Jo Constantz of Bloomberg reports that among white-collar workers, middle manager job cuts have risen to more than 30% of laid-off employees as companies such as Meta preach a culture of efficiency. She writes: The latest corporate buzzword is efficiency, and that hasn’t been good for much-maligned middle managers. If you’ve got direct reports, you should probably be looking over your shoulder. “It’s always been a joke with my peers that middle management is the most dangerous position to be in,” said Cody Sandell, who lost his job late last year as a director of product management at a … [Read more...]
Cocoa Futures Doubled in Less than Three Months
Ryan Dezember of The Wall Street Journal reports prices for cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, have surged to records. He writes: Cocoa prices have climbed past a record set nearly a half-century ago, costing chocolate makers, bakers and aficionados alike. The sharp climb in price for chocolate’s main ingredient started with bad weather in West Africa, where much of the world’s cocoa is grown. Speculators piling into one of the hottest trades outside of artificial intelligence have added fuel to the rally. Cocoa futures rose another $1,105 a metric ton over Thursday and Friday to … [Read more...]
Where Are All the Distressed Office-Building Sales?
Carol Ryan of The Wall Street Journal reports that only 3.5% of offices sold last year came from a distressed seller, thanks to optimism and forgiving lenders. Ryan writes: If offices are in such hot water, where are all the forced sellers? Office-building owners have been under pressure since the Covid-19 pandemic hollowed out their buildings in early 2020. According to data from real-estate consulting firm Colliers, the U.S. vacancy rate has risen from 11% in late 2019 to 17% today, higher than at any point in the 2008 global financial crisis. But forced sales are still … [Read more...]
Somali Pirates on the Move Again
The Associated Press reports that the EU maritime force says it is shadowing a Bangladesh-flagged ship seized by pirates off the Somali coast. They write: The 23 crew members of a Bangladesh-flagged cargo ship boarded by pirates off Somalia this week have been taken hostage, and a European Union vessel is tracking the ship as it heads toward the coast, the EU’s maritime security force said Wednesday. The hijacking of the MV Abdullah, first reported Tuesday by the British military, took place nearly 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) east of Somalia’s coastal capital Mogadishu. An EU ship … [Read more...]
Who’s Going to Pay for New Big-Rig Charging Plan?
Paul Berger of The Wall Street Journal explains that the Biden administration envisions a phased-in nationwide rollout of electric-charging and hydrogen fueling stations for heavy-duty trucks, but who is going to pay? Berger writes: A new federal initiative aims to speed up and better coordinate the rollout of charging and refueling stations for zero-emission big rigs. Industry officials say questions over how much the buildout will cost or who will pick up the tab still need to be resolved. The Biden administration this week released the strategy laying out where and when battery-electric … [Read more...]
Meet the World’s Largest Cargo Plane
Jennifer Hiller and Brian McGill of The Wall Street Journal report that Radia Inc., a unicorn startup, plans to use rocket science to overcome one of the wind power industry’s biggest hurdles with a giant cargo plane. The plane has a massive 261-foot wingspan and a fuselage volume of 272,000 cubic feet. They write: An aerospace engineer thinks he knows how to transform renewable energy: by building the world’s largest plane. Mark Lundstrom, an MIT-trained rocket scientist and Rhodes scholar, has spent more than seven years with an engineering team designing the WindRunner, a gargantuan … [Read more...]
Car Makers Turn to Teamwork to Compete with China’s Cheap EVs
Arjun Neil Alim, Patricia Nilsson, and Peter Campbell of the Financial Times report that German carmakers are looking at sharing costs to counter the wave of cheaper cars produced in China. He writes: Volkswagen is considering partnering with other carmakers to produce cheaper electric vehicles to help it compete with a coming wave of lower-cost rivals from China. The world’s second-largest carmaker plans to decide later this year how to produce an EV costing less than €25,000, chief executive Oliver Blume told a press conference in Berlin. Chief financial officer Arno Antlitz said it was “so … [Read more...]
Shifting Container Ship Traffic
Michael Rudolph of FreightWaves reports that the trade routes to the East Coast are struggling against the turmoil in the Red Sea conflict and in the Panama Canal, with the droughts, are causing a shift to the West Coast ports. Rudolph writes: A recent round of U.S. and British strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen raise fresh questions about the impact of container shipping in the Red Sea, as shippers continue to seek alternative means of navigating the crisis. The strikes, which were conducted on Saturday, spurred threats from Houthi leaders and a warning from Jake Sullivan, national … [Read more...]
A Growing Russian and Chinese Bond
Gleb Stolyarov of Reuters reports on the booming trade partnership between Russia and China thanks to Western firms abandoning the Russian market. Stolyarov writes: Business at Nikita Minenkov's logistics company, based near the Amur River that marks the border between Russia and China, was going well. Since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine it's gone even better - company turnover has doubled for two years running. Minenkov's Eurasia Logistics Group is one of multiple Russian businesses to benefit from a sharp uptick in trade with China, since Western firms abandoned the Russian market … [Read more...]
Jobs Market Lost Pace in February
Ed Frank of The Wall Street Journal tells his readers that the employment trends index ticked down to 112.29, from January’s downwardly revised 113.18. He writes: The U.S. labor market weakened a little in February, reflecting that jobs were becoming harder to come by, according to a jobs trends index. The Conference Board’s employment trends index ticked down to 112.29 in February from a downwardly revised 113.18 in January, the private-research group said Monday, flipping two months of improvement. “While the index is still elevated compared to its prepandemic level and the … [Read more...]
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