GivingTuesday raises record $3.1 billion in tough economy
The organization, celebrating 10th year, estimates giving increased about 15% from 2021's $2.7 billion
GivingTuesday raised a record $3.1 billion in 24 hours for charitable causes in the U.S. earlier this week, as the event that started as a hashtag in 2012 celebrated its 10th anniversary and its status as a staple of fundraising for nonprofits, the group's leader said Wednesday.
Despite the difficult economic year that many households have experienced, with inflation in the costs of basic goods, gas and housing, people were still willing to give, said GivingTuesday CEO Asha Curran.
“That's really what we saw yesterday,” she told The Associated Press. “That whatever it is that people are experiencing, they were as generous as they had the capacity to be.”
GivingTuesday estimated that giving increased about 15% from 2021's $2.7 billion, outpacing inflation. Donations were tallied using an array of data sources that includes major community foundations, companies that offer fundraising software, the payment processor PayPal and large grantmakers like Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable. Their methodology for compiling the estimate seeks to eliminate duplicate data points, Curran said.
While it's too early to know whether giving overall in 2022 will stay on par with last year and 2020, when philanthropic donations boomed, people in the U.S. have been more resilient in their spending than might be expected given inflation and high interests rates.
Ragan Petrie, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, has puzzled over the durability of consumer spending and hypothesized that giving could be similarly resilient. She added that GivingTuesday has now become better known. And as a fundraising platform mostly limited to a single day, it has a built in sense of urgency.
“That helps people focus attention. And it's accompanied by all sorts of things like matches and leaderboards and fundraising goals that create kind of a contest or the competition around it,” Petrie said, which is appealing to many donors.
In another measure of the resilience of donations, Fidelity Charitable said Tuesday that for the first time since 2018, the value of grants from its donor advised funds exceeds the value of investments going into the funds.
The organization said this year's totals marked the largest amount donated on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving since the group started tracking it.
DonorsChoose, which allows public school teachers to raise money for their classrooms, said this year's GivingTuesday marked its secondhighest day of giving in more than 20 years. It saw 52,000 people give $10.6 million including matched donations.
“As one of the nonprofits that joined the inaugural GivingTuesday 10 years ago, we are so excited to see what a global movement of generosity this has become,” the organization said in a statement.
The hashtag to promote fundraising on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving started in 2012 as a project of the 92nd Street Y and the organization GivingTuesday became an independent nonprofit in 2020. The organization has also launched a campaign to raise $26 million over five years to expand their database of giving.
In the 10th year of nonprofits and donors marking the day, Curran said, people continue to show incredible generosity.
“They give in a multitude of ways. It does not always have to do with money. It often has to do with community. It is very collective. It has a lot to do with people feeling like they are a fractal of a larger whole,” Curran said. “And yesterday was just one more reaffirmation of that.”
Wells Fargo cuts hundreds more mortgage employees
Wells Fargo & Co. cut hundreds more mortgage employees Thursday, the latest in a series of reductions across the industry after higher interest rates brought the pandemic-era homelending boom to halt.
The reductions took place across the country, according to people familiar with the plans, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The latest wave comes amid ongoing Federal Reserve rate hikes to tame persistent inflation, pushing mortgage rates toward their highest levels in two decades. Refinancings have dried up and some potential homebuyers have been sidelined in the process.
“We regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions and the needs of our businesses,” a representative for Wells Fargo said in a statement.
The latest reductions in the bank's mortgage unit add to thousands already made by Wells Fargo this year. The firm is not alone: Rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut hundreds of home-lending staff and reassigned hundreds more in June, with further reductions since. Nonbank lenders, which swelled to dominate the mortgage business since the financial crisis, have also been slashing their ranks.
Wells Fargo, the biggest home lender among U.S. banks, expects that business to “remain challenging in the near term” on higher rates, Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo told investors in October. The division reported a 70% drop in fees for the first nine months of this year.
The firm is planning a longer-term retreat in the mortgage business, abandoning its longtime strategy to be the biggest in the industry, Bloomberg reported in August.
Markets make wobbly start to December
A day of wobbly trading on Wall Street ended Thursday with a mixed finish for stocks and bond yields broadly lower after the government reported that a measure of inflation that's closely watched by the Federal Reserve eased in October.
The muted action came as traders looked ahead to a closely watched monthly report on the job market due out Friday that will show how the labor market is holding up and how that may influence what the Fed does next in its bid to cool inflation.
The S&P 500 closed 0.1% lower after drifting modestly higher and lower for much of the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.6% and the Nasdaq composite edged up 0.1%.
Banks and household goods providers were among the biggest drags on the benchmark S&P 500. Bank of America fell 2.9% and Costco slid 6.6%.
Gains in health care companies, communications services stocks and elsewhere in the market helped keep the losses in check. Drugmaker Pfizer rose 1.9% and Netflix climbed 3.7%.
Salesforce slumped 8.3% for the biggest drop in the S&P 500 after Bret Taylor said he would resign as co-CEO of the customer-management software developer.
Yields on both shortterm and long-term bonds fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences mortgage rates, edged lower to 3.51% from 3.61% late Wednesday. The yield on the two-year note, which tends to track market expectations of future Fed action, fell to 4.24%. from 4.33% a day earlier.