Minnesota United has completed one of its main loose ends going into next season. The Loons and wingback Anthony Markanich have agreed to a new contract, a source told the Pioneer Press this weekend.

Markanich was set to become a free agent at the end of the 2025 season, but will now remain a member of the Loons for years to come. In July, The Athletic reported Markanich’s camp was “entertaining pre-contract offers from abroad,” including one Belgian club, per Tom Bogert.

Markanich is earning near the league minimum at $104,000 in guaranteed compensation, according to the MLS Players Association. He will receive a raise in his new deal.

Markanich is one of six key players with up-in-the-air futures with the club. MLS All-Star goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair and injured midfielder Hassani Dotson will be free agents, while veterans Michael Boxall, Wil Trapp and Robin Lod are under club options for 2026.

Markanich, a 25-year-old Illinois native, has developed into a mainstay at left wingback under head coach Eric Ramsay. His play along the back line has allowed Joseph Rosales to move into central midfield in August.

Markanich has contributed six goals and one primary assists in more than 1,500 minutes across 26 matches, including 19 starts. He has added two goals in the U.S. Open Cup and one more in Leagues Cup this year.

He has received good marks in defensive stats compared to other fullbacks, per his FBref.com scouting report.

Ramsay said he was impressed with Markanich’s tenacity to score, particularly on set pieces, during training sessions a year ago and that is has come to fruition this year.

The Loons acquired Markanich in a deadline-day trade from St. Louis City last August. The Loons paid a paltry $50,000 in GAM (General Allocation Money) to St. Louis for Markanich, with St. Louis able to receive $100,000 more if performance metrics were met.

Markanich didn’t register a goal nor an assist in only 62 minutes for Minnesota last year.

The Colorado Rapids drafted the Illinois native 26th overall in the 2022 MLS draft. After a career at Northern Illinois, he played 574 minutes across two years for Colorado and then 1,968 in two years for St. Louis. He had only one goal and no primary assists over that four-year span.

Edward Lotterman

With President Donald Trump using any means to force the Federal Reserve to pump up the money supply, that institution and that variable remain the focus of news. That certainly will remain over the next 18 months as results of his other policy changes, many still yo-yoing on a daily basis, work their way through the larger economy.

The column last week explained basic concepts of money and the history of banking in our country. It ended at Congress establishing 12 Federal Reserve Banks in 1913. These could expand and contract available money to meet the needs of an expanding economy. They also could intervene as needed to prevent banking-sector crises that touched off major recessions. These scourged the poor harder than anyone else.

When a local commercial bank in a district was short of cash, whether to meet depositors’ withdrawals or to make more loans to merchants and farmers, it could borrow from its district Fed’s “discount window.” The Feds demanded collateral. Promissory notes already made to local banks on earlier loans filled this need. If a bank did not repay its loans from the Fed, that institution had rights to principal and interest paid by the original farm or business borrower.

Loans the Fed made were less than the value of promissory notes presented as collateral. If a local bank came with $10,000 in IOUs seeking money for six months, it might get only $9,750 from the Fed. After six months, it would repay $10,000, of which $250 would be interest. This deduction or “discount” for the borrowing local bank was why such borrowing was said to be at the “discount window.” Interest paid was the “discount rate.”

The crucial point here, often not understood, is that the Fed need not have any money in its possession to make such loans. It simply created it out of nothing with a few pen strokes in a ledger. No gold or silver or anything from the U.S. Treasury was needed.

All local banks had “reserve accounts” with their Fed holding at least the fraction of their deposits as law required. In making a loan, the Fed merely altered the accounting entry, so the new money appeared in the local bank’s reserve account and could be drawn on.

This boggles minds of many intro econ students. They are boggled even more when told that the Fed creating a new $10,000 out of nothing for one borrowing bank could increase the total national money supply, currency plus bank deposits, several times. Perhaps $30,000 or $50,000 or even $100,000 would be added to circulation. (No, it cannot be explained here. Just accept it as true.)

Such discount lending could meet the challenges of local banks seeing increased loan demand or satisfying panicked depositors. Unfortunately, when faced by a national downturn, 12 legally unconnected banks had no way to initiate a response.

Fortunately, the New York Fed president was Benjamin Strong, an unrecognized great American. He had been J.P. Morgan’s right-hand aide in stemming a disastrous bank panic in 1907. In 1914, Strong gave up a future of great wealth to accept a moderate salary as president of the most important new regional Fed bank. Strong learned that when a lack of liquidity overwhelmed multiple banks, leaving them unable to make new loans while also struggling to meet depositor withdrawals, the N.Y. Fed need not wait for such banks to come in.

If the Fed simply went to open markets for government bonds and bought some with money created out of thin air, it would create greater liquidity for the entire banking system.  Smaller Fed banks like Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City or Dallas could not. But with New York the center of finance for the nation as a whole, the New York Fed carrying out such “open-market operations” affected all regions.

Understand, however, that a danger loomed: Excessive available money could cause inflation.

In that case, the district Feds could raise their discount rates, discouraging local banks’ borrowing. As existing loans were paid off, the money was simply “destroyed.” The New York Fed did the same by selling previously purchased Treasury bonds in open markets. The money it got in payment simply disappeared.

(Yes, this is hard to understand. Buy a used introductory macro econ text and read the chapters on money, banking and central banking.)

Returning to history, the 1929 stock market crash threw financial markets and banks of all sizes into disarray. Strong had died at age 55 of tuberculosis 12 months earlier. The decentralized Fed system was leaderless. It and the U.S. Treasury stood around like law enforcement officials at the Uvalde school shooting. They twiddled their thumbs and tsk-tsked as catastrophe unfolded. When historians assert, “If Ben Strong had not died, the Great Depression might never have occurred,” they have a good case.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt and a new Congress passed legislation that restructured the Fed into a national system with a seven-member Board of Governors. These plus 12 District Bank presidents made up a 19-member Federal Open Market Committee. It would meet periodically to make policy decisions. All members would deliberate, although only five of the presidents would vote in an annual rotation.

That is the system we have today. Discount window lending has almost disappeared. However, the Fed buys and sells Treasury securities, or short-term derivatives thereof, daily. It does not set any interest rate. It just increases and decreases the money supply.

Yes, it does set targets for one extremely-short-term rate. This is the “Fed funds rate” paid on 24-hour loans between commercial banks on money they must have in legally mandated reserve accounts kept at their district Feds. Since 2008, the FOMC has set upper and lower limits for this rate. Current ones, from 4.25% to 4.5%, were set last Dec. 18. Rates actually paid to each other hover around 4.33%.

Now, understanding that this rate in itself has little intrinsic importance is crucial. It matters only in its relationship to quantities of money the Fed creates from nothing or destroys without a trace.

In emergencies, such changes can be huge. The Fed created 370 billion new dollars, in the category of M2, currency plus bank deposits, in one week after the first U.S. COVID-19 case was identified in a Washington state nursing home on Jan. 20, 2020. By the time it peaked in mid-April 2022, M2 was up 39.2%, some $6.25 trillion. Hence the inflation that decided a key election.

However, before that election, the FOMC raised its Fed funds target stepwise from 0.25% to 5.5%. To do that, it had to destroy $1.2 trillion of the money supply. These cuts hit bottom in September 2020, about 30% above the 2020 starting point.

However, as the FOMC first held this overnight rate target and then began to drop it in 2024, the Fed had to return to increases in the money supply. The upshot is that we are $6.3 trillion, or 39.7%, above our pre-COVID bliss 4½ years ago.

So, in trying to force interest rates lower, Trump is demanding to further inflate an already historically high money supply even more. He is ignorant of that, but buyers and sellers of bonds and mortgage lenders understand it well. Trump doesn’t understand that markets, not Fed governors, are in the driver’s seat. Forcing overnight rates lower will drive long-term rates higher as inflation looms. No well-informed and sane person would want to go into the 2026 election with mortgage and medium-term farm and business loan interest rates rising, but our president seems hell-bent on that.

St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By MELINA WALLING and JOSHUA A. BICKEL, Associated Press

NEWTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Tyler Jones and Kayla McDonald both grew up camping, so when it came time to plan their wedding, they wanted to be outside to celebrate with friends and family in nature.

They also wanted a late summer wedding. That meant choosing a venue that could move the event inside at the last minute if the weather in the Cincinnati area didn’t cooperate.

“It could be a hundred degrees, you know, with humidity,” Jones said. When their big weekend forecast came up a mere 84 degrees, they breathed a sigh of relief.

Tyler Jones, left, chats with family members before his wedding Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025, in Newtown, Ohio. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

Stickier, hotter, longer summers driven by human-caused climate change are changing another time of year: wedding season. Many couples who pick the summer to get hitched now face hitches that range from melting makeup to uncomfortable guests. Some are choosing venues better able to handle the heat, or shifting to dates earlier or later in the year.

“More and more, we kind of get the feedback of, ‘I don’t want to be hot during my wedding,’” said Christina Elsass, co-owner and venue manager of Mojave East, where Jones and McDonald wed in August.

Venues recognizing the shift

Six years ago, Elsass and her husband — who used to be a wedding photographer — opened Mojave East, a play on the Mojave Desert, to honor her roots and their West Coast love story. Since they started the business, she said they’ve seen a shift to more demand in October and November and less in May, June and September, which are traditionally big wedding months.

Christina Elsass, co-owner and venue manager of Mojave East, poses for a portrait Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, in Newtown, Ohio. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

“We have noticed that the weather has gotten a bit hotter during those, like during September, I would say, most specifically, and even into October,” she said.

Some venues are now even advertising the changing trend on their websites. Westmount Country Club in New Jersey writes that fall is becoming the “it” season for weddings, citing milder weather. The Beaumont Inn in Pennsylvania says that a spring wedding means guests won’t have to bundle up in layers, but it also won’t be “unbearably hot.”

Some summer lovebirds have to adapt

But other factors still play into the decision. Some religious sects advise against wedding during certain months of the year; for instance, some Christian denominations limit weddings on certain days of Advent and Lent, in winter and early spring, respectively. Other couples still want a summer wedding because it’s more convenient for their visiting guests, or because a particular date is important to them.

In the name of love, for an event that is often costly and a significant challenge to organize, many couples don’t want to back out even if the weather poses a challenge. One couple in the Philippines walked down a flooded aisle this July after Typhoon Wipha intensified monsoon rains.

Rylee Kennedy, who got married last June in Pennsylvania during a heat wave, had to pivot in the hours leading up to the ceremony. She didn’t walk down the aisle surrounded by blooming flowers and trees, as she had envisioned. Due to the heat and concern for guests’ safety, everything moved to their backup indoor space where they held the reception.

“With weather just being so unpredictable now, you really have to make sure that if you do have to switch gears, you’re not going to have a wedding that isn’t part of your vision or didn’t align with what you wanted it to be,” Kennedy said.

For those who choose to stay the course with summer nuptials, some wedding experts are adding to the planning list. Brides, the nearly century-old bridal magazine, last year advised readers to communicate with their wedding planners and caterers about the heat, consider extra hair trials or an updo and look into switching to shorter dress lengths for bridesmaids. It also urged them to come up with a heat plan for guests.

Options for keeping cool are key

McDonald and Jones liked Mojave East for the extra heat-combating elements it will provide: fans, misters, water stations and the opportunity to duck inside for fresh air if needed.

Elsass didn’t want Mojave East’s indoors space to feel like an inferior backup plan, so she worked to keep the aesthetics and light bright and appealing.

“Because we’ve been intentional about how we run the indoor ceremony, it doesn’t feel like an afterthought,” Elsass said.

Newlyweds Kayla McDonald and Tyler Jones pose for family photos during their wedding Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025, in Newtown, Ohio. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

Grace Mattingly, a wedding planner in Richmond, Kentucky, said she talks with couples right when planning starts about how to keep guests safe in heat, whether it’s using tents or umbrellas to create shade or moving indoors. She said it’s a conversation that doesn’t happen enough across the business of wedding planning.

On their wedding day, McDonald and Jones were able to keep the ceremony outdoors, but their “first look” photographs were moved into a shaded area to avoid the afternoon sun. When some guests arrived early, many of them waited indoors, cups of water in hand.

Related Articles

Nonalcoholic beer and mocktails can help people stay sober or drink less, but are not for everyone

Literary calendar for week of Aug. 31

Minnesota’s first K-pop convention coming to St. Paul RiverCentre

Skywatch: So much going on this September

Readers and writers: A reading list for a thrilling fall

During the ceremony, guests used fans to keep cool and shade themselves as the sun began to set. And once the knot was tied, almost every guest went inside for the cocktail hour to cool off in the air conditioning. Misters ran outside for anyone who wanted some fresh air.

All those options meant that no matter the weather, Jones and McDonald would have a day that stayed true to their vision, even if some things had to change last-minute.

“I think we’re both believers in what happens, you make the best of it,” Jones said.

Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social. Follow Joshua A. Bickel on Instagram, Bluesky and X @joshuabickel.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By LAURA UNGAR, Associated Press

Several years into her sobriety, Logan Denzer decided to try nonalcoholic beer and mocktails while others around her drank real booze.

“A lot of people feel out of place” when everyone else is imbibing, said the 27-year-old from Los Angeles, who considers these beverages “an excellent solution.”

Millions of Americans agree — including others recovering from addiction, people trying to cut down on their drinking and the rising number of young adults forgoing alcohol altogether.

They’ve fueled a booming industry. Recent research shows that drinking less, or nothing at all, is a much healthier way to go. Alcohol has been linked to cancers, injuries and a host of other problems.

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Still, health experts say nonalcoholic beverages aren’t for everyone, especially if they might trigger cravings for alcohol. These so-called NA drinks are meant to mimic alcohol in many ways, such as appearance, smell and taste.

“It’s important to recognize that these are probably not one-size-fits-all products,” said researcher Molly Bowdring of Stanford University. “You might see peers or friends or family members use them and have no problem with them, but it really comes back to your own individual experience.”

‘Zebra striping’ helps cut back on booze

Retail sales of nonalcoholic wine, beer and spirits surged to $823 million last year. That’s according to market research firm NielsenIQ, which says more than nine in 10 NA customers also buy alcohol.

“They’re wanting to not necessarily drink during the week, or they’re wanting to switch out at a particular occasion,” said Marcos Salazar of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association. “So they may have an alcoholic beverage and then an adult nonalcoholic beverage. That’s called zebra striping … and it kind of extends the night.”

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Retiree Ann Kopp Mitchell, who recently tasted various NA beverages at Monday Morning Bottle Shop in San Diego, does a version of this.

“If I want a glass of wine with my dinner, I don’t feel guilty. I can enjoy that glass of wine. And if I wanna have a spirit because we’re celebrating someone’s birthday, or champagne, I will do that. But I’ll only have one, and then let it go, and then maybe go to a nonalcoholic,” she said. “It’s a way of continuing with that social pattern of drinking that I enjoy.”

While a typical beer has about 5% alcohol by volume, NA drinks are only allowed to have up to 0.5%, about the same as a ripe banana. People sometimes pick them when they don’t want to be intoxicated, like before exercise or driving.

More mocktails on the menu is a positive health trend — but watch the sugar

An online survey Bowdring conducted with colleagues found that the vast majority of people who drink both beverages say NA drinks help them reduce their alcohol use.

That makes their growing popularity a positive trend overall, said Dr. Joseph Lee, CEO of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, an addiction treatment and advocacy organization.

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

“More and more when I go to restaurants, mocktails are just offered, like they’re on the menu and it’s just part of the norm now,” said Lee, an expert in psychiatry and addiction medicine. “Those are really healthy things to see on a broader public health level.”

But there is a catch: Some drinks, like mocktails made with soda and sweet syrups, have high levels of sugar. The American Heart Association recommends limiting added sugars to no more than about six teaspoons a day for women and nine teaspoons a day for men. A 12-ounce can of soda on its own contains 10 teaspoons.

Who should be wary of NA beverages?

The picture gets murkier for people with drinking problems.

Those entering treatment for alcohol use disorder say they’ve had mixed success using NA beverages to reduce or stop their drinking, Bowdring said.

“They do contain a lot of the alcohol-related cues,” she said. “Because they are so similar to alcohol, it could be that they actually trigger craving for full strength alcohol and may lead people to revert to alcohol use.”

Bartender Shelby Campos adorns the top of a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – with fruit and a flower at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

When Denzer first got sober seven years ago, she and her friends avoided drinking NA beverages.

“We were pretty opposed to it because we were like, ‘Well, this tastes like beer and we’re a year sober, and so we’re going to associate that taste with actual alcohol,’” said Denzer, who was treated at Hazelden Betty Ford. “As time went on, we became more open to it.”

But it’s not for everyone, she said, “particularly for people who are either newer in recovery or who are on shaky ground.”

Related Articles

How you can pack a lunch that a child will actually eat

A five-mile run through the Minnesota State Fair? Sure, if fried-food stops are included

Dave Terry’s Top 10 Minnesota State Fair food commandments (plus one)

St. Croix Chocolate Co. in Marine on St. Croix has been sold

Labor Day grilling on a budget: Summer chicken, bruschetta and peach crisp

Experts agreed that NA drinks are more appropriate for those further along in recovery.

“Everyone’s journey is going to be a little bit different,” Bowdring said. “I encourage folks to just sort of be aware of how these drinks are impacting them.”

That’s the bottom line, even for those who aren’t dealing with alcoholism.

You should have “an honest appraisal, without judgment, about your own health risk in much the same way that most people can look at their family history and gauge their risk for everything from diabetes to breast cancer,” Lee said. “What it comes down to is: You really need to know yourself.”

Video journalist Javier Arciga contributed to this story from San Diego.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.