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New Post has been published on OmCik
New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/airbus-takes-control-of-bombardier-cseries-in-rebuff-to-u-s-threat/
Airbus takes control of Bombardier CSeries in rebuff to U.S. threat
MONTREAL/TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) – Airbus has agreed to take a majority stake in Bombardier’s troubled CSeries jetliner program, securing the plane’s future and giving the Canadian firm a possible way out of a damaging trade dispute with Boeing.
Shares in Bombardier leapt more than 20 percent on Tuesday after news of the deal with Europe’s biggest aerospace group.
Airbus will get a 50.01 percent stake in an entity recently carved out of Bombardier to produce and market the CSeries, four years after it first flew with a goal to enter the $125 billion a year market for large jets.
But in a move emblematic of the huge risks of aerospace competition, Bombardier will get just one dollar for the majority stake in exchange for Airbus’s purchasing and marketing power to support an aircraft that has won fans for its fuel efficiency but few recent orders due to doubts over its future.
In reality, the terms of the deal mean Bombardier could pay Airbus to take over by agreeing to underwrite $700 million of risks related to cost overruns in coming years.
“It’s an unexpected move by Airbus but indicates they see good market potential for the CSeries. Neither they nor Boeing currently offer an aircraft in the regional jet market,” said aerospace consultant John Strickland of JLS Consulting.
Airbus shares rose around 5 percent.
The deal is similar to one that Airbus walked away from in 2015 when it decided the investment in a plane that had not yet entered service was too risky – with one major difference: that some of the jets will be produced in the United States.
That could change the power balance in Bombardier’s costly trade dispute with Boeing, though it is not the main reason why the two former rivals have come together, executives said.
The U.S. Commerce Department has threatened a possible 300 percent duty on CSeries jet imports after backing Boeing’s complaint that Bombardier received illegal subsidies and dumped the planes at low prices.
The deal with Airbus now means CSeries jets can be built at Airbus’ Alabama assembly plant, which according to the two companies would exempt them from import duties.
“Assembly in the U.S. can resolve the (tariff) issue because it then becomes a domestic product,” Bombardier’s chief executive, Alain Bellemare, told reporters at Airbus’s headquarters in Toulouse.
Airbus CEO Tom Enders hailed the tie-up as “a win for Canada … a win for the UK,” referring to Bombardier’s wing-making factory in Northern Ireland whose future had been threatened by the distant trade war.
He said it would also create new U.S. jobs.
The deal appeared to catch Boeing off guard. Locked in a separate 13-year trade dispute with Airbus, Boeing called it a “questionable deal” between two of its subsidized competitors.
Bellemare said he hoped the deal would be approved within 6-12 months. Canadian Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, who must officially decide whether to green-light the deal, said it looked like “Bombardier’s new proposed partnership … would help position the CSeries for success”.
An Airbus A320neo aircraft and a Bombardier CSeries aircraft are pictured during a news conference to announce a partnership between Airbus and Bombardier on the C Series aircraft programme, in Colomiers near Toulouse, France, October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau
Bombardier, which had not secured a new order in 18 months for the 110-130 seat plane, said the partnership should more than double the value of the CSeries program.
While it will lose control of a project developed at a cost of $6 billion, the deal gives the CSeries improved economies of scale and a better sales network.
For Airbus, the deal strengthens the bottom end of its narrowbody portfolio after poor sales of its own A319 model and expands its global footprint, potentially opening up further deals in other sectors in Canada.
Tony Webber, a former chief economist at Qantas, said the CSeries could complement Airbus’s existing single-aisle models.
STRATEGIC DECISION
Bellemare said the deal was expected to close in the second half of 2018.
“We’re doing this deal here not because of this Boeing petition. We are doing this deal because it is the right strategic move for Bombardier,” he said, referring to Boeing’s complaint that the Canadian firm received illegal subsidies and dumped CSeries planes at “absurdly low” prices.
Bombardier said the deal would not result in job losses and would keep the head office in Montreal and unions said the deal would benefit the program.
The Boeing-Bombardier dispute has snowballed into a bigger multilateral trade dispute, with British Prime Minister Theresa May asking U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene to save British jobs.
Bombardier is the largest manufacturing employer in Northern Ireland and May’s Conservatives rely on the support of the small Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) party for their majority in parliament.
Business Secretary Greg Clark said Britain would work closely with the planemakers, while the DUP said the agreement was “incredibly significant news” for Belfast.
Talks for the deal between Airbus and Bombardier first started over dinner at the end of August.
Enders said the deal was different from an earlier round of talks in 2015, when he abruptly ordered an end to negotiations. He said the CSeries’ had since been certified, entered service and was performing well.
Some analysts said the deal could drive Boeing closer together with Brazil’s Embraer, with which it already cooperates.
Under the deal, Bombardier will own about 31 percent of CSeries Aircraft Limited Partnership (CSALP), which manufactures and sells the jets, while Investissement Québec, the investment arm of the province of Quebec, will hold 19 percent.
Bombardier is in the middle of a five-year turnaround plan after considering bankruptcy because of a cash-crunch as it developed multiple planes simultaneously, including the CSeries.
($1 = 1.2529 Canadian dollars)
Additional reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru, Alana Wise in Atlanta, David Ljunggren in Arlington, Va., Michael Holden in London and Richard Lough and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris; Writing by Denny Thomas, Guy Faulconbridge and Richard Lough; Editing by Mary Milliken, Himani Sarkar and Mark Potter
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Citigroup downgraded on credit quality concerns, 'disappointing' margins
Mounting credit concerns and lethargic profit margins will plague “weak” Citigroup earnings over the next two years, said one Wall Street research firm.
Societe Generale reduced its rating on Citigroup shares to sell from hold Monday, citing deteriorating credit trends and increased loan loss provisions as detailed in the bank’s most recent earnings report.
“Although revenues were 2 percent ahead of consensus, boosted mainly by capital markets revenues, it is more worrisome that the credit quality of North American cards deteriorated and net interest margin was flat again despite the recent Fed fund rate increase,” wrote analyst Andrew Lim. “Earnings momentum is weak.”
Citigroup earnings beat Wall Street expectations on Thursday, but shares of Citi have fallen more than 3 percent since the report. Group loan loss provisions were $2 billion, 7 percent worse than consensus and 15 percent higher year over year, according to Lim. A loan loss provision is an expense that is reserved for defaulted loans or credit.
Higher loan loss provisions not only eat into earnings, but may also suggest mediocre debtors or poor credit.
“Although part of the uptick in provisions is due to seasonal effects and one-offs like hurricanes,” conceded Lim, “we are concerned about the deteriorating trend over several quarters in North America and have adjusted our forecasts accordingly.”
The analyst cut his fiscal 2018 earnings estimate by 0.2 percent, but slashed his 2019 estimate by a significant 11.1 percent, to $6.80. He also reduced his 12-month price target to $65, which is 10 percent below Friday’s closing price. His old price target was $70.
Citigroup’s net margin also underwhelmed Societe Generale’s analyst. That is the difference between what a bank pays in interest on deposits and what it earns on assets like loans.
“Despite the recent 25-basis point increase in the Fed funds rate, Citi’s net interest margin was static at 2.72 percent,” said Lim. “The weak net interest margin trajectory is disappointing and completely at odds with management’s guidance that there should be some positive sensitivity to rising short rates.”
Lim isn’t alone in his critical appraisal of Citigroup. Vertical Group equity research analyst Dick Bove told CNBC’s “The Rundown” last week that Citigroup failed on multiple fronts. Bove also cited Citi’s disappointing loan book as well as its inability to capitalize on rising rates.
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US online retail sales likely to surpass $1 trillion by 2027, consulting group says
U.S. online retail sales will surpass $1 trillion by 2027 compared with $445 billion this year, according to a forecast by business advisory firm FTI Consulting, as more Americans move away from brick-and-mortar stores.
Online sales will grow at a compound annual rate of 12 percent through 2020 and at a relatively moderate 9 percent over the next decade, according to the report released on Tuesday.
Purchases made online accounted for 12 percent of total U.S. retail sales and 50 percent of total sales growth in the past year, according to the study.
FTI said Amazon.com total share of these online sales is likely to increase to 53 percent by 2027 from 34 percent in 2016. This means Amazon’s share would represent nearly 12 percent of U.S. retail sales by 2027 compared with 4 percent at present.
This year, stronger online business is once again expected to boost total sales for the U.S. holiday season, a period which typically accounts for 20 to 40 percent of annual sales for many retailers.
U.S. retail industry group the National Retail Federation has forecast non-store sales, which include online sales, to rise 11 to 15 percent to about $140 billion during the last two months of this year. In 2016, those sales rose 12.6 percent.
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Trump's decision to kill key Obamacare payments will cost insurers big time through end of year
President Donald Trump’s decision to end key federal payments to Obamacare insurers “will lead to substantial” losses of revenue for health plans,
Avalere Health said that insurers nationally will lose $1 billion in federal funds as a result of Trump’s dramatic move, unless it is reversed by Congress or halted by court order.
The payments reimburse insurers for discounts in out-of-pocket health costs they currently give to about 6 million Obamacare customers.
Obamacare insurers in Florida will lose the most from Trump’s decision: $200 million,
They are followed by California insurers, which will lose about $107 million in payments, Texas insurers, which will lose about $98 million, and North Carolina insurers, which will lose about $66 million, the analysis found.
Many insurers, in setting their Obamacare plan premium prices for 2018, had accounted for the possibility of the payments being ended during that year by requesting higher rates than they otherwise would have.
But Trump’s decision to end the payments effective last week — after months of threatening to do so — means insurers will have to eat the loss of that money through the end of 2017, since they are not able to adjust their current premium prices upwards to absorb the financial fallout.
“Plans can neither increase premiums nor exit the market at this late stage,” noted Caroline Perason, senior vice president at Avalere.
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GM will test self-driving cars in New York City
Self-driving cars will soon take on perhaps their biggest challenge yet: driving in New York City.
Cruise Automation, the self-driving arm of General Motors, announced Tuesday it will begin testing its Chevy Bolts inside five square miles of Manhattan in early 2018.
Testing in New York had previously been limited, due in part to a state regulation requiring drivers to keep a hand on the wheel at all times.
But in May, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced a one-year pilot program to allow for testing of fully self-driving vehicles on public roads.
Cruise has applied for a permit, and a spokeswoman for the governor said that after months of conversations with Cruise the company is on a likely track toward receiving approval.
Leaders around the country are clearing the way for autonomous vehicles technology given the expected safety benefits. Car crashes are overwhelmingly caused by human error and there were more than 37,000 deaths caused by U.S. motor vehicle crashes in 2016.
Related: 2016: A tipping point for excitement in self-driving cars
Many experts expect self-driving vehicles to first be available to the public in Arizona, due to favorable weather and simpler road conditions. There are fewer pedestrians and cyclists to worry about in suburban settings.
But General Motors has made a habit of testings its cars in difficult, urban environments. It already tests in downtown San Francisco. Its cars there have been the victims of a series of fender-benders in the last month amid the rough-and-tumble nature of city driving.
“Based on our experience, every minute of testing in San Francisco is about as valuable as an hour of testing in the suburbs,” Cruise Automation CEO Kyle Vogt said in a Medium post earlier this month. “We test in San Francisco only because we have to. We believe it’s the fastest path toward deploying self-driving cars at scale.”
In New York, GM’s self-driving cars will tango with aggressive pedestrians and cab drivers. The cars are programmed to stop for pedestrians, a habit that hurried New Yorkers may take advantage of, slowing the Bolts from being able to drive at a reasonable speed.
There’s no consensus over when exactly autonomous vehicles will become common and available for the public to use. Many car and tech companies have cited 2020 as a date for deploying the technologies.
Vogt has previously said he believes the technology will arrive in months, rather than years. Some Cruise employees are using the company’s internal ridesharing app to travel around the city.
Earlier this week, Bryan Salesky — who leads Ford’s self-driving car program, Argo AI — cautioned that the vehicles wouldn’t be ubiquitous on city streets for at least a few years.
CNNMoney (Washington) First published October 17, 2017: 11:34 AM ET
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Best Practices for Salespeople Who Work at Home
(Image: iStock)
Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part series about working from home that was originally published on May 13, 2016. The second part is published here.
It is 5 a.m. and the alarm is buzzing loudly. The room is dark, but birds are announcing dawn’s arrival.
Just like that, you get into your morning routine: waking the house, making breakfast, getting ready for work or getting the kids ready for school. If timed right, you can even get in a full-hour workout at the gym.
Then the workday begins. For some people, that means driving to an office. For others, it means walking into the next room: their home office.
We asked two of sales team superstars how they make the best of a workday away from the traditional office. Here’s what they had to say.
Ignore the laundry.
“I try to make (working at home) a routine so I can keep myself organized,” says Sean Tyhurst, an integrated direct marketing specialist with the Life & Health Group of ALM, LifeHealthPro’s parent company. “The challenge is always … the things that will kick you off of your routine.”
Ellen Malloy is in integrated media sales at ALM, and she agrees: “The huge myth about working from home is that you can just wander around doing household chores and checking your laptop from the kitchen,” she says. “You can’t do that. It is important to have structure to be successful.”
Malloy recommends having a designated office or at least an office area at home so you can concentrate. “No barking dogs (or) crying babies!”
Email vs. prospecting calls
Do you ignore your Inbox until 4 p.m. and instead call prospects all day? Or do you do both?
Tyhurst says that the first thing he does is check any emails that might have arrived the night before. Then, it’s all about preparing for calls with prospects, making calls and looking for new ways to grow the existing client base.
“Sometimes, I have calls until the end of the day … Then I’ll catch up (with email),” he says. If, however, there are gaps between prospecting calls, he’ll turn his attention to his email Inbox.
See also: Is email killing your sales productivity?
The do’s and don’ts of working at home
DO:
Shut yourself off or close the office door while you’re working.
Keep your office separate from the rest of the house.
Stay in your office during the work day; don’t wander into the kitchen unless it’s time for lunch.
Treat your home office like a ‘real’ corporate office. Recreate that environment with your equipment (big monitors, work space, desk), and try to make the same mental shift, too.
Exercise: Take a walk or bike ride. Stand up and do some jumping jacks, or just look out the window and stretch for five minutes. You’ll feel and work better afterwards.
Headphones can be a life-saver when there are other people in the house or distractions outside.
Turn on music without any lyrics or tune into the “concentration music” channels on YouTube. This can help keep any distractions at bay.
If you fall behind in your work, block out calendar time for each project that needs attention. Set deadlines and tangible time commitments to work with.
To avoid the temptation of snacking at home, eat protein for breakfast and keep wholesome snacks such as an apple or nuts near your desk. This will help you feel more awake, as opposed to snacking on junk food, which can zap your energy.
Keep separate records for all of your business expenses, and maintain them weekly.
Find work spaces outside your home where you can go if you’re feeling lonely.
DON’T:
Let your routine slip for too long, which can quickly become a bad habit. Skipping your morning shower or dressing like a slob simply because you’re at home is a slippery slope.
Maintain balance. Don’t let your work life bleed into your home life. “You’ll end up resenting it, since ‘work’ is physically in your home. Learn how to manage that,” Malloy says.
Don’t tell people who don’t need to know that you’re working from home. They might become jealous or take you less seriously.
Don’t let people drop by simply because you’re “at home.” Technically, you’re at work.
Don’t get sloppy. Keep routine business hours. Be available to your co-workers or clients during those hours. Otherwise you may lose the privilege of working from home.
See also: 10 ways to be more productive
Where are you most productive?
It’s not hard to spot people who have retreated from their home office to the neighborhood coffee shop. Look for the laptops, headphones, smartphones and necessary electronic charging equipment set up nearby.
But do these caffeinated workers actually get much done? Maybe, unless their workday necessitates calling clients. Making client calls in public can be disruptive and irresponsible, from a client-safety perspective.
Both Tyhurst and Malloy agreed that they are more productive working from their home office than anywhere else.
“I’m far more productive when I’m in my home office than when I’m in a hotel or at a conference. I have dual monitors and a keyboard at home … At a hotel, I’m working on a small laptop, which means that if I’m trying to make a report, it takes twice as long because I have to go back to another screen,” Tyhurst explained.
Malloy also noticed that her productivity tanks when working outside of her home office, thanks in part to the noise and endless chatter of public places.
“I do find that if it is a gorgeous morning, starting to answer emails from my front porch with a cup of coffee can be very productive and keeps me feeling positive and upbeat,” she says. “So changing your location can be great and very helpful, but you have to find what works for you.”
Both emphasized that finding a the place and structure that works best for you, creating your own habits and sticking to them will help you be most successful and productive when working remotely.
— Read 10 Sales Behaviors That Prospects Hate on ThinkAdvisor.
— Connect with ThinkAdvisor’s Life/Health channel on Facebook and Twitter.
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Exclusive: Microsoft responded quietly after detecting secret database hack in 2013
(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp’s secret internal database for tracking bugs in its own software was broken into by a highly sophisticated hacking group more than four years ago, according to five former employees, in only the second known breach of such a corporate database.
The company did not disclose the extent of the attack to the public or its customers after its discovery in 2013, but the five former employees described it to Reuters in separate interviews. Microsoft declined to discuss the incident.
The database contained descriptions of critical and unfixed vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used software in the world, including the Windows operating system. Spies for governments around the globe and other hackers covet such information because it shows them how to create tools for electronic break-ins.
The Microsoft flaws were fixed likely within months of the hack, according to the former employees. Yet speaking out for the first time, these former employees as well as U.S. officials informed of the breach by Reuters said it alarmed them because the hackers could have used the data at the time to mount attacks elsewhere, spreading their reach into government and corporate networks.
“Bad guys with inside access to that information would literally have a ‘skeleton key’ for hundreds of millions of computers around the world,” said Eric Rosenbach, who was U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber at the time.
Companies of all stripes now are ramping up efforts to find and fix bugs in their software amid a wave of damaging hacking attacks. Many firms, including Microsoft, pay security researchers and hackers “bounties” for information about flaws – increasing the flow of bug data and rendering efforts to secure the material more urgent than ever.
In an email responding to questions from Reuters, Microsoft said: “Our security teams actively monitor cyber threats to help us prioritize and take appropriate action to keep customers protected.”
Sometime after learning of the attack, Microsoft went back and looked at breaches of other organizations around then, the five ex-employees said. It found no evidence that the stolen information had been used in those breaches.
Two current employees said the company stands by that assessment. Three of the former employees assert the study had too little data to be conclusive.
Microsoft tightened up security after the breach, the former employees said, walling the database off from the corporate network and requiring two authentications for access.
The dangers posed by information on such software vulnerabilities became a matter of broad public debate this year, after a National Security Agency stockpile of hacking tools was stolen, published and then used in the destructive “WannaCry” attacks against U.K. hospitals and other facilities.
After WannaCry, Microsoft President Brad Smith compared the NSA’s loss to the “the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen,” and cited “the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities.”
Only one breach of a big database from a software company has been disclosed. In 2015, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation – which develops the Firefox web browser – said an attacker had gotten access to a database that included 10 severe and unpatched flaws. One of those flaws was then leveraged in an attack on Firefox users, Mozilla disclosed at the time.
In contrast to Microsoft’s approach, Mozilla provided extensive details of the breach and urged its customers to take action.
Mozilla Chief Business and Legal Officer Denelle Dixon said the foundation told the public about what it knew in 2015 “not only inform and help protect our users, but also to help ourselves and other companies learn, and finally because openness and transparency are core to our mission.”
The Microsoft matter should remind companies to treat accurate bug reports as the “keys to the kingdom,” said Mark Weatherford, who was deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security when Microsoft learned of the breach.
FILE PHOTO: An advertisement about the Microsoft Cybercrime Center plays behind a window reflecting a nearby building at the Microsoft office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. on May 15, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
Like the Pentagon’s Rosenbach, Weatherford said he had not known of the Microsoft attack. Weatherford noted that most companies have strict security procedures around intellectual property and other sensitive corporate information.
“Your bug repository should be equally important,” he said.
ALARM SPREADS AFTER INTERNAL PROBE
Microsoft discovered the database breach in early 2013 after a highly skilled hacking group broke into computers at a number of major tech companies, including Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc.
The group, variously called Morpho, Butterfly and Wild Neutron by security researchers elsewhere, exploited a flaw in the Java programming language to penetrate employees’ Apple Macintosh computers and then move to company networks.
The group remains active as one of the most proficient and mysterious hacking groups known to be in operation, according to security researchers. Experts can’t agree about whether it is backed by a national government, let alone which one.
More than a week after stories about the breaches first appeared in 2013, Microsoft published a brief statement that portrayed its own break-in as limited and made no reference to the bug database.
“As reported by Facebook and Apple, Microsoft can confirm that we also recently experienced a similar security intrusion,” the company said on Feb. 22, 2013.
“We found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected, and our investigation is ongoing.”
Inside the company, alarm spread as officials realized the database for tracking patches had been compromised, according to the five former security employees. They said the database was poorly protected, with access possible via little more than a password.
Concerns that hackers were using stolen bugs to conduct new attacks prompted Microsoft to compare the timing of those breaches with when the flaws had entered the database and when they were patched, according to the five former employees.
These people said the study concluded that even though the bugs in the database were used in ensuing hacking attacks, the perpetrators could have gotten the information elsewhere.
That finding helped justify Microsoft’s decision not to disclose the breach, the former employees said, and in many cases patches already had been released to its customers.
Three of the five former employees Reuters spoke with said the study could not rule out stolen bugs having been used in follow-on attacks.
“They absolutely discovered that bugs had been taken,” said one. “Whether or not those bugs were in use, I don’t think they did a very thorough job of discovering.”
That’s partly because Microsoft relied on automated reports from software crashes to tell when attacks started showing up. The problem with this approach, some security experts say, is that most sophisticated attacks do not cause crashes, and the most targeted machines – such as those with sensitive government information – are the least likely to allow automated reporting.
Editing by Jonathan Weber and Edward Tobin
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Trump should rip the Band-Aid with new Fed chief pick, says wealth fund advisor
President Donald Trump should shake up the Federal Reserve by picking a central bank chief who won’t continue Janet Yellen’s vision, said Komal Sri-Kumar, an advisor to sovereign wealth funds.
With Yellen unlikely to be reappointed, many traders have generally been hoping for someone like Yellen who won’t raise interest rates too fast to keep the economic expansion going.
However, Sri-Kumar argued that the U.S. economy is being artificially “propelled by the excessive amount of liquidity” due to the easy money policies of the current Fed. It’s time to get back to normal after nearly a decade since the 2008 financial crisis, which sparked the central bank stimulus in the darkest days of the Great Recession, he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
A top contender who is seen as breaking with the Yellen Fed — meaning tighter policy and less intervention — is former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Warsh was formerly a member of an advisory committee to Trump.
The stock market initially would likely falter on a Warsh appointment but thrive over the long haul, said Sri-Kumar, president of the macroeconomic consultancy Sri-Kumar Global Strategies. “The question is, do you want a more quick market sell-off, and then a take off on the economy on true fundamental basis? Or do you want push it up and then have a sharper crash later on?” He advocates for the former.
A leading candidate for Fed chair who is seen as preserving some continuity with Yellen’s vision is current Fed Governor Jerome Powell, a former investment banker and partner at the Carlyle Group. Powell also served as a Treasury official under former President George H.W. Bush.
A Powell appointment would be well received by markets, said Ed Campbell, portfolio manager at Prudential Financial-owned QMA.
“I think the best outcome for markets would be Powell; dovish in that camp but also probably more of a friend of deregulation,” Campbell said on “Squawk Box.”
On Warsh, Campbell said: “There would be a little bit of an adjustment. They would respond poorly initially.”
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Horse race for Fed chair pits Warsh against mentor and brings Yellen back
Now with no clear winner in sight, markets see a tight horse race shaping up for the Fed chairmanship in a shifting field.
A report that President Donald Trump was impressed by Stanford University economist John Taylor drove Treasury yields slightly higher Monday afternoon. Around the same time, another article said the president would interview the much more dovish Fed Chair Janet Yellen for another term, helping to push yields lower.
Last week, markets saw two different candidates as the leading contenders — Fed Gov. Jerome Powell and former Fed Gov. Kevin Warsh. Powell took the lead after a report that he was the choice being pushed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The week before, the more hawkish Warsh was seen as being the top choice following reports he could have a lock on the job because of his Wall Street background and family ties to Trump.
“I actually think that today’s [bond] market movements kind of suggest the market doesn’t have a firm idea,” said Tom Simons, Jefferies money market economist. “It’s kind of bouncing around on rumors and headlines. I think it’s because it’s hard to know what the decision criteria is. Where do these guys fall on the strata? You’re going to know when you know.”
Both Warsh and Taylor are viewed as more hawkish than Yellen and even Powell. Yields have moved higher when reports favored either of them.
“Taylor and Warsh are more cut out of the same fabric. Taylor is the economist version of Warsh, and Taylor is Warsh’s mentor,” said Diane Swonk, CEO of DS Economics. The two work together at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “Warsh is the markets guy, and Taylor is the actual economist.”
Swonk said Taylor, who believes the Fed should follow strict rules on full employment and inflation when raising rates, would quickly work to make the Fed more rules-based and could drive interest rates higher. If Taylor looks to be in the lead, interest rates will rise.
“It suggests the fed funds rate is way too low right now,” said Swonk. She said it’s not out of the question that Trump could take Warsh and Taylor, with Taylor as Fed chair. The two together could make an interesting transition at the Fed, and they could act more quickly to deregulate financial institutions, a goal of the Trump administration.
The probability market moved dramatically after in markets. Taylor suddenly jumped above Warsh for second place with 25 percent odds to Warsh’s 23 percent. That was still below Powell, who was in the lead with 29 percent.
Yellen was a not-so-distant fourth with 20 percent odds, followed by White House economic advisor Gary Cohn, with just 7 percent. that Trump will interview Yellen this week.
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The middle class will take the biggest hit from Obamacare subsidy cuts
How many people buy Obamacare compliant policies and don’t get a subsidy for their out-of-pocket costs and their premiums?
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 6.7 million people out of a total of 15.4 million in the Obamacare compliant individual health market do not get any kind of subsidy. That is 44 percent of the total market.
I don’t see any evidence that Trump understands who he is hurting. Particularly when he argues he’s just ending an “insurance company bailout.”
He isn’t hurting the low-income people—by law they will get the CSRs while the additional premium cost that occurs when he fails to pay the insurers for them just gets picked up by Obamacare’s premium subsidy system that caps people’s out of pocket maximum premium.
He isn’t even hurting the insurance companies in the long-run by sticking them with this now unfunded mandate. Yes, they will take a big hit because they aren’t getting their CSR payments in October, November, and December to cover a benefit they are mandated to provide. But almost all of them can afford to bridge themselves into 2018 where they’ll ultimately raise the rates to cover the cost of providing the CSRs.
He’s really only hurting the middle class stuck in Obamacare, many of whom came to his campaign rallies complaining of the extraordinarily high cost of their individual health insurance and wanting Trump to do something about it.
He has. He just caused their rates to go up even higher.
Commentary by Robert Laszewski, the president of . He has 20 years of experience in the insurance industry, serving as a chief operating officer for nine of those years, before beginning his Washington, D.C. policy- and market-consulting business.
For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow on Twitter.
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If Trump kills NAFTA, farmers, bars and factories lose jobs
President Trump’s threat to blow up NAFTA once seemed far fetched.
But life without the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement could become a reality. The fourth round of the renegotiation of NAFTA ends Tuesday, and little progress on tough issues has been made thus far.
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Trump routinely threatens to withdraw from the pact if negotiations go south. As president, he has the authority pull out of NAFTA on his own, but he must give Mexico and Canada six-months notice.
American farmers, restaurant workers and some manufacturing employees would get hit hard if Trump pulls out of NAFTA, according to an in-depth analysis published in August by ImpactECON, a consulting firm in Colorado.
Its economists ran two post-NAFTA scenarios. Both possibilities baked in U.S. tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico — and retaliatory measures against American exports.
1) American wages decline: 255,000 people, all low-skilled workers, would lose their jobs
2) American wages don’t decline: 1.2 million low- and high-skilled workers lose their jobs. Why? Because workers would still be relatively expensive while imported products would become more expensive due to tariffs.
Related: Trump: Tearing up NAFTA ‘will be fine’
Top of the chopping block: Service workers. That includes waiters, cafe baristas, retail store salespeople and a slew of other, mostly low-skill, low-pay positions.
Those jobs rely on cheap imports of clothing, food, machines and many other items.
That sector would lose the lion’s share of jobs — 247,000 — under the wages-decline scenario. (ImpactECON didn’t break out job losses by sector for its larger job-loss scenario.)
Related: As Trump threatens NAFTA, Mexico looks to South America
Car plants in the United States would lose nearly 17,000 jobs; textile factories 4,400 positions; cattle ranchers and fisheries roughly 9,500; food companies 26,000 employees.
However, those losses would be partly offset by gains in industries like machinery, electronics, sugar production and chemical sales.
Still, the overall effect would be negative, the study concludes.
In the big picture, about 14 million American jobs depend on trade with Mexico and Canada, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business organization that opposes Trump’s trade agenda.
Trump says NAFTA triggered an exodus of good-paying manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Robert Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that roughly 800,000 American jobs went to Mexico between 1997 and 2013. NAFTA became law in 1994.
Related: NAFTA talks spark deep divide in American agriculture
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded in 2015 that NAFTA neither caused an exodus nor sparked a job boom. It said the deal’s economic impact was modest.
What will not be modest is the change in tariffs on American products sent to Canada and Mexico. NAFTA removed almost all taxes at the border to create a free trade zone.
But without trade deals with the U.S., both nations are expected to slap stiff tariffs on American exports heading into their lands.
For example, American livestock currently crosses the Mexican border tariff-free. Take away NAFTA and the average tariff Mexico would put on south-bound steaks would rise to about 58%. And that would depress American exports to Mexico.
Canada and Mexico would also raise tariffs higher than the United States in some cases, at least initially.
With NAFTA, cars and auto parts face no taxes. Without it, Canada slaps on a 4% tax and Mexico 13%, while the U.S. puts a 1% tax on Canada and a 3.5% tax on Mexico.
CNNMoney (New York) First published October 17, 2017: 11:11 AM ET
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Trump Is Open to an ACA Deal With the Democrats: Lamar Alexander
President Donald Trump (Photo: White House)
A top Republican senator says he has backing from President Donald Trump to try to hammer out a bipartisan Affordable Care Act deal with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
The senator, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told reporters in Washington he has support for his negotiations from Trump, according to separate reports from CNN and Bloomberg.
(Related: Math Geniuses Size Up 5 ACA Change Ideas)
Alexander said he and Murray hope to come up with the support to appropriate and extend funding for a major Affordable Care Act subsidy program, the cost-sharing reduction subsidy program. The program helps low-income Affordable Care Act public exchange plan users pay their deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance amounts.
One challenge is attracting enough Republican votes in both the House and the Senate to keep an Affordable Care Act subsidy program alive.
A related, but separate, challenge is rounding up enough support from Republicans to getting a subsidy funding measure onto the floor in both the House and the Senate.
“Our goal is to find a consensus of a significant number of Republicans and Democrats who are willing to support and co-sponsor a limited agreement that extends cost-sharing payments for two years and gives states meaningful flexibility,” Alexander said, according to the CNN account of his remarks.
—-Read 3 Weird Ways a 2018 ACA Subsidy Cut Could Help You on ThinkAdvisor.
— Connect with ThinkAdvisor’s Life/Health channel on Facebook and Twitter.
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Patently tough: Long road ahead for Qualcomm in China case against Apple
SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – Qualcomm Inc wants to hit Apple Inc where it hurts most: iPhone sales in China – one of its biggest global markets where most of its flagship smartphones are made.
The U.S. chipmaker’s legal gambit to ban sales and manufacturing of iPhones could cripple global supply of Apple’s most important product, legal experts say, but many believe Qualcomm faces a stiff battle to get there.
Instead, Qualcomm may be looking to frustrate the tech giant through a lengthy legal fight that could last years in China as it seeks to gain leverage in the firms’ global standoff over royalty payments it demands, intellectual property lawyers said.
Qualcomm said this week it had filed the suits in Beijing’s intellectual property court, claiming patent infringement against Apple. If successful Apple could be blocked from selling or manufacturing some iPhones in China.
The two firms are fighting on multiple fronts around the globe from the United States to Europe and Asia, but the China case is particularly thorny because the iPhone is almost entirely made in the country by contract manufacturer Foxconn.
“Effectively – if they get an injunction – you would have a worldwide injunction that would block (Apple) exports from China,” said Erick Robinson, director of patent litigation for Beijing East IP and a former director of patents for Qualcomm.
“China is still unpredictable and Apple has a ton to lose.”
Apple has antitrust suits against Qualcomm in the United States as well as nearly a dozen in the United Kingdom, Japan, China and Taiwan alleging that Qualcomm is charging unfair prices for its technology.
In return, Qualcomm is seeking injunctions against Apple in the United States with complaints to the International Trade Commission as well as filing complaints in Germany. Now it has set it sights on China.
But putting Apple away in China is a tough act, lawyers said.
Apple suppliers employ hundreds of thousands of people in China, so authorities may be wary of hitting jobs with a ban on production.
More to the point, lawyers said it was unlikely either firm would allow the case to get to an injunction, speculating that Qualcomm’s main aim was to increase its leverage over Apple at the negotiating table over any final settlement.
A Shanghai-based intellectual property lawyer said it would take “a year or two” to get to the point where the threat of injunction was imminent, but that eventually it would get “too close for comfort”.
”The consequences are just dire if (an injunction) were to actually happen, the lawyer, who asked not to be named because Qualcomm and Apple were clients of his firm, said.
“That is very significant leverage Qualcomm would have over Apple.”
FILE PHOTO: A Qualcomm sign is pictured at one of its many campus buildings in San Diego, California, U.S. April 18, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
SMARTPHONE TARGET
The chipmaker has not made public which iPhone models would be included, but Christine Trimble, a spokeswoman for Qualcomm, said it would cover the iPhone 7. The patents include power savings technologies and Apple’s Force Touch feature in newer iPhones.
“The patents we’re asserting in these complaints are non-cellular wireless technologies that Apple uses in its iPhones,” Trimble told Reuters.
“The patents are a few examples of the many Qualcomm technologies that Apple is using without paying Qualcomm.”
Apple, which has said previously it pays fair and reasonable rates for the patents it uses, said Qualcomm’s claim is “meritless.”
“Regulators around the world have found Qualcomm guilty of abusing their position for years. This claim is meritless and, like their other courtroom maneuvers, we believe this latest legal effort will fail,” said a Apple spokeswoman in Shanghai.
Chinese regulators fined Qualcomm $975 million in 2015 over antitrust violations. Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission said last week it would fine the firm $774 million over similar issues.
‘MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION’
Lawyers said Apple would likely file more unfair competition or anti-trust cases against Qualcomm in Chinese courts, or seek to get the relevant patents invalidated by the Chinese patent office.
The iPhone maker could also seek to have the patent cases held up by the Beijing IP court while the patent invalidation decision was being made. The cases would then go through a series of hearings at the Beijing court before any injunction.
“Given the known circumstances and the parties, an injunction is unlikely to be forthcoming in this type of situation,” said Elliot Papageorgiou, head of intellectual property at Clyde & Co China.
Last year, a Beijing court banned Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models, saying they were too similar in design to the Shenzhen Baili 100C smartphone. The ruling was overturned this year in favor of Apple.
Injunction requests, often used to boost leverage in negotiations, have not proved hugely effective in patent litigations, however. By the time a court makes a ruling on such cases, the products involved in the suit often become outdated and defending firms introduce new models that do not use disputed patents.
“The reality is both parties should get together and avoid mutually assured destruction,” said Beijing-based Robinson, who estimated it would be 18 months before any potential injunction.
“Apple has been giving Qualcomm trouble in the United States and in China; Qualcomm has the patent portfolio to completely block the manufacturing chain for Apple if that’s what they want to do.”
Additional reporting by Engen Tham in SHANGHAI and Cate Cadell in BEIJING; Editing by Miyoung Kim & Shri Navaratnam
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Lufthansa reportedly offers $590 million for Alitalia's planes and staff
ALBERTO PIZZOLI | AFP | Getty Images
A picture taken on March 15, 2017 shows an Alitalia – Etihad plane on the runway of the airport of Brindisi.
German airline Lufthansa has offered 500 million euros ($590 million) to acquire the planes, airport runway slots and air crew of Italy’s ailing national carrier Alitalia, the newspaper Corriere della Sera said on Monday.
Citing three anonymous sources, the paper said Lufthansa has also proposed halving Alitalia’s workforce of 12,000 employees and reducing its short- and medium-range flights.
The paper said the offer was likely to be rejected by the state commissioners who are managing the carrier while it is being sold. Lufthansa declined to comment on the report.
The deadline for suitors to submit binding bids for Alitalia is 1700 GMT on Monday. However, on Friday Italy’s government extended to April 30 a deadline to improve the bids which had previously been set for Nov. 5.
Rome wants to sell the whole of Alitalia in one package and avoid a split of its aviation and ground service activities.
On Friday the government also passed an emergency decree to add a further 300 million euros to the loan of 600 million euros it made to the loss-making carrier in May.
It also extended the deadline for the repayment of the loan, which was due in November this year, to Sept. 30, 2018.
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Trump to interview Yellen about Fed chair appointment this week
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen speaks during a press conference after the Federal Open Market Committee meetings in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2017.
President Donald Trump will interview Janet Yellen Thursday about potentially staying on as chair of the Federal Reserve after her first term ends in February, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC on Monday.
If the president appoints Yellen to another term as the nation’s top central banker, it will be a sharp turn from the president’s prior remarks about the economist. As a presidential contender, Trump accused Yellen of being overly political.
Politico was .
Yellen was appointed to the fed by former President Barack Obama in 2014. She is the first female head of the institution, which sets the country’s monetary policy and regulates its major banks.
There are a number of other contenders for chair, including Fed Governor Jerome Powell, Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, Stanford economist John Taylor, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, and Neel Kashkari, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
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Insurance payouts may not cover all wildfire damage for California wineries
Wineries damaged by wildfires tearing through Northern California are starting insurance claims, and at least some of the smaller vintners are likely to find limits in their policies mean payouts fall short of rebuilding costs.
Gaps in coverage and a spike in rebuilding costs, typical after a disaster, may come as a shock to many small wineries, favorites of Napa and Sonoma county tourists, said Tom Pagano, who heads the vineyard insurance practice for insurance broker Aon Plc.
“The easy part of insurance is buildings burning down, Pagano said, describing the complicated claims process. Crops are covered, but not vines, and policies often impose quirky limits, such as when grapes spoil due to electrical failures instead of fires. The blazes came as harvest was ending and production was underway at many wineries.
Even with best insurance protection, vines themselves can take years to grow and mature.
Insured losses from the California wildfires will total billions of dollars for vintners, homeowners and other entities, said Pagano.
Catastrophe risk modeler RMS calculates the region sustained $3 billion to $6 billion of insured and economic losses as of Oct. 12. The figures do not include automobile or crop losses, and RMS wrote in a blog post that long-term business interruption to the wine industry “could result in a higher total loss.
The fires north of San Francisco Bay have destroyed at least a dozen wineries among more than 5,000 structures, as well as killing more than 40.
About thirty wineries in the Napa Valley Vintners trade group reported “some degree of damage” including to wine-making facilities, vineyards and tasting rooms, said Patsy McGaughy, a spokeswoman for the group, which has surveyed half of its 550 members. About a half dozen wineries reported significant losses and are part of an industry that contributes $57.6 billion to the state’s annual economy, according to industry figures.
Vineyards, which mainly occupy the valley floor, appear to have been largely unscathed, as the fires in Napa County burned mainly in the hillsides, McGaughy said.
Smaller wineries, especially, are likely to find “the limitations that were not expected” in their policies said Robert Gall, managing director for the National Property Claims Practice of insurance broker Marsh, a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies.
Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa is one of the better prepared and is moving fast. It has hired a forensic expert to assess damages and a builder in order to stay ahead of the demand for construction services.
“Its a maze of information and things to keep track of,” said Sonia Byck-Barwick, who runs the winery with her brother, Rene.
The winery has already started the insurance claims process with a specialty lines unit of Allianz, which covers its buildings and property, and Lloyd’s of London, which covers wines in production and storage, she added.
Fire destroyed its winemaking facility, tasting room, event center and 7,500 cases of wine. The winery is still shipping wine, thanks to 10,000 cases it stored elsewhere. About 12 weddings, scheduled on the property during the coming weeks, have been canceled, Byck-Barwick said.
“Luckily we have great insurance which covers everything,” Byck-Barwick said. “Some things might be a little low, but I feel very confident that we’ll be able to rebuild,” Byck-Barwick said.
Other U.S. winery insurers include the Travelers Companies and Chubb.
Smaller wineries may lack resources or expertise to negotiate additional coverage for issues such as spoilage caused by utility failures, which is typically subject to far lower limits than other parts of a policy, Aon’s Pagano said.
For example, a clause for the coverage may be limited to $100,000 and hidden deep in a policy that otherwise covers up to $2.6 million in damages.
Wineries that try to cut corners by underinsuring must also often pay co-insurance, a type of penalty that is equivalent to a percentage of the underinsured amount, based on factors such as coverage the business should have had, and deducted from the final payout.
“It’s going to be a big issue,” Pagano said.
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It's time to embrace the exclamation point (!)
Humans say a lot without words.
Forty-three facial muscles stretch into more than 10,000 different expressions, plus hand gestures, body posture and eye gaze. All of this conveys a whole lot more feeling beyond spoken sentences.
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But expression gets lost when communicating over text, email or Slack. In the workplace, people stress over how to make up for it: Is it professional to use wink emojis, “hahaha,” or “lol?”
Perhaps the most controversial expression-replacement tool is the exclamation point.
If you email your boss “Hi!” is that pushing it? If you never use exclamations, do you come across as cold and humorless?
Maybe it’s time we open the floodgates, peppering our emails and slacks with as many exclamation points as we desire. Maybe 2017 is the year we get over our fear of the exclamation.
Related: How to email potential new mentors
Vyvyan Evans, communications expert and author of “The Emoji Code,” calls this fear “the angry jerk phenomenon” — our worry that without some sort of added signal between the lines, people read work correspondence and assume we’re cold, upset or otherwise miffed.
“One of the problems with digital communication is that it sucks the empathy out of the message,” Evans says. “And so we can often misconstrue the message that someone is saying: the meaning behind their words.”
The exclamation point has become the focus of this heated debate.
And Evans’ research proves it’s harder than ever to message humor, irony and sarcasm through a simple text email. He says people are far less formal with their business communications than a decade ago. Even emojis have made their way into the workplace because they often can express emotion better than words can.
Related: How a ‘confidence coach’ taught me to be more confident
That epitomizes the decision point at hand: how much of our emotional selves do we bring to our work correspondence?
Kaitlyn Anastasia, a 24-year-old administrative assistant at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York, says she frequently waffles about when to include and exclude exclamation points.
“I’ve had bosses in the past who say, ‘No, don’t include exclamation points at the end,'” she says. “I personally don’t mind [when people use them,] it puts me at ease a little bit because it affirms they’re not angry with me. For my generation, a period abruptly ending a sentence like that can come off as mean, like you’re getting yelled at or something or someone’s mad at you.”
According to Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, Anastasia isn’t alone. She says women are particularly torn when it comes to making this decision. If women use too many exclamation points to appear enthusiastic, for example, research shows they’re viewed as less competent than their male peers. And if they don’t use enough, they’re not considered warm or likeable.
Tannen remembers one woman describing an uncomfortable situation: an intern confessed his initial impression of her (“she’s a b—-“).
“She said, ‘What?! Why?’ and he said, “Because your emails were so abrupt and to-the-point. No exclamation points, no caps,'” Tannen remembers “If we talk in ways that a person at work and in authority would talk, people don’t like us. And that’s what she fell into.”
But as social media rules more of the world around us, including how we communicate, Tannen says we’re going to see a shift in punctuation use at work. Maybe (finally) even changing the way we email at work.
Someone just has to make the first move.
Or rather, someone just has to make the first move!
CNNMoney (New York) First published October 17, 2017: 6:47 AM ET
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