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The World
China’s heat wave is creating havoc for electric vehicle drivers: As a globally unprecedented heat wave continues to hold its grip on southern China, with the highest temperature as much as 113°F (45°C), severe droughts and shortages in the hydropower supply are wreaking havoc on the lives of residents. Electric vehicle owners are one group particularly feeling the heat. Since public charging posts are temporarily closed or restricted and many owners don’t have a private charging post, they’ve suddenly found themselves facing serious difficulties in powering their daily commutes. (MIT Technology Review)
Taiwan shoots at Chinese drone over outlying island for first time. Taipei seeks to balance assertive response against risk of sparking actual conflict. (Financial Times)
China stepped up its fight against the yuan’s weakness with a stronger-than-expected currency fixing for the sixth straight day. The People’s Bank of China set its daily reference rate for the yuan at 6.8906 per dollar, 177 pips stronger than the average forecast in a Bloomberg survey of analysts and traders. That’s after the PBOC set the yuan fixing at at 249 pips higher than estimated on Tuesday, marking the second strongest bias on record since the survey was initiated in 2018. (Bloomberg)
Pakistan: Food prices soar amid floods. Both the IMF and the UN have pledged emergency funds as flooding hits Pakistan's breadbasket. However, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal says recovery could cost more than $10 billion. (Deutsche Welle)
Russia plans to halt natural gas flows to Germany again. (New York Times)
Plug Hong Kong’s brain drain or Singapore will poach top talent and ‘shake’ regional financial status, human resources experts warn. Human resources experts say methods for attracting high-quality staff have been built up piecemeal and incentive schemes are not generous enough. Warning comes after Singapore announces new work visa rules from next January designed to woo foreign professionals (South China Morning Post)
Goldman Sachs will scrap most of its remaining Covid-19 restrictions for employees at its US offices as the Wall Street group looks to get more of its bankers back into the office. “With many tools including vaccination, improved treatments and testing now available, there is significantly less risk of severe illness,” Goldman told staff. (Financial Times)
Mississippi Will Tax Forgiven Student Debt in a Departure From Other States: Several states are moving ahead to exempt residents from being taxed on forgiven student loan debt under President Joe Biden’s relief plan, while Mississippi has decided against the exemption. New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, Hawaii, and Idaho are the latest states to exempt their residents that qualify under Biden’s plan from state income tax. Others—Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, and South Carolina—are still reviewing whether debt forgiveness will be subject to taxation. (Bloomberg)
Economy
US jobs openings and a consumer confidence gauge both topped forecasts, pointing to strength in household and labor demand that risks sustaining inflationary pressures and raises the prospects for a third straight 75 basis-point interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve. The Conference Board’s August index of sentiment rose to a three-month high, and the report also showed firmer buying plans for appliances and cars. Job vacancies, meanwhile, unexpectedly increased to 11.2 million in July, close to a record and underscoring persistent tightness in the labor market. (Bloomberg)
Stocks Drop for Third Straight Day; Dow Sinks 308 Points: The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each declined more than 1%, as a strong labor-market reading and brightening consumer confidence added to investors’ concerns about the likely pace of Fed rate increases. The two-year Treasury yield finished at its highest level since 2007, at 3.466%. (Wall Street Journal)
Inflation in Britain could top 22 per cent on the back of high energy costs next year, Goldman Sachs has warned, as new data showed that consumers are paying record prices in the shops. Inflation, which is already in double figures at 10.1 per cent, could more than double and peak at 22.4 per cent early next year if the Ofgem price cap rises by 80 per cent in January, the US investment bank said. The forecast is based on record natural gas prices, which have risen by 90 per cent this month alone. (The Times)
German inflation accelerated to a 40-year high of 8.8 per cent in the year to August, bolstering calls for the European Central Bank to accelerate the pace of interest rate rises when its policymakers meet next week. (Financial Times)
Bridgewater Associates opened an office in Singapore, strengthening billionaire Ray Dalio’s footprint in Asia. (Bloomberg)
Technology
In the years after Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, business boomed. Droves of readers bought digital subscriptions, and the newsroom roughly doubled in size, adding hundreds more journalists. But The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss. The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances. The Post now has fewer than the three million paying digital subscribers it had hailed internally near the end of 2020, according to several people at the organization. Digital ad revenue generated by The Post fell to roughly $70 million during the first half of the year, about 15 percent lower than in the first half of 2021. (New York Times)
Snap plans to lay off a fifth of its 6,500-strong workforce in a dramatic shake-up as the social media group battles a slump in advertising demand. The boom has turned this year into a deep and broad stock sell-off amid high inflation and a wider economic slowdown, forcing the biggest tech groups such as Meta and Google to freeze hiring and seek out other cost-cutting measures. (Financial Times)
A House of Representatives committee has asked five cryptocurrency exchanges—Coinbase, FTX, Binance.US, Kraken and KuCoin—to provide information on what the companies are doing to protect consumers from fraud and scams related to digital assets. (The Information)
CrowdStrike reports Q2 revenue up 58% YoY to $535.2M, subscription revenue up 60% YoY to $506.2M, and subscription customers up 51% YoY to 19,686. (MarketWatch)
Arizona governor arrives in Taiwan to meet president, TSMC execs. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Smart Links
Airlines braced for grim winter as economic slowdown threatens recovery. (Financial Times)
Wall Street West Is Booming in Aspen With New Crop of Elite Residents. (Bloomberg)
Home-Price Growth Decelerated in June. (Wall Street Journal)
US Army Grounds Entire Fleet of 400 Chinook Helicopters. (Bloomberg)
China's Communist Party congress to kick off Oct. 16 at 'crucial moment'. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Elon Musk’s $251 Billion Fortune Increasingly Hinges on SpaceX. (Bloomberg)