Things To Do In SW Florida

As political tensions continue to run high, predictions that Canadian travelers would shun Central Florida are becoming a reality, with hotel bookings down and airlines scaling back flights in response to lower demand.

Sandra Pappas, who owns a Disney-focused travel agency in Canada, said she started noticing the downturn in February. That’s when President Donald Trump unleashed threats to impose sweeping tariffs and make the nation the 51st state.

“Unfortunately, there has been a huge drop-off, more for future travel,” said Pappas, who runs Click the Mouse. “It’s quieter than we’ve ever seen, except for COVID.”

She estimated requests for travel quotes to Orlando’s theme parks are down more than 50%. To adapt, her business is pivoting to other Disney-themed vacations, such as Disneyland Paris and Disney cruises departing from Vancouver.

The impact could be considerable. About 3.3 million Canadians visited Florida in 2024, making them the top source of international tourists and about 2% of total travelers, according to state tourism numbers. read more

By NG HAN GUAN

YIWU, China (AP) — The trade war between the world’s two largest economies is escalating as China on Friday slapped a 125% tariff on U.S. goods in response to President Donald Trump’s 145% tariff on Chinese products.

Caught in the crosshairs are businesses that are part of the more than $582.4 billion trade between the countries, with Chinese exporters making up the bulk of that exchange.

Here’s what some of them had to say. Most of them spoke in the eastern city of Yiwu, known as home to the world’s largest wholesale market:

Jiang Jiayu, owner of Yiwu Jiayu Festive Supplies Co.

American customers would normally be placing their Christmas orders at this time of year, she said, but right now, there is no sign of them. U.S. customers make up about 10% of Jiang’s business. She said she didn’t understand the purpose of Trump’s tariffs.

“Can the U.S. produce what China, or Yiwu is producing now? Ordinary people are the ones who will get hurt the most by the tariffs,” she said. “I don’t think he can continue his behavior for long.” read more

By BERNARD CONDON and STAN CHOE, AP Business Writers

NEW YORK (AP) — The upheaval in stocks has been grabbing all the headlines, but there is a bigger problem looming in another corner of the financial markets that rarely gets headlines: Investors are dumping U.S. government bonds.

Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a stable, predictable, good place to store their money.

“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”

That could be bad news for taxpayers paying interest on the ballooning U.S. debt, consumers taking out mortgages or car loans — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets. read more

LONDON (AP) — Ireland’s data privacy watchdog said Friday it’s investigating Elon Musk’s social media platform X over its use of personal data to train his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

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The Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into “the processing of personal data comprised in publicly-accessible posts” that European users posted on X.

“The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs” under the bloc’s data privacy law, the commission said in a statement posted online. read more

I receive a great many inquiries about retirement accounts. One area of particular interest is Roth conversions.

Fortunately, IRA expert Ed Slott and his staff spend a great deal of time and effort addressing the most important questions you should be asking before you decide that a conversion makes sense for you. The following questions are very important. If you haven’t considered all of them, you probably should not be completing a conversion.

Question 1: When will you need the funds you are considering converting? If you are not looking at a 10- to 15-year time horizon, you probably should not be considering a conversion.

Question 2: Do you believe that future tax rates when you will be likely to withdraw funds from your account will be higher than current tax rates? If you believe that it is likely that future tax rates will be much higher than current tax rates, then you have more of an incentive to do a conversion.

Question 3: Where will the money come from if you do a conversion now? Do you have the funds available to do a conversion? Before you convert, it is essential that you determine what the income tax liability will be if you do a conversion. Naturally, you need to know what your marginal tax bracket will be, based on all of the other income you will be reporting in the year of conversion. It’s most cost- effective if your funds are available from non-IRA funds. read more