REAL ESTATE

Chris Kelly

HomeServices of America, a Minneapolis-based Berkshire Hathaway franchised real estate agency, announced President and CEO Gino Blefari has assumed the role of chairman emeritus with Chris Kelly, formerly executive vice president, succeeding Blefari as president and CEO. Blefari will continue as a strategic adviser to the organization.

ADVERTISING/PUBLIC RELATIONS

Minneapolis-based advertising agency Linnihan Foy announced that it has been named media agency for the 2025 Minnesota State Fair.

EDUCATION

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities announced it has named Shari Olson president of Northland Community & Technical College in East Grand Forks, Minn. Olson previously served as president in the Maricopa County Community College District at South Mountain Community College in Arizona. … Capella University, Minneapolis, announced the appointment of Karthik Iyappan Gunasekaran to its board of trustees. Gunasekaran most recently served as VP of AI and software products at the Project Management Institute; his résumé also includes business adviser at Harvard Innovation Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and guest lecturer at Tufts University Gordon Institute. … Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, announced that John C. Volin will serve as president. Volin currently serves as the executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Maine; his appointment at Gustavus begins Aug. 15.

FEDERAL RESERVE

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis announced the appointment of four new members to its Community Depository Institutions Advisory Council: Kelly Skalicky, Stearns Bank, St. Cloud; Andrew Gesell, BankCherokee, St. Paul; Mike Hauswirth, Superior National Bank, Hancock, Mich., and Trina Hoff, Northern Communities Credit Union, Eveleth, Minn. The Minneapolis Fed’s region includes upper Michigan.

HEALTH CARE

Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, a Center City, Minn.-based substance addiction treatment and recovery program and facility, announced the hire of Marc Baer as chief operating officer. Baer most recently served as an officer and corporate vice president at Centene Corp. and also was an officer at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

HONORS

The U.S. Small Business Administration announced it has named Carol Anderson of Morrison County as the 2025 SBA Minnesota Women in Business Champion of the Year. Anderson has partnered with the Small Business Development Center, SCORE, Minnesota Business Finance Corp., and the Women’s Business Center, and currently serves as chairwoman of the MBFC board.

LAW

Maslon, Minneapolis, announced the addition of attorney Annika Misurya to the firm’s Litigation Group. Misurya has held leadership roles with Minnesota Women Lawyers and the Women’s White Collar Defense Association. … Fredrikson, Minneapolis, announced that attorney Warren Sexson has joined the firm as an associate in its Mergers & Acquisitions Group.

MANUFACTURING

SkyWater Technology, a Bloomington-based semiconductor foundry, announced the appointment of Percy V. Gilbert as senior vice president of engineering. Gilbert previously held senior roles at NXP Semiconductors and IBM Systems Group.

MARKETING

Patrick Campion announced the launch of Fame Sport, a sports marketing consultancy, in Minneapolis. Campion is a former VP of marketing at Sleep Number and the architect behind its NFL strategy. Campion is co-leading the venture with Lynne Robertson, who formerly owned Fame advertising agency.

MILESTONES

Frattallone’s Hardware & Garden announced it commemorated 50 years in business last month. Founded in Arden Hills by Larry Frattallone, who runs the business with his sons, Mike and Tom, the Ace Hardware franchise has 21 metro area locations.

NONPROFITS

Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Eden Prairie, announced that Franco Cordeiro has joined the organization as director, Enterprise Risk Management. Franco most recently held a similar role at at Medtronic, and also held director positions at KPMG Consulting and Macquarie Bank.

OPENINGS

The Market at Malcolm Yards, a Minneapolis food hall, announced the opening of Kinsley’s Smokehouse Deli. James Adams is chef and owner.

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EMAIL ITEMS to businessnews@pioneerpress.com.

Soul Asylum front man Dave Pirner might have been going through the motions with one of his between-song messages in St. Paul on Saturday. “You could be anywhere, but you’re here,” he said before thousands at the Minnesota band’s free alt-rock set on the lawn outside Allianz Field.

But for those gathering soccer fans, there was no other place to be than the Midway to see legendary Argentine forward Lionel Messi and Inter Miami play Minnesota United.

Pirner did tailored a subsequent message for the Loons and his jersey-wearing audience.

“I want to thank the football club for having us,” he said. “The real kind of football.”

Inside the stadium, a sellout crowd of 19,710 watched Messi score a goal, but the Loons beat the Herons convincingly, 4-1, on a beautiful early summer afternoon. It was the Loons’ 100th home game at Allianz Field.

Here are six other anecdotes from a historic soccer day in Minnesota:

A crowd unlike any other

Normally, the only signs of a game at Allianz Field two hours before kickoff are stadium workers trickling in for their shifts and the faint scent of one vendor’s beignets wafting outside the gates. By that time on Saturday, the stadium’s four corner entrances had lines snaking down the block.

Chris Bernett and son Isaac drove from La Crosse, Wis., to attend their first MLS game. They were the first in line at the southeast entrance roughly three hours before kickoff.

They spent more than $400 per ticket for spots in the stadium’s lower bowl, jumping at the chance for the soccer-playing Issac to see his favorite player, Messi.

“We wanted to make this happen for him,” Chris said toward his beaming child in a Messi No. 10 jersey.

Made it their own

Other MLS teams have moved their Messi matches to nearby NFL stadiums to accommodate the huge demand to see the eight-time FIFA player of the year and one-time World Cup champion. The Loons kept the most-circled game on their schedule at their 19,600-seat stadium instead of moving it to Huntington Bank or US Bank stadiums — where the club could have more than doubled their gate receipts.

The decision to keep it at their much-smaller, soccer-specific venue meant its season-ticket base of 14,500 could sit in their exact seats for the match. And the choice to keep it in St. Paul meant MNUFC gave up more than $3 million in revenue, a source told the Pioneer Press on Saturday.

There also is an element of that being a false choice because if the game had moved to the Vikings’ or Gophers’ homes, the artificial turf fields at those spots might have kept the 37-year-old Messi from playing in Minnesota, anyway.

One let down

Hundreds of fans pressed up against metal gates at Allianz Field’s southwest entrance to get a glimpse — and maybe an autograph — from one of the greatest players of all time.

But unlike other visiting teams going through those doors, Inter Miami came through the loading dock on the other side of the venue. While there were more guards Saturday, security remained a concern.

Yet that logistical change was an undeniable bummer for those waiting throngs.

‘Pretty cool’

Dave Waters used to live across the street from St. Paul Central High School, which made it walkable to go see Minnesota Thunder matches there 20 years ago.

On Saturday, the Minneapolis resident and season-ticket holder biked to Allianz Field. But security guards told him he couldn’t park his bike in one of the metal racks. He just shrugged it off with a brief chuckle.

“It’s fun,” Waters said in a well-worn Thunder jersey before the game. “He is the best soccer player there is. Pretty cool to be able to see him in person.”

Left early

After Robin Lod extended the Loons’ lead to 4-1 in the 70th minute, Messi fans started to head for the exits.

“All the players in our team (were) just enjoying the moment because we had a good lead,” Lod said.

Mementos

It was fitting for the Loons’ two Argentine players — Joaquin Pereyra and Nicolas Romero — to each come away with a pink Messi jersey after the match.

Romero held up his collector’s item for a photo from the Pioneer Press, while Pereyra had his draped over the chair at his locker as he showered.

Loons captain Michael Boxall joked: “Bold of him to leave it there.”

Inter Miami forward Lionel Messi (10) kicks the ball against Minnesota United midfielder Robin Lod (17) in the second half of a MLS game at Allianz Field in St. Paul on Saturday, May 10, 2025. Minnesota United beat Inter Miami, 4-1. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump reportedly is ready to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar during his trip to the Middle East this coming week, and U.S. officials say it could be converted into a potential presidential aircraft.

The Qatari government acknowledged discussions between the two countries about “the possible transfer” of a plane to be used temporarily as Trump’s Air Force One, but denied that the jet “is being gifted” or that a final decision had been made.

ABC News reported that Trump will use the aircraft at his presidential plane until shortly before he leaves office in January 2029, when ownership will be transferred to the foundation overseeing his yet-to-be-built presidential library.

The gift was expected to be announced when Trump visits Qatar, according to ABC’s report, as part of a trip that also includes stops in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the first extended foreign travel of his second term.

But hours after the news, Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar’s media attaché, in a statement said, “Reports that a jet is being gifted by Qatar to the United States government during the upcoming visit of President Trump are inaccurate.”

“The possible transfer of an aircraft for temporary use as Air Force One is currently under consideration between Qatar’s Ministry of Defense and the US Department of Defense,” the statement said. “But the matter remains under review by the respective legal departments, and no decision has been made.”

Meanwhile, administration officials, anticipating questions about the president accepting such a large gift from a foreign government, have prepared an analysis arguing that doing so would be legal, according to ABC.

The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause bars anyone holding government office from accepting any present, emolument, office or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State,” without congressional consent.

One expert on government ethics, Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, accused Trump of being “committed to exploiting the federal government’s power, not on behalf of policy goals, but for amassing personal wealth.”

“This is outrageous,” Clark said. “Trump believes he will get away this.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer poked fun at Trump’s “America first” political slogan.

“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” the New York Democrat said in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”

Air Force One is a modified Boeing 747. Two exist and the president flies on both, which are more than 30 years old. Boeing Inc. has the contract to produce updated versions, but delivery has been delayed while the company has lost billions of dollars on the project.

Delivery has been pushed to some time in 2027 for the first plane and in 2028 — Trump’s final full year in office — for the second.

Trump intends to convert the Qatari aircraft into a plane he can fly on as president, with the Air Force planning to add secure communications and other classified elements to it. But it will still have more limited capabilities than the existing planes that were built to serve as Air Force One, as well as two other aircraft currently under construction, according to a former U.S. official.

The official was briefed about the plane and spoke Sunday on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that have not yet been made public.

The existing planes used as Air Force One are heavily modified with survivability capabilities for the president for a range of contingencies, including radiation shielding and antimissile technology. They also include a variety of communications systems to allow the president to remain in contact with the military and issue orders from anywhere in the world.

The official told The Associated Press that it would be possible to quickly add some countermeasures and communications systems to the Qatari plane, but that it would be less capable than the existing Air Force One aircraft or long-delayed replacements.

Neither the Qatari plane nor the upcoming VC-25B aircraft will have the air-to-air refueling capabilities of the current VC-25A aircraft, which is the one the president currently flies on, the official said.

ABC said the new plane is similar to a 13-year-old Boeing aircraft Trump toured in February, while it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport and he was spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club.

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Trump faced lawsuits for violating the Emoluments Clause during his first term, but those were ended by the Supreme Court in 2021, which found the cases moot because the Republican had left office.

Clark said the reported Qatari gift is the “logical, inevitable, unfortunate consequence of Congress and the Supreme Court refusing to enforce” the Emoluments Clause.

Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, which is now largely run by his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has vast and growing interests in the Middle East. That includes a new deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar, partnering with Qatari Diar, a real estate company backed by that country’s sovereign wealth fund.

Qatar, which is ruled by the Al Thani family, is home to the state-owned airline Qatar Airways. The country also has worked to have a close relationship to Trump after he apparently backed a boycott of Doha by four Arab nations in his first term. Trump later in his term applauded Qatar.

Administration officials have brushed off concerns about the president’s policy interests blurring with family’s business profits. They note that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and that a voluntary ethics agreement released by the Trump Organization in January bars the company from striking deals directly with foreign governments.

But that same agreement allows deals with private companies abroad. That is a departure from Trump’s first term, when the organization released an ethics pact prohibiting both foreign government and foreign company deals.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked Friday if the president might meet with people who have ties to his family’s business, said it was “ridiculous” to suggest Trump “is doing anything for his own benefit.”

Edward Lotterman

Crucial topics in economics go in and out like fashion trends.

When I first taught macroecon in the 1980s, the money supply was a key issue in economic policy. Inflation was high. The Keynesian orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s, that a central bank like the Federal Reserve should actively raise and lower interest rates to manage the economy, was in disrepute.

And the United States was not the only nation that was experiencing recession at the same time as high inflation.

Monetarists, a philosophical minority group led by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, emphasized the role of the money supply in economies and its primacy in determining inflation. Central banks, Friedman argued, needed to shun alternating gas and brake pedals on interest rates. They should instead focus on limiting money growth so that, as output grew, prices would remain stable.

Inflation was a symptom of too much money in the economy, they argued. This incentivized demand, and by extension prices, to go up. So the Fed should crimp down on money growth to end it. The wage and price controls President Richard Nixon had tried were as useless as the faddish WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons purveyed by his successor, Gerald Ford.

How things have changed!

The Fed just finished deliberating last week with our nation in the most perilous economic time since the late summer of 2008. Yet one can search in vain for any mention of “money supply” in the current thinking of the Fed. This is especially — and tragically — ironic because the current problems derive largely from the largest peacetime expansion of the money supply in at least a century.

President Jimmy Carter had taken the politically courageous step of appointing Paul Volcker, a pragmatic monetarist, to head the Fed even though advisers warned Carter that the new appointee would follow policies that would doom his reelection.

Volcker convinced the Federal Open Market Committee to crimp money growth and stay the course regardless of what happened to interest rates, output or employment. Some short- and medium-term business and consumer interest rates went to 20%. The federal government had to guarantee 14% for 30 years to sell bonds. Unemployment rose and output fell. High interest rates attracted foreign money, making the dollar “stronger.” That took a pole axe to farming, steel and autos among other sectors that depended on exporting or that competed with imports.

Inflation did fall, although it took years. But people had learned a lesson. At least part of the monetarist creed was correct. Money indeed mattered. Inflation could be avoided or conquered by regulating how much money is out there.

Econ teachers taught even freshman intro students about the money supply in great detail. Here’s what they learned:

In general terms, the money supply is currency — bills and coins in circulation — plus bank deposits that can readily be used to make payments. Measures of money called M1, M2 and M3 were made, depending on which types of deposits — checking, saving, certificates of deposit or even money-market mutual funds — were included. There were even further variations. These were discussed frequently in financial news media. Students had to memorize details before exams.

Then, somehow, in the post-stagflation prosperity of the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with low inflation, good GDP growth, very low unemployment and federal budget deficits melting away, we forgot about the money supply.

In the new century, the Alan Greenspan-led Fed responded to the exogenous shock of 9/11 by cutting interest rates. That required increasing the money supply but this detail was not mentioned. The most common measure, M2, was up 6% in a year and 16% in two years after the attack. Remember that folks.

We got into a long national nightmare of war in the Middle East and South Asia. Financial markets throbbed with a panoply of new financial institutions — hedge funds — trading new financial instruments — derivative securities — the values of which were tied to still other financial instruments like home mortgages. Creating and trading these new derivatives became frenzied. As long as underlying residential real estate demand, and prices, went up, these would continue to make money. Then the housing market collapsed. But the derivatives still had to be financed.

After a warning hiccup in very short-term money markets in mid-August 2007, the bust came in 2008. Investment bank Bear Stearns went under in mid-March setting off a panic. When Lehman Brothers faltered badly in October, we teetered on the abyss of a market crash worse than 1929.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury pulled the nation back from the brink with an enormous bailout they jerry-rigged in ways that stretched the limits of their statutory authority. New Fed- and Treasury-created securities absorbed bad loans and were parked in obscure new funds with names like “Maiden Lane.” Wall Street and the general economy were saved from disaster.

However, many consumers got hosed. Laws regulating home foreclosures went widely unenforced. Vulture funds such as the one led by Donald Trump’s first Treasury secretary Stephen Mnuchin bought up distressed mortgages and robo-processed foreclosures. Household losses created new multimillionaires.

Yet somehow in all this, the term “money supply” got erased from the brains of pundits, journalists and the general public. Mentioning how much money had been created to save us from Wall Street’s financial debacle would have been like discussing distress in the lower tract at a Ladies Aid tea.

In retrospect, the rise was not all that much. M2 rose by 10.3% in the year after Bear Stearns’ downfall and topped out at only a cumulative 17% three years after the panicked Lehman Brothers weekend. Pin those numbers also, folks.

We faced no more big exogenous shocks until COVID hit as 2020 opened. It was the worst global pandemic in a century. The Fed, acting in very good faith and erring on the side of too much rather than too little, pulled out all the stops.

On Jan. 20, 2020, the CDC announced a case in a Washington state nursing home. The Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Jan. 29 of that year does not mention this. But at their March meeting, they dialed the money printing press up to warp speed. By the time President Joe Biden took his oath 12 months to the day after the first COVID announcement, the Fed had already increased the M2 by 25.3%. They kept at it, peaking out at a 40.6% cumulative increase in the money supply 26 months after the first U.S. case.

One must dig deep to find estimates of money supply for World War I and the Civil War, but it is clear that what happened after COVID was unprecedented in the peacetime history of our nation. Yet no mention of it was made in the general media. Nor has it generated much discussion among economists.

And the resulting inflation (enter the monetarists!) largely cost the Biden-Harris-Walz Democrats the 2024 election, sweeping Trump into the Oval Office. With war in Ukraine, it spiked farmland prices to a degree not seen since the run-up to the 1980s farm crisis. And it certainly is a major factor in the bidding up of house prices and financial markets.

Yet it gets no mention at all.

Our economy is in real peril. The Fed faces difficult choices. It had succeeded in slowly letting some air out of the money supply balloon, so that a year ago, M2 was only 34% above the pre-COVID starting point. But to ease its target rates, the Fed had to again create money. So that the figure for March 2025, is 40.7% above five years ago.

Compound that with Trump’s tariffs and we have a real problem. Until this trend enters general discussion, and is remedied, all other policy moves will be crippled.

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