Wall Street chiefs testified before

“We are living through unprecedented times, which history will judge the leaders of government and industry by actions we take to address the health and economic crises, and longstanding structural inequities. At JPMorgan Chase, we entered this crisis from a position of strength and leveraged our size and scale to contribute to the stability in our country and ongoing support for the real economy — our customers, employees and communities impacted by the global crisis. In 2020, we extended credit and raised capital totaling $2.3 trillion for customers and businesses of all sizes, helping them meet payroll, avoid layoffs and support operations. We waived fees…

Soaring assets and stocks in the past year have in some cases handed midlevel workers huge windfalls.

Those who have benefited from the market surge typically fall into one of three categories, said Sahil Vakil, founder of personal-finance tech company MYRA: They were given company shares as compensation and those same shares recently boomed; they caught last year’s retail investing frenzy and rode the market to new highs; or they invested early on in cryptocurrency, to great success.

The Nasdaq Composite rose nearly 47% over the past 12 months, and even after a recent pullback, a crypto investor who put $10,000 in

at the end of 2019 could have netted more than $50,000 in gains after bitcoin’s 2020-21 surge.

TOTTENHAM, Australia — The stench hits you first, pungent, musty and rotting. Then you hear them: a sound like ocean waves, or pouring rain hitting concrete. And the occasional squeak.

The horror lurking in the darkness is a throng of thousands of mice swarming above, around and inside a storage bunker of wheat at the Fragar family’s farm seven hours west of Sydney, Australia. After a long and painful drought, the mice are ravaging the family’s first good harvest in years and endangering the next one, putting their business on the brink of ruin.

Their farm is just one of thousands along the country’s eastern grain belt that are contending with what local residents call the worst mouse plague in living memory, with far-reaching consequences both in the fields and in rural communities.

It’s like “watching the mice eat away at your future,” said Kathy Fragar, 51.

The mice have added unpleasant tasks to many people’s routines. Storekeepers set traps and drown the mice they catch. Residents burn dead mice in backyard “crematories.” Grocers clean up flour that spills onto the floor from nibbled packages. Hospital workers place diffusers in waiting rooms in a largely fruitless attempt to mask the stink of rotting rodent corpses.

At the Fragars’ farm, the mice scatter when the light hits them, sliding like a waterfall down the sides of a bright blue tarp and disappearing down holes and into the grass. For every visible mouse, there are countless more underneath the covering.

TOTTENHAM, Australia — The stench hits you first, pungent, musty and rotting. Then you hear them: a sound like ocean waves, or pouring rain hitting concrete. And the occasional squeak.

The horror lurking in the darkness is a throng of thousands of mice swarming above, around and inside a storage bunker of wheat at the Fragar family’s farm seven hours west of Sydney, Australia. After a long and painful drought, the mice are ravaging the family’s first good harvest in years and endangering the next one, putting their business on the brink of ruin.

Their farm is just one of thousands along the country’s eastern grain belt that are contending with what local residents call the worst mouse plague in living memory, with far-reaching consequences both in the fields and in rural communities.

It’s like “watching the mice eat away at your future,” said Kathy Fragar, 51.

The Randalls consider themselves lucky because they’ve been able to keep the mice out of their fields, through baiting and burning of the land.

But they live in an old house, full of tiny cracks and holes for rodent intruders to slip through. Even in the morning cold, she has to open the windows to alleviate the odor.

Signs of mice are all around: Ms. Randall’s phone case has been chewed ragged at the edges, the family’s stereo system has been destroyed, and there are scores of tiny teeth marks in the handle of a pair of scissors on the counter.

She thought the last straw would be if the mice ever got into her bed. But when it actually happened — when she found droppings in her good sheets at 10:30 p.m. after an exhausting day — she just sighed, stripped the sheets and made the bed again.

“You’ve just got to resign to the fact that you’re not going to win the battle, you’re not going to get rid of them,” she said. “So you just do the best as you can and just wait for it to be over.”