Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to close a projected $170.6 million budget gap in 2023 relies on booming tax revenues that she said proves Chicago’s budget has fully recovered from the economic catastrophe caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Fed’s move raised its key short-term rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%, its highest level in 15 years. It was the central bank’s sixth rate hike this year — a streak that has made mortgages and other consumer and business loans increasingly expensive and heightened the risk of a recession.

McDonald’s Chief Financial Officer Ian Borden said U.S. prices were 10% higher than last year in the July-September period. But while some lower-income consumers appeared to shift to cheaper menu items, overall demand remained strong.

Thursday’s better-than-expected estimate from the Commerce Department showed that the nation’s gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic output — grew in the third quarter after having shrunk in the first half of 2022.

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to review the $25 billion deal between Kroger and Albertsons to ensure it complies with antitrust laws. Locally, the merger would combine the parent companies of Chicago grocery stalwarts Jewel Osco and Mariano’s.

Approximately 62% of applicants have jobs, and nearly half have sought medical attention at a hospital’s emergency room in the past year, officials said. An initial lottery will identify 10,000 applicants to verify the information contained in their applications.

Thanks to a “little-known loophole,” hedge funds, private equity firms and real estate investors have “siphoned” approximately $280 million from schools, parks, libraries, fire departments and other government agencies between September 2015 and September 2022 in Cook County. 

Gig workers like ride-hailing drivers and delivery people are a key part of the modern U.S. economy. Most of those workers are contracted, and therefore not considered full employees with all the benefits included.

One year after the Chicago City Council approved what Lightfoot calls the Chicago Recovery Plan, city officials have spent just $130.5 million of the $1.227 billion earmarked for a host of programs including affordable housing, mental health, violence prevention, youth job programs and help for unhoused Chicagoans, according to data released as part of the mayor’s 2023 budget proposal.

As co-chair of the Senate’s Ukraine Caucus, Sen. Dick Durbin said any push to sit down at the negotiation table and offer Russia territory that it illegally took must come from the Ukrainians, not Western pressure.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip Dybvig won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for their research into bank failures.

Friday’s government report showed that hiring fell from 315,000 in August to the weakest monthly gain since April 2021. The unemployment rate fell from 3.7% to 3.5%, matching a half-century low.

The number of available jobs in the U.S. plummeted in August compared with July as businesses grow less desperate for workers, a trend that could cool chronically high inflation.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to close a projected $170.6 million budget gap in 2023 relies on booming tax revenues that she said proves Chicago’s budget has fully recovered from the economic catastrophe caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot did not explain Thursday how she would propose to bridge the city’s projected 2023 budget shortfall, which is now 33% bigger than the gap she detailed nearly two months ago.

The economy shrank in the first half of this year, the government confirmed in a report Thursday, underscoring fears of a broad-based slowdown that could lead to a recession.