Even borrowing money is more expensive these days — and the Federal Reserve might decide to keep it that way for a while.

All eyes are on the Fed’s May meeting today, where Fed chair Jerome Powell will make an announcement about interest rates. Though analysts do not expect the Fed to cut rates just yet, some had projected a cut might be coming soon. That now appears increasingly unlikely.

Instead, his remarks are expected to shed light on how much longer the US economy will have to endure high interest rates, which are squeezing everyone from prospective home buyers to people who have racked up credit card debt.

High interest rates have helped cool a too-hot economy, significantly bringing down inflation to 3.5 percent from its 9.1 percent peak in June 2022. But it’s still well above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, and inflation has increased slightly in the last few months, which means we might not see a rate cut anytime soon.

“The ‘last mile’ ... to the Fed’s target range was expected to be more difficult than what came before it,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Even with that expectation, however, inflation data in the first three months of 2024 has been surprisingly high.”

Why inflation has remained high

A few factors are driving stubborn inflation.

Housing costs have been the biggest contributor by far. Inflation in rent and homeowners’ cost of living in their own homes has moderated somewhat but by less than expected, Colyar said. Auto insurance and repair costs have also risen sharply even though car prices have fallen. And health care costs have also picked up.

Nicole Narea/Vox

But this isn’t necessarily a “strong indication that inflation will remain similarly high for the rest of 2024,” Preston Caldwell, chief US economist at Morningstar, said in a note to investors Friday.

The US economy has so far staved off a recession, growing at a slower but still solid pace in the first quarter of 2024 in part because Americans are continuing to spend a lot. The job market also remains strong, with the US blowing past projections to add 303,000 jobs in March.

That hasn’t given the Fed much urgency to cut rates anytime soon. “It’s not an economy in obvious need of the pick-me-up that a rate cut would deliver,” Colyar said.

Strong consumer spending, though, isn’t expected to last as Americans deplete any savings they accrued in the pandemic and rack up more household debt. That will likely cause US economic growth to slow in the coming year, which “should be sufficient to cool off remaining excess inflation,” Caldwell told Vox.

When will the Fed cut interest rates?

After the Fed’s December meeting, financial analysts were expecting six interest rate cuts in 2024, beginning in June. But given that inflation has remained high and the economy is still going strong, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.

Caldwell said he’s now expecting three cuts this year starting in September. Other top economists at UBS, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have also pushed back their projections for a rate cut. For example, Bank of America is projecting only a single rate cut in December.

Some Fed officials also have not ruled out the possibility of another rate hike, which would be the first since last July. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman recently said she would support a rate hike “should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.”

But Caldwell said that still seems a far-off possibility. “The mere fact that they’re delaying rate cuts already has a contractionary effect on the economy,” he said.

Colyar said he will be watching Powell’s remarks to discern “how spooked they have been by the hotter-than-expected inflation data in the first quarter” and to what extent he attributes the stickiness of inflation to a few industries, rather than an indication of current overall cost pressures.

What continued higher interest rates might mean for the economy

Recent economic data has already dampened earlier enthusiasm in the stock market about an imminent interest rate cut. Powell’s remarks might have a similar depressive effect, depending on how pessimistic he is about the Fed winning its battle against inflation in the near term.

“The first effect is psychological,” Colyar said. “Persistently high borrowing costs are painful and will eventually break something.”

It’s already slowing down the real estate market significantly. Mortgage rates have surpassed 7 percent, and that’s keeping prospective home buyers and sellers on the bench. People who secured lower interest rates just a few years ago don’t want to sell and would have to secure a higher-rate mortgage for their new lodging, so there are fewer homes on the market, keeping prices higher than many buyers can afford.

Americans’ total credit card debt also hit a record $1.13 trillion earlier this year, and repaying that in a high interest rate environment is bound to hurt their wallets.

At the same time, the US economy has proved resilient even in a high interest rate environment. The Fed doesn’t need to step in just yet given steady job growth and economic growth, as well as strong consumer spending.

“However, I would argue that the time to start loosening policy is before things are flashing red,” Colyar said. “Waiting too long because shelter prices are slow in moderating I think is an unnecessary risk.”

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

For the past seven years, Harvey Weinstein has been the bogeyman of popular culture. His depravity seems to the public to be so established that other monstrous men’s misconduct is measured by his misdeeds: Well, sure, he might have done something wrong, but he’s not exactly Harvey Weinstein, is he? Yet while Weinstein’s guilt might be thoroughly determined in the eyes of the public, the eyes of the legal system are a different matter. On April 25, the New York State Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein’s 2020 sex crime conviction.

Weinstein’s legal victory here hinges on a procedural issue, and an ironic one at that. Part of what convinced the public so thoroughly of Weinstein’s guilt was the sheer number of accusations against him. There were dozens upon dozens of them; at Vox, we kept a running tally that topped out around 80. Such an enormous flood of accusations seemed to suggest that at least some of them had to be accurate.

It was those very additional accusations, however, that got this trial overturned. When Weinstein originally came before the court in 2020, he was being tried for various sex crimes against three different women. Over the course of the trial, however, Judge James Burke allowed prosecutors to present testimony from three other Weinstein accusers, even though Weinstein wasn’t being prosecuted for attacking these women. Burke also said that if Weinstein chose to testify, prosecutors would be able to ask Weinstein about all the accusations against him during cross-examination, even the ones he hadn’t been charged for. (In the end, Weinstein did not testify.)

In the press, unprosecuted accusations against Weinstein went a long way toward establishing the pattern of behavior that convinced the public of his guilt. In the courts, however, New York state law holds that you can’t use an accusation of an uncharged crime as evidence against someone who you are currently prosecuting for a different crime.

“Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged,” said the Court of Appeals in their 4–3 decision. “It is our solemn duty to diligently guard these rights regardless of the crime charged, the reputation of the accused, or the pressure to convict.”

Currently, Weinstein is in a New York City hospital, where he’s receiving a variety of health tests. He remains in custody, serving out the 16-year term he was sentenced to in California after having been convicted there of rape in 2022. New York prosecutors have said they intend to recharge him, but it’s unclear if he’ll be transferred to California in the interim.

To understand exactly how the legal mechanisms at play here worked, I called up Eliza Orlins. Orlins is a public defender based in New York City who, as part of her job, sees how these rules affect people with a lot fewer resources than Harvey Weinstein. Together, we talked through the court’s decision; the difference between the way journalists gather proof and the way courts do; and how the justice system fails survivors of sexual violence. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

As I understand it, one of the issues here is the testimony from previous alleged victims of Weinstein. The judge in the first trial agreed to let them testify, and then the appeals court concluded that they shouldn’t have been allowed to testify. What is the nuance here? What’s the disagreement?

The trial court’s ruling was overturned on two different grounds. There’s Molineux and then there’s Sandoval, and they’re different. In the decision, I think they clearly lay out the two different ways in which those things are applied.

Essentially, the Molineux rule begins with the premise that uncharged crimes are inadmissible. And then they carve out exceptions. Uncharged crimes have to meet a qualifying test. You have to figure out the relevance and weigh the probative value against the potential for prejudice.

Just to differentiate before we go into both of these things, Sandoval is differentiated from Molineux. Typically, there’s a Sandoval hearing pretrial which [looks at] the things that the prosecutor wants to utilize on a potential cross-examination of the defendant, if they choose to testify at trial, and [determines] what would be allowed to be employed for impeachment purposes.

Essentially, there’s a two-part test for admission of Molineux evidence. First, it has to be logically relevant to prove one or more specific material issues in the case. Secondly, it has to have legitimate probative value that outweighs its prejudicial effects. Here the court of appeals determined, frankly correctly, that this evidence of these allegations of prior bad acts should not have been admitted. The admission of them was not harmless error, and there would have been the potential for an acquittal but for this testimony.

Okay, so you’re saying that for evidence to get admitted, it has to prove the facts of this specific case that’s being tried currently, not just demonstrate that Weinstein’s the kind of guy who’s likely to do something like this. Can you tell us how this evidence fails the test?

I really recommend people read the majority’s decision, because the court lays it out quite well and quite clearly. The Molineux rule is that things shouldn’t come in as propensity evidence. It can’t come in as proof of bad character alone. The prosecution shouldn’t be proving against a defendant a crime that is not alleged in the indictment. The evidence shouldn’t be admissible, simply because it’s very easy for a jury to misconstrue that evidence and say, “If he did that, he probably also did this.”

This is so interesting to me. In journalism, when you’re reporting on a sexual violence case, you’re taught to look for multiple accusations and patterns of behavior because, of course, it’s very hard to work with classical forms of evidence for sexual violence cases. There usually aren’t witnesses. A lot of times the accusations are coming out years and years after the event. So we usually tend to feel that if we can find multiple credible accusations that establish a pattern, that’s compelling and that is worth reporting.

Obviously the standards of evidence are very different in journalism from how they are in courtrooms, because we’re doing different things. Journalists aren’t trying to figure out someone’s legal guilt or innocence, and we can’t put anyone in jail. But I’m wondering if you can talk me through some of the differences in how the legal system thinks about establishing these patterns.

First of all, I think that the legal system does a poor job of addressing the harms that are caused, especially in cases of sexual assault, sexual violence, domestic violence, intimate partner violence. Even if someone is charged and goes to jail, it’s very hard to feel as though there’s any sort of way in which victims are being made whole. There’s some really interesting jurisprudence on this. Danielle Sered wrote an incredible book called Until We Reckon about restorative justice and how poorly the legal system addresses the harms to victims to begin with.

In terms of the way that we need to think about trying cases, for crimes to be charged, even for a case to be indicted, there has to be reasonable cause to believe that the crime has occurred. Then the case goes forward. Then at a trial, obviously, there has to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. When we’re dealing with uncharged crimes, there’s a reason why those crimes weren’t charged, right? These are things that the prosecution either feels they couldn’t even find reasonable cause to believe occurred, or they certainly don’t feel they could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

By admitting these other uncharged crimes, it is just a way to bolster the prosecution’s claim and show that this person had the propensity to do this. It flies in the face of what due process looks like.

Really the problem is that the charges have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, based on things that are within the framework of that specific charge. While there are exceptions to the Molineux rule about keeping out uncharged crimes, the reason why those exceptions exist is because there are certain times when that evidence does necessitate admission to explain something.

There are specifically laid out exceptions in the law. They tend to establish motive, intent, absence of mistake or accident, a common scheme or plan, the identity of the person who’s charged with the commission of the crime. That list is not exhaustive, but those are the main categories. It’s really critical that those things aren’t admitted just to show propensity evidence.

Do you think that anything about this ruling will change anything about how sexual violence cases are prosecuted going forward?

I appeared before the judge who was the trial judge in the Weinstein case many times for over a decade. I found him, even within a system that is unbelievably cruel, to stand out as someone who was immeasurably cruel. There are certain things that he did over the years to clients of mine that I will truly never forget for as long as I live. I think his legacy will be that he made these rulings to try to stick it to Weinstein, to try to make sure that there was a conviction, and that has now resulted in the retraumatization of victims.

He was behaving like a prosecutor, and the reality is that the prosecutors are also at fault. They are the ones who brought up evidence that wasn’t admissible and convinced the judge to admit that evidence.

So, is it going to change the way we prosecute cases? I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so. I think that using outside evidence should only be done in the most limited of circumstances when it’s truly appropriate.

So we’ve talked about the Molineaux rule. How does Sandoval play into this? That’s about what the prosecutors are able to cross-examine Weinstein on, right?

This decision is just saying: People should have the right to testify in their own defense. By making a ruling that makes it so that if you testify your cross-examination will be devastating, that makes it hard for people to then do that. I think that it is important for people to remember that.

This case is horrifying and it’s so upsetting and I feel so deeply for the victims, but the decision should be looked upon as one that is ultimately going to help people who are far less privileged than Harvey Weinstein. The majority of my clients, they’re all poor and they’re people of color and people from marginalized communities who really don’t have all of those advantages. I think that the ways in which prosecutors overreach just to try to show jurors how loathsome of a person someone is, to try to garner a conviction is not the right thing. Ultimately, that leads to reversals of convictions.

This is the perfect example of how prosecution really isn’t about getting justice for the victims. They’re not actually looking out for the people who’ve been hurt here.

Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu.

At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing.

The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared.

While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration.

The egg market is dominated by some major players

The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease.

Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms.

The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease.

When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs.

Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive.

And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins.

“It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch.

Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent.

Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers.

Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs?

Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry.

During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply.

Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf.

Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively.

The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating.

“We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.”

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