US producer prices post the biggest increase in 5 months - CNBC

U.S. producer prices increased by the most in five months in March, but underlying wholesale inflation was tame.

The Labor Department said on Thursday its producer price index for final demand rose 0.6 percent last month, lifted by a surge in the cost of gasoline. That was the largest increase since last October and followed a 0.1 percent gain in February.

In the 12 months through March, the PPI rose 2.2 percent after advancing 1.9 percent in February. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PPI would climb 0.3 percent in March and increase 1.9 percent on a year-on-year basis.

A key gauge of underlying producer price pressures that excludes food, energy and trade services was unchanged last month after ticking up 0.1 percent in February. The so-called core PPI increased 2.0 percent in the 12 months through March. That was the smallest annual increase since August 2017 and followed a 2.3 percent rise in February..

Data on Wednesday showed consumer prices rose by the most in 14 months in March, driven by more expensive gasoline. But core inflation remained muted amid a plunge in the cost of apparel.

Slowing domestic and global growth are keeping inflation contained. Wage inflation has also been moderate despite a tight labor market.

Minutes of the Federal Reserve's March 19-20 policy meeting published on Wednesday described inflation as "muted," though officials expected it to rise to or near the U.S. central bank's 2 percent target. The Fed's preferred inflation measure, the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, is currently at 1.8 percent.

Last month, wholesale energy prices jumped 5.6 percent, with gasoline prices shooting up 16.0 percent, the most since August 2009. Energy prices rose 1.8 percent in February.

Gasoline accounted for over 60 percent of the 1.0 percent rise in goods prices last month. Goods prices increased 0.4 percent in February.

Wholesale food prices rose 0.3 percent in March, reversing a 0.3 percent drop in the prior month. Core goods prices rose 0.2 percent after edging up 0.1 percent in February.

The cost of services increased 0.3 percent in March after being unchanged in the prior month. Prices for healthcare services fell 0.2 percent last month. There was a sharp drop in the cost of hospital outpatient services. Those healthcare costs feed into the core PCE price index.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/producer-price-index-march-2019.html

2019-04-11 12:31:08Z
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Jeff Bezos challenges retail rivals to outdo Amazon’s $15 minimum wage - The Verge

In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos throws in a message to his company’s retail competitors, urging them to start a price war on the minimum wage they pay their employees. Amazon moved to a $15 minimum wage in the United States at the end of last year — though it did so with cuts to benefits and stock grants that meant some employees would end up being paid less, which then led Amazon to announce a further boost in pay to rectify the situation. Still, in a country with a federal minimum hourly pay of $7.25, Amazon’s actions can be considered progressive.

“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” Bezos writes. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.”

In June of this year, Target plans to bump its minimum hourly wage to $13 per hour (from the current $12 per hour), ahead of a move to $15 per hour by the end of 2020. Walmart’s minimum wage is $11 per hour. Costco, citing a boost in sales, announced a move to $15 per hour in March. All of these moves are driven, in larger or smaller part, by a highly competitive jobs market, with US unemployment currently measured at 3.8 percent.

With workers harder to find and keep, all retailers are having to spend more on staff, and Walmart is especially sensitive to that, given its massive overhead related to retail locations, and that it employs more than 1.5 million people in the US and more than 2.2 million worldwide. Amazon’s wage increase last year, by contrast, benefited 350,000 employees. The difference in workforce size and overhead costs is part of the reason why Amazon can be more aggressive with its pay increases.

The genius of Bezos’ challenge today is that he wins no matter what. If others go to $15 per hour, he can claim Amazon pushed them to it; if they go beyond that number, that means Amazon’s employees are suddenly cheaper than the competition’s; and if no one else budges, Amazon claims the moral high ground inherent in having a higher minimum pay than its rivals. Never mind what working conditions at Amazon warehouses might be like.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/11/18305891/amazon-minimum-wage-jeff-bezos-shareholder-letter-2019

2019-04-11 11:39:55Z
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Oil Rallies As OPEC Production Falls | OilPrice.com - OilPrice.com

Draghi's Ambiguity Indicates ECB Is Preparing For The Worst - Investing.com

Mario Draghi’s did nothing to dampen speculation that the European Central Bank (ECB) will have to loosen monetary policy again before too long. The outgoing president said on Wednesday that data since the bank’s last policy meeting have confirmed that the slowdown at the end of 2018 is “extending into the current year” and that the risks to the economy remain tilted to the downside thanks to geopolitics, trade conflicts and “vulnerabilities in emerging markets.”

Draghi threw shade at U.S. President Donald Trump in particular, whose repeated threats of tariffs, he said, had contributed to the weakening of business confidence. The ECB had already its basic game plan for the rest of the year last month, when it changed its forward guidance by taking a rate hike this year off the table, and by announcing a new round of long-term loans, known as TLTROs, to start in September.

But the few details it provided about the TLTROs at that time left open the question of whether they would actually loosen monetary conditions, or whether they were just intended to roll over existing access to credit to stop conditions tightening prematurely. Draghi declined repeated invitations to clear up that ambiguity on Wednesday, saying that the topic wouldn’t be discussed until the Governing Council’s next meeting in June.

“We need more information,” was the curt explanation. In the same vein, Draghi declined to give a direct answer to whether his talk of mitigating the impact of negative interest rates was—as most analysts believe—a preliminary step toward cutting the ECB's deposit rate even further from its current level of -0.4%.

By June it should be clearer whether, and how strongly and quickly, the euro zone will recover from a slowdown that still seems not to have run its course. Forward-looking indicators in the euro zone’s German engine room are still bleak: incoming fell 4.2% in February and the expectations component of remain close to a seven-year low despite turning up slightly in March.

“While the ECB tries to sound optimistic, it has started to prepare for the realization of the downside scenarios,” said Nordea Markets' Jan von Gerich. “We think more rate cuts remain in the tool box and more bad data would now more easily spur the market pricing of such moves.”

Draghi returned more than once to his recent theme that the ECB has enough tools at its disposal to get inflation back to target after years of undershooting. But the euro zone’s has been trending down for 10 years despite increasingly unorthodox steps taken to turn it around. After falling to 0.8% year-on-year in March, it stands at less than half the desired rate.

Draghi appeared to hint at the central bank letting the euro zone economy run hot by saying there was "no implicit ceiling" in its medium-term target of just below 2%. This effectively inviting inflationary forces—whether higher wage agreements or exchange rate weakness—to try their luck.

Chance would be a fine thing. But inflation remains elusive. And with the only just still in hiking mode, the window for the ECB to raise interest rates in this cycle may well have shut.

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April 11, 2019 at 11:45AM

Rogers spends $1.72B in hard-fought auction for wireless spectrum licenses - Global News

Rogers Communications will spend $1.72 billion to acquire spectrum licences from the federal government, making it by far the biggest spender in a hard-fought auction that pitted Canada’s wireless companies against each other.The Canadian treasury will get a total of nearly $3.47 billion from auctioning 104 licences to Canada’s wireless networks, which are racing to get ready for fifth-generation technology that will roll out over a decade or so.Story continues belowThis year’s auction was for the 600 megahertz band of frequencies, which can cover large areas and easily penetrating buildings.Next year’s auction will be for 3,500 MHz licences, which are even more valuable because they’re more widely used in fifth-generation networks around the world.READ MORE: With 5G, data could reach you in as little as a millisecond, 50 times faster than 4GCanada’s three national carriers were only allowed to bid on 64 of the available licences in this year’s auction because of restrictions imposed by the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.ISED Minister Navdeep Bains said some of the licences were set aside for smaller carriers in order to stimulate competition which, he said, will bring down consumer prices.“I’m confident this strategy – in the short, medium and long-term – will benefit consumers.”WATCH: Consumer complaints about wireless and internet services continue to grow

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April 11, 2019 at 10:47AM

Uber plans to sell $10 billion worth of stock in IPO: Source - CNBC

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1. Uber plans to sell $10 billion worth of stock in IPO: Source  CNBC
2. Lyft Sell-Off Hits 11% as Uber Nears 2019's Biggest IPO Filing  Yahoo Canada Finance
3. Uber seeks $10 billion in what could be one of the top 10 IPOs of all time  Financial Post
4. Uber Is On Its Way to an IPO  Bloomberg
5. To Uber, I'm a driver but not a worker. But their billion-dollar IPO is built off my labor.  NBC News
6. View full coverage on Google News

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April 10, 2019 at 10:58PM

Keeping Canada's power on will require 20,000 new workers by 2022 - CTV News

OTTAWA -- Canada's electricity providers say they need to appeal to a younger and more diverse workforce if they're going to keep the country's lights on.

A new report on the industry's labour needs from Electricity Human Resources Canada suggests at least 20,500 new workers will be needed in power plants and transmission systems before 2022.

"It's extremely critical," said Michelle Branigan, the CEO of the organization formed 15 years ago to address workforce concerns in the sector.

Almost 107,000 people are employed directly in the industry in Canada, from generation to power delivery. Currently the industry is not as diverse as Canada as whole, with women accounting for only one in four employees and visible minorities just over one in 10. It's also older than average: Workers under age 25 account for fewer than one in 20 people.

The demand for new workers is complicated by the fact many of the jobs require substantial training.

"These people are not trained in like three months or six months and ready to hit the ground running," said Branigan.

Most of the new workers will be needed to replace the aging workforce, but the industry is also expanding as demand for power grows thanks to battery-powered electronics, electric cars and digital systems.

The future workforce is also going to have to be more agile, able to work on renewable energy sources and digital technologies that are transforming the sector at a rate it has never before seen, said Branigan.

Failing to address this critical demand for workers runs the risk that Canada's power systems will become less reliable, she said.

"If you don't have the right people in the right place at the right time, with the right skills, that's where we could run into difficulty," she said.

The report notes a number of electricity-sector jobs demand similar skills as other industries -- engineers, cybersecurity experts, information and communication technology specialists, to name a few -- and electricity companies have to compete with flashier and more popular companies for the same workers.

Many young people know little about the provincial utilities that generate and transmit much of Canada's electricity, Branigan said.

"But do you know Google, do you know Shopify, do you know these types of organizations? Yes, you do. Those resonate with young people. Where are they going to think about when they start thinking about an industry that is sexy and cool and is going to be exciting for them?"

Nirav Patel, the director of human resources at Ontario Power Generation, said promoting the skilled trades as options for young people, and marketing the industry to kids as young as elementary-school levels, could help attract them.

Patel also said while the industry is changing, there is one thing electricity can offer that some other industries cannot: security.

"The jobs are going to be around for a long time," he said.

Branigan also warned employers not to focus on the big physical need to refurbish and modernize electricity grids, at the expense of the workforce that runs them.

"At the end of the day we need the people to keep the power on," she said.

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April 11, 2019 at 03:38PM