AT&T workers strike the Southeast; more than 20,000 walk out
More than 20,000 union workers for AT&T in the Southeast are on strike as of midnight Friday, officials said.
Members of the Communication Workers of America – including 4,000 in Georgia – charged the huge telecommunications company with unfair labor practices during negotiations aimed at securing a new contract.
The previous agreement expired Aug. 3.
Since then, the talks have gone nowhere because the company has made sure that an agreement cannot happen said Richard Honeycutt, the union's vice president for the Southeast in a statement issued late Friday. "Our talks have stalled because it has become clear that AT&T has not sent negotiators who have the power to make decisions so we can move forward toward a new contract."
The company, which is based in Dallas, has annual revenue of about $170 billion a year. It includes the remnants of Atlanta-based BellSouth, which for more than two decades was the largest of the seven regional phone companies.
Company officials said they were blindsided and mystified by the strike call.
"We're baffled as to why union leadership would call one when we're offering terms that would help our employees – some of whom average from $121,000 to $134,000 in total compensation – be even better off," said AT&T spokesman Jim Kimberly.
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Company officials were adamant about being prepared for a walk-out. In the days before the contract expired, AT&T officials said they would be prepared for a strike and that business operations would go on smoothly with managers, executives and contractors picking up the slack.
"We're prepared for a strike and in the event of a work stoppage, we will continue working hard to serve our customers," Kimberly said on Friday night
Union leaders scoffed at the notion, arguing that the company will have to prioritize work delaying new installations and non-emergency maintenance.
The union's Southeast region includes technicians, customer service representatives and others who "install, maintain and support" the company's landline and internet line services. The region includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Union officials have said that the key issues are job security and healthcare costs.
Workers could have stayed on the job without a contract, even if negotiators failed to reach a deal. More than 30,000 Verizon workers last summer ratified a contract after working for a year without one.
This article was written by Michael E. Kanell, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution.
Amazon is reportedly selling thousands of products that are mislabeled, banned, or declared unsafe by federal agencies, according to an investigation from TheWall Street Journal. It found that no fewer than 4,152 items fitting those criteria were freely available to buy on Amazon’s storefront.
The list of mislabeled, banned, and unsafe products found by the Journal is shocking, including “FDA-approved” products that the agency never vetted, medication that lacked child safety warnings, banned sleeping wedges for babies, illegally imported prescription drugs, electronics that falsely claim UL-certified safety ratings, toys with unsafe amounts of lead or potential choking hazards, and more. Many of the products found had the company’s Amazon Choice label, which isn’t something you should automatically put any trust in. Perhaps worst of all, the investigation found at least 157 items that Amazon said it explicitly banned.
The issue here is Amazon’s massive network of third-party sellers that sell freely on Amazon and even ship from the company’s warehouses if they participate in the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program. Product pages for third-party sellers can be hard to tell apart from “Sold by Amazon.com” items. A small line of text is the only thing that indicates who the actual seller is.
But there’s a big difference between buying from Amazon and buying from someplace else through Amazon. Namely, Amazon doesn’t take legal responsibility for unsafe products because it’s technically not the one selling it. Any disputes have to be taken up with the third-party seller.
It didn’t use to be this way, but as marketplace sellers have exploded onto the scene through Amazon, the company’s moderation of those listings (done by a combination of human workers and machine learning flags) simply hasn’t been able to keep up with the sheer volume of products. Barring a major shift in policy on Amazon’s end, it seems that customers will continue to be on their own when it comes to making smart purchases from the online retail giant, especially where third-party sellers are concerned. The Journal’s Joanna Stern has some suggestions on how you can avoid unsafe or other iffy purchases.
Amazon has since responded to the WSJ’s investigation with a blog post, where the company shared more information about how it approves third-party sellers and the tools it uses to try and weed out problematic listings. Per the post, “We invest significant resources to protect our customers and have built robust programs designed to ensure products offered for sale in our store are safe and compliant.”
Update August 23rd, 3:25pm: Added statement from Amazon regarding preventative measures for problematic products.
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. (Reuters) - When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Friday, traders will comb through his remarks for clues on whether the U.S. central bank will deliver more rate cuts this year.
FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell holds a news conference following the Federal Reserve's two-day Federal Open Market Committee Meeting in Washington, U.S., July 31, 2019. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger/File Photo
They may be disappointed.
For all his reputation as the most plain-spoken person to run the U.S. central bank in decades, if not ever, Powell may be reluctant in his remarks to fellow central bankers at this year’s Kansas City Fed economic symposium to say much about where rates will go. The reason: he may not actually know, and does not want to get locked in.
Fellow Fed policymakers, even those who supported July’s rate cut, are signaling reluctance to do more, with Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker calling for a wait-and-see approach and Dallas Fed chief Robert Kaplan saying he is “open minded” but would “like to avoid having to take further action.”
Since the Fed cut rates in July, the U.S. economic picture has darkened.
New threats by President Donald Trump to impose additional tariffs on China, and then a decision to defer some of those new taxes until December, are boosting already heightened uncertainty for businesses.
U.S. factory activity is on the decline.
Globally, dozens of central banks are cutting rates and some economies look poised to fall into recession.
Finally, in a signal that investors are increasingly worried about a U.S. recession, yields on 2-year Treasuries sank below those 10-year debt on Thursday in yet another “yield curve inversion.”
At the same time, labor markets remain strong and consumers continue to spend at stores and online.
Part of the reason the yield curve inverted is because the U.S. economy remains so much stronger than much of Europe: investors would rather have “safe” U.S. Treasuries, even with their dropping yields, than say, German bonds with a negative yield.
Beyond the conflicting economic data, dire market signals and dissent from within the Fed, Powell may also want to lay low to avoid attracting even more vitriol than he already has as the first Fed chief to be publicly called "clueless" by the president who appointed him.
“The Economy is doing really well. The Federal Reserve can easily make it Record Setting!,” Trump said on Twitter on Thursday. “Be early (for a change), not late. Let America win big, rather than just win!”
Even if Powell sticks to a set piece, characterizing last month’s move as a “mid-cycle” adjustment and preserving his options going forward, he could still disappoint markets and court even more turbulence.
Investors though, have high hopes that the Fed will stimulate the economy, placing overwhelming bets that the central bank will lower borrowing costs again at its Sept. 17-18 policy meeting.
Reporting by Ann Saphir, Howard Schneider and Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Dan Grebler
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell comes to this year’s meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, caught between discord within the U.S. central bank over appropriate monetary policy and mounting outside pressure for more interest rate cuts.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as Jerome Powell, his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, speaks at the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
In navigating that divide, Powell is unlikely to use his keynote speech on Friday at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium to veer much from the message he sent last month after the Fed cut rates for the first time in a decade: That the move was a “mid-cycle adjustment” and not the start of a rate-cutting cycle.
He will likely nod to the possibility that trade tensions, which have escalated since the July 30-31 policy meeting, may worsen a global economic slowdown and ultimately make more U.S. rate cuts necessary.
But he is expected also to try to ensure he is not seen as bowing before repeated attacks from President Donald Trump for not easing policy further, or caving to a bond market where investors appear to be heavily betting the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee will end up doing so.
“We cannot rule out this year’s Jackson Hole being another fundamental shift in policy as it has been in years past,” UBS economists wrote in a note earlier this week. “But more likely, Powell will give another speech on risk management to try to lean dovish without committing to bold actions that the committee may not ratify.”
Since last August’s annual central bank gathering in Grand Teton National Park, Powell has faced an increasingly difficult terrain both politically and economically.
Trump has steadily ratcheted up his criticism of the Fed and Powell, who was handpicked by the president in late 2017 to head the central bank.
Last week, Trump called Powell “clueless” and urged the Fed to reduce borrowing costs by a full percentage point to boost the economy, which is feeling the drag from the U.S.-China trade war.
Some Fed policymakers point to low U.S. unemployment, which is near a half-century low, strong consumer spending and other bullish data as reason to hold the line on any further interest rate moves.
But the economy has slowed as the stimulus from Trump’s tax cuts and increased government spending have faded, and business sentiment and spending have declined amid mounting uncertainty over the outcome of the White House’s trade policies.
As trade wars and other economic developments have slowed growth in countries from Germany to Turkey to Australia, central banks have responded by cutting interest rates, setting up an international trend the Fed may find it hard to buck.
Powell’s colleagues inside the Fed are nowhere near a broad consensus on how to proceed. The Fed chief mustered a majority among the current voting policymakers to back last month’s rate cut, but the minutes of the meeting released on Wednesday showed a wider gulf inside the broader committee than was reflected in the decision.
Caught between these moving levers, Powell may opt to stand still.
“(Powell) does not want to surprise with a 100-basis-point cut ... (he wants to) telegraph it methodically and achieve the easing in a way that everybody around the world can see and anticipate and prepare for,” said Julia Coronado, who runs the consulting firm MacroPolicy Perspectives and follows the Fed closely.
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Powell faces other complications that have emerged since last year’s Jackson Hole conference.
On trade, his conundrum is this: If he cuts rates to offset risks from uncertainties over Trump’s policies, the president may simply go harder at China, creating more uncertainty in markets and among businesses and making further rate cuts necessary.
After the rate cut last month, Trump vowed to impose tariffs on an additional $300 billion in Chinese imports on Sept. 1, though he later deferred some of the levies to December.
One index tracking world trade uncertainty has spiked recently, driving up overall global uncertainty that in the past has set the stage for downturns. (For a graphic, please see here)
“If the Fed cuts rates as Trump demands, that will ease pressure on the stock market, which Trump may take as giving him a stronger hand in his trade spat with China,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and one of the authors of the policy uncertainty index.
“Central banks can’t really provide insurance against potential trade wars.”
Markets are also creating a difficult-to-navigate feedback loop. A yield curve inversion last week that reversed itself and then returned on Thursday underscores investors’ fears that a recession may be around the corner, and while some Fed policymakers have cautioned against taking too much of a signal from falling long-term borrowing rates, others say they can’t be ignored.
FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and New York Federal Reserve President John Williams walk together, ahead of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank’s annual conference on monetary policy, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, U.S., August 22, 2019. REUTERS/Ann Saphir
The feedback loop between the Fed and bond markets “might not be broken until the economic data signal very decisively that further easing is inappropriate,” Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius wrote this week.
Last year at Jackson Hole, Powell tried to fundamentally reset U.S. monetary policy expectations toward a data-centric practice and away from theory-based models. This year, though, the challenge is that the data itself is giving mixed signals.
“Part of the problem is that the Fed has raised transparency and guidance to such a level that when they are in a situation where things are really, literally, uncertain and it is hard to give that guidance, the markets don’t know what to do,” said Maurice Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “You don’t know what is going to happen next.”
Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao
That's not the only thing that propped the stock's rally during the session, if you ask CNBC's Jim Cramer.
After Home Depot — Lowe's chief rival — beat profit estimations the day prior, a number of hedge fund managers loaded up on the equity and decided to short Lowe's, he said. A short is when an investor places a bet that a stock price will fall in the near future and tries to turn a profit on the depreciation.
"This kind of trade is a way to bet on the comparative performance of companies in a given industry," the "Mad Money" host said, calling it a "pairs trade."
When Lowe's reported this morning, however, they realized played their hands wrong. The home improvement retailer saw slightly higher same-store sales growth in the U.S. than Home Depot — 3.2% to 3.1%. The pairs trade was busted and caused a short squeeze, Cramer said.
"Traders know that discipline trumps conviction, that's a rule. If a trade goes against you, you have to get out, which in this case means covering your short positions at any price," he said. "Disciplined short-sellers bought back stock to close out their positions and take the loss, and it catapulted the thing into the stratosphere."
Cramer gives more insight into short squeezes here
Maintain confidence
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on August 14, 2019 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Cramer said that the economy is in good shape, but Wall Street could talk itself into a recession.
The stock market, climbing less than 1% during the trading day, continued to stage its recovery from last week's massive sell-off that was triggered in large part because of worries about a recession signal, on top of the prolonged U.S.-China trade war.
The and both posted their fourth positive trading days in the last five, while the finished its third in four days.
"If the president were to simply calm down the rhetoric on China, rather than taking them on like some kind of trash-talking wide receiver, the bears would lose their biggest crutch," said the host, who blamed fears about the bond market on "angry rhetoric and frightening jeremiads from supposed experts" who should listen to conference calls.
The head of a payroll services company told CNBC that he doesn't see signs of slowdown in medium-sized businesses, despite growing fears of a looming recession.
Paycom CEO Chad Richison said his company may not be a great "proxy" for the rest of the economy, but his company has a pulse on hiring in the country. The cloud-based human capital management provider has digitized how employers run their HR shops.
The tech firm is a disruptor in the payroll industry with more than 23,500 clients and targets businesses that employ 50 to 5,000 people.
"I think the economy's been strong," Richison said in a one-on-one with Cramer. "We aren't really seeing a deterioration of growth in [medium-sized businesses], but, you know, we're waiting to see what happens."
Technology has impacted nearly every industry and one subset is transforming the backend of business operations.
Cloud computing is a secular growth theme in recent years that has been one of the hottest parts of the market, yet the average person can't explain what the companies that make up the group actually do, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Wednesday.
The "Mad Money" host has crowned a number of his favorite stocks in the sector under the so-called and riskier "cloud prince" umbrellas, but only advises that investors only own companies that they have done their homework on.
"There are a lot of great opportunities in the cloud space, but if you're going to own these stocks, you need to understand what these companies actually do, which is why we're running this whole cloud primer series," he said.
Cramer broke down and gave recommendations on 11 names in the cloud-based software cohort.
(Reuters) - Target Corp (NYSE:) raised its annual profit forecast on Wednesday after reporting better-than-expected quarterly results as higher investments to remodel stores and beef up digital business drew in more shoppers, sending shares up 17%.
The retailer has been adding muscle to its same-day services with initiatives like Shipt, in-store pickup and Drive-up as customers increasingly get used to faster deliveries from rivals Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:) and Walmart (NYSE:) Inc.
These services allow shoppers to pull into a store and pick-up their orders within minutes of placing them through the mobile app or website. The company said one out of five customers, who used its same-day service in the second quarter, were new.
Faster services also drove more than three-fourths of the 34% increase in comparable digital sales. The robust online sales accounted for more than half of the 3.4% growth in same-store sales.
Analysts on average were expecting same-store sales to grow 3%, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
"Q2 could not have gone better for Target," Moody's vice president Charlie O'Shea said.
Target has also been building on its merchandise by adding more private label brands, redesigning about 300 stores this year and opening smaller locations in college towns and urban areas to reach a wider audience.
Earlier this week, the company said it was starting a new grocery brand, Good & Gather, that would hit stores in September.
The retailer expects the brand, which has everything from dairy and meats to ready to eat pasta, to have more than 2,000 items by the end of 2020.
Its store traffic grew 2.4%, while gross margins improved to 30.6% in the quarter, benefiting from a better assortment of its products and competitive pricing.
"The strong gross margin performance despite the slew of weather-driven markdown concerns highlights the companies balanced mix, strong execution, and scaling e-commerce strategies," J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Horvers said.
Target said it expected full-year adjusted profit to be between $5.90 and $6.20 per share, up from the prior range of $5.75 to $6.05 per share. The outlook accounted for potential additional U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports.
Excluding certain items, the company earned $1.82 per share in the quarter ended Aug.3, beating the average analyst estimate by 20 cents.
Total revenue rose 3.6% to $18.42 billion, above expectations of $18.34 billion.
The company's stock, which have risen 29% this year, were on course to open at a record high, driving gains in other retail players and adding to broad gains for Wall Street.
Shares of Walmart and Amazon rose 1% in premarket trade and those of department store operators such as Macy's were also higher.
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After a long delay, Facebook is releasing a tool that will allow people to see what kind of information it has collected about their online activity beyond its borders — from the news they read, to the shopping websites they visit, to the porn they watch — along with an option to disassociate that data from their accounts.
Facebook collects information about its users in two ways: first, through the information you input into its website and apps, and second, through tracking which websites you visit while you’re not on Facebook. That’s why after you visit a clothing retailer’s website, you’ll likely see an ad for it in your Facebook or Instagram News Feed. Basically, Facebook monitors where you go, all across the internet, and uses your digital footprints to target you with ads. But Facebook users have never been able to view — much less purge — this external data Facebook collected about them, until now.
Facebook tracks your browsing history via the “Login with Facebook” button, the “like” button, Facebook comments, and little bits of invisible code, called the Facebook Pixel embedded on other sites (including BuzzFeed). Today, the company will start to roll out a feature called “Off-Facebook Activity” allowing people to manage that external browsing data, and finally delivering on a promise it made over a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg announced at a company event in 2018 that it would develop a feature called “Clear History.”
The new tool, now called “Off-Facebook Activity,” will display a summary of those third-party websites that shared your visit with Facebook, and will allow you to disconnect that browsing history from your Facebook account. You can also opt out of future off-Facebook activity tracking, or selectively stop certain websites from sending your browsing activity to Facebook. Nearly a third of all websites include a Facebook tracker, according to severalstudies.
People in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain will gain access to “Off-Facebook Activity” first. Facebook said it will continue rolling out the feature everywhere else over the coming months. The tool, found in account settings > “Off-Facebook Activity,” includes an option allowing you to “clear” your browsing history.
However, it’s important to note that neither Facebook’s announcement nor screenshots of the feature mentions the word “delete” — and that’s because the browsing isn’t being deleted, it’s simply disassociated from your Facebook account, according to a Facebook spokesperson. In other words, Facebook will still hold on to the data, but will anonymize it rather than pair it with your profile.
For example, although your browsing history won’t be used to advertise a discount to an online store you’ve visited before, the activity will still appear in aggregated audience data shown to developers using Facebook’s analytics tools.
If you disable off-Facebook activity collection or clear off-Facebook activity history, your browsing history won’t be used to target ads to you on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan wrote in a blog post.
However, the data isn’t being removed from Facebook servers. Just as Facebook still collects anonymous browsing information from people who are logged out or don’t have Facebook accounts, Facebook will treat people who have opted out of external website tracking similarly, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
The tool is finally launching, more than a year after the company initially said it would release the feature, originally marketed as “Clear History” by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s May 2018 developer conference, F8. In February, people familiar with the origins of Clear History said that Zuckerberg rushed the announcement at the event as a public relations play to curb criticism over the company’s stance on privacy and customer data in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Clear History, along with an international ad campaign focused on how “fake news” and “clickbait” “is not your friend, and a privacy-themed pop-up store in New York City, were the company’s attempts at garnering goodwill, people who spoke to BuzzFeed News earlier this year said.
“It’s public relations,” one former employee told BuzzFeed News. “It’s, ‘Hey, look at this shiny thing, please don’t pay attention to this mushroom cloud.’”
Clear History was marred by a number of delays, with Facebook telling Recode last December that “it’s taking longer than we initially thought” due to issues with how data is stored and processed. Facebook engineers re-built the way the browsing data is indexed in order to allow users to disconnect their browsing history and opt out of personalized tracking moving forward, a spokesperson said.
The company has moved away from the Clear History name, noting that the feature is just one of three main tools in Off-Facebook Activity. A spokesperson would not say how many accounts Facebook expects to use the feature, but did confirm that it may have an impact on the company’s bottom line as it will affect how ads will be targeted in the future.
When asked about Clear History in March in an interview with CNBC, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said “our bottom line is getting this right” while implying the change in ad targeting may slow growth rate.
“But we believe deeply that doing the right thing for people on our service is the only way to protect our long-term business,” she said. “And it is the right thing to do.”
