🏦 Markets: Investors don’t seem to know where to go in the current economic climate. After some gains last month, Wall Street finished Friday with a second straight week of losses.

The sell-off came in response to new reports that consumer sentiment hit its lowest point in six months, falling far short of expectations.

All three major indexes ended up a fraction of a percent down as of the closing bell.

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It's impossible to put down!

🏈 Season’s greetings: We’re almost four months away, but football fans are already starting to salivate over some of the matchups being announced for the upcoming NFL season. The season kicks off with the Super Bowl-winning Chiefs taking on a young-and-hungry Lions team. Then, we’ll get to see Aaron Rogers suit up for the Jets and play against the Bills for the season’s first Monday night game. Week 11 delivers a Chiefs vs. Eagles Super Bowl rematch.

💼 Executive move: Twitter CEO Elon Musk hinted on Thursday that he’d selected his replacement and that she’d take over the job in about six weeks. The next day, he confirmed that Linda Yaccarino was his choice, confirming that she “will focus primarily on business operations” while he works to introduce new products and tech. Yaccarino most recently held the position of chairwoman for global advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal.

✈️ Travel plans: Arriving at the airport can be a frustrating ordeal, but Lyft says it’s trying to help by alleviating at least one of the hassles associated with air travel. The ride-hailing app is set to introduce a new feature that will let users reserve a vehicle that will be waiting for them when they touch down at their destination. It’s already available at Chicago O’Hare and LAX airports and will soon be expanded to even more cities.

🧑‍💼 Biden’s nominees: The Federal Reserve has been in the news a lot over the past year as the central bank works to bring down the inflation rate. Now, President Joe Biden is pushing for the Senate confirmation of two new economists to serve in influential Fed positions. He has nominated Philip Jefferson to fill the position directly under Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Adriana Kugler to sit on the central bank’s board.

CNN might have pioneered the cable news template, but Generation X preferred to get its updates from a different breed of anchors.

In between music videos, MTV became known for providing legitimate and reliable news about world events, pop culture, and everything in between. Although the network’s news division has remained a part of the company in the decades since then, that’s about to change.

Paramount, which owns MTV, has announced widespread budget cuts that will spell the end of MTV News.

What made it special

Instead of the stuffy, formulaic news broadcasts that became synonymous with their parents’ generation, teens and young adults in the ‘90s found more relatable hosts with Kurt Loder, Sway Calloway, and others.

Young journalists managed to offer a mix of facts and context that spoke to MTV’s core audience without condescention.

Some credited the MTV News, at least in part, for mobilizing young voters who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992. He returned the favor two years later when he showed up for a town hall event and took questions including one about his go-to style of underwear: “Usually briefs.”

Then there was the music-related news, which was unsurprisingly the network’s specialty. From celebrity feuds to the untimely deaths of entertainers like Tupac and Kurt Cobain, viewers could always rely on MTV for the latest.

A lasting legacy

MTV News might be coming to an end, but its impact on the overall news culture will certainly live on. It proved that young people actually cared about the news and wanted trustworthy journalists to deliver it to them in a compelling way.

Alternative news sites that don’t take themselves too seriously and even certain segments on platforms like CNN probably wouldn’t exist in their current form without the trailblazers at MTV News.

After suffering some major losses last year and sustaining the collapse of FTX earlier this year, you might have been tempted to count Bitcoin out. But the leading cryptocurrency currently on the market seems to have defied the odds in a big way.

Outperforming the stock market

The S&P 500 has had a pretty decent 2023, gaining 7% in value thus far. But that’s nothing compared to Bitcoin, which has seen its price skyrocket by a whopping 65% over the same period.

Is it sustainable? That’s almost impossible to say. Nevertheless, the many so-called experts who continuously downplayed the staying power of crypto haven’t been proven right … at least not yet.

Reasons for the Bitcoin bounce

When it comes to explaining the major gains that Bitcoin has seen this year, there are a few factors to consider:

• The price plummeted last year, giving Bitcoin plenty of room to recover.
• Economic turmoil led worried investors to hedge their bets with crypto.
• Bitcoin is seen by many people as more trustworthy than other digital assets.

While the overall crypto market has seen some gains in recent months, it’s important to note that the biggest winner appears to also be the market’s biggest player.

It’s still an uncertain investment

If it had been possible to predict the future, last year would’ve been a great time to invest in Bitcoin. But just like when it was trading for a fraction of a penny in 2010, hindsight is always 20/20.

For that reason, anyone rushing out to buy Bitcoin now should be aware that anything could happen.

There aren’t many investments that come with guaranteed gains, but with an asset as young as Bitcoin, it’s still unclear how a major recession or other market forces could impact its value.

You might recognize the name Epic Games from a wide array of online and console video games like the immensely popular “Grand Theft Auto” franchise.

But behind the scenes, the company has been expanding its reach into a lot of other realms of the digital economy … most recently, the fashion world.

Here’s what we know

On the surface, it might not make much sense for a gaming company to partner with a fashion brand, but if you step back and take a look at Epic Games’ plans to increase its future market share it all starts to come together.

In a joint announcement with CLO Virtual Fashion, the company confirmed that the brands have made mutual investments in each other. The statement didn’t provide any specific dollar amounts, though.

It appears that its stake in the virtual fashion firm will play a role in Unreal Engine, which is a digital marketplace that Epic Games controls where users can, among other things, buy or sell clothing designs.

It’s an expanding market

Virtual fashion is a relatively new industry, but it’s growing fast. Another leading name in this space, DressX, has partnered with Roblox. And even though the Metaverse appears to be hanging on by a thread, it nevertheless hosted its second Fashion Week earlier this year.

The primary application for virtual fashion seems to be to accentuate the look of avatars in online worlds, and Epic Games executive Kim Libreri is bullish on its future.

She said: “Bringing high-quality digital fashion into real-time virtual worlds is complex and can be a creative barrier for digital fashion creators. It is exciting to see how CLO Virtual Fashion’s solutions work with Unreal Engine to help designers across industries make life-like digital fashion garments.”