News of the Day

The producer price index, a gauge of prices received at the wholesale level, increased 0.5% in April, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. On a year-over-year basis, wholesale inflation rose 2.2%, also the highest in a year. The core PPI inflation was at 2.4%, the biggest annual move since August 2023.

Stripping out volatile food and energy prices, the core PPI also rose 0.5%. Excluding trade services from that core group showed a 0.4% increase on the month and 3.1% on a 12-month basis, the highest level since April 2023.

Services prices boosted the wholesale inflation reading, rising 0.6% and accounting for about three-quarters of the headline gain, while the final demand goods index increased 0.4%. The services increase was the biggest monthly gain since July 2023, the BLS reported.

As thousands of new graduates toss their caps this month, research shows more than 40 percent of master’s degrees aren’t financially worth obtaining, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity found.

Looking at career earnings at graduation and a decade later, while accounting for factors such as dropout rate, the study found that bachelor’s degrees are much more likely to be financially worth it for students than graduate degrees.

More than three-quarters, 77 percent, of four-year bachelor degrees have a positive return on investment, the study found, compared to just 57 percent of master’s degrees.

Subject of study had a significant influence on financial return, with the best degrees to pursue for undergraduate studies being engineering, computer science, and nursing degrees, while fine arts, education, and biology programs had the lowest median return.

The average return on investment for a bachelor’s degree is about $160,000, the study found, but degrees in especially lucrative fields could top $500,000 or more.

For graduate study, law, medicine and dentistry were the most lucrative, according to the analysis.

A health system with numerous hospitals and clinics in Wisconsin is investigating a cyber attack that interrupted access to some technology systems. But it’s unclear whether hackers gained access to sensitive patient information.

The St. Louis-based Ascension said it detected “unusual activity” on some network systems Wednesday that it believes was caused by a “cyber security event.”

Ascension said it is working to uncover what information may have been affected by the breach. If sensitive information was exposed, Ascension said it will notify people affected.

Alex Holden is the chief information security officer at Hold Security, a Mequon-based cyber security firm. Based on Ascension’s public statements about the breach, he said it looks like the attack wasn’t a “full intrusion” into their network.

“They’re also encouraging their partners to break technology connections into Ascension for the time being,” he said. “There seems to be either exploitation that came from a certain party into them, or there is a threat that the breach is not fully contained — and it may affect their partners as well.”

Last year, a cyber attack caused a system-wide outage for Hospital Sisters Health System and Prevea. In early 2024, Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, a nonprofit managed health care organization, also suffered a cyber attack that resulted in patients’ personal information being released.

According to the New York Times, hospital systems have increasingly been targets for hackers in recent years. The Times reports that health care is one of the economic sectors most susceptible to cyber attacks because medical records can be sold for a lot of money.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a broad investment package designed to strengthen the role of Southeast Wisconsin as a hub for AI-powered economic activity, innovation, and job creation. These investments include $3.3B in cloud computing and AI infrastructure, the creation of the country’s first manufacturing-focused AI co-innovation lab, and an AI skilling initiative to equip more than 100,000 of the state’s residents with essential AI skills.

These investments will be rolled out in a four-part strategy designed to create long-term benefits for the state’s economy and job market.

Investing in cloud and AI infrastructure

First, Microsoft will invest $3.3B between now and the end of 2026 to expand its national cloud and AI infrastructure capacity through the development of a state-of-the-art datacenter campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Along with building a physical data center, Microsoft will partner with Gateway Technical College to build a Data Center Academy to train and certify more than 1,000 students in five years to work in the new data center and IT sector jobs created in the area.

Transforming businesses of all sizes in every industry

Second, Microsoft will establish a manufacturing focused AI Co-Innovation Lab on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the first of its kind in the United States. This lab will connect Wisconsin manufacturers and other companies with Microsoft’s AI experts and developers to design and prototype AI and cloud solutions to improve and accelerate their work and grow their business. This lab will aim to serve 270 Wisconsin companies by 2030, including 135 manufacturing businesses.

Creating a future-ready workforce

Third, Microsoft will partner with United Way Wisconsin, United Way Racine, and other community partners, to upskill more than 100,000 people across Wisconsin by 2030 on generative AI. In addition, Microsoft will work with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 3,000 local AI software developers and provide opportunities for 1,000 local business, civic and government leaders to participate in immersive bootcamps where they can learn how to effectively adopt generative AI into their organizations.

Reinforcing the community’s central role

And finally, Microsoft will invest in a series of long-term local education and youth employment programs to support the very community that is supporting us. In partnership with the Racine Unified School District (RUSD), Microsoft will work with Girls in STEM to expand its program to two additional RUSD middle schools. This expansion will provide access to STEM education for more than 500 middle school-aged girls over the next five years. Working with Racine County, Microsoft will support their Summer Youth Employment Program, matching at least 125 young people (16-18 years old) with local employers to receive soft skills and on the job training annually.

Last Thursday, the United States . Departments of Labor and Treasury today announced a new data-sharing partnership, the latest effort to support a multi-layered approach to fraud prevention by providing states with controls, tools and strategies to identify and combat unemployment insurance fraud.

The data-sharing partnership provides state unemployment agencies with access to Do Not Pay Working System data sources and services through the UI Integrity Data Hub. Maintained by the National Association of State Workforce Agencies’ UI Integrity Center, the hub is a centralized, multistate data-matching system used by state unemployment agencies to aid fraud prevention and improper payment reduction efforts.

Administered by the Office of Management and Budget and operated by Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Office of Payment Integrity, the Do Not Pay Working System provides a no-cost service for federal agencies and federally funded state-administered programs to verify claim eligibility and prevent fraud and improper payments.

The department’s Employment and Training Administration oversees the nation’s unemployment insurance system through federal-state partnerships. Providing state agencies with access to additional payment integrity data sources is one of ETA’s key antifraud strategies.

“To mitigate fraud risks and reduce improper payments, state unemployment agencies need access to the best controls,” explained Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training José Javier Rodríguez. “This partnership will allow states to access critical Do Not Pay data sources, which means they will be able to use existing infrastructure like the UI Integrity Data Hub more effectively to ensure the accuracy of unemployment payments.”

UI agencies in all 53 states and territories participate in the UI Integrity Data Hub. The Department of Labor oversees the UI Integrity Center’s operations and activities, including the management and maintenance of the UI Integrity Data Hub, and recently invested American Rescue Plan funding to support the integration of this new data source.

A federal appeals court this week lifted a court order that would have temporarily blocked the final phase of a controversial transmission project.

In March, U.S. District Court Judge William Conley granted a request by conservation groups to temporarily block a proposed land swap. That order prevented the Cardinal Hickory Creek transmission project from crossing through a Mississippi River wildlife refuge.

The utilities behind the project appealed that decision in the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel on the Chicago appeals court said the injunction blocking the land swap was not justified.

The appeals court said Conley needed to show that the National Wildlife Refuge Association, Driftless Area Land Conservancy and Wisconsin Wildlife Federation were likely to succeed in their lawsuit challenging the project. The court said he failed to do so.

“Instead the district court expressed concern that private parties might begin to build a transmission line before the court could address the merits,” the appeals court wrote.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line runs more than 100 miles from Dane County to Dubuque County in Iowa. The first half of the project came online in December 2023.

ITC Midwest and Dairyland Power Cooperative, the co-owners of the Cardinal Hickory Creek line, said in a statement they were pleased with the appeals court’s decision.

They said the district court has stalled the line’s completion by blocking the utilities from exchanging land with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They said the land exchange was needed to finish a 1.1 mile segment near the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.

“The key effect of the appeals court order is that the government and utilities are now free to complete the land exchange,” the utilities said in a statement.

The U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday and signaled it is still leaning towards eventual reductions in borrowing costs, but put a red flag on recent disappointing inflation readings that could make those rate cuts a while in coming.

Indeed, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that after starting 2024 with three months of faster-than-expected price increases, it “will take longer than previously expected” for policymakers to become comfortable that inflation will resume the decline towards 2% that had cheered them through much of last year.

That steady progress has stalled for now, and while Powell said rate increases remained unlikely, he set the stage for a potentially extended hold of the benchmark policy rate in the 5.25%-5.50% range that has been in place since July.

U.S. central bankers still believe the current policy rate is putting enough pressure on economic activity to bring inflation under control, Powell said, and they would be content to wait as long as needed for that to become apparent – even if inflation is simply “moving sideways” in the meantime.

The Fed’s preferred inflation measure – the personal consumption expenditures price index – increased at a 2.7% annual rate in March, an acceleration from the prior month.

“Inflation is still too high,” Powell said in a press conference after the end of the Federal Open Market Committee’s two-day policy meeting. “Further progress in bringing it down is not assured and the path forward is uncertain.”

Last week, a Dane County court overturned a 2022 decision by the Public Service Commission that would have allowed family in Stevens Point to use third-party financing to install solar on their home.

Under that agreement, the family would lease the system from North Wind Renewable Energy Cooperative. Similar lease agreements are common in other states, but utilities have opposed their use in Wisconsin, saying they are not allowed under existing state law.

The family in Stevens Point sold their home and did not move forward with the project, according to North Wind Founder Josh Stolzenburg.

Even so, the Wisconsin Utilities Association last year challenged the PSC’s decision in Dane County Circuit Court.

Last Friday, the court sided with the utility association, sending the issue back to the Public Service Commission. The court said the PSC incorrectly interpreted what constitutes a “public utility” in its decision because it focused on the singular project and not North Wind’s activities as a whole.

State law defines a “public utility” as any entity owns, operates, manages or controls equipment used for the “transmission, delivery or furnishing of heat, light, water or power either directly or indirectly, to or for the public.”

Utilities are largely opposed to third-party financing for solar installations, saying it violates state law by allowing installers to act as a utility without being regulated as one.

“We’re pleased with the decision of the court affirming our position that if you provide energy to the public, either directly or indirectly, you must be regulated as a public utility,” Bill Skewes, executive director for the Wisconsin Utilities Association, said in an email.