to build confidence that inflation is moving down sustainably toward our goal,” Powell said in prepared remarks for his speech at the Economic Club of New York. “We cannot yet know how long these lower readings will persist, or where inflation will settle over coming quarters.”

“While the path is likely to be bumpy and take some time, my colleagues and I are united in our commitment to bringing inflation down sustainably to 2 percent,” Powell added.

However, he also noted that progress made toward the Fed’s twin goals.

In recent days, data has shown that while inflation remains well above the target rate, the pace of monthly increases has decelerated and the annual rate has slowed to 3.7% from more than 9% in June 2022.

“Incoming data over recent months show ongoing progress toward both of our dual mandate goals —maximum employment and stable prices,” he said.

The speech was delayed at the onset by protesters from the group Climate Defiance who charged the dais at the club’s dinner and held up a sign saying “Fed is burning” surrounded by the words “money, futures and planet.”

Powell hinted the labor market and economic growth may need to slow to ultimately achieve the Fed’s goal.

“Still, the record suggests that a sustainable return to our 2 percent inflation goal is likely to require a period of below-trend growth and some further softening in labor market conditions,” Powell said.

The comments come the same day initial jobless claims hit their lowest weekly level since early in 2023, indicating that the labor market is still tight and could exert upward pressure on inflation.

Fed officials have been using interest rate hikes in part to try to level out a supply-demand imbalance in the jobs market. However, robust job creation in September and a slow pace of layoffs could put progress on inflation at risk.

“Additional evidence of persistently above-trend growth, or that tightness in the labor market is no longer easing, could put further progress on inflation at risk and could warrant further tightening of monetary policy,” he said.

In recent days, other Fed officials have said they think the Fed can be patient from here. Even some members who favor tighter monetary policy have said they think the Fed can halt rate hikes at least for now while they watch the lagged impact the rate hikes are expected to have on the economy.

Markets widely expect the Fed to hold off on additional rate hikes, though there remain questions over when officials might begin cutting rates.

Powell was noncommittal on the future of policy.

Given the uncertainties and risks, and how far we have come, the Committee is proceeding carefully. We will make decisions about the extent of additional policy firming and how long policy will remain restrictive based on the totality of the incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” he said.

U.S. pharmacy chain CVS Health said on Thursday it is pulling some of the most common decongestants with phenylephrine as the only active ingredient from its shelves and will no longer sell them.

The move comes after a panel of advisers to U.S. health regulators raised doubts over the efficacy of the ingredient.

Last month, the panel refused to back the effectiveness of oral over-the-counter (OTC) medicines made with phenylephrine, adding that no more trials were required to prove otherwise.

CVS said “other oral cough and cold products will continue to be offered to meet consumer needs.”

Phenylephrine was substituted for pseudoephedrine in many non-prescription cold and allergy medicines after the latter was restricted amid reports of abuse.

Phenylephrine is a major component used in some of popular products like Benadryl, Sudafed, GSK’s Advil and Kenvue’s Tylenol.