Daily Business Briefing
Sept. 16, 2021Updated Sept. 16, 2021, 11:57 a.m. ET
Sept. 16, 2021, 11:57 a.m. ETRetail sales increased slightly in August, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, highlighting an uneven pace for the economic recovery as spending behavior swings month over month.
The 0.7 percent climb in sales last month came after a 1.8 percent decline in July and gains earlier in the summer. The gains in August, which were better than what economists expected, were prompted by a rise in spending on clothing, electronics, and furniture and home goods.
Sales at bars and restaurants fell, after a rise in July.
That drop is “partly tied to the end of summer, but it’s also tied to fear of the virus when going into a bar,” said Beth Ann Bovino, the U.S. chief economist at SP Global.
Sales of sporting goods and musical instruments and at book stores rose as students prepared to go back to school. Sales at nonstore retailers, which include e-commerce businesses, rose about 6 percent in August after falling in July.
“The resurgence of the virus resulted in households switching their buying options to hands-free transactions,” Ms. Bovino said.
Sales of cars and auto parts were down 4.5 percent in August. The auto industry has been hit by a shortage of computer chips, causing Toyota Motor to announce recently plans to slash production by about 40 percent.
Prices of consumer goods continued to climb in August, albeit at a slower pace, according to data from the Labor Department released this week. The Consumer Price Index rose 5.3 percent in August from a year earlier, the data showed, suggesting inflationary pressures were starting to ease.
The University of Michigan will publish its monthly consumer sentiment index on Friday, a key indicator regarding the economic recovery and consumer behavior. The index fell more than 13 percent in July because consumers expected price increases to continue.
With more employers announcing mandates, the pace of coronavirus vaccinations had been trending steadily upward through the Labor Day holiday, giving economists reason for optimism if cases and hospitalizations level off or decline in September.
Analysts at Bank of America said on Thursday that spending for clothing increased 27 percent for the week ending Sept. 11 compared with the same period last year, based on credit and debit card data. The analysis also found that sales at department stores rose by 21 percent, while spending on furniture were up 9 percent compared with the same time last year.
“Households are sitting on a lot of cash,” Ms. Bovino said. “We expect to see a robust holiday spending season.”

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A Marks Spencer store in Paris. The British company said “supply chain complexities” after Brexit made getting fresh food from Britain to France each day too difficult.Credit...Ian Langsdon/EPA, via Shutterstock


Marks Spencer, the large British retailer that has been battling Brexit costs and delays for months, said on Thursday that it would close its 11 food stores in France.
The stores were supplied with products made in Northampton, near the middle of England, and shipped across the English Channel each day. At the start of the year, once Britain began its new trading relationship with the European Union, the stores’ shelves emptied out in Paris as new customs checks and tariffs upended the retailer’s supply chain.
“The supply chain complexities in place following the U.K.’s exit from the European Union, now make it near impossible for us to serve fresh and chilled products to customers to the high standards they expect,” Paul Friston, the company’s managing director for international business, said in a statement on Thursday.
At one store near the Bastille in Paris, it had become common to see bare refrigeration units devoid of Stilton cheese, British-grown broccoli or British-made sandwiches that appealed to the French, as well as ex-patriots from across the channel. Some of the MS stores took to adding French foods to the shelves, but the import delays never eased enough to alleviate the shortages.
Rather than booming free trade with the European Union and countries farther afield, the post-Brexit trading rules have frustrated many companies with significant added costs. Rules of origin requirement have forced clothing retailers to move distribution centers to the European Union, businesses of all sizes have increased customs payments and food producers have to pay for health certificates. Supply chains have also been badly disrupted by the pandemic. Recently, the British government decided to delay the imposition of checks on goods imported from the European Union until mid-2022.
MS reported more than £16 million ($22 million) in costs for the financial year ending in March, which included a digital track-and-trace platform and veterinary certification costs. It said the biggest Brexit impact was on supplying its stores on the island of Ireland.
The stores in France that are closing by the end of the year are run by a partner in a franchise agreement. Nine other stores in France, located in transport hubs and operated by a different partner, will stay open, the company said. The website, which sells mostly clothes and home products, will keep running.
MS had already changed the supply of products in the Czech Republic because of Brexit. It stopped selling fresh and chilled food and increased the range of frozen products and those that could be stored at room temperature.
Brexit has been blamed for the closures, but the international business of MS, which includes stores in India, the Middle East and Asia, has been hampered by the pandemic as well. Revenue dropped about 17 percent in the year to March.
The company was struggling with shifting consumer trends well before the pandemic and was trying to restructure its business away from clothing and home products to food sales, while closing stores and improving its online shopping experience. The pandemic forced an acceleration of this plan. Last year the company substantially increased the number of jobs it planned to cut to 7,000, from 950. In the end, more than 8,000 workers left its stores in Britain by March.
Liz Aldermancontributed reporting.

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Credit...Financial Services Committee


The insurer MassMutual will pay a $4 million fine to Massachusetts securities regulators as part of a settlement involving the conduct of Keith Gill, a former employee and online trader known as “Roaring Kitty” whose relentless cheerleading for shares of GameStop was at the heart of the meme stock mania earlier this year.
Regulators said the unit of MassMutual that employed Mr. Gill, who resigned in January, failed to adequately supervise his and other agents’ trading and online activity. Moreover, Mr. Gill was carrying out trades on behalf of three other people not affiliated with MassMutual without the insurer’s knowledge, the settlement said. The insurer neither admitted nor denied the accusations, but it agreed to the fine as well an independent compliance review and other measures.
“MassMutual is pleased to put this matter behind us, avoiding the expense and distraction associated with protracted litigation,” a spokeswoman said.
Mr. Gill cultivated a huge online following with over 250 hours of YouTube videos detailing his views on GameStop, a troubled video game retailer that was once a mainstay of malls but whose stock had languished in recent years. However, GameStop became a favorite of masses of day traders who loosely organized themselves on Reddit’s WallStreetBets trading message board and briefly drove the company’s share price up as much as 600 percent within days in late January.
Mr. Gill’s videos — he filmed himself sitting in a video-gaming chair wearing his trademark red headband — were informal and irreverent. But even as his online fame grew, it was virtually unknown that he was as a registered securities broker, and that until he resigned January he worked as a financial wellness education director at MassMutual, officially known as Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.
“As far as MassMutual is concerned they were obviously totally at fault for not supervising him,” William F. Galvin, the secretary of the commonwealth, in an interview. “I mean, it was beyond a small matter of negligence. It was complete and thorough.”
Mr. Gill would regularly update his personal GameStop position publicly, posting his trades on Reddit under the recurring rubric of “GME YOLO Update.” But the settlement said that Mr. Gill also carried out nearly 1,700 trades in the accounts of three other people. What was being traded and the identities of the people were not disclosed.

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Robert Kaplan, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, made nearly two dozen stock trades of $1 million or more last year.Credit...Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press


The Federal Reserve is poised to overhaul the rules around what its officials are allowed to invest in and trade after disclosures last week showed that two of the central bank’s officials had been active in markets in 2020, drawing outcry.
Robert S. Kaplan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Eric Rosengren, the president of the Boston Fed, bought and sold stocks and real estate-tied assets last year.
Those transactions complied with Fed guidelines, but they involved securities that could have been affected by Fed decisions and communications during a year in which it was actively supporting a broad swathe of financial markets amid the pandemic. Policy researchers and even some former Fed employees were upset by the disclosures.
In response to the scrutiny, both regional presidents announced that they would sell their holdings and move them to cash and broad-based funds. Still, the episode highlighted that the Fed’s rules governing its officials’ financial activity — although in line with what much of the government uses, and in some cases stricter — allow for considerable individual discretion. The central bank said on Thursday that it will re-examine those policies at the direction of Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair.
“Because the trust of the American people is essential for the Federal Reserve to effectively carry out our important mission, Chair Powell late last week directed board staff to take a fresh and comprehensive look at the ethics rules around permissible financial holdings and activities by senior Fed officials,” a Fed spokesperson said in a statement.
“This review will assist in identifying ways to further tighten those rules and standards,” the spokesperson added. “The board will make changes, as appropriate, and any changes will be added to the Reserve Bank Code of Conduct.”
The statement came about an hour after Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, announced that she had sent letters to the Fed’s 12 regional banks urging them to adopt tougher restrictions.
“The controversy over asset trading by high-level Fed personnel highlights why it is necessary to ban ownership and trading of individual stocks by senior officials who are supposed to serve the public interest,” Ms. Warren wrote in the letters.

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Peter Rawlinson, the chief executive of Lucid Motors, with a Lucid Air.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

The Tesla Model S had previously been the car that could go the furthest on a charge.Credit...David Zalubowski/Associated Press


Lucid Motors, a start-up automaker, has unseated Tesla, the dominant maker of electric cars, as the producer of the electric vehicle that can travel farthest on a single charge.
Lucid’s top-of-the-line Air Dream Edition Range can drive 520 miles on a full battery, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday, beating by more than 100 miles the Tesla Model S Long Range, previously the car that could go the furthest on a charge.
How far electric cars can travel before they have to be plugged in — a metric known as their range — is important because the infrastructure for charging the vehicles is in its infancy, and filling up a battery can take hours depending on the car and charger.
President Biden and other world leaders want people to switch to electric vehicles to fight climate change. But that is unlikely to happen until the auto industry eases the fears that drivers will be left stranded with no plug in sight or will have to wait hours for their cars to refuel.
Until there are more fast-charging stations, automakers are trying to come up with electric cars that can go longer distances on a full battery. Tesla, which makes about two-thirds of electric vehicles sold in the United States, has long won that contest, producing several cars that can travel more than 300 miles without recharging. Many automakers have struggled to hit that threshold or go much beyond it.
Lucid and its chief executive, Peter Rawlinson, a former Tesla engineer, have said for months that their cars will go further than Teslas because they are more aerodynamic and use smaller, more efficient motors and other components. The E.P.A. provided official confirmation of those claims.
“Crucially, this landmark has been achieved by Lucid’s world-leading in-house E.V. technology, not by simply installing an oversize battery pack,” Mr. Rawlinson said in a statement.
Tesla is expected to soon face much more competition, including from Lucid and from Rivian, another start-up that is expected to begin delivering electric pickup trucks to customers this month. Traditional automakers such as General Motors and Volkswagen are also accelerating their efforts. Ford Motor is planning to sell an electric version of its F-150 pickup truck, the most popular vehicle in the United States, next spring.
But Lucid’s cars will occupy a luxurious niche in the market. The Air Dream Edition starts at $169,000 before federal and state incentives, though the company has said it will eventually offer more affordable versions of the Air, including one that will sell for about $77,000. The company is also working on a sport-utility vehicle.

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CF Fertiliser’s plant in Billingham, England. The company’s parent, CF Industries, said it would halt operations at two plants in Britain because of high prices of natural gas.Credit...Gregor Schmatz for The New York Times


Manufacturers in Britain have warned in recent weeks that soaring prices for natural gas would force them to shut down factories, and that prediction is now coming true.
CF Industries, a global producer of agricultural fertilizer, said late Wednesday it would halt operations at two plants in northern England because of high natural gas prices. The company said it did not know when production would resume.
CF uses large volumes of natural gas to produce hydrogen in a process that makes ammonia for fertilizers.
Wholesale prices for natural gas are at their highest in years, and have more than doubled since the spring. The main causes are a resurgence of global demand, especially in Asia, and worries that European countries are not putting enough fuel in storage to prepare for winter.
The jump in natural gas prices is in turn leading to very high electricity prices because the fuel is used at many power stations, putting pressure on both consumers and industry.
UKSteel, an industry group, said on Wednesday that its members were facing “extortionate” electric power prices and said that some steel makers were being forced to shut down during periods of extremely high rates.
On Wednesday, a fire that shut down a cable bringing electricity from France led to a further surge in electric power prices. Kent Fire and Rescue, which used as many as 12 fire engines to fight the blaze, said Thursday that firefighters had finished their work at the scene, and that cause of the fire had not been determined.
National Grid, Britain’s main electricity supplier, said the part of the cable damaged by the fire would be out of service until March. Another part of the cable was offline because of planned outage, and will be back online Sept. 27. Together, the cable can provide enough electricity to power two million homes.

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Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters


Nearly a decade ago, Lloyd Blankfein, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said he hoped to turn the elite investment bank into something akin to the Walmart of Wall Street.
The firm started a consumer-focused lending operation called Marcus and set a goal of generating at least $6 billion in annual revenue from lending activities by the end of 2020. It came up more than $1 billion short.
The head of Marcus, Omar Ismail, left the firm earlier this year to head a fintech company backed by Walmart, prompting some to say Walmart was more interested in becoming a bank than Goldman was interested in courting retail customers, the DealBook newsletter reports.
But Goldman isn’t ready to give up its consumer banking ambitions, as a new acquisition makes clear. On Wednesday, the bank announced that it would buy GreenSky, which arranges consumer loans for large purchases like home renovations or cosmetic surgery, for $2.2 billion in one of Goldman’s largest-ever acquisitions.
The “buy now, pay later” sector is hot right now, with Amazon, Square and others recently getting into the fast-growing market via deals and partnerships.
GreenSky, though, has struggled. It went public at a valuation of around $4 billion in 2018. In July, it paid a $2.5 million penalty to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for allowing retailers to take out loans for thousands of people who did not request them.
Goldman hopes that GreenSky will do better as part of one of the world’s largest financial firms. Making loans in-house with Goldman could give the service an advantage over its competitors, which rely on partner banks. But the jury is still out on whether the Wall Street stalwart can make meaningful inroads on Main Street.

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Three House Democrats on a key committee who voted down a measure that would link the prices of certain prescription drugs to those paid overseas on Wednesday could represent a significant barrier to passing a broader, big social spending bill.
The measure, which could still be put back in the final bill, could save the government around $500 billion over a decade, estimates suggest, with that money coming out of the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. But health industries are large and powerful lobbies, and they do not enjoy having their revenues cut, Margot Sanger-Katz reports for The New York Times.
Without the drug pricing provision, Democrats will have a tough time financing their other priorities, which include new coverage for poor Americans without insurance, extra subsidies for people who buy their own coverage and new dental, hearing and vision benefits for older Americans through Medicare.

























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~$150 are passing their bill using a special budget procedure to avoid a Republican filibuster. But that process means their bill has to hit specified budget targets. If the savings from drug price regulation are reduced, so, too, is the pot of money that can be spent on other goals. Democrats have already abandoned plans for some other revenue-generating policies, like a wealth tax.
Naturally, the pharmaceutical industry is not happy about the prospect of large price cuts. And lowering drug prices does come with trade-offs. READ THE ARTICLE →

In a nod to a popular internet meme, Codex generates a website for “a cat that’s an attorney,” providing a biography, a phone number and a small avatar.
“This is a tool that can make a coder’s life a lot easier.”
That’s the takeaway for one seasoned programmer about Codex, a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs built by OpenAI, one of the world’s most ambitious research labs.
Though a wide range of A.I. technologies have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, even the most impressive systems have ended up complementing human workers rather than replacing them, Cade Metz reports for The New York Times.
Codex can generate programs in 12 computer languages and even translate between them. But it often makes mistakes, and though its skills are impressive, it can’t reason like a human. It can recognize or mimic what it has seen in the past, but it is not nimble enough to think on its own.
Sometimes, the programs generated by Codex do not run. Or they contain security flaws. Or they come nowhere close to what you want them to do. OpenAI estimates that Codex produces the right code 37 percent of the time.
Tom Smith, who oversees an A.I. start-up called Gado Images, used the system as part of a “beta” test program this summer. He said the code it produced was impressive. But sometimes, it worked only if he made a tiny change, like tweaking a command to suit his particular software setup or adding a digital code needed for access to the internet service it was trying to query.
Codex may help experienced programmers do their everyday work a lot faster or help novices learn to code. READ THE ARTICLE →

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United Airlines, one of the first major companies to announce a vaccine mandate, said Thursday that nearly 90 percent of its employees were vaccinated, including more than 95 percent of management. The airline’s strict companywide vaccine requirement begins on Sept. 27.



U.S. stocks drifted in early trading Thursday, a day after the SP 500 logged its biggest gain in weeks. The index was slightly higher in early trading, while the Nasdaq composite was slightly lower.

Retail sales rose unexpectedly in August, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The 0.7 percent climb in sales last month comes after a 1.8 percent decline in July and gains earlier in the summer, highlighting an uneven pace for the economic recovery as spending behavior swings month to month.

Initial jobless claims in the United States rose by 20,000 to 332,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.

European stocks were higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.8 percent.

Oil prices fell slightly a day after crude oil futures jumped more than 3 percent. West Texas Intermediate futures were down 0.2 percent at $72.45.

Source: New York Times

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