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Tag: industrial news

  • Housing market has hit ‘rock bottom,’ says Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman

    Housing market has hit ‘rock bottom,’ says Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman

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    Housing market has hit ‘rock bottom,’ says Redfin CEO

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  • Appeals court rules to restrict abortion-pill access, but it will remain widely available for now

    Appeals court rules to restrict abortion-pill access, but it will remain widely available for now

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    A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that access to the abortion pill mifepristone should be restricted, although the pill will remain widely available for now as the case moves through the appeals process.

    The opinion from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said that mifepristone should remain available but with increased restrictions, effectively barring patients from accessing the pill by mail.

    In…

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  • IRS says it’s catching more wealthy tax cheats and cutting phone wait times

    IRS says it’s catching more wealthy tax cheats and cutting phone wait times

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    It’s been one year since a law earmarked a massive cash infusion for the Internal Revenue Service, and the tax agency says it’s making a return on the investment.

    Now it has to sell that idea as the congressional budget process grinds on.

    Wednesday…

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  • JD.com Earnings Beat. Stock Can’t Escape China Gloom.

    JD.com Earnings Beat. Stock Can’t Escape China Gloom.

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    JD.com Posts Earnings Beat. But the Stock Can’t Shake the China Gloom.

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  • U.S. Steel Takeover Talk Rattles Manufacturers

    U.S. Steel Takeover Talk Rattles Manufacturers

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    U.S. Steel Takeover Talk Rattles Manufacturers

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  • J&J’s Kenvue Deal Could Be Too Popular. What Happens if It Is.

    J&J’s Kenvue Deal Could Be Too Popular. What Happens if It Is.

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    Johnson and Johnson


    $40 billion exchange offer for shares in


    Kenvue


    is likely to generate strong interest from the healthcare company’s shareholders, resulting in participants being able to swap only a portion of their J&J stock. 

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  • Hawaiian Electric’s stock slides 26% as S&P downgrades credit to junk on risk from Maui wildfire lawsuits

    Hawaiian Electric’s stock slides 26% as S&P downgrades credit to junk on risk from Maui wildfire lawsuits

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    Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc.’s stock added to losses Tuesday, tumbling 26% after S&P Global Ratings downgraded its rating on the utility company to junk.

    S&P Global Ratings cut its rating on the company HE to BB- and placed it on CreditWatch negative, meaning the rating agency could downgrade it again in the near term.

    The devastating…

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  • ‘Good news really is bad news’: Stocks hit a roadblock as strong retail sales reinforce soft-landing view

    ‘Good news really is bad news’: Stocks hit a roadblock as strong retail sales reinforce soft-landing view

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    Investors were jolted by a stronger-than-expected retail sales report on Tuesday, which underscores the dual-edged sword now facing markets.

    July’s 0.7% surge in retail sales is helping to bolster the view that a resilient U.S. economy can avoid a recession, despite more than a year of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. However, the data also serves as another piece of information that some policy makers can use to support even more hikes in the final four months of this year, and left the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield…

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  • J&J Investors Must Decide If They Want Kenvue Stock

    J&J Investors Must Decide If They Want Kenvue Stock

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  • Builder confidence falls for the first time in 2023, despite strong U.S. home-buying demand

    Builder confidence falls for the first time in 2023, despite strong U.S. home-buying demand

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    The numbers: Builder confidence waned in August as the 30-year mortgage rate surged, dampening U.S. home-buying interest.

    Despite a persistent shortage of homes on the market for resale, builders have lost confidence in the late summer amid declining customer traffic from higher mortgage rates, as well as challenges in the construction process.

    Mortgage…

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  • Donald Trump indicted in Georgia election-interference case

    Donald Trump indicted in Georgia election-interference case

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    Former President Donald Trump was criminally indicted by a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton County on Monday night in connection with a probe into his efforts to overturn the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election.

    The 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 of his associates, including Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser John Eastman, was handed to a judge in Atlanta around 9 p.m. Eastern after a daylong session by the Fulton County grand jury, and the details…

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  • How much would a strike cost the Big Three automakers? Wall Street thinks it has an answer.

    How much would a strike cost the Big Three automakers? Wall Street thinks it has an answer.

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    Wall Street got busy Monday calculating the impact of a strike on the Big Three automakers amid increasingly fraught labor negotiations between union workers and companies, and a  “greater likelihood” of a walkout next month.

    Also on Monday, President Joe Biden weighed in, urging the United Auto Workers and Ford Motor Co.
    F,
    +0.49%
    ,
    General Motors Co.
    GM,
    +0.53%

    and Stellantis NV
    STLA,

    to “to work together to forge a fair agreement.”

    Negotiations so far have been tense, and the contract expires in one month.

    Citi analyst Itay Michaeli estimated that a strike at GM lasting about two weeks impacting roughly about 100,000 vehicles would result in an impact of around $1.3 billion before interest and taxes; a five-week one, impacting about 280,000 vehicles, would result in a $3.4 billion impact EBIT. That would be a similar hit as GM’s 2019 strike, he said.

    Recent headlines are “pointing to increasingly challenging labor negotiations and a greater likelihood of a strike next month,” Michaeli said.

    A longer stoppage would result in shrinking dealer inventory and possibly start to impact sales sometime during the second half of October.

    For Ford, Michaeli calculated an impact of about $1.6 billion EBIT for a two-week strike affecting about 130,000 Ford vehicles, growing to $4 billion in the case of a five-week strike affecting 330,000 Ford cars and trucks. Like GM, sales would be hobbled roughly by mid-October in the case of a longer strike.

    “For both companies, the exact volume impact will in part depend on the extent of any Canada/Mexico downtime, and to that, GM appears somewhat better positioned than Ford due to GM’s higher exposure to Mexico production (including for pickup trucks) and other supply-chain considerations,” the analyst said in his note Monday.

    Both companies likely can keep their guidance intact in the case of a brief, one-week strike, but a strike beyond the two-week mark “likely triggers a [fiscal-year guidance] cut, though it would set 2024 up with reduced inventory and greater volume/price recovery prospects,” Michaeli said.

    A big question is whether a strike targets one specific automaker, as it was the case with GM in 2019, or all three at the same time — with more industry volume loss but also potentially a shorter strike, Michaeli said.

    “To that, Ford is generally viewed to be the least likely to be selected as a target,” he said.

    Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner said in his note Monday that he estimates an impact on earnings of about $400 million to $500 million for every week of production for each automaker, for a total of about $1.4 billion.

    GM’s 2019 strike lasted almost six weeks, with a loss of about $3.6 billion EBIT; GM North America lowered revenue estimates as nearly 300,000 fewer vehicles were delivered.

    Extrapolating the same $13,000 per unit in EBIT hit, Ford, GM and Stellantis could see [$550 million, $480 million, and $400 million] in weekly profit impact, reaching that $1.4 billion-a-week estimate, Rosner said.

    “In a bad-case scenario with 8 weeks of strike against all 3 automakers, which would bring the UAW strike fund to very low levels, this could cause $11.2 billion in lost profits for the [Detroit 3],” Rosner said. “While this is considerable, it would still be considerably less than the impact from the lifetime of the 4-year contract,” which would create “a permanent raise in the OEMs’ cost,” he said.

    The analyst also quantified the cost of UAW’s demands, focusing on the union’s “higher-probability asks” such as converting temporary employees into full-time workers, the elimination of a tiered-wage system, and about 40% base wage increase over the four years of the life of the contract. He left out “unlikely” to be met demands around pensions and post-retirement healthcare benefits.

    “Our analysis suggests accommodating these demands would likely constitute a large but not destructive headwind to OEMs’ earnings in year 1, with incremental costs stepping up even further in subsequent years,” Rosner said in the note.

    If these demands are granted with cost-of-living raises on top, Rosner estimated costs to all three automakers around $3.6 billion in the first year of the contract, amounting to $23 billion in total for the four years, “with highest hit to Stellantis, followed by GM and then Ford.”

    “Specifically, we estimate that the conversion of temporary employees to full-time workers would cost D3 a total of $1.4 billion, not yet factoring in wage increases, with the highest impact to Stellantis given the higher [percentage] of temporary employees used currently relative” to GM and Ford, the analyst said.

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  • Exor Buys 15% Stake in Philips

    Exor Buys 15% Stake in Philips

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    By Joe Hoppe

    Exor and Royal Philips jointly said that they have entered a relationship agreement, with Exor picking up a 15% stake in Philips for an undisclosed sum, but worth around 2.58 billion euros ($2.82 billion).

    Investment company Exor, which holds stakes in a number of companies such as car makers Ferrari and Stellantis, said Monday that its investment is fully supportive of Dutch health-technology company Philips’ leadership, strategy and value creation potential, and gives it the ability to nominate one member to Philips’ supervisory board.

    As of Friday’s closing, Philips had a market cap of around EUR17.18 billion.

    Exor said it was committed to being a long-term minority investor, and while it doesn’t plan to buy more shares in Philips in the short-term, over time the agreement allows for Exor to increase its participation to a maximum limit of 20% of Philips’ outstanding share capital.

    “Exor’s investment in Philips, their long-term outlook and increased focus on healthcare and technology, fit well with our strategy and substantial value creation potential,” Philips Chief Executive Roy Jakobs said.

    Write to Joe Hoppe at joseph.hoppe@wsj.com

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  • Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg: The stupidest story of the summer appears over

    Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg: The stupidest story of the summer appears over

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    The stupidest story of the summer may be over. Finally, mercifully.

    Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire and chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc.
    META,
    -1.34%
    ,
    on Sunday appeared to pull the grown-up card — or at least the less-immature card — to scuttle a cage fight with Elon Musk, the even richer billionaire, Tesla Inc.
    TSLA,
    -1.10%

    CEO and X owner.

    From the start, it was a story that appeared to live mostly in Musk’s imagination. Yet it still sparked a media frenzy, as the prospect of two emotionally stunted billionaires publicly pummeling each other was not without some appeal.

    But the proposed MMA-style fight apparently met its demise the same way it was born — through a lot of online bluster.

    Weeks after proposing the fight, then resorting to multiple delaying tactics while noting how out of shape and unprepared he was, Musk apparently reached out to Zuckerberg over the weekend asking for a “practice bout” first.

    Author and journalist Walter Isaacson — who is currently writing a biography of Musk — tweeted a text exchange Sunday that he said Musk had sent him.

    “Wanna do a practice bout at your house next week?” a text apparently from Musk reads. The reply, purportedly from Zuckerberg: “If you still want to do a real MMA fight, then you should train on your own and let me know when you’re ready to compete. I don’t want to keep hyping something that will never happen, so you should either decide you’re going to do this and do it soon, or we should move on.”

    In real news: Tesla cuts prices for some Model Y versions in China, as price war ramps back up

    Zuckerberg later posted a more public burn on Meta’s Threads — the Twitter/X rival that sparked this whole thing to begin with — saying: “I think we can all agree that Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on…If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

    It was unclear what the two billionaires now plan to do with their spare time, if not fight each other.

    In completely unrelated news, fellow mega-billionaire and Amazon.com Inc.
    AMZN,
    -0.11%

    founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée announced a $100 million donation Friday to Maui wildfire relief efforts.

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  • SoftBank looking to buy remaining 25% stake in Arm from its Vision Fund: report

    SoftBank looking to buy remaining 25% stake in Arm from its Vision Fund: report

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    SoftBank Group Corp. is reportedly in discussions to purchase the 25% stake in chip designer Arm Ltd. that is held by its Vision Fund 1, ahead of a highly anticipated IPO.

    Reuters reported Sunday that Japan’s SoftBank
    9984,
    +0.37%

    — which owns 75% of Arm — is negotiating a deal with VF1, the $100 billion investment fund it created in 2017, and noted that a deal could give VF1 investors a big boost after years of meager returns. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co. are among VF1’s largest investors.

    SoftBank is planning to launch a long-awaited initial public offering for British chip designer Arm as soon as September. That will likely be the biggest IPO of the year on Wall Street, aiming to raise $8 billion to $10 billion at a valuation around $60 billion to $70 billion.

    A number of large tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc.
    AMZN,
    -0.11%
    ,
    Intel Corp.
    INTC,
    +0.61%

    and Nvidia Inc.
    NVDA,
    -3.62%
    ,
    are reportedly in the mix to be anchor investors in Arm’s IPO.

    Last week, SoftBank reported its tech-heavy Vision Funds turned a quarterly profit for the first time in 18 months

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  • Want companies to lower their prices? Stop buying stuff from them.

    Want companies to lower their prices? Stop buying stuff from them.

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    The thing that will make companies lower prices is if consumers stop complaining about paying more for the things they need and want, and actually start refusing to buy them.

    As the U.S. corporate earnings-reporting season progresses, with earnings from major retailers Walmart Inc.
    WMT,
    +0.59%
    ,
    Target Corp.
    TGT,
    +0.10%

    and Home Depot Inc.
    HD,
    +0.52%

    on tap next week, investors can get a ground-floor view of how consumer demand may have been hurt, or not, by higher prices, and what the companies plan to do, or not do, about it.

    This dynamic of how consumers adjust their spending habits when prices change is referred to by economists as the price elasticity of demand.

    For companies to cut prices, ‘you have to have the consumer go on strike, and they’re not there yet.’


    — Jamie Cox, Harris Financial Group

    Those who trust companies will choose to ratchet down prices on their own, or at least not raise them because the rise in input costs has been slowing, haven’t been listening to what the many companies have told analysts on their post-earnings-report conference calls.

    Read: U.S. inflation eases again, PCE shows. Prices rise at slowest pace in almost two years.

    Kraft Heinz Co.
    KHC,
    +0.47%

    acknowledged after its second-quarter report that its relatively higher prices have hurt demand, but not by enough for the food and condiments company to consider cutting prices.

    Colgate-Palmolive Co.
    CL,
    +0.81%

    said it will continue to raise prices, even as inflation slows and selling volume declines, as the consumer-products company continues to be laser focused on boosting margins and profits.

    And while PepsiCo Inc.
    PEP,
    +0.16%

    was worried that elasticities would increase, given how its lower-income customers were being particularly pressured by inflation, the beverage and snack giant reported strong results as it witnessed “better elasticities” in most of the markets in which it operated.

    “Obviously, there is still carryover pricing, and I don’t think we’ll do anything different than our normal cycles on pricing in the balance of the year,” PepsiCo Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston told analysts, according to an AlphaSense transcript.

    Basically, as MarketWatch has reported, so-called greedflation is alive and well.

    Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group, said as long as the job market stays strong, as it is now, corporate greed will continue to pay off.

    “If something is more expensive, and you have a job, you’ll complain about it, but you won’t substitute it for something cheaper,” Cox said. For companies to cut prices, “you have to have the consumer go on strike, and they’re not there yet,” Cox added.

    ‘At some point, people are going to say, “All right — enough.” ’


    — Paul Nolte, Murphy & Sylvest Wealth Management

    The reason elasticity is so important in the current environment is that, as long as consumers continue to pay the higher prices companies are charging, inflation will remain stubbornly high, making it, in turn, more likely that the Federal Reserve will continue to raise interest rates or, at the very least, not lower them.

    But the longer interest rates stay high enough to crimp economic growth, the more likely the stock market will reverse lower as recession fears rise.

    “At some point, people are going to say, ‘All right — enough,’ ” said Paul Nolte, senior wealth manager and market strategist at Murphy & Sylvest Wealth Management. “But we just haven’t seen that yet.”

    What is elasticity?

    Economists use the term “price elasticity of demand” to refer to the way in which consumers adjust their spending habits when prices change.

    “Elasticity tries to measure how much more producers will want to produce if prices rise, and how much more consumers will want to buy if prices fall,” explained Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica.

    Elasticity often depends on the type of product a company sells.

    For example, consumer-discretionary-goods companies that sell products and services that people want will often experience greater price elasticity than consumer-staples companies that sell things that people need, such as groceries and prescription drugs.

    But even for needs, consumers often still have a choice, as less expensive generic, or private-label, alternatives may be available.

    Andre Schulten, chief financial officer of consumer-staples maker Procter & Gamble Co.
    PG,
    +0.58%
    ,
    which recently beat earnings expectations as it continued to raise prices, telling analysts that, while there was “some trading into private label,” the overall market share of private-label products was unchanged for the year.

    As Harris Financial’s Cox said, consumers may be complaining about higher prices, but they aren’t yet desperate enough to stop buying.

    The Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book economic survey stated that business contacts in some districts had observed a “reluctance” to raise prices as consumers appeared to have grown more sensitive to prices, but other districts reported “solid demand” allowed companies to maintain prices and profitability.

    That’s likely why companies and analysts have become less concerned about price elasticity. Based on a FactSet analysis, mentions of the word “elasticity” in press releases and conference calls of S&P 500 companies
    SPX
    increased as inflation and interest rates started surging in early 2022 through the end of the year.

    With inflation trends softening this year, the Fed took a brief pause in raising rates in June, helping fuel further stock-market gains, before raising rates again in July.

    Mentions of the word elasticity in earnings press releases and conference-call transcripts of S&P 500 companies.


    FactSet

    As the chart shows, “elasticity” popped up in more than 55% of earnings releases and conference calls in mid-2022, but with the second-quarter 2023 earnings-reporting season more than half over, mentions had dropped to about 20%.

    Perhaps that will pick up, as retailers, especially those catering to lower-income customers — recall the PepsiCo comment — assess the demand impact of continued price increases.

    Meanwhile, the branded-foods company Conagra Brands Inc.
    CAG,
    +0.71%
    ,
    whose wide-ranging food brands including Birds Eye, Duncan Hines, Hunt’s, Orville Redenbacher’s and Slim Jim, were starting to see the emergence of a different dynamic.

    Chief Executive Sean Connolly said consumers were shifting behavior in some categories as prices remained high. Rather than trade down to lower-priced alternatives, he noticed some consumers buying fewer items overall, “more of a hunkering down than a trading down.”

    That’s exactly the kind of consumer behavior that is needed, if companies are to stop feeding into the greedflation phenomenon and to start pulling back on prices.

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  • How U.S. and China Are Breaking Up, in Charts

    How U.S. and China Are Breaking Up, in Charts

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    A deepening confrontation between the U.S. and China is eroding trade ties between the world’s two largest economies, with goods from China accounting for the smallest percentage of U.S. imports in 20 years.

    Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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  • Why have frozen fruit and vegetable prices soared by almost 12% — but the cost of fresh produce has not?

    Why have frozen fruit and vegetable prices soared by almost 12% — but the cost of fresh produce has not?

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    What’s going on with frozen fruit and vegetables?

    Food prices rose 0.2% on the month in July after remaining unchanged in June, and they rose 4.9% on the year, while the cost of food at home rose 3.6% on the year, government data released Thursday showed. Prices of fresh fruits and vegetables rose just 1.2% year over year.

    However, there were some big — even alarming — outliers: Frozen fruit and vegetable prices increased by 11.8% in July over last year, frozen vegetable prices rose 17.1% and frozen noncarbonated juice and drink prices rose 16.3%.

    Those price rises are at odds with overall inflation figures. U.S. consumer prices rose to 3.2% in July from 3% in the prior month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week. It was the first increase in 13 months.  

    Why have the prices of frozen fruits and vegetables shot up over the past 12 months, while the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables has increased so little? 

    Climate change and extreme weather conditions — from heavy rainfall to drought, particularly in California — have led to big problems for farmers. This has been compounded by issues related to the war in Ukraine and an ongoing increase in the cost of labor, experts said.

    As a result, a large proportion of the fruits and vegetables grown were destined to be sold as fresh produce — which led to a shortage of ingredients for frozen goods, said Brad Rubin, sector manager at Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. “Because of the late crop, lots of produce is being pushed to the fresh market to keep up with demand,” he said.

    California weather

    California has experienced some drastic weather conditions over the last 12 months. Some 78 trillion gallons of water fell in California during winter 2022 and early spring 2023, according to data from the National Weather Service, delaying planting. And all that snow and rain was followed by a months-long drought in the region.

    What happens in California is felt by consumers across the country. 

    “California produces nearly half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables,” according to estimates from the Sciences College of Agriculture, Food & Environmental Sciences at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. “California is the only state in the U.S. to export the following commodities: almonds, artichokes, dates, dried plums, figs, garlic, kiwifruit, olives, pistachios, raisins and walnuts,” it says.

    The subsequent price rises hit ingredients like strawberries and raspberries especially hard, Rubin added. Inventories of frozen berries are “near five-year lows” after winter storms in Watsonville flooded agricultural fields, damaging and delaying the strawberry crop. Most of the strawberries in the U.S. are grown in California. 

    Labor costs

    Frozen fruits and vegetables have a longer supply chain than fresh produce, which can make them more vulnerable to disruptions in inventory, experts say. Rising energy prices are also pushing up the cost of cold storage. 

    In addition to those issues, U.S. farmers are dealing with increased labor costs and fewer migrant workers, partly due to changes in government policies and the closure of borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a February 2023 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. 

    “Immigration has traditionally provided an important contribution to the U.S. labor force,” the report said. “The flow of immigrants into the United States began to slow in 2017 due to various government policies, then declined further due to border closures in 2020-21 associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline in immigration has had a notable effect on the share of immigrants in the U.S. labor force.”

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also continues to affect agricultural production in the U.S., said Curt Covington, senior director of institutional business at AgAmerica Lending, a financial-services company providing agricultural loans. Because the war disrupted supplies of commodities like wheat and corn — also pushing up prices for those goods — farmers have been prioritizing planting those crops over vegetables. 

    “These escalating frozen-vegetable prices present a challenge for farmers as they grapple with increased production costs and labor pressures,” and that presents a long-term challenge for farmers, “potentially impacting their profitability,” Covington said. 

    All of these factors — from international supply chains to extreme weather conditions — will have an effect on the cost of frozen goods in U.S. supermarkets. Ultimately, experts said, consumers will end up paying the price.

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  • Regulators open floodgates for driverless taxis in San Francisco, whether they’re wanted or not

    Regulators open floodgates for driverless taxis in San Francisco, whether they’re wanted or not

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    State regulators on Thursday opened the floodgates for more robotaxis on the streets of San Francisco.

    After a contentious, seven-hour meeting, the California Public Utilities Commission — which oversees taxis and autonomous vehicles, among things — approved two resolutions to broadly expand driverless taxi service from Alphabet’s
    GOOG,
    +0.05%

    GOOGL,
    +0.02%

    Waymo and GM’s
    GM,
    -5.79%

    Cruise.

    On a pair of 3-1 votes, regulators approved allowing Waymo and Cruise to offer fared driverless rides across San Francisco, at all hours of the day, with an unlimited number of vehicles.

    While the driverless vehicles are already ubiquitous on city streets, San Francisco is now set to become the first U.S. city with two fleets of robotaxis that will be able to fully compete with taxis and ride-hailing services.

    “Today’s permit marks the true beginning of our commercial operations in San Francisco,” Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, said in a blog post.  “We’re incredibly grateful for this vote of confidence from the CPUC, and to the communities and riders who have supported our service.” 

    Waymo said it expects “incredibly high demand,” and will be expanding its robotaxi service incrementally.

    Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said he was “thrilled” by the votes. “It’s a huge milestone for the AV industry, but even more importantly a signal to the country that CA prioritizes progress over our tragic status quo,” he tweeted.

    The expansion was opposed by San Francisco city officials, who say autonomous-driving technology is not ready for prime time, and that the companies need to be more transparent in how they operate. On Wednesday, the city’s fire department released details of 55 incidents so far this year where driverless cars interfered in emergency scenes.

    Read more: Driverless cars are driving San Francisco crazy — ‘They are not ready for prime time’

    That’s just the tip of the iceberg: Jeffrey Tumlin, the head of San Francisco’s transportation agency, told MarketWatch in July that the city was seeing “up to 90 incidents per month … of varying degrees, some are minor, some are major obstructions.” Those included instances of autonomous cars stopping in the middle of traffic, crashes and other driving hazards.

    While acknowledging the positives of driverless technology — which its advocates say is much safer than human drivers — Tumlin said the city would like a more gradual expansion of autonomous cars, with limitations, like the next level of a “learner’s permit.”

    Regulation of autonomous vehicles, however, is up to the state.

    The PUC meeting had been delayed twice, and Thursday’s meeting featured public comment from more than 150 people voicing their opinions on both sides of the issue.

    PUC Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma was the sole dissenter on Thursday’s votes, which were absent one member. She told the hearing that there was no rush to make a decision, and advocated delaying the vote again. She noted that Cruise and Waymo claim to have maintained a good safety record, but that there were discrepancies about the data submitted to regulators. “Passengers should not be endangered, first responders should not be prevented from doing their jobs,” she said.

    Alice Reynolds, the president of the CPUC, argued that this was an incremental approval, echoing comments by Commissioner John Reynolds, a former managing counsel at Cruise who did not recuse himself from voting, that the California DMV has already given the companies a permit to operate.

    “We do expect the autonomous-vehicle companies to engage with first responders,” Reynolds said. “In the meantime the resolutions before us to meet our requirements.”

    Teamsters vice president Peter Finn blasted the decision, saying it was “irresponsible and shows a complete disregard for public safety.”

    “Public safety decisions should not be made by regulatory bodies that are in the pocket of Big Tech,” Finn said in a statement, adding that the Teamsters support pending state legislation that would require a trained human operator in autonomous vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds, which would include most trucks.

    A number of companies have autonomous cars driving on San Francisco streets, but only Cruise and Waymo had been approved for taxi service, with limitations. Earlier this week, the two companies disclosed how many driverless vehicles they operate in San Francisco: Cruise runs 100 vehicles during the day and 300 at night, while Waymo has 250 robotaxis operating.

    That number could soon grow significantly.

    Cruise’s Vogt said in an earnings call last month that Cruise could add “several thousand” robotaxis to San Francisco in an effort to create a disruptive service resembling Uber.

    Therese Poletti contributed to this report.

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  • Lidar Is Coming of Age. Investors Can Begin to Compare the Companies.

    Lidar Is Coming of Age. Investors Can Begin to Compare the Companies.

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    Lidar Is Coming of Age. Investors Can Begin to Compare the Companies.

    The market for lidar, a key technology for self-driving cars, is maturing, making it possible for investors to start to differentiate between the companies and their stocks.

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