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The World
America is running out of everything: The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive. This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022. The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage. (The Atlantic)
The number of workers in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is down roughly 30% from pre-COVID levels. Among the 22 biggest ports in the world, LA and Long Beach this year have experienced the longest turnaround times (how long it takes a ship to move through port), according to RBC's data. (Axios)
Just 180 more days until your oven arrives: Appliance delays cause havoc. Consumers stuck without refrigerators and stoves find creative solutions; ‘I didn’t think it would take this long’. (Wall Street Journal)
'Containergeddon': Supply crisis drives Walmart and rivals to hire their own ships. The Flying Buttress, a dry bulk cargo ship, has been drafted into the service of retail giant Walmart, which is chartering its own vessels in an effort to beat the global supply chain disruptions that threaten to torpedo the retail industry's make-or-break holiday season. (Reuters)
US special forces secretly training Taiwan’s military: The Pentagon has been sending special operations forces to Taiwan for several years to help the country prepare for a possible Chinese attack. People familiar with the deployments, which involve rotating special forces for short periods and not long-term missions, said the US was training Taiwanese forces partly in connection with that country’s purchase of arms, such as F-16 fighters, from the US. One person said the rotations had been occurring for at least a decade, and included US marines, army special forces and Navy seals. (Financial Times)
China’s bid to ‘weaponize trade’ crumbles as it turns to Australia despite ban. China has imported copper concentrate and cotton from Australia this year, despite imposing informal bans on the goods due to diplomatic tensions. (South China Morning Post)
Britain has accused President Putin of “choking off” the supply of gas to Europe to increase energy prices and win approval for a new gas pipeline. Ministers believe Russia is deliberately restricting gas exports as part of a strategy to force European Union nations into approving Nord Stream 2, a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. (The Times)
Russia accounted for most state-sponsored hacking detected by Microsoft over the past year, with a 58% share, mostly targeting government agencies and think tanks in the U.S., followed by Ukraine, Britain and European NATO members. (Associated Press, Microsoft)
Poland’s constitutional court ruled that Polish laws have supremacy over those of the European Union in areas where they clash, a decision likely to embolden the country’s right-wing government and worsen its already troubled relationship with the EU. (Associated Press)
Ireland finally abandoned its cherished 12.5% corporate tax rate and signed up to a minimum 15% global rate that will cost the country about €2bn in lost revenues. The new tax rate will affect 1,556 companies in Ireland employing 500,000 people, among them US tech giants such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. Ireland now joins 140 countries in agreeing to the effective levy of 15% on major multinationals ahead of today’s meeting of the OECD. (Financial Times)
President Biden said more U.S. businesses should obligate workers to receive COVID-19 vaccinations, calling the move vital to ending the pandemic and sustaining the economy. "Today I'm calling on more employers to act," Biden said. (Reuters)
IBM tells US staff they must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by December 8 or face an unpaid suspension, but will consider medical and religious exemptions. (CNBC)
Canada will place unvaccinated federal employees on unpaid leave and require COVID-19 shots for air, train and ship passengers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, as he unveiled one of the world's strictest vaccine mandate policies. (Reuters)
The Senate voted along party lines to raise the U.S. borrowing limit into December, after Democrats struck a short-term agreement with Republican leaders that averted a looming default for now but sets up another showdown within months. The key moment came earlier in the evening, when 11 Republicans joined all 50 Democrats in a vote to break the 60-vote filibuster threshold and proceed to final passage of the measure, which cleared the Senate 50 to 48, with two Republican absences. (Wall Street Journal)
Americans' trust in media dips to second lowest on record, edging down four percentage points since last year to 36%. (Gallup)
Economy
Hospital M&A in 2021 characterized by fewer but much larger deals: Hospitals are increasingly looking outside traditional care delivery methods threatened by COVID-19 to diversify business models by pursuing stakes in home health, virtual care and post-acute services. (Healthcare Dive)
Remote work has vastly improved the Black worker experience: A survey finds that Black employees in white collar jobs feel more valued and supported working from home. (Bloomberg)
Today’s trendy office aesthetic: Domestic touches have become popular in workplace design, further blurring the line between work and home. (The Atlantic)
The Mom Project, a job board for mothers, gets $80 million to grow. The company saw a surge of job seekers joining its platform in August, which it says suggests mothers are increasingly eager to return to work. (Wall Street Journal)
What’s a business district without all the business? Bloomberg News has been following along since June as six global cities take this circuitous route back to the office, and chronicling its impact on cities. Our most recent update paints a complicated picture of the return: Broadway is back in New York City and office occupancy is rising, while London’s triumphant return to work (and to buying sandwiches downtown) may be thwarted by fuel and labor shortages this winter. As far as workplace activity goes, San Francisco — with its preponderance of flexibility-focused tech companies — continues to lag. And new Covid restrictions implemented at the end of September have kept Singapore’s four-stage transition plan idling at step one. (City Lab)
As natural gas prices rise to record highs in Europe and Asia, so does the risk of economic damage. “The gas shortage is, first of all, symptomatic of broader trends in commodities of strong demand and supply underinvestment,” explains Damien Courvalin, head of energy in Goldman Sachs Research’s commodities team, on an episode of Exchanges at Goldman Sachs. Power demand has surged during the COVID recovery, but disruptions to gas supply and a lack of investment in recent years have left exceptionally low levels of inventory ahead of peak winter demand, portending a temporary (albeit likely to recur) boost to inflation and a damper on consumer incomes. “Ultimately, the real risk is the one we’re now seeing in China where, because of energy shortages, our economists had to reduce their year-on-year growth rate forecast by a percent for the end of ’21 and the beginning of 2022,” Courvalin says. “That’s the real risk to economic growth—not so much prices themselves, but really the point where you are just unable to generate electricity and you are forcing much lower economic growth.” (Goldman Sachs Podcast)
Technology
A chain of recent, devastating hacks is exposing some of the Internet’s most fiercely guarded secrets, stepping up a guerrilla struggle between tech firms and anonymous hackers and raising fears that everyday Internet users could get caught in the crossfire. Hackers this week dumped a colossal haul of data stolen from Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming site, revealing what they said was not just the million-dollar payouts for its most popular video game streamers but the site’s entire source code — the DNA, written over a decade, central to keeping the company alive. That followed the hack by the group Anonymous that exposed the most crucial inner workings of Epik, an Internet services company popular with the far right, and triggered firings and other consequences for some of the company’s clients whose identities had previously been undisclosed. (Washington Post)
Facebook’s U.S. brand reputation is on a steady downward slope, as whistleblower Frances Haugen adds to the pile of controversies that have engulfed the social media giant in recent years. But these scandals aren’t dragging down Facebook’s advertisers, and the platform is still boasting healthy favorability ratings abroad and usage metrics in the U.S. For Facebook, however, it’s not one imbroglio, but a constant drumbeat of scandals that has caused its reputation to slowly decline in the U.S. It’s not Haugen’s “60 Minutes” interview or congressional testimony that has received the most attention from consumers, but the outage that hit the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms on Monday. Two-thirds of U.S. adults said they heard about the outage “a lot” or “some,” compared to roughly half who said the same of Haugen’s allegations against Facebook. (Morning Consult)
Google and YouTube announced a new policy that prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments. It's one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation. (Axios)
NASA’s Perseverance rover finds signs of epic ancient floods on Mars. New results from the mission reveal that its landing site of Jezero Crater has a surprisingly dynamic and complex hydrologic history. The results show that 3.7 billion years ago, a river did indeed flow into this region at speeds of several meters per second, feeding a lake that filled the 45-kilometer-wide crater to depths as great as 100 meters in places. But the team’s analysis also revealed unexpected fluctuations in the lake’s depth, which appeared to occasionally rise or fall by several meters, possibly the result of seasonal variations. “There was a lake,” says co-leader Nicolas Mangold of the University of Nantes in France, “but the story is different than expected.” The most surprising characters in the story of Jezero so far were spied jutting from the delta’s fine-grained sediments: boulders more than a meter across that were worn round and smooth by long tumbles through Jezero’s river yet paradoxically too immense for any mere river to move. “They should not be there,” Mangold says. (Scientific American)
The moon didn’t die as early as we thought: Samples from China’s lunar lander could change everything we know about the moon’s volcanic record. (MIT Technology Review)
Smart Links
Tesla moving headquarters to Texas from California. (Los Angeles Times)
California bars forced non-disclosure clauses in severance agreements. (Reuters)
QR codes are a privacy problem — but not for the reasons you’ve heard. (Washington Post)
Samsung sees Q3 profit up 28% on chip demand, foldable phones. (Nikkei Asian Review)
UK House prices rise at fastest pace for 14 years. (The Times)
Andreessen Horowitz’s Haun: Competition for crypto equity deals ‘has intensified.’ (The Information)
At Salesforce, a CEO shift from Benioff to Taylor draws near. (The Information)
Melinda French Gates is teaming up with Flatiron Books to launch a female-focused imprint. (Elle)
Apple’s plan for cars: Using iPhone to control A/C, seats, radio, and more. (Bloomberg)