Business
Why 'economic headwinds' are suddenly to blame for everything
An atmospheric disturbance is whipping through the job market.
When Volvo announced it was cutting more than a thousand jobs last year, its CEO cited a particular phenomenon for the cuts. When the founder of the Messenger announced to his hundreds of employees that they were all laid off without severance, less than a year after the online publication booted up, the same weather pattern got the blame.
Chief executives at accounting firms, cookie companies and Crypto.com have all laid off thousands of workers in the last year, and pointed the finger at one metaphorical culprit: economic headwinds.
The phrase evokes a solemn CEO scanning the sky from the deck of the corporate ship. Eye on the horizon, he senses a change in the weather, a different snap to the rippling canvas, a new chop to the sea. With a grim set to his jaw, he concludes that only one course of action can save the voyage: massive layoffs.
Headwinds have always blown around in business English, but the phrase economic headwinds serves a special purpose: a majestic waving of the hand, an abandon to the fates, an inkling of force majeure.
“It’s a useful term, because we can’t control the wind,” said Thomas C. Leonard, a historian of economics at Princeton University. “If you’re a corporation trying to sell unhappy outcomes to shareholders or regulators, it’s a way of saying it’s a tough environment, but more importantly it’s a tough environment beyond our control.”
It’s a phrase heard often these days in the tech and media sectors, which face real challenges.
Tech companies that could raise and spend cash freely when interest rates were close to zero are struggling to stay afloat. The ad market has hit the doldrums — in part because all those companies that used to have cheap cash to pump into ads now have to keep their powder dry — which has taken the wind out of the sails of many media businesses, which had been facing financial problems for decades. And in L.A., Hollywood studios have been slow to pick up the pace of production after last year’s strikes, as they face questions over the viability of the streaming business model.
Executives in these industries are using the term precisely because of the contrast between their challenges and the wider world, Leonard said.
“The wild thing is, notwithstanding the headwinds in media and technology, the economy is doing unbelievably well,” Leonard said. Inflation is down, unemployment is at historically low levels, the U.S. is outperforming other rich countries, the stock market is booming, and even inequality of wealth and income is falling, Leonard said.
This presents a conundrum for those tasked with swinging the ax: how to explain why your company is ailing when everybody can see blue skies above?
By leaning on economic headwinds, executives can acknowledge a problem while avoiding getting into the messy details — say an outdated business model or internal failings.
EDGAR, the online database of the Securities and Exchange Commission, confirms that economic headwinds are being evoked more now than ever. In the 2000s, only a slight breeze was blowing, with public filings showing a handful of economic headwinds mentions. Things picked up in 2008 and 2009, as the financial crisis battered corporate America, but conditions seemed to subside in the middle of the last decade.
Then high interest rates rolled in. Since 2022, when the Federal Reserve started ratcheting up the federal funds rate to cool down the economy, EDGAR has been logging record after record. Nearly 500 companies mentioned economic headwinds in 2022. In 2023, that more than doubled to over 1,000.
A scan of the Newspaper Archive, which stretches back to the 18th century, tells a similar story. Through the booms and busts of the Gilded Age, the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the whirlwind of the 1970s oil crisis and stagflation, economic headwinds were barely worth mentioning. Most early mentions are riffs on the metaphor of the ship of state, with entire nations beating against the breeze, or come as puns in stories about airplanes or shipping companies.
But something changes after Y2K. Press usage of the phrase follows the same trajectory as the SEC record — with mentions up through the recession, followed by a dip, and now heading to new heights.
The collective experience of the last few years — pandemic, recession, inflation and now interest rate hikes — may have led to a turning of the rhetorical tides, said Robert Reich, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and former secretary of Labor.
“The dominant economic assumption for really the entire post-World War II era has been that Keynesian macroeconomic management can tame the uncertainties and extremes of the economy,” Reich said. But since 2020, it’s been difficult to avoid the sense that things are spiraling out of control. “Most people felt at sea, and there’s something not necessarily comforting but seemingly realistic about these metaphors now.”
The economy stopped feeling like a precision machine in need of a tuneup, pointed surely toward growth, and started feeling more like an unpredictable journey to an unknown shore.
“Seeing the economy as a boat, one of those old galleons, or a three-masted schooner, tossed on the great waves of uncertainty and the waves of this roiling system makes much more sense to people,” Reich said.
It’s also “a wonderfully convenient way of avoiding responsibility” when things go sideways, Reich added.
Nautical metaphors are nothing new for the world of commerce — trade, finance and the joint-stock company can all trace their roots to seafaring merchants engaged in risky adventures to haul holds full of goods across the world in capital-intensive ships. And business euphemisms aren’t just limited to the seas. Few parts of the natural world have been spared from the corporate lexicon, with its changing landscapes and seismic shifts. Even the cosmos is fair game, especially in a tech world known for its moon shots and escape velocities.
Such fanciful phrases might serve a more grounded purpose: smoothing things over with investors. Research has shown that euphemisms actually work to soften bad news in the financial markets.
Kate Suslava, a professor of accounting at Bucknell University, spent years tracking how the use of metaphors in corporate earnings calls changes how the stock market reacts to new information. She found that investors aren’t total rubes — the stock prices of companies whose executives used negative metaphors like speed bumps or economic headwinds, or mentioned the need to tighten our belt or sharpen our pencils to get back to work after a series of missteps, indeed went down on the day of the earnings call.
What surprised her was that over the following months, the stock prices of the companies in question continued to drift down. “Investors take it as bad news, but it should be even worse news,” Suslava said. “If the market was efficient, they would completely capture it on the date of the call.”
In other words, a softening metaphor gets investors to under-react to the bad news. “Which is exactly the point of euphemisms,” Suslava said. “They work.”
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
Residents in the city of Monterey Park will be the first in the nation to vote on a permanent ban on data centers Tuesday.
If approved, Measure NDC would prohibit data centers within the city limits and could only be overturned by another vote.
Yard signs saying “No Data Center” in English and Chinese with images of dragons line sidewalks in the San Gabriel Valley city.
As a wave of data center opposition sweeps the country, numerous towns and counties across the U.S. have instituted temporary moratoria and other restrictions on the facilities. But only a handful have instituted indefinite bans, and just four other towns have sent related matters to the ballot.
Supporters are hoping the vote will set a precedent for the rest of the region, where residents are fighting proposals in Vernon and City of Industry.
“This is about as permanent a ban as we can get,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of the group No Data Center Monterey Park. “Winning Measure NDC would send a huge message to the rest of the San Gabriel Valley about how residents don’t want data centers.”
The ballot measure emerged from the fight against a 247,000-square-foot center proposed in 2024 by the Australian-owned investment firm HMC StratCap for a residential area in Monterey Park.
The facility would have sat less than 500 feet away from the nearest home and used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person, predominantly Asian American city.
While the developer touted the potential for jobs and tax revenue, residents expressed concerns about noise and air pollution, rising electricity rates and a potential to lower property values.
The company pulled its plans in late March following public outcry and a March 4 city council vote to extend a temporary data center moratorium and place a ban on Tuesday’s ballot.
In a letter to the city council, HMC StratCap said it would pursue a different use for the land and would not engage in a ballot measure fight.
The city council later banned data centers indefinitely, the first in California to do so, said Mayor Elizabeth Yang. But she’s still been out campaigning for the measure with all four other council members.
“If a council puts in an ordinance, a future council can reverse it too,” said Yang. “With the ballot measure, unbanning it is a lot harder because you need the entire city to vote on it.”
The measure proposes the ban “to protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”
While California places third in the country for existing data centers with about 300 facilities, it hasn’t been a hot spot in the recent AI-driven data center boom. High electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois or Arizona.
“Most of California’s data centers are small by today’s standards,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at UC Riverside who studies how to reduce the environmental impacts of data centers. “Ten years ago, they would be medium-sized, but the power demand for new AI data centers has increased a lot.”
The average operating data center demands 45 megawatts, according to the Washington Post, while the average planned one would draw 430 MW. The one proposed for Monterey Park would have required about 50 MW at peak demand.
As proposals crop up in SoCal, they’re met with fierce opposition. Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoria, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. City of Industry, Vernon, City of Commerce and Santa Fe Springs are moving in the other direction, trying to court developers and streamline data center approvals. Community groups are fighting that.
Outside the San Gabriel Valley, residents of Coachella and Imperial County are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
Matthew Shaw, a volunteer with the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, who recently published a report on opposition to AI data centers, said a vote to ban them in Monterey Park “would lead to copycats, partially because so many groups are just opposed to any data center development at all.”
While there is no formal opposition to Measure NDC, some building trades like Ironworker Local 433 supported the Monterey Park data center when it was still live before city council. Those in the data center industry are lamenting the state of public opinion.
“These are multi-billion-dollar assets that are built by multi-trillion-dollar companies. These things will get done,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority. “My biggest problem is that our industry does not invest enough in community engagement.”
Paryavi said towns that seek to limit data centers are missing out on thousands of jobs generated by data center construction, operations and customers, as well as faster artificial intelligence speeds and better performance.
Kung said local community organizers are “looking at the empirical evidence” and seeing a ban as a win.
“We’ve never seen a city that embraces a data center and is like, ‘Look how our quality of life has increased, look how all the revenue has gone into citywide improvements,’” he said. “That just doesn’t exist.”
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