LOS ANGELES -- Legendary Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully will return to call games in 2016, the team announced on Friday during the game against the Cubs at Dodger Stadium.
The announcement was made in the middle of the second inning, with a prepared video featuring Magic Johnson introducing Jimmy Kimmel, who revealed cue cards with the news.
"I talked it over with my wife, Sandi, and my family and we’ve decided to do it again in 2016," Scully said. "There’s no place like home and Dodger Stadium and we look forward to being a part of it with all of our friends."
It will be the 67th consecutive season Scully has called Dodgers games, the longest streak of any broadcaster with one team. He began his Dodgers career on June 18, 1950 alongside Red Barber and Connie Desmond.
Cubs manager Joe Maddon, who met with Scully before the game, inadvertently spilled the beans to reporters before Friday's game, saying Scully would have an announcement about his decision for 2016 at some point on Friday night.
"Vin is a national treasure and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier to have him back at the microphone in 2016," said Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten. "Vin makes every broadcast special and generation after generation of Dodger fans have been blessed to be able to listen to him create his poetic magic since 1950. We look forward to adding many new chapters to that legacy in 2016."
Scully, who was elected to the Hall of Fame as the recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award in 1982, has just about seen it all. He has called all six Dodgers World Serieschampionships, and has also been behind the mic for 25 World Series, 12 All-Star Games, three perfect games and 20 no-hitters.
Scully has reduced his schedule in recent years, and this year calls home games plus road games in San Francisco. It seems likely he will continue a similar schedule going forward, though that hasn't yet been announced.
The Ashley Madison hack, which posted the information over 32 million accounts, may have been performed by the Twitter user with the name “Thadeus Zu,” according to a security researcher.
Brian Krebs, the researcher, pointed to the account’s owner based on past postings to the social media side and other Twitter information that led him to believe he’s part of the “Impact Team” responsible for the attack. But Thadeus Zu has spoken out against the accusations, tweeting, “They’re eyeballing the wrong dude here, man,” according to the publication.
Krebs has targeted Zu for numerous reasons, including citing information that Zu has hacked government sites in the past and has played AC/DC songs once the hack was completed. The Ashley Madison hack, meanwhile, had the song “Thunderstruck” played from the company’s computers.
He also appeared to tweet links to the huge data dumps from the hacks, before they were picked up by the mainstream media, according to Krebs. Krebs said his initial interest in the account had come about because it posted a link to Ashley Madison source data soon after it was released.
“Thadeus Zu — whoever and wherever he is in real life — may not have been directly involved in the Ashley Madison hack; he claims in several tweets that he was not part of the hack, but then in countless tweets he uses the royal “We” when discussing the actions and motivations of the Impact Team,” according to Krebs.
“But one thing is clear: If Zu wasn’t involved in the hack, he almost certainly knows who was,” added Krebs.
An infographic on millennials in the federal government last year. (Office of Personnel Management)
With sagging morale of federal workers one of the biggest challenges in government, a key group that’s the foundation of the future workforce is shrinking: millennials. A new survey by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service on the challenges to managing talent in government shows that the numbers of employees under age 30 are at their lowest levels since 2005.
This group now makes up just 6.6 percent of the federal workforce, down from 9.1 percent in 2010, a drop of more than 45,000 people, the Partnership found. Employees under age 25 dropped from an already low 2 percent five years ago to 0.9 percent this year. If you look at the entire U.S. workforce, 23.5 percent are under 30 years old, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The greatest challenge for federal agencies is recruiting and retaining younger employees, those who represent the foundation of the workforce in the years ahead,” the partnership said in its study, “Improving the Employee Experience,” released this month with Deloitte Consulting.
The study found that once they land a job in government, many employees believe their career development is shifted to a slow track, with minimal recognition from their bosses, shrinking opportunities for training and few assignments that really harness their talent.
Millennials also don’t view government as a permanent career the way older generations did. But surveys find that they do like public service. Several obstacles are in the way of government keeping them for at least a chunk of their careers, among them the slow hiring process and a series of internship programs that, despite a revamp last year, haven’t been working as effectively as they could.
The White House is responding to these alarms and is working with federal agencies to improve what’s known in bureaucratic jargon as “employee engagement.” We’ll have more for you in coming weeks on what some agencies are doing.
Last week, global financial markets were churning, but it really only mattered if you were an oil trader, Chinese bureaucrat or hedge fund manager.
Now it’s starting to get scary for everyone.
An 8.5 percent drop in the Shanghai Composite index in Monday’s trading session spread to financial markets across the world. In the United States, the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down 2.5 percent in Monday morning trading, after steeper declines in Asian and European stock markets, falling prices for oil and other commodities, and a rush of money into the safety of United States Treasury bonds.
What’s fascinating is that there is no clear, simple story about what is different about the outlook for interest rates; United States and European corporate profits; or economic growth compared with one week ago, when the S.&P. 500 index was 8 percent higher.
Here’s how to make sense of what is a truly global story, stretching from the streets of Shanghai, where stock investing has become a middle-class sport in recent years, to the oil fields of both the Middle East and Middle America, to the hallways of power in the Federal Reserve in Washington.
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Pedestrians in Tokyo looking at closing information for Tokyo's Nikkei Stock Average, after stocks there ended down more than 4 percent, a six-month low.CreditKimimasa Mayama/European Pressphoto Agency
This Started in China, but Is a Lot Bigger Than China
The immediate trigger to the outburst of global volatility was China, where the sharp drop in stocks Monday continued a rout that has been underway — with periodic pauses thanks to government interventions — all summer.
The Chinese economy is slowing, and the 38 percent drop in the Shanghai Composite Index since June 12 is indeed a huge number. There is no question that this giant economy is struggling with a transition from the investment-and-export-led boom of the last generation toward something more sustainable.
But a few facts make China’s problems less satisfying as an explanation for the turmoil across world markets. The Chinese stock market has risen sharply over the past year as millions of middle-class Chinese citizens took to making investments. Even after its steep drop this summer, the Shanghai index is down less than 1 percent for the year and still up 43 percent from one year ago.
The volatile Chinese stock market took an especially sharp decline in recent weeks.
Shanghai Composite Index, percent change from Aug. 22, 2014
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There may be a more complex story for why a sharp drop in the Chinese market should cause bigger ripples in the global economy than the sharp gain over the six months that preceded it. The fact that the Chinese government has pulled out unprecedented steps to try to contain the stock market sell-off, to little avail, may suggest limitations on the power of even the mighty Chinese state.
In other words, the sell-off in Chinese stocks may not matter much in isolation. But it tells us much about the inability of Chinese leaders to bring its economy in for a soft landing. And that is something scarier.
Other Emerging Markets Are Getting Hammered
Some of the key evidence for the “this is about more than China” story come from other emerging markets, stretching from Malaysia to Mexico, that are also taking it on the chin. Their currencies and stock and bond prices have fallen sharply over the last week. Some of that most likely reflects exposure to the Chinese economy. But some of it reflects something bigger.
Call this the Taper Tantrum 3.0.
The original taper tantrum happened in June 2013. It is a cute name for what happened when global financial markets collectively went berserk over the realization that the Fed was serious about tapering its program ofquantitative easing — or put more plainly, that the Fed would wind down its injections of money into the financial system over time.
In effect, the Fed’s easy money policies led global investors to search for higher-yielding securities, which they found in many faster-growing emerging markets. Money gushed into these countries in search of better returns from 2010 until 2013, driving up prices of assets.
But as the end of the era of cheap dollars has approached, that hot money has pulled out — and created volatile spikes in interest rates and damage to those emerging economies. (Look at this presentation by Hyun Sung Shin of the Bank for International Settlements for a more detailed argument around how and why this happens).
Falling Oil Prices Are a Cause and Effect
The carnage in financial markets has had a particularly big impact of the price of commodities, including oil, the most economically significant commodity of them all.
The price of a barrel of oil fell from around $60 in late June to under $40 on Monday. Over time, that will be good news for American and European energy consumers, but there are complex feedback loops that probably make the commodity sell-off both a cause and a result of the broader emerging markets panic.
When oil prices first plummeted in the second half of last year, there were widespread forecasts that the price drop would cause oil exploration to shutter around the world, helping keep the market in balance. Instead, American producers have kept up production, keeping supplies high despite lower prices.
Here’s the feedback loop: The slowdown in China and other emerging markets lowers demand. High supplies and weak demand equals lower prices — which feeds back into weaker economic conditions for energy-producing countries like those in the Middle East, Latin America and Russia.
Then the Fed Makes Its Move
In the background of all of this is a crucial decision looming for the United States Federal Reserve. Fed officials have expressed confidence that the domestic economy is on track and that the time is right to raise interest rates after nearly seven years of keeping them near zero. It could make that move at its policy meeting Sept. 16 and 17.
Fed officials have indicated a determination to base interest rates on what is most appropriate given the state of the American economy and not to overreact to fluctuations in markets. The latest volatility will test that resolve.
Futures markets are increasingly betting that the Fed will indeed hold off to assess the damage to the economy, if any, from the latest global financial strains. On Monday, the market priced in a 24 percent chance of a rate increase in September, compared with a 48 percent chance just a week ago.
And the value of the dollar on currency markets fell 1.6 percent Monday (as measured by the dollar index) as investors priced in greater likelihood of the Fed’s keeping rates lower for longer.
Commentators have long accused that the Fed of overreacting to the latest financial market moves, a complaint that makes Fed officials bristle; they argue they are making their decisions based on measures of the real economy like inflation and employment data. If markets remain volatile heading into the next meeting but economic data remains consistent with recent solid readings, that will make for a tough decision.
Of course, it is the Fed’s job to set policy based on where the economy is going, not where it has been. If markets keep falling, that could endanger American growth prospects. On the other hand, the Fed’s job isn’t to try to protect investors from the risks of a downturn.
And if the last few days have taught anything, it is that global markets will be poised for a big reaction, no matter what the central bank does.
NBC News Special Report: Stocks Plummet In Early Trading2:06
Stocks took a stomach-turning dive on Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 1,000 points in a matter of seconds. The market recovered some of its losses but was still way down for the day.
The sudden plunge was reminiscent of the fear that gripped the markets during the financial crisis of 2008, and it followed big declines in Asia and Europe.
Investors around the world are worried about China, the world's second-largest economic power and a huge market for American products. China devalued its currency two weeks ago and has shown other signs of economic weakness.
Two hours into trading, the Dow was down 454 points, or 2.8 percent, at 16,005. At its worst point, just after the opening bell, the Dow was down an eye-popping 1,089 points, or 6.6 percent.
"Fear has taken over," Adam Sarhan, CEO of the investment company Sarhan Capital, told CNBC. "The market topped out last week."
Last week was the worst for the market in four years, and the Dow had already entered what is known as a correction, down more than 10 percent from its all-time high, reached in May.
On Monday, the Standard & Poor's 500 index, a broader gauge of the overall market, was down more than 5 percent before recovering, and the Nasdaq, loaded with technology stocks, was down more than 8 percent.
In percentage terms, the drop in the Dow, even at its worst point on Monday, was not nearly as severe as in historic stock market crashes. In 1987, on what came to be known as Black Monday, the Dow fell by 22 percent.
But the free-fall was more than enough to get investors' attention. It also got the attention of Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary.
Few stocks were immune as the free-fall extended to the biggest names in American commerce. General Electric fell 11 percent, Verizon 12 percent and Apple 11 percent. All recovered their losses significantly.
The sell-off on Monday swept west across the globe. Stocks closed down more than 8 percent in Shanghai and more than 4 percent in Tokyo. Markets in London, Paris and Frankfurt were all down more than 4 percent.
"It is going to be a bad day," CNBC's Jim Cramer said on TODAY. "It's probably going to be a bad week."
There was no immediate reaction from the White House, but the jolt to the market shook the presidential campaign.
The worldwide market decline has extended to commodities, including crude oil, which is below $40 per barrel for the first time since the financial crisis six years ago.
That is good news for drivers — the national average for gasoline is $2.59 a gallon, down 14 cents in a month — but bad news for energy stocks, which make up a significant chunk of Americans' retirement portfolios, and state economies that depend on oil.
Traders have been putting their money in investments they consider safer, including government bonds and gold.
The market's last correction was in April 2011. Cramer pointed out that the American economy is much healthier than it was then. Unemployment in April 2011 was 9.1 percent, compared with 5.3 percent today.
He also cautioned that some of the factors that could send the U.S. market far lower are unlikely — a big rise in unemployment, a spike in interest rates or inflation, or a banking crisis.
For now, though, "There is just a tremendous decline coming from China," he said, "and we are importing it."
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