What You Need to Know Today
LaborAmericans With Four-Year Degrees Now a Record 25% of Unemployed WorkersThe milestone comes amid a raft of high-profile mass firings by companies like Amazon, Target and Starbucks.
A frenzied, AI-fueled rally in Oracle stock briefly made Larry Ellison the world’s richest person in September. But that is now very old news. A prolonged slump since then has seen the tech giant give up all those gains and more, delivering a $130 billion hit to Ellison’s net worth. Oracle’s swoon has vaulted Alphabet co-founder Larry Page past Ellison and into the number two spot.
Page, who served two stints as Google’s chief executive before it was restructured as Alphabet, now has a net worth of $256.9 billion, his highest total ever. He still trails Elon Musk’s $421.8 billion, while Ellison slipped to third place with $253.3 billion. See the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for who else is at the top of the pile.
Bloomberg OpinionICE Raids on Charlotte Met With Silence By Bank of AmericaThe reaction by residents of North Carolina’s largest city to federal paramilitary dragnets has been empathetic and broad. The reaction by the region’s largest employers? Notably silent.
More bad news arrived on Friday for President Donald Trump and the wavering US economy. As far as Americans are concerned, the future of their wallets is looking glum. With inflation having hit 3% and unemployment rising to 4.4%, the third part of the troubled trifecta, US consumer sentiment, has fallen to one of the lowest levels on record.
The final November sentiment index dropped to 51 from 53.6 in October, according to the University of Michigan. Views of personal finances were the dimmest since 2009. Data from the survey along with studies by private companies have become more useful of late, as federal agencies once renown for their “gold standard” in economic data have become unreliable.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the US Department of Labor, said it is canceling its October consumer price index report because it was unable to retroactively obtain some data it says wasn’t collected during the government shutdown. The November CPI report will now be published Dec. 18—after the Federal Reserve’s last meeting of the year.
This marks the first time the agency has forgone publishing a monthly CPI report, according to decades of archived news releases back to 1994. While past shutdowns delayed publication of economic data, until now the BLS hasn’t failed to produce a major report. The announcement follows the BLS’s decision to cancel the October employment report for what it contends are similar data collection issues.
The lack of data from the Trump administration means the $7 trillion market for securities linked to US inflation will employ backup mechanisms for the first time. Missing official data triggers contingency plans written into legal documentation decades ago, with the added wrinkle that the bond and derivatives markets use different fallbacks. —David E. Rovella
