If you’ve noticed an empty store shelf where Clorox bleach, Glad trash bags or Burt’s Bees skin products should be, you’re not alone.

Clorox, the consumer products giant that makes those and many other items, is still picking up the pieces after a devastating cyberattack two months ago. The company said in late September that for weeks, it had been unable to automatically process orders for its vendors, including large retail stores like Walmart and Target.

That slowed down sales and caused outages and shortages.

Allan Liska, a cybersecurity researcher at Recorded Future, speculated about the damage caused to Clorox’s manufacturing operation after the cyberattack: ‘When [Clorox] couldn’t take in the orders, even though the lines themselves could run, [Clorox] couldn’t tell them what to produce or where to send it.’

Liska isn’t working on the Clorox case, but said he is familiar with it.

Last week, Clorox started to explain how the ransomware attack has hurt its business. The company said Wednesday it will likely lose money in the first quarter of its fiscal 2024, which ended Sept. 30, as a result of the breach and the necessary repairs to its systems.

Clorox had $1.74 billion in revenue in the first quarter of last year, and in early August, shortly before it disclosed the cyberattack, the company said it expected sales to grow in the mid single digits in the first quarter.

If sales had grown 5%, that would have resulted in $1.83 billion in revenue based on last year’s totals. Instead, the company said last week that sales will fall 23% to 28% from a year ago.

That would come out to between $1.25 billion and $1.34 billion in revenue instead. That might translate to a revenue drop of $500 million or more compared to what Clorox anticipated before it discovered the breach.

Bloomberg reported last week that officials believe Clorox was hacked by the same group that went after casino operators MGM and Caesars Entertainment in September.

MGM, Caesars and Clorox all had to tell the public about those hacks because of new rules that securities regulators adopted in July. Essentially, companies have to disclose any major data breach within four days. And some of the largest hacks of the recent past, like those that affected JBS USA Holdings and Colonial Pipeline, affected companies that don’t have to follow similar rules.

But even if Clorox did not have to announce a major data breach, consumers would notice when Tilex, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, Kingsford charcoal or Scoop Away cat litter were in short supply. They just might not know the reason for it.

Clorox, for its part, says that it’s still dealing with the effects of the breach and continuing to get its business back on track.

‘All our manufacturing sites are operational, and we are ramping up production and working to restock trade inventories,’ Clorox told NBC News in an emailed statement.

The company says it will benefit as retailers start to restock, but even that won’t happen until its fiscal second quarter, in early 2024.

Until that’s complete, shoppers are likely to have to deal with continued shortages of some of Clorox’s products.

Caroline Ellison testified that FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried told her to steal money from FTX’s customers and use them to repay firms that had lent money to Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm Ellison was leading.

‘Sam directed me to commit these crimes,’ Ellison said in court on Tuesday, after telling prosecutors that she, Bankman-Fried, and others had committed fraud.

Ellison, who at various times also dated and lived with Bankman-Fried, said that Alameda took about $10 billion from customers who had put their money on the FTX exchange to trade digital currencies. She said Bankman-Fried set up the system that let her move the money.

She also said that Bankman-Fried directed her to send balance sheets to lenders that made Alameda’s losses look less risky.

Her testimony follows that of FTX cofounder Gary Wang, also a witness for the prosecution. Both were charged with a series of financial crimes in December, and Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Bankman-Fried faces seven federal charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering, that could put him in prison for the rest of his life. He is scheduled to face additional charges at a separate trial in March 2024. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in both cases.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said in December that, at Bankman-Fried’s direction, Ellison manipulated the price of a digital token that FTX had issued, and then used it as collateral for undisclosed loans that Alameda took from FTX. That means Alameda, the trading firm, was secretly using money that belonged to FTX customers to repay debts and cover losses it had sustained.

That meant Alameda was telling investors it had more collateral to back up its loans than it really did, making the FTX exchange look safer than it was.

Ellison started at Alameda as a trader in 2018. She testified Tuesday that after the hedge fund suffered large losses that year, Bankman-Fried made getting more money a top priority. To that end, he told Alameda employees to get loans on any terms they could, and created the digital token, FTT. She said Alameda owned 60% to 70% of the supply of the coin, which cost essentially nothing to make. When its market price rose from an initial 10 cents to $50 over time, Alameda gained billions.

Ellison, who became co-CEO of Alameda in October 2021, said that Bankman-Fried told her to put those billions in FTT on the balance sheet so Alameda could borrow money, and that Bankman-Fried persuaded her to proceed even though she initially felt it was misleading.

Alameda later did the same with other coins.

She also testified that Alameda made some $5 billion in personal loans to company insiders. Some of those loans were risky because they could be called in at any time, and she said there were enough of them to bankrupt Alameda if they all became due and payable immediately.

While Ellison was officially in charge of Alameda, prosecutors say Bankman-Fried was calling the shots and was responsible for those schemes. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have argued that Ellison was fully responsible and mismanaged the company.

For a short time, FTX was one of the biggest names during a boom in the digital currency industry. It struck sponsorship deals with sports teams and ran a star-studded Super Bowl commercial. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth was estimated in the tens of billions, primarily because of his ownership stake in the company.

Alameda and FTX quickly collapsed in November 2022 after Coindesk reported on the tight links between the two firms and the liabilities Alameda had. One of FTX’s biggest rivals announced that it would sell its holdings of the digital token that comprised much of Alameda’s balance sheet, which caused its value to crater.

Then, nervous customers started pulling their money from the FTX exchange. FTX couldn’t give those customers their money back, in part because of the money it had lent to Alameda. It had to halt withdrawals, and within days, both companies filed for bankruptcy protection.

Ellison, like Wang before her, is cooperating with the government in exchange for a reduction in her sentence. Without such a deal, both faced sentences that could have kept them in prison for the rest of their lives.

Ellison and Wang both had close personal relationships with Bankman-Fried, or SBF, who appeared distressed at times by Wang’s testimony against him. Meanwhile Ellison was one of the first people Bankman-Fried recruited to work with him, in 2017. Before that, they were coworkers at a trading firm in New York.

Bankman-Fried was sent to jail in August in advance of the trial after the government accused him of witness tampering. He had purportedly leaked diary entries from Ellison to The New York Times.

This story was reported in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and The Guardian.

Momtaj Mansur flew to Saudi Arabia in September 2021, excited to work at one of the world’s biggest companies, Amazon. He was promised a well-paying job and planned to use the money to help his family back in Nepal.

Less than a year later, he said he was living in a crowded room with seven other men, jammed with bunk beds infested with bed bugs. The water was often salty and undrinkable. His hopes were shattered, and he was deep in debt.

Momtaj Mansur is one of more than 50 current and former workers who said they were misled and exploited by firms that supply labor to Amazon in Saudi Arabia and by their network of recruiting agencies in Nepal.

All the workers said they had to pay fees to recruiters to get hired, ranging from the equivalent of $830 to $2,040, even though fees that large are illegal, according to the Nepali government. To pay those fees, many workers needed to take out loans at high interest rates. They also all said they were duped by recruiters into working for labor supply companies rather than directly for Amazon.

The workers were interviewed as part of an international reporting collaboration with NBC News, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and The Guardian.

Click here to read the ICIJ’s version of this story.

About a dozen workers like Mansur agreed to speak on the record. Others, fearful that speaking out would hurt their chances for other employment, were interviewed with the agreement that their names would not be published. To substantiate their accounts, the journalists reviewed photographs, emails, receipts, messages and other documentation from their time working at Amazon.

After being presented with the findings, Amazon told NBC News it had conducted its own investigation and found labor violations. The company promised measures to fix the problems, including compensating workers who paid recruiting fees to the companies supplying labor.

“We are deeply concerned that some of our contract workers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia … were not treated with the standards we set forth, and the dignity and respect they deserve,” John Felton, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, said in a written statement.

“We appreciate their willingness to come forward and report their experience,” Felton wrote. “Our supply chain audit process and our own investigation surfaced violations of our standards.”

In particular, the company cited recruiting fees and squalid housing among the violations it found, but declined to offer more details or discuss other labor violations.

A kitchen where Momtaj Mansur and other workers shared housing in Saudi Arabia.Courtesy of Momtaj Mansur

A key player for Amazon is a labor supply company that gets workers from other countries — the Saudi-based Abdullah Fahad Al-Mutairi Co. Amazon is among several large corporations that has contracted Al-Mutairi, which has billed itself as “a leading provider of human resource solutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Forty-nine of the 54 workers interviewed were hired through Al-Mutairi.

Amazon said it considered “suspending” the company “when these allegations came to light.” Instead, it decided to work with Al-Mutairi to make “significant changes to their operations.”

Al-Mutairi did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

To get workers, Al-Mutairi has worked with recruiting companies in Nepal and elsewhere to attract laborers. 

Momtaj Mansur in Nepal was one of them.

When he came to Saudi Arabia, he worked at Amazon’s vast two-story warehouse called RUH 6, in the capital city, Riyadh. He spent his nights as a “picker,” hustling up and down aisles grabbing iPhones, packs of Red Bull and other items ordered by Amazon’s customers across the Arabian Peninsula. He recalled that Amazon managers berated him for being slow, even as he exceeded company targets to pick 70 to 80 items an hour from shelves and boxes.

Then things got worse. In May 2022, Mansur said, he was among a group of workers who were let go without warning or explanation — without work, wages or enough food.

Mansur said he pleaded with Al-Mutairi: If there was no more work at Amazon, let them return to Nepal.

“I told them: Either kill us or send us home, but don’t give us so much pain.” 

He said the labor supply firm told him that the only way he could return home was to pay the company an exit fee of more than $1,300 as a penalty for leaving before the end of his two-year contract. It was an enormous sum for his family, which subsisted on about $300 a month, along with rice, wheat and peas grown on a fifth of an acre shared with relatives. 

The labor firm was “heartless,” Mansur said. “How could I pay that amount? By selling our house or my kidney?”

In the end, his family sunk itself even deeper in debt by taking out a loan — at 36% interest — to pay the exit fee.

Job growth was stronger than expected in September, a sign that the U.S. economy is hanging tough despite higher interest rates, labor strife and dysfunction in Washington.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 336,000 for the month, better than the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 170,000 and more than 100,000 higher than the previous month, the Labor Department said Friday in a much-anticipated report. The unemployment rate was 3.8%, compared to the forecast for 3.7%.

Stock market futures turned sharply negative following the report and Treasury yields jumped. Dow futures were down more than 250 pints, while the 10-year Treasury yield soared 0.17 percentage point to 4.87%, up around its highest levels since the early days of the financial crisis.

The payrolls increase was the best monthly number since January.

“Slowdown? What slowdown? The U.S. labor market continues to exhibit amazing strength, with the number of new jobs created last month nearly twice as large as expected,” said George Mateyo, chief investment officer at Key Private Bank.

Investors have been on edge lately that a resilient economy could force the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates high and perhaps even hike more as inflation remains elevated.

Wage increases, however, were softer than expected, with average hourly earnings up 0.2% for the month and 4.2% from a year ago, compared to respective estimates for 0.3% and 4.3%.

Still, traders in the fed funds futures market increased the odds of a rate increase before the end of the year to about 44%, according to the CME Group’s tracker.

“Clearly it’s moving up expectations that the Fed is not done,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “All else equal, it probably moves the start point for rate cuts, which has been a moving target, to later in 2024.”

Sonders said the bond market is “in the driver’s seat” as far as stocks go, a trend that accelerated earlier in the week after the Labor Department reported a jump in job openings for August.

From a sector perspective, leisure and hospitality led with 96,000 new jobs. Other gainers included government (73,000), health care (41,000) and professional, scientific and technical services (29,000). Motion picture and sound recording jobs fell by 5,000 and are down 45,000 since May amid a labor impasse in Hollywood.

Service-related industries contributed 234,000 to the total job growth, while goods-producing industries added just 29,000. Average hourly earnings in the leisure and hospitality industry were flat on the month, though up 4.7% from a year ago.

The private sector payrolls gain of 263,000 was well ahead of a report earlier this week from ADP, which indicated an increase of just 89,000.

In addition to the powerful September, the previous two months saw substantial upward revisions. August’s gain is now 227,000, up 40,000 from the prior estimate, while July went to 236,000, from 157,000. Combined, the two months were 119,000 higher than previously reported.

The household survey, used to calculate the unemployment rate, was a bit lighter, rising 215,000.

The labor force participation rate, or those working against the total size of the workforce, held steady at 62.8%, still a half percentage point below the pre-Covid pandemic level. The rate for those in the 25-to-54 age group also was unchanged at 83.5%. A more encompassing measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons edged down to 7%.

The September report comes at a critical time for the markets and economy.

Treasury yields have surged and stocks have slumped amid concern that a still-hot economy could keep Federal Reserve policy tight. The central bank has raised interest rates 5.25 percentage points since March 2022 in an attempt to curb inflation that is still running well ahead of the Fed’s 2% target.

In recent days, multiple policymakers have said they are still concerned about inflation. They largely have cautioned that while another rate hike before the end of the year is an open question, rates are almost certain to stay at an elevated level for “some time.”

Though market pricing puts little chance on the Fed hiking again, the higher-for-longer narrative has been causing angst for investors. Higher interest rates raise the cost of capital and run counter to the easy monetary policy that has underpinned Wall Street strength for much of the past 14 years.

A strong job market is central to the rates equation.

Policymakers feel that a tight labor picture will continue to put upward pressure on wages which then will push prices higher. Fed officials have said they don’t believe wages played a role in the initial inflation surge in 2021-22, but have become more of a factor lately.

Workers at Mack Trucks have gone on strike Monday after rejecting a proposed contract between the company and the United Auto Workers union.

The union released a letter on X, formerly known as Twitter, that said 73% of UAW members voted against the contract and would walk off the job at 7 a.m. ET. About 4,000 UAW members work at Mack Trucks in three states.

UAW President Shawn Fain wrote in a letter addressed to the company that the two sides now need to settle issues include wage increases, cost of living allowances, job security and pensions.

‘We are surprised and disappointed that the UAW has chosen to strike, which we feel is unnecessary,’ Mack Trucks President Stephen Roy said in a news release.

Mack Trucks says terms of that deal included a 10% wage increase in the first year and a compounded 20% increase to pay over the course of the five-year agreement, with a guarantee of no increases in health insurance premiums.

Mack Trucks is owned by Volvo, so the new strike is separate from the UAW dispute with Detroit’s Big Three.

Since Sept. 15, about 25,000 workers have walked off the job in an escalating series of strikes against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, which makes cars under brands such as Jeep, Dodge and Chrysler.

In its statement, Mack Trucks pointed to the UAW’s classification of the proposal as ‘a record contract for the heavy truck industry.’

The rejected agreement between the union and Mack Trucks may be a record, but it also falls short of the terms the UAW and the Big Three have discussed. The union is seeking a 40% pay increase for those members and says Ford, GM and Stellantis have all offered increases of around 20%.

In his statement, Roy suggested those kinds of increases were not realistic in the trucking industry.

‘The UAW called our tentative agreement ‘a record contract for the Heavy Truck industry,’ and we trust that other stakeholders also appreciate that our market, business, and competitive set are very different from those of the passenger car makers,’ he said.

In the housing market today, it feels like what goes up doesn’t have to come down.

It looked like home prices were finally cooling off late last year after price spikes that began during the pandemic. Nationwide, prices dipped gradually in the second half of 2022 as mortgage rates climbed in response to rising interest rates. And some areas where a lot of new homes had been built — like Austin, Texas; Boise, Idaho; and Charlotte, North Carolina — saw significant price declines.

Granted, that was a double-edged sword for many people. Higher interest rates tend to bring home prices down, but that’s because they make it more expensive for buyers to borrow money to finance their purchases.

The rate hikes were not enough to undo the big price gains of the past few years, especially in parts of the U.S. where home sale prices already run well above the national average, but the change came as a relief for many people.

Then something even more surprising happened early this year. Prices started going up again. Potential homebuyers who may have breathed a sigh of relief a few months ago are now staring at an improbable double whammy: Prices are at all-time highs even with mortgage rates at 23-year highs.

The average U.S. rate for a 30-year mortgage was 7.49% on October 5, according to government-backed lender Fannie Mae.

In fact, an NBC News analysis of data from Zillow found that estimated mortgage payments have increased in more than 500 cities since the end of 2020, with payments doubling in more than half of cities.

Two of Sam Bankman-Fried’s former friends from MIT, who also worked at crypto exchange FTX while living with the company co-founder in the Bahamas, took the stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week to testify against their former classmate, confidant, and boss — a man who allegedly ran a crypto empire that defrauded thousands of customers out of billions of dollars.

Gary Wang, the lesser-known co-founder of FTX, was asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos on Thursday, “Did you commit financial crimes while working at FTX?”

“Yes,” responded Wang. He said that his crimes, including wire and commodities fraud, were carried out with the help of Bankman-Fried, FTX ex-engineering head Nishad Singh and Caroline Ellison, who ran sister hedge fund Alameda Research and had been Bankman-Fried’s girlfriend.

“Mr. Wang, do you see any of the people you committed those crimes with in the courtroom today?” Roos continued.

Wang, dressed in an oversized and wrinkled suit with a red tie and glasses, awkwardly stood up and looked around the courtroom before responding, “Yes.”

“Who do you see?” asked Roos.

“Sam Bankman-Fried,” he said.

The trial, set to last six weeks, will resume on Tuesday with key testimony expected from Ellison, who is considered the prosecution’s star witness, having already pleaded guilty to multiple charges. Bankman-Fried faces seven federal charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering, that could put him in prison for the rest of his life.

Thus far, Bankman-Fried, 31, has remained mostly quiet in court intently listening to witnesses and at times writing notes to his attorneys. But as Wang testified against him, Bankman-Fried looked visibly upset, shifting his gaze from his former friend to the ground, and at one point putting his head in his hands.

Wang, 30, was technology chief for FTX, which spiraled into bankruptcy in November. He spoke so fast that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and the prosecutor both stopped him at points to ask that he slow his pace.

Much of Wang’s testimony on Friday focused on the final days at FTX before the entire operation imploded, including reports in the media detailing Alameda’s business practices and its troubling ties to FTX.

Wang said that in response to the reporting an emergency meeting was called between Bankman-Fried, Wang and Singh, to discuss shutting down Alameda. He said they ultimately decided against such a move because he and Bankman-Fried were aware that Alameda had no way to repay the roughly $14 billion hole in its books.

Prosecutors took the jury through a series of tweets, beginning on Nov. 7. Posts came from the company blaming bank hours for slow withdrawals, while Bankman-Fried tweeted from his personal account, assuring customers that all was fine.

“FTX was not fine and assets were not fine,” Wang testified.

On Nov. 12, after FTX declared bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried asked Wang to drive with him to the Bahamas Securities Commission for a meeting. On the drive, Bankman-Fried told Wang to transfer assets to Bahamian liquidators because he believed they would allow him to maintain control of the company. Wang said he wasn’t in the meeting with the securities authority, though Bankman-Fried’s dad was present.

Wang said he returned to the U.S. and met with prosecutors the next day. He faces up to 50 years in prison when he faces a judge for sentencing following this trial. He told jurors he signed a six-page cooperation agreement that requires him to meet with prosecutors, answer their questions truthfully and turn over evidence.

$65 billion line of credit

For months, Bankman-Fried has known that Wang and Ellison, who were integral members of his personal and professional inner circles, had turned on him. Both pleaded guilty in December and have since been cooperating with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Wang’s testimony, which stretched into Friday, was given under a cooperation agreement with the government. Ellison is expected to take the stand under a similar arrangement.

Born in China, Wang moved to the U.S. at age 7 and grew up in Minnesota before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study math and computer science. He worked at Google after college.

Wang, who first met Bankman-Fried during high school at a summer camp, owned 10% of Alameda, while his boss owned the other 90%. Wang told the court about the advantages that Alameda received by having code baked into FTX’s software that allowed special access to the crypto exchange. Those privileges ultimately resulted in Alameda owing FTX $8 billion worth of customer deposits.

“We gave special privileges on FTX that gave unlimited withdrawals on the platform to Alameda,” Wang said. Alameda was allowed to withdraw and transfer those funds and had a $65 billion line of credit. 

“When customers deposited USD, it went to Alameda,” he said. “It existed in the computer code. Alameda could have negative balances and unlimited withdrawals.”  

That “bug” in the code was written by Nishad Singh, who was FTX’s director of engineering, and reviewed by Wang. Bankman-Fried was calling the shots, Wang said.

Wang also told the court about a $1 million personal loan he received and a $200 million to $300 million loan in his name from Alameda that was never deposited into his account, but rather was used to make investments into other companies on behalf of FTX. That was all done by Bankman-Fried, he testified. 

In early 2020, Wang said he discovered for the first time Alameda’s negative balance exceeded FTX’s revenue, an indication that Alameda was taking customer funds. Wang said he brought this to Bankman-Fried’s attention several times. 

In late 2021, Wang discovered Alameda had withdrawn $3 billion from its $65 billion line of credit.

Wang’s compensation was a base salary of $200,000 per year plus stock. He owned roughly 17% of FTX.

Even though they were co-founders, “ultimately it was Sam’s decision to make” when there were disagreements, he said.

An $8 billion bug

Adam Yedidia, who was the prosecution’s second witness on Wednesday, continued his testimony on Thursday. Yedidia met Bankman-Fried in college at MIT, and the pair remained close friends.

Yedidia, assuming a robotic posture on the stand, worked out of FTX’s Hong Kong office from January to October of 2021 and then in the Bahamas until last year’s collapse. In his testimony, he referred to a group Signal thread called “People of the House,” referring to Bankman-Fried’s $35 million penthouse, where many employees lived.

In terms of who was paying the rent, Yedidia recalled Bankman-Fried saying he “assumed it’s just Alameda paying for it in the end.”

Yedidia said Bankman-Fried had told him before he began working in the Bahamas in 2019 that he and Ellison had sex. Bankman-Fried asked Yedidia if it was a good idea for them to date, to which Yedidia said no. Bankman-Fried responded by saying he was expecting that answer.

One of Yedidia’s responsibilities was fixing the bug in the code that gave Alameda preferential treatment. In June 2022, he submitted a report to Bankman-Fried on Signal that showed $8 billion in customer money held in an internal database tracking the cash wired to an Alameda account called “fiat at ftx.com” was missing.

Yedidia said he and Bankman-Fried spoke about it at the pickleball court at the resort in Nassau, Bahamas. He asked his boss if things were OK. He was concerned because it “seemed like a lot of money” from FTX customers was at risk.

“Sam said, we were bulletproof last year. We aren’t bulletproof this year,” Yedidia testified.

Yedidia said he asked when they would be bulletproof again.

Bankman-Fried said he wasn’t sure, but it may be six months to three years. Yedidia said Bankman-Fried appeared “worried or nervous,” which he said was atypical. Still, Yedidia said he trusted Bankman-Fried and Ellison to “handle the situation.”

On cross-examination, Christian Everdell, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, focused on how Yedidia was the one responsible for developing and reviewing the code.

He asked about the long hours employees worked and Yedidia’s concern for Wang being near burnout. That resulted in Yedidia instituting a rule to not wake Wang at night for bug fixes because he needed sleep.

Everdell also drilled Yedidia on his high level of compensation in his less than two years at FTX. His base salary was between $175,000 and $200,000, but he received multiple bonuses of more than $12 million in cash and company equity. 

Yedidia said he’s now teaching math — geometry and algebra — at a high school. He invested most of the millions he earned as bonuses back into FTX, and his equity stake is now worthless.

As FTX was failing, Yedidia said he was by Bankman-Fried’s side. He highlighted a Signal exchange in November 2022, during which he wrote, “I love you Sam. I’m not going anywhere.” He said he wrote the message because so many people had left.

When asked what changed, Yedidia said he learned that FTX customer deposits had been used to pay loans to creditors. He said Alameda’s actions seemed “flagrantly wrong.”

Yedidia’s testimony ended on a fiery note, which was later struck from the record. He was asked why he had lost faith in FTX and resigned.

“FTX defrauded all its customers,” he said. 

Investment to zero

The third witness to take the stand was Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm, a crypto venture capital firm that invested over $275 million in FTX. That stake was wiped out.

Huang testified about his firm’s due diligence on FTX, and he told the court that Bankman-Fried assured him that funds would be used for FTX and not Alameda. Additionally, he was promised that Alameda had no preferential treatment on the FTX platform, even though the hedge fund was one of its top traders.

Huang said he was concerned about FTX’s lack of a board of directors, but he eventually invested anyway. During cross-examination, Huang said Paradigm pressed Bankman-Fried on the board issue and was told he didn’t want investors as directors but he did plan on having a board with experts.

CORRECTION (Oct. 8, 2023, 6:45 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article and a video caption misstated Sam Bankman-Fried’s role with FTX. He is one of two co-founders, not the sole founder.

Walk past any bank and you’ll likely see savings rates advertised in the window.

That’s because, for the first time in many years, rates have climbed to 5% on some high-yield savings accounts. Much the same goes for other common financial products, like certificates of deposits (CDs) and money market funds, as the Federal Reserve has boosted interest rates to 20-year highs.

But there’s a catch.

“At the end of the day, there is no free lunch,” said Lauren Goodwin, economist and director of portfolio strategy at New York Life Investments. “If money market or cash-like yields are higher, it’s likely because inflation is higher.”

Last year, consumer prices jumped at rates unseen since the 1980s, swiftly eroding the purchasing power of each U.S. dollar. To attract and keep depositors in this environment, banks have been dangling juicier returns.

For example, a $1,000 investment in a typical “high-yield” savings account in January 2021 — when inflation started picking up — was paying just 0.7% in annual interest at the time, according to Investopedia data.

Then, as the Fed ratcheted rates higher to combat inflation, the rate on that same account surged to 5% by early 2023, delivering much more generous returns. As the interest compounded, that initial deposit would have grown to $1,059.72 as of this August, for a gain of $59.72 on paper.

But that’s before adjusting for inflation. In reality, that balance is worth only $902.86 in 2021 dollars — a $97.14 net loss in purchasing power.

Some investment strategies have done a better job cushioning the blow from inflation — or even beating it — than others. But as the track record of even a high-yield savings account shows, it hasn’t been easy. Try out our simulator to see for yourself. Just pick an initial investment value to explore how three common financial products’ returns compare with stashing cash under the mattress. Then hit “Apply Inflation” to see how those current-day balances look in 2021 dollars.

The criminal cyberattack on MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last month resulted in the company’s losing around $100 million, it said in a filing Thursday evening with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The admission is a rare insight into the giant sums that major companies can lose when they fall victim to significant hacks.

MGM, whose prominent casinos along the Las Vegas Strip include the Bellagio and Mandalay Bay, were hacked last month. The company said it deliberately shut down a number of services “to mitigate risk to customer information.”

The shutdown had severe impacts for MGM. Some hotel customers couldn’t use key cards to enter their rooms. Employees were locked out of corporate emails for days. The tech news website 404 Media found entire sections of slot machines at MGM casinos roped off.

The fallout stood in sharp contrast what happened to rival Caesars Entertainment, which disclosed that it had been hacked around the same time. Caesars indicated in its SEC filing that it may have paid the hackers to go away.

In an open letter also published Thursday evening, MGM CEO Bill Hornbuckle said that “the vast majority of our systems have been restored,” adding, “We also believe that this attack is contained.”

Even though those systems were shut down, the hackers did access some customer information. While customer bank account information and credit card numbers appear untouched, the hackers stole some customers’ personal information, including names, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, Hornbuckle said.