Small Business Jobs Index Increases Slightly
No “V” there just yet: the Paychex | IHS Markit Small Business Employment Watch draws from the payroll data of approximately 350,000 Paychex clients to gauge small business wage and employment trends on a national, regional, state, metro, and industry basis.
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Disney to Lay Off About 28,000 From Theme Parks in U.S. Walt Disney cited continuing restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly its inability to reopen Disneyland in Southern California. The workers had been on furlough since April, and about two-thirds are part-time employees.
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Shell to Cut Up to 9,000 Jobs
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Seven Airlines Close Billions of Dollars in Loans With Treasury The U.S. Treasury said it has closed loans to seven passenger airlines and joined with the industry to call on Congress to extend more aid to prevent massive job cuts later this week.
U.S. Consumer Confidence Rebounds Meaningfully in September
• Improves to highest level in six months.
• Appraisal of both current conditions and expectations firm.
• Confidence rises in all age brackets.
Meaningfully? Really?
I tend to put more weight on the U. of M. survey (via Axios):
‘Hidden unemployment’ is masking the jobless problem in Europe
(…) The way Eurostat measures employment, even workers on zero hours are counted as employed. Marc de Muizon, an economist at Deutsche Bank in London, estimates between 5% and 10% of all workers were on a furlough program in the four major eurozone economies of Germany, France, Italy and Spain in August.
The Spanish furlough has been unique in that employers there tended to have their furloughed employees completely out of work, rather than just working reduced hours.
Another issue is that those workers who lost their jobs weren’t able to look for a new one. Without school closures and lockdowns, in the second half of 2020 these people should start appearing in unemployment rate statistics, he says.
By the end of 2021, de Muizon expects the official unemployment rate in the euro area to top 10%. (…)
CHINA MANUFACTURING PMI: Operating conditions continue to improve solidly in September
China’s manufacturing economy retained strong growth momentum in
September, with firms signalling further marked increases in production
and new work. Notably, new business expanded at the strongest rate since January 2011, aided by a solid rebound in export sales. Increased activity at home and abroad was reportedly driven by the easing of lockdown measures as the sector continued to recover from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.Furthermore, employment stabilised in September, which ended an eight-month period of job shedding. However, operating margins remained under pressure, as firms reported a further marked increase in input costs but raised their selling prices only slightly.
The headline seasonally adjusted Purchasing Managers’ Index ™ (PMI ™ )
edged down from 53.1 in August to 53.0 in September, to signal a further solid improvement in the health of the sector. Operating conditions have now strengthened in each of the past five months. Notably, the latest reading rounded off the best quarterly performance since Q4 2010.
Chinese manufacturers recorded a sharp and accelerated increase in total
new work during September, with a number of firms commenting that a
further recovery in client demand had boosted sales. Furthermore, the
rate of new order growth was the steepest recorded since the start of 2011.
Stronger external demand also helped to lift sales, with new export business expanding at the quickest pace since August 2017.
Manufacturers registered a softer, but still marked, rise in production during September. Companies continued to report that higher inflows of new work led them to raise output.
Greater amounts of new business added further pressure on operating
capacities, as highlighted by a sustained increase in backlogs of work. At the same time, employment levels were broadly stable, which brought about an end to a period of job shedding that stretched back to January.In line with the positive trends seen for new orders and output, manufacturers raised their purchasing activity again in September, and at
the fastest rate since January 2011. Consequently, inventories of inputs rose
for the fourth month in a row. While stocks of finished goods also increased
at the end of the third quarter, the rate of accumulation was only marginal.
A lack of stocks at distributors, meanwhile, led to a further increase in
average lead times for inputs in September. The rate at which vendor
performance deteriorated remained much less severe than that seen at the
height of the pandemic, however.Operating expenses faced by Chinese manufacturers rose again in September amid reports of higher prices for raw materials. Furthermore, the rate of cost inflation quickened from August and was solid. However, average output charges increased at the slowest rate for three months, rising only slightly overall. A number of panellists indicated that greater market competition had restricted their ability to raise their prices.
Chinese manufacturers were generally confident that production would rise
over the next 12 months. Notably, the degree of positive sentiment improved
to a three-month high. Growth forecasts were underpinned by hopes that
client demand and global economic conditions will strengthen once the
pandemic is over.
U.S. Goods Trade Deficit Continues to Deepen in August
Covid-19 Cases Jump in Canada, Prompting New Restrictions Canada is seeing a sharp rise in cases of Covid-19, alarming health officials and triggering a second round of lockdowns and strict distancing recommendations.
Comparing the two neighbours:
NBF puts this in the broader context:
18 of the 26 countries listed by NBF are seeing rising cases. Excluding the last 4 Asian and Oceanian countries, it’s 18 out of 22.
China Greenlights Another Vaccine for Human Testing Chinese drugmaker Shenzhen Kangtai will test its vaccine on people after showing it protected mice and monkeys from coronavirus
(…) Chinese institutions are behind many of those experimental vaccines and are responsible for four of the 10 candidates in the final stages of testing. At the same time, Beijing has overseen an unorthodox campaign to inject members of its military—as well as hundreds of thousands of employees of state-owned enterprises, journalists and other people—with homegrown vaccine candidates before their clinical trials are complete. (…)
- An experimental Covid-19 drug helped reduce virus levels and improve symptoms in patients who weren’t hospitalized, according to a preliminary analysis of clinical trial data. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Tuesday that early data shows signs that its drug can help treat patients with Covid-19 in the earlier stages of the disease, before they are hospitalized. The company said it has begun discussing the results with regulators. (WSJ)
- Moderna climbs after saying COVID-19 vaccine generates antibodies in older adults
PANDEMONIUM
House Democrats Poised to Trim Big Tech’s Sails One possible proposal would be the forced separation of online platforms
The House Antitrust Subcommittee is nearing completion of a report wrapping up its 15-month investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. (…)
Rep. David Cicilline (D., R.I.), who chairs the subcommittee, has indicated the panel is poised to recommend significant measures targeting Big Tech’s power, including requiring owners of huge technology platforms to separate those platforms from other businesses.
Mr. Cicilline hasn’t released details, but such a law could potentially ban Amazon from competing with sellers on Amazon.com, or Google from offering services that consumers look for on its search engine.
“You can’t set all the rules, control the marketplace and also sell on it, in the way that Amazon does, for example,” Mr. Cicilline said in a recent podcast for the Brookings Institution think tank. (…)
“It’s clear that some of these dominant platforms must be broken up. All of them must be regulated,” he said during a virtual event with progressive groups on Sept. 1.
The congressman has called the idea “Glass-Steagall for the Internet,” invoking a 1933 law that divided traditional banking businesses from Wall Street investment banks. (…)
Opponents of a Glass-Steagall-like proposal say customers can move on if a platform doesn’t offer a diverse, competitive set of options, and that it is fair for companies to make a profit off their creations. (…)
The platform-separation idea is just one of several circulating in Washington to curb Big Tech’s power. (…)
China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google – Reuters’ sources
China is preparing to launch an antitrust probe into Alphabet Inc’s GOOGL.O Google, looking into allegations it has leveraged the dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition, two people familiar with the matter said. (…)
A decision on whether to proceed with a formal investigation may come as soon as October and could be affected by the state of China’s relationship with the United States, one of the people said. (…)
A potential probe would also look at accusations that Google’s market position could cause “extreme damage” to Chinese companies like Huawei, as losing the U.S. tech giant’s support for Android-based operating systems would lead to loss of confidence and revenue, a second person said. (…)
THE FT EDITORIAL BOARD:
A tawdry debate shows the risk to US democracy Donald Trump sounds like a man preparing to contest the election result
Some 60 years have passed since the first televised debate between the two main candidates for the White House. Some of the sequels have been quotable, others soporific, but none quite as dismaying as the one held in Ohio on Tuesday. (…)
By far the bleakest lesson of the night, though, is that fears for the election itself are warranted. Mr Trump did not just waver and dissemble when asked whether he would accept defeat in November. He also urged his supporters to go to polling stations and “watch very carefully” because “bad things happen”. The evidence that voter fraud is rife, and that it disproportionately benefits the Democrats, is thin. But by stoking the idea, Mr Trump readies a pretext to contest any adverse result for him, and encourages his base to take matters into their own hands. “Dog-whistling” is the politico-speak for such language, but it implies subtlety. Mr Trump was blatant.
And this is to say nothing of his eerily ambiguous message to white nationalists. “Somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left”, his formulation on the night, could be a general observation or something much darker. Either way, the president had the opportunity to be plain in his condemnation of the far-right, and did not take it. Snap polls suggest that Mr Biden, though often frail-seeming and quick-tempered, “won” the debate. But no one with a care for American democracy can have switched off feeling anything but queasy. (…)
Hence in a year of lethal contagion, of state violence and economic carnage, none of these troubles is quite the largest issue at stake in November. That is America’s democratic process itself. The worst presidential debate in memory was also the most ominous. No one will have savoured it more than the nation’s autocratic enemies.