Is being nice holding you back at work?

One viral TikTok has young workers up in arms about the perils of being pleasant in the workplace.

A TikToker who goes by the name Jacqueline recently posted a TikTok video where she claimed that people who are “a pleasure to work with” will “never get promoted.”

The video has struck a nerve and has now racked up 8 million views and 900,000 likes.

Jacqueline says in the video that executives “will never allow an employee who is both good at doing the work and good at keeping a smile on their face while doing the work move up the ladder, because they know they can keep serving you sh-t on a platter and you’ll eat it with a smile.”

She added: “You will never be promoted out of a hardworking more junior position where a lot of the hard work exists … If you are in an executive suite, you do not have to be a pleasure to work with or good at your job.”

TikTok users in the comment section largely agreed with Jacqueline and put a name to her theory called “performance punishment” where good workers are assigned more tasks as a consequence of being reliable and effective.

Although the stereotype that jerks are more successful has long persisted, evidence suggests otherwise.

A 2020 study by Cameron Anderson, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, found that people with disagreeable personalities do not progress any faster in the workplace than agreeable people.

The study used results from a personality test taken by college students and graduates 14 years prior and how their careers turned out after.

It found that disagreeable people had two distinct traits that canceled out any career gains. This is that they were dominant and assertive which helped them attain power, but they were also more selfish and less communal which is a trait viewed negatively by coworkers.

You can reap certain benefits by being pleasant at work, especially if you can make your colleagues’ lives easier, according to Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at the University of Texas at the McCombs School of Business.

″Helping other people and being other-oriented can give you the benefit that people trust you more, which means access to a variety of resources, like information that not everyone in the organization has access to,” Brodsky said to CNBC Make It.

“You can also gain status by being seen as someone who’s useful to everyone and others like to reward those who they feel like are deserving. There’s a lot of benefits to being other-oriented like we like nice people and we do nice things for those people,” he added.

A 2022 study by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Iowa and Purdue University looked at the outcomes of prosocial motivation in the workplace — meaning people who like to help others.

It found through an analysis of 200 studies that workers with high levels of prosocial motivations experience greater wellbeing, career advancement, and job performance.

Although there’s a popular view that most CEOs are narcissists, Ryan Vogel, an associate professor at the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University, said this isn’t necessarily true.

People who do things for others and are open to the idea of reciprocating good things “do better for themselves in their careers,” Vogel told CNBC Make It. “People want to be associated with those kinds of people.”

“Narcissists are quite good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes momentarily but eventually people catch on,” he added. “Yes, there are a lot of CEOs that are narcissists but there’s a lot of CEOs that are not narcissists as well. Not every narcissist wins the tournament and ends up as a CEO.”

However, there are some caveats to being too nice.

In Jacqueline’s TikTok video, she conflates having a pleasant personality with being a pushover, according to Vogel. 

“A pushover would be like anchoring the far end of the scales of high agreeableness,” Vogel said. “I would say, pleasant is not necessarily as high on agreeableness. Pleasant people don’t bend over backwards. They’re not necessarily people pleasers but they treat people civilly.”

Brodsky agrees with this view and says that being too “other-oriented” can sometimes backfire because you lose focus on your own self-interests.

“When that happens, you might not fight for your self-interest as much as you need which at times can be necessary in organizations.”

Part of the reason the video has been such a hit on social media is that people’s expectations of corporate loyalty has been violated in recent years and workers have become much more critical of leaders as a result, according to Brodsky.

“The work relationship has changed over the past number of decades. It used to be you work 40 years at an organization, you get a gold watch or whatever and then you retire. Now, there isn’t very much corporate loyalty and especially right now, in the time of layoffs,” Brodsky says.

“When you have organizations that aren’t loyal to their employees, you would expect that employees become less loyal to their organizations.”

Arcade giant Dave & Buster’s is set to allow adults 18 and older to place real-time bets with friends on arcade games.

The Dave & Buster’s app will begin to incorporate an option to bet against other players, the company said Tuesday as part of a news release. The arcade company is partnering with Lucra, a company that makes gamification software, and expects to launch the bet feature in the coming months.

‘This new partnership gives our loyalty members real-time, unrivaled gaming experiences, and reinforces our commitment to continuing to elevate our customer experience through innovative, cutting-edge technology,’ Simon Murray, senior vice president of entertainment and attractions at Dave & Buster’s, said in the news release.

A representative for Lucra said that there will be a limit on bets but added that the limit was not something the company could share publicly yet, noting that the average bet between users is $10.

The company also said that it has ‘extensive responsible gaming policies’ and that its partners can configure bet limits.

Dave & Buster’s, which started in 1982, has more than 222 venues in North America, offering everything from bowling to laser tag, plus virtual reality. The company says it has 5 million loyalty members and 30 million unique visitors to its locations each year. The company’s stock is up more than 50% over the past year.

Gambling has in recent years moved from a fringe activity into the mainstream thanks in large part to the legalization of sports gambling in many states, leading to a rush of apps and advertising that has caused some concerns about rises in problem gambling.

The Dave & Buster’s effort appears to be significantly different than sports betting, most notably since players are gambling against each other rather than against the company itself.

Lucra, founded in 2019, makes what it calls ‘gamification services’ that include ‘cash, e-commerce, or cashless contests on partner platforms.’

“We’re creating a new form of kind of a digital experience for folks inside of these ecosystems,” said Michael Madding, Lucra’s chief operating officer. “We’re getting them to engage in a new way and spend more time and money.”

Lucra says its skills-based games are not subject to the same licenses and regulations gambling operators face with games of chance. Lucra is careful not to use the term “bet” or “wager” to describe its games.

“We use real-money contests or challenges,” Madding said.

Lucra’s contests are currently available in 44 states.

The social betting category is a $6 billion industry, according to gaming research firm Eilers & Krejcik. Several companies such as Fliff and Rebet have emerged, hoping to mimic the success of the gambling industry and capture a younger market.

Strong demand and tight supply continue to push home values higher, even though mortgage rates are now moving higher again.

Home prices in February jumped 6.4% year over year, another increase after the prior month’s annual gain of 6%, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index released Tuesday. It was the fastest rate of price growth since November 2022.

The 10-city composite rose 8%, up from a 7.4% increase in the previous month. The 20-city composite saw an annual gain of 7.3%, up from a 6.6% advance in January.

“Following last year’s decline, U.S. home prices are at or near all-time highs,” said Brian Luke, head of commodities, real and digital assets at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “For the third consecutive month, all cities reported increases in annual prices, with four currently at all-time highs: San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York.”

Prices in San Diego saw the biggest gain among the 20 cities in the index, up 11.4% from February of 2023. Both Chicago and Detroit reported 8.9% annual increases. Portland, Oregon, saw the smallest gain in the index of just 2.2%.

“The Northeast region, which includes Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., ranks as the best performing market for over the last half year. As remote work benefitted smaller (and sunnier markets) in the first part of the decade, return to office may be contributing to outperformance in larger metropolitan markets in the Northeast,” according to Luke.

“Since the previous peak in prices in 2022, this marks the second time home prices have pushed higher in the face of economic uncertainty. The first decline followed the start of the Federal Reserve’s hiking cycle. The second decline followed the peak in average mortgage rates last October,” he added.

This index records prices on a three-month moving average, so they go back as far as December, when mortgage rates hit their recent lows. There was also a strong expectation then that the Federal Reserve would lower interest rates. That may have driven buyers to jump in.

Since that time, however, mortgage rates have jumped nearly a full percentage point. In addition, stubborn and persistent inflation has lowered expectations that the Fed will cut rates significantly this year.

Trump Media shares climbed nearly 7% Tuesday, continuing a rise that has seen the Truth Social owner surge about 50% in the past week.

DJT closed the trading day at roughly $50 a share, about 30% below its opening price of $70.90 in late March.

The stock has had several volatile days in the past month, trading at a high of about $60 a share and a low of just over $20 per share.

Trump Media’s rise has come without significant news about its finances improving. The company’s social media business had $58 million in losses last year and just $4.1 million in revenue.

The recent climb in the stock may be the result of steps the company has taken to target short sellers, according to Jay Ritter, a business professor at the University of Florida who is an expert on initial public offerings.

“In the last week or so, the company has informed its shareholders how to make it difficult to loan their shares to short sellers, and it is possible that the number of shares available to short has decreased, increasing the [cost] borrowing rate for short selling,” Ritter said.

The Truth Social owner also has urged Congress to investigate possible “unlawful manipulation” of the stock.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

Federal prosecutors are digging into internal practices at Block, the financial technology firm launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, discussing with a former employee alleged widespread and yearslong compliance lapses at the company’s two main units, Square and Cash App, two people with direct knowledge of the contacts say.

During the discussions, the former employee provided prosecutors from the Southern District of New York documents that they say show that insufficient information is collected from Square and Cash App customers to assess their risks, that Square processed thousands of transactions involving countries subject to economic sanctions and that Block processed multiple cryptocurrency transactions for terrorist groups.

Most of the transactions discussed with prosecutors, involving credit card transactions, dollar transfers and Bitcoin, were not reported to the government as required, the former employee said. Block did not correct company processes when it was alerted to the breaches, the former employee told prosecutors and NBC News.

Roughly 100 pages of documents the former employee provided to NBC News identify transactions, many in small dollar amounts, involving entities in countries subject to U.S. sanctions restrictions — Cuba, Iran, Russia and Venezuela — as recently as last year.

“From the ground up, everything in the compliance section was flawed,” the former employee told NBC News. “It is led by people who should not be in charge of a regulated compliance program.” 

A second person with direct knowledge of Block’s monitoring programs and practices echoed that assessment; NBC News granted the former employee and the second person anonymity to guard against potential reprisals.

The Southern District of New York declined to comment.

Jack Dorsey at the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami in June 2021. Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

Edward Siedle, a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer who represents the former employee and participated in the discussions with prosecutors, said, “It’s my understanding from the documents that compliance lapses were known to Block leadership and the board in recent years.”

Prosecutors met with the former employee after NBC News reported in mid-February that two other whistleblowers had told financial regulators about compliance failures at Cash App, the hugely popular mobile payment platform owned by Block. Cash App, introduced in 2013, allows users to send and receive money instantaneously among themselves and to buy stocks and Bitcoin. As of December, Cash App had 56 million active transacting accounts and $248 billion in inflows during the previous four quarters, the company said.

Asked about the probe, a Block spokeswoman provided the following statement: “Block has a responsible and extensive compliance program and we regularly adapt our practices to meet emerging threats and an evolving sanctions regulatory environment. Our compliance program includes systems, tools, and processes for sanctions screening, as well as investigating and reporting on sanctions issues in accordance with our regulatory obligations. Continually improving the safety and security of our ecosystem is a top priority for Block. We have been and remain committed to building upon this work, as well as continuing to invest significantly in our compliance program.”

The company said it believed it had voluntarily reported the “thousands of transactions” described by the former employee to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, a department of the U.S. Treasury that enforces economic sanctions. But the former employee disputed that, saying thousands of different transactions were not reported.

Block’s voluntary self-disclosure to OFAC led the agency to issue a no-action letter, indicating the closure of the investigation with no administrative action. The letter identified Cash App transactions, the company said, adding that the resolution confirmed Block’s analysis of its controls and processes companywide.

Square, the other main business unit at Block, is a financial services platform used by millions of merchants. Documents provided to prosecutors and reviewed by NBC News identify instances at Square when it failed to conduct basic customer due diligence on its international merchant sellers and improperly reimbursed some of the merchants’ funds that had been frozen for sanctions violations. (Merchants are considered customers at Square, while users are considered customers at Cash App.) New customers at both Square and Cash App who triggered sanctions alerts at their initial screenings were permitted to conduct transactions before the alerts were resolved, the documents say. They also show instances of employees’ flagging that customer biography information, such as linked social media accounts, was not screened against sanctions keyword lists. 

Cash App’s design increased the risk of compliance lapses, the documents indicate. “Due to the nature of the product,” a document said, “customers do not appear to leave stored balances in Cash App very long so our ability to block a stored balance or reject funds is limited. In virtually all situations, balances have been depleted by the time of review.”

Block said sanctions risk on Cash App is mitigated by compliance controls and the nature of the customer base, focused on U.S. customers.

The former employee also told prosecutors about the findings of an outside consultant Block hired to assess its internal systems for monitoring suspicious activities, rating customer risks and screening for sanctions violations. The consultant identified almost 50 deficiencies in those systems last year, the documents show. 

In its response to NBC News, the company said the hiring of the consultant showed Block’s commitment to perform and improve compliance, adding that 50 deficiencies were not unusual given the report’s scope. The former employee’s interpretation of the report misconstrues its findings and their significance, the company said. 

The company declined to answer questions about the specific deficiencies cited in the documents. It said that when deficiencies are identified, Block works “with our in-house legal team, as well as with outside counsel and consultants, to advise us on the issue and appropriate remediation.” The company conducts recurring sanctions screening on all merchants, it said, and its program includes the essential components expected by OFAC.

OFAC administers and enforces economic sanctions to protect the nation against “targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists and terrorist organizations, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, narcotic traffickers, and others,” according to its website. It “strongly encourages” companies to develop, implement and routinely update sanctions compliance programs. “Senior management’s commitment to, and support of, an organization’s risk-based sanctions compliance program is one of the most important factors in determining its success,” OFAC says, and it is essential to fostering “a culture of compliance throughout the organization.”

Along with senior management, the Block board of directors was informed of extensive lapses at the company, the former employee told prosecutors. In recent months, Block has announced the unexpected departures of two directors: Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary and a Block director since 2011, resigned in February, and in April it said Sharon Rothstein, a director since 2022, will not stand for re-election at the company’s annual meeting in June.

Block said that Summers and Rothstein were leaving the board to devote more time to other professional and personal activities and that their departures were not “a result of any disagreements with the company on any matter relating to the company’s operations, policies or practices.”

During his time on the board, Summers served on the audit committee, which is charged with reviewing and discussing with management the company’s program and policies on risk assessment and risk management. The committee is overseen by Lord Paul Deighton, a former Goldman Sachs executive who was commercial secretary to the treasury in the U.K. government from 2013 to 2015. NBC News requested interviews with Deighton and Summers, but they declined, forwarding the requests to Block’s corporate communications unit. 

Block has encountered difficulties with regulators before. In late 2021, the Financial Market Supervisory Committee of the Bank of Lithuania ordered Verse Payments Lithuania UAB, the company’s European version of Cash App, to determine the identity of its existing clients whose identities had not been established or had been established out of compliance with the law on Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing. 

Verse and its former head were fined last year when the Bank of Lithuania inspected Verse and “found serious and systematic violations of the prevention of money laundering and terrorism financing.” The top Verse executive “did not ensure the safe and reliable operation of the institution, did not take effective measures to eliminate violations and did not ensure the compliance of the institution’s activities with the established requirements, although information about the violations committed by the institution was known to him for a long time,” the Bank of Lithuania said at the time.

Block shut down Verse last year. On an earnings call in August, Dorsey said that Verse required significant investment and that its market had “not seen the growth and profitability we had expected.”

Mobile payment apps like Cash App, PayPal and Venmo are popular, with over three-quarters of U.S. adults using them, according to a study last year by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Known as person-to-person payment platforms, the services pose risks to their users and to the financial system, regulators say. In recent years, for example, law enforcement officials have cited criminals’ use of payment apps to evade laws, such as laundering stolen Covid relief funds in 2020.

Cash App is not a bank, but it uses external banking partners to conduct various services. One is Sutton Bank, the small Ohio institution that issues Cash App’s prepaid Visa debit cards, allowing users to spend or withdraw their funds. Banks are required to know every one of their customers, but the Cash App program “had no effective procedure to establish the identity of its customers,” the previous whistleblowers said in their complaints to federal financial regulators.

On March 29, Sutton Bank settled a consent order with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that echoed the whistleblowers’ allegations. In the order, the FDIC alleged “unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law or regulation” at Sutton, including those relating to the Bank Secrecy Act. 

Under the order, Sutton agreed to revise its internal programs to “improve its supervision and direction” of its anti-money laundering and terrorism financing program and “to assure and maintain the Bank’s full compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act.” Sutton also agreed to look back to July 2020 “to ensure that all required customer identification program information has been obtained and the bank has formed a reasonable belief that it knows the true identity” of its customers. 

The FDIC order cited Sutton Bank’s work with “third parties” or outside entities and required it to provide details about anti-money-laundering compliance and customer identification programs at the outside companies it works with. The FDIC did not name Cash App in the order, but it is the largest third party that Sutton Bank works with, according to its chief compliance officer. The FDIC order also required Sutton to provide quarterly reporting of “third-party compliance with legal, contractual, and service level responsibilities, and management actions to address anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism deficiencies.”

James Booker, senior counsel at Sutton Bank, said in an email that the bank is working closely with regulators and that the recent consent order “settled some longstanding issues concerning anti-money laundering controls” that had arisen “prior to the bank’s 2023 restructuring of its anti-money laundering program.” 

As for Block, it said the Sutton consent order was not likely to affect Cash App’s ongoing business relationship with the bank.

Former President Donald Trump is building a second-term economic agenda that analysts say could reheat the very inflation that he has slammed President Joe Biden for creating.

“I call it a ring around the country. We have a ring around the country,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview released Tuesday, referring to aggressive tariffs he has promised to impose in a second term. “I also don’t believe that the costs will go up that much.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly pledged to hike tariffs, cut taxes and encourage cheap money policy if he wins the November election.

Yet economists and Wall Street analysts agree that these plans would likely drive consumer prices higher.

Trump has outright dismissed this idea: “I don’t believe it’ll be inflation. I think it’ll be lack of loss for our country,” he said in the Time interview.

Trump has pledged to raise tariffs by 10% on imports across the board, and push them even higher — to between 60% and 100% — for China and Mexico.

He also wants to extend his first-term tax cuts, which raised deficits when they were first implemented and are due to expire in 2025.

“I will make the Trump Cuts permanent … and we will cut your taxes even more,” Trump said at a February rally in South Carolina.

Plus, Trump has signaled his intent to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and then to pressure the next Fed chair to lower interest rates. Trump allies have also been working on plans to force the Fed to consult Trump on interest rate decisions, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Analysts view these proposals as threats to inflation’s rocky road back down to the commonly accepted ideal level of around 2%.

“A second Trump term could bring higher tariffs, attempts to weaken the dollar, even higher deficits, deportation of illegal immigrants, and other policies that could put upward pressure on inflation,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote last week.

“Most of the major policy initiatives being suggested by Donald Trump’s campaign would be inflationary,” Paul Ashworth, Capital Economics’ chief North America economist wrote Monday. “Whether it’s narrowing the trade deficit via tariffs or a dollar devaluation, curbing immigration or, now we learn, compromising the Fed’s independence.”

When it comes to tariffs, Wall Street analysts note that businesses pass on higher import costs to their customers by raising prices.

Trump flatly rejected that idea in the Time interview. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, that’s gonna be a tax on us.’ I don’t believe that. I think it’s a tax on the country that’s [exporting] it.”

Trump’s tariff policies “would be a significant escalation to existing trade policy, and they would further increase costs for U.S. importers, place upward pressure on inflation and potentially strengthen the U.S. dollar,” Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a report from early April.

But that inflationary impact “could be partially absorbed in the near term,” the Wells Fargo analysts added, explaining that many suppliers have started to diversify their inventory away from “tariff-exposed product.”

The Trump-era tariffs on China that nearly started a trade war had only a “marginal” effect on the economy, according to the Wells Fargo report: “The surge in consumer price inflation is primarily attributed to the pandemic’s disruptions rather than the trade war’s tariffs.”

Reached for comment, the Trump campaign said, “under President Trump, inflation was non-existent, gasoline was cheap, groceries were affordable, and the American Dream was alive and well.”

Despite the inflationary threat posed by core elements of Trump’s agenda, polling has consistently found that voters trust Trump more than they trust Biden to bring down the cost of living and manage inflation.

In part, voters’ nostalgia for Trump’s economy is a byproduct of the scars that post-pandemic inflation left them with.

In January 2017, when Trump took office, the consumer price index, a key inflation metric, hung at an annual rate of 2.51%. That number dipped over the course of his administration, and by the time Biden entered the Oval Office, the 12-month inflation rate was at 1.40%.

By the summer of 2022, year-over-year CPI had soared to roughly 9%, driven primarily by the collision of pent-up consumer demand with a snarled global supply chain that could not deliver products fast enough. CPI has since cooled, to 3.48% in March of this year.

But that inflation whiplash over the past five years appears to have left many voters with a bitter memory of the Biden economy.

It has also catapulted a data point that is usually only tracked by economists into the front of voters’ minds, and introduced it to a new generation.

The last time inflation was above 9% was in 1981. The only Americans who were over 18 years old in 1981, and thereby most likely to directly feel the soaring prices, are people who, today, are 61 and above. For everyone else, this kind of inflation has no precedent in their adult lives.

Biden has faced an uphill climb to persuade voters that they are better off thanks to his economic accomplishments, including low unemployment, sustained GDP growth and historic clean energy investments.

In recent months, Biden has also taken a more aggressive stance on potential trade restrictions on China. Earlier in April, Biden said he wants to triple tariffs on imported Chinese steel and aluminum.

But while Biden makes his economic case to voters, Trump has capitalized on the fraught economic data of the past several months to lambast his opponent and the Fed.

“INFLATION is BACK—and RAGING!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post earlier in April. “The Fed will never be able to credibly lower interest rates, because they want to protect the worst President in the history of the Untied States!”

It was unclear what the former president meant by this, especially given that Powell, a lifelong Republican, was appointed by Trump.

Trump Media shares dropped sharply Wednesday, closing down by more than 9.5%.

Trump Media, which trades under the DJT ticker, closed at $45.16 per share, a loss of $4.77 per share.

The company, which owns the Truth Social app, is still trading well below the more than $70 per share it opened at in its public trading debut on March 26.

Trump Media in a regulatory disclosure Tuesday confirmed that former President Donald Trump received an extra 36 million shares of the company in a so-called earnout bonus.

Trump, who already owned more than 78 million shares, received the windfall because the share price remained above a benchmark of $17.50 for 20 trading days over the month since the stock began being publicly traded.

Trump’s stake in Trump Media now stands at 65% of the company’s shares, and is worth $5.7 billion at a share price of $50.

The former president is barred from selling those shares during the six months following the execution of Trump Media’s merger with the shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. in late March.

Trump Media’s share price surge has come as the company’s CEO, former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, has complained about potential market manipulation of the company’s stock by short sellers, and as the firm has encouraged shareholders to take steps that would prevent their stock from being loaned for short selling trades.

Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3 Partners, told CNBC that short interest in DJT shares is more than $147 million, with 3.55 million shares shorted.

Dusaniwsky said the fees charged to borrow shares for short sell trades are “rising again with stock borrow fees on existing shorts nearing 300% fee and rates on new stock borrows to support new short sales are hitting the 600% fee level.”

“This means that existing short sellers need to have DJT’s stock price decline by -$0.35 every day just to cover their short financing costs,” he wrote in an email.

While there was increased short selling in Trump Media since the beginning of the year, when it still traded under the DWAC ticker, since the middle of April, there has been an increase in covering of short positions by traders, Dusaniwsky said.

“For the year, there has been 1.4 million new shares shorted, worth $59 million, a 66% increase in total shares shorted,” Dusaniwsky wrote. “But over the last thirty days we’ve seen 2.8 million shares of short covering, worth $97 million, a -40% decline in total shares shorted.”

“DJT’s early April price drop still makes it a profitable month for DJT short sellers with a +$79 million month-to-date mark-to-market profits, +43% for the month,” he said. “But since mid-April, DJT shorts are down -$80 million in mark-to-market losses, -62%.”

“These losses, coupled with the sky-high stock borrow costs have squeezed some shorts out of their positions,” he wrote. “Expect more short covering if DJT’s stock price stays at these levels or higher as the high stock borrow financing costs keep taking a bite out of prospective profits, even on weekends.”

Private payrolls increased at a faster than expected pace in April, indicating there are still plenty of tailwinds for the U.S. labor market, according to ADP.

The payrolls processing firm reported Wednesday that companies added 192,000 workers for the month, better than the Dow Jones consensus outlook for 183,000 though a slight step down from the upwardly revised 208,000 in March.

At the same time, the firm’s wage measure showed worker pay up 5% from a year ago, a multiyear low that provided some welcome news against multiple other signs showing inflation has proved more resilient than many economists and policymakers had expected.

“Hiring was broad-based in April,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said. “Only the information sector — telecommunications, media, and information technology — showed weakness, posting job losses and the smallest pace of pay gains since August 2021.”

Job gains were strongest in leisure and hospitality, which posted an increase of 56,000. Other industries showing gains included construction (35,000) and sectors covering trade, transportation and utilities as well as education and health services, both of which saw increases of 26,000.

Professional and business services contributed 22,000 to the total while financial activities added 16,000.

Companies with 500 or more workers showed the biggest gain in hiring with 98,000.

The ADP release comes two days ahead of the more closely watched nonfarm payrolls report. In recent months, ADP has consistently undershot the Labor Department’s count, though the numbers were fairly close in March. The department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that private payrolls increased by 232,000 for the month versus ADP’s 208,000.

Friday’s report is expected to show growth of 204,000 in total nonfarm payrolls for April, down from March’s 303,000, according to the consensus Dow Jones estimate.

It’s finally here: the long-predicted consumer pullback.

Starbucks announced a surprise drop in same-store sales for its latest quarter, sending its shares down 17% on Wednesday. Pizza Hut and KFC also reported shrinking same-store sales. And even stalwart McDonald’s said it has adopted a “street-fighting mentality” to compete for value-minded diners.

For months, economists have been predicting that consumers would cut back on their spending in response to higher prices and interest rates. But it’s taken a while for fast-food chains to see their sales actually shrink, despite several quarters of warnings to investors that low-income consumers were weakening and other diners were trading down from pricier options.

Many restaurant companies also offered other reasons for their weak results this quarter. Starbucks said bad weather dragged its same-store sales lower. Yum Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, blamed January’s snowstorms and tough comparisons to a strong first quarter last year for its brands’ poor performance.

But those excuses don’t fully explain the weak quarterly results. Instead, it looks like the competition for a smaller pool of customers has grown fiercer as the diners still looking to buy a burger or cold brew become pickier with their cash.

The cost of eating out at quick-service restaurants has climbed faster than that of eating at home. Prices for limited-service restaurants rose 5% in March compared with the year-ago period, while prices for groceries have been increasing more slowly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Clearly everybody’s fighting for fewer consumers or consumers that are certainly visiting less frequently, and we’ve got to make sure we’ve got that street-fighting mentality to win, irregardless of the context around us,” McDonald’s CFO Ian Borden said on the company’s conference call on Tuesday.

Outliers show that customers will still order their favorite foods, even if they’re more expensive than they were a year ago. Wingstop, Wall Street’s favorite restaurant chain, reported its U.S. same-store sales soared 21.6% in the first quarter. Chipotle Mexican Grill saw traffic rise 5.4% in its first quarter. And Restaurant Brands International’s Popeyes reported same-store sales growth of 5.7%.

Even so, many companies in the restaurant sector and beyond it have warned consumer pressures could persist. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told analysts the spending caution extends worldwide.

“It’s worth noting that in [the first quarter], industry traffic was flat-to-declining in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and the U.K.,” he said.

Two of the chains that struggled in the first quarter cited value as a factor. Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said occasional customers weren’t buying the chain’s coffee because they wanted more variety and value.

“In this environment, many customers have been more exacting about where and how they choose to spend their money, particularly with stimulus savings mostly spent,” Narasimhan said on the company’s Tuesday call.

Yum CEO David Gibbs noted that rivals’ value deals for chicken menu items hurt KFC’s U.S. sales. But he said the shift to value should benefit Taco Bell, which accounts for three-quarters of Yum’s domestic operating profit.

“We know from the industry data that value is more important and that others are struggling with value, and Taco Bell is a value leader. You’re seeing some low-income consumers fall off in the industry. We’re not seeing that at Taco Bell,” he said on Wednesday.

It’s unclear how long it will take fast-food chains’ sales to bounce back, although executives provided optimistic timelines and plans to get sales back on track. For example, Yum said its first quarter will be the weakest of the year.

For its part, McDonald’s plans to create a nationwide value menu that will appeal to thrifty customers. But the burger giant could face pushback from its franchisees, who have become more outspoken in recent years. While deals drive sales, they pressure operators’ profits, particularly in markets where it is already expensive to operate.

Still, losing ground to the competition could motivate McDonald’s franchisees. This marks the second consecutive quarter that Burger King reported stronger U.S. same-store sales growth than McDonald’s. The Restaurant Brands chain has been in turnaround mode over the last two years and spending heavily on advertising.

Starbucks is also betting on deals. The coffee chain is gearing up to release an upgrade of its app that allows all customers — not just loyalty members — to order, pay and get discounts. Narasimhan also touted the success of its new lavender drink line that launched in March, although business was still sluggish in April.