| | | | | | | Presented By Walmart | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · Dec 31, 2022 | | 🎊 Hello, New Year's Eve! I'm feeling so grateful for the fascinating, vocal, smart, wise readers of AM, who make up the world's most interesting breakfast table. Thank you for the privilege of conversing each morning. - Smart Brevity™ count: 1,189 words ... 4½ minutes. Edited by TuAnh Dam.
🌐 Situational awareness: In a span of less than 40 hours heading into New Year's Eve, news broke of the loss of three of the globe's best-known people — Pelé, Barbara Walters and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. - Those bulletins capped what the N.Y. Times called a "Year of Momentous Deaths" — including Queen Elizabeth II, Mikhail Gorbachev, Sidney Poitier, Bill Russell, Loretta Lynn, Jiang Zemin, Madeleine Albright, Jean-Luc Godard, Shinzo Abe, Pelé, Régine, Meat Loaf, Ivana Trump and Vin Scully. All the obits.
| | | | | | 😱 1 big thing: $30 trillion year |  Data: FactSet; Chart: Axios Visuals Stock investors are nervous about the potential for another year of pain, Axios' Matt Phillips writes. - The S&P 500 finished '22 down nearly 20% — the index's worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.
Why it matters: This was the S&P's seventh worst year in records stretching back to 1929, according to FactSet data. - That means '22 ranks with the ugliest years of the Great Depression — and the dot-com bust — in the annals of market massacres.
🧮 Adding it up: Global stocks and bonds lost more than $30 trillion this year, the Financial Times calculates (subscription). 💡 What happened: In 2021 and 2022, prices increased at the fastest pace in 40 years, forcing the Fed to respond with the sharpest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s. So 2022 was a perfect cocktail for financial pain. Today's front pages 🥊 Reality check: Before you get too despondent about your 401(k), keep things in perspective. - Remember: Before 2022 came 2020 and 2021 — years in which the S&P 500 was up 16% and 27%, respectively.
The bottom line: Since the end of 2019, stocks are up about 19%. - And the S&P is up just 7% in an average year, per FactSet.
So for all the wild swings, investors have lived through a three-year period of ... slightly below-average returns. |     | | | | | | 2. 📺 Barbara Walters: Living history, live | | Barbara Walters interviews President Obama on "The View" in 2010. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Barbara Walters spent more than half a century interviewing rulers, royalty and stars who came and went. She outlasted most of 'em. - Why she mattered: Walters, who died yesterday in New York at 93, was the first woman to become a TV news superstar, during a career remarkable for its duration and variety, AP's Frazier Moore writes.
Walters made headlines in 1976 as the first female evening news anchor, with an unprecedented $1 million salary that drew gasps. - Late in her career, she created ABC's spicy "The View."
🖼️ The big picture: By 2004, when she stepped down from "20/20," she had logged 700+ interviews — from Margaret Thatcher and Muammar Gaddafi to Michael Jackson and Elton John. - Her two-hour talk with Monica Lewinsky in 1999 drew 70 million viewers — among history's highest-rated television interviews.
Photo: Ida Mae Astute/Disney via Getty Images Above: In 2014, during her final show as co-host of "The View," Walters posed with a throng of TV newswomen she helped pave the way for. 📚 Coming attractions: USA Today's Susan Page has been working for almost two years on a book with the working title "Barbara Walters: A Life," due to Simon & Schuster this spring. - Susan has done 100+ interviews with family and friends, colleagues and competitors. Pub date is TBD.
Susan told me Walters was "one of television's great innovators, gender aside, in a career that spanned the explosion and the decline of network TV as the mediator of our culture." Barbara Walters at her desk in New York in 1966. Photo: Rowland Scherman/Getty Images | | | | | | | | 3. 🕊️ Pope Benedict was hero to conservatives | | Pope Benedict XVI in Sydney, Australia, in 2008. Photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP Former Pope Benedict XVI — the first pontiff in 600 years to resign, and a standard bearer for conservatives — died today at 95 in the Vatican monastery where he lived. - Bells tolled in Rome on news of his death, and many went to pray in St. Peter's Square on hearing the news, Reuters reports.
The Vatican said his body would lie in state beginning Monday in St. Peter's Basilica. Pope Francis will preside at his funeral on Thursday. - A Vatican spokesman said: "Following the desire of the Pope Emeritus, the funeral will take place in a sign of simplicity."
🔭 Zoom out: Benedict was the first German pope in 1,000 years. - He was elected in 2005 to succeed the widely popular John Paul II.
Child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy. But he is credited with jump-starting the process to discipline or defrock predator priests after a laxer approach under his predecessor. | | | | | | | | A message from Walmart | | Walmart is investing $1 billion in career training and development | | |  | | | | At Walmart, a first promotion is often just the first of many — 75% of management started as hourly associates. That's just one reason why Walmart was named one of LinkedIn's Top Companies to Grow a Career in 2022. Learn how Walmart's mentorship and training help associates advance in their careers. | | | | | | 4. ⛳ 1,000 words | | Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images President Biden plays golf yesterday at the Buccaneer Golf Course in St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands. He returns to the White House on Monday. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP | | | | | | | | 5. 📈 First look: Biden maps manufacturing gains | | Map: The White House This White House map, headlined "U.S. manufacturing is on the rise," shows plans for battery and electric-vehicle plants, semiconductor fabs and other projects funded by legislation signed by President Obama. - It's included in a year-end memo by White House senior adviser Anita Dunn and National Economic Council director Brian Deese.
"America ends 2022 in a stronger position than many major global economies," they write. - "While we have more work to do, and we may see setbacks along the way, we end the year with clear evidence that President Biden's economic strategy of growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out is working."
Read the 4-page memo. | | | | | | | | 6. 🚗 IRS acknowledges rising costs | | The IRS is raising the mileage rate for tax deductions for operating a vehicle for business use, Axios' Kelly Tyko reports. - The 2023 rate is up 3¢ a mile, to 65.5¢ per mile.
Why it matters: This reflects high gas prices and inflationary times. 🧠 Context: The announcement follows two increases in 2022. - The IRS usually updates mileage rates once a year. But the agency made a rare midyear adjustment July 1 — the first midyear change in 11 years.
Go deeper. | | | | | | | | 7. 🗳️ Every vote counts | | Front page of yesterday's Arizona Republic Arizona Attorney General-elect Kris Mayes (D) was certified the winner Thursday over Abe Hamadeh (R) in an automatic recount in "one of the tightest races ever in Arizona history," the Arizona Republic reports. - Her winning margin was 280 votes out of 2.5 million ballots cast — down from a 511-vote lead she had held in official results.
| | | | | | | | 8. 🍞 1 food thing: Baking frenzy | | Photo: Camilla Ferrari/The New York Times. Licensed by Axios This is panettone — a yeast-leavened bread — hanging upside down to cool, in order to preserve the puffy dome, at Coppa del Mondo bakery in Lugano, Switzerland. - Why it matters: Some call it "the mountaintop" of baking. Now a gold rush is on as the holiday treat bursts its Italian borders and gains a global profile, Julia Moskin writes in The New York Times (subscription).
"Like Basque burnt cheesecake and French croissants," Moskin writes, "panettone is being tested and transformed far from home, with new flavors like black sesame, Aperol spritz and cacio e pepe [cheese and pepper]." - "Disputes have broken out between purists and ultrapurists."
| | | | | | | | A message from Walmart | | Walmart named one of LinkedIn's Top 20 Companies to Grow a Career | | |  | | | | Patrick Joseph began his Walmart career as a pharmacy intern. Today, he oversees 11 pharmacies and eight vision centers — and his story is just one of many. See how Walmart's focus on mentorship and advancement helps create more stories like Patrick's. | | | | ❄️ Thanks for sharing New Year's Eve with us. Please invite your friends to sign up. |  | | Are you a fan of this email format? Your essential communications — to staff, clients and other stakeholders — can have the same style. Axios HQ, a powerful platform, will help you do it. | | | |
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