Live Business News: Stocks, Markets and Inflation
14 min readDaily Business Briefing
June 9, 2021, 12:37 p.m. ET
June 9, 2021, 12:37 p.m. ET
That burrito fix is going to get a bit more expensive.
Executives at the fast-food chain Chipotle said on Tuesday that they had raised menu prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of the increased employee wages.
In May, in an effort to hire 20,000 employees in the tight labor market, Chipotle said it was raising wages and would pay workers from $11 to $18 an hour.
Those higher labor costs will bring higher food prices. “We really prefer not to” raise prices, Chipotle’s chief executive, Brian Niccol, said Tuesday at the Baird Global Consumer, Technology and Services conference. “But it made sense in this scenario to invest in our employees and get these restaurants staffed, and make sure we had the pipeline of people to support our growth.”
Job openings in the United States surged to record levels in April, the Labor Department said on Tuesday, the latest sign that businesses were struggling to hire workers as the economy reopens. Employers added hundreds of thousands of jobs in May, but the road to recovery for the labor market is bumpy.
The labor market has forced other restaurant chains to increase wages to attract job candidates. That’s a stark contrast from earlier this year, when Congress was debating raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the restaurant industry argued such a move would imperil the economic recovery.
But Chris Kempczinski, the chief executive of McDonald’s, said on a call with Wall Street analysts in January that the company was doing “just fine” in the more than two dozen states that had phased in higher minimum wages. In May, McDonald’s said it was raising hourly wages for current employees by an average of 10 percent and that the entry-level wage for new employees would rise to $11 to $17 an hour, based on the location of the restaurant. The pay increases apply only to its 650 company-owned restaurants; the vast majority of its nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States are independently owned.
Even with the price increases, Chipotle executives argued that the price of their food items remained reasonable. Excluding higher-priced markets like New York, the price of a chicken burrito remains below $8, Mr. Niccol noted, and that a price increase of 3 to 4 percent equates to “quarters and dimes that we’re layering in.”
Royal Dutch Shell will respond to a recent defeat in a Dutch court by accelerating its efforts to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, the company’s leader said Wednesday.
Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Shell, said that he was “disappointed” by the ruling requiring the oil company, Europe’s largest, to move faster in slashing greenhouse gases, but added that the company was planning to do just that.
“For Shell, this ruling does not mean a change but rather an acceleration of our strategy,” Mr. van Beurden said in an article published on LinkedIn. “We will seek ways to reduce emissions even further in a way that remains purposeful and profitable,” he added.
On May 26, the District Court in The Hague ruled that Shell must reduce its global net carbon emissions by 45 percent, by 2030 compared with 2019. The court said that Shell owed a duty of care to the citizens of the Netherlands, where the company has its headquarters, to protect them from the consequences of global warming like rising sea levels.
Mr. van Beurden said his first reaction to the ruling was “surprise” because Shell had been in the forefront among oil majors in setting out targets to reduce emissions including those of the customers who burn the company’s products in their cars or jet engines. He also said that if Shell decided to stop selling gasoline and diesel today, people would just turn to other providers for fuel. “It would not help the world one bit,” he said.
Mr. van Beurden said that Shell still expected to appeal the judgment.
After reflection, though, Mr. van Beurden said he and his colleagues also felt “a determination to rise to the challenge” posed by the court.
The Shell executives may have realized that the ruling is a harbinger of increased pressures to come and that Shell, which has a long history dating to the 19th century, needs to do more on climate change if it wants to thrive in future decades.
President Biden on Wednesday revoked a Trump-era executive order that sought to ban the popular apps TikTok and WeChat and replaced it with one that calls for a broader review of a number of foreign-controlled applications that could pose a security risk to Americans and their data.
The Trump-era order had not been carried out “in the soundest fashion,” administration officials said in a call with reporters on Wednesday, adding that the new directive would establish “clear intelligible criteria” to evaluate national security risks posed by software applications connected to foreign governments, particularly China.
Mr. Biden’s order will bolster recent actions the Biden administration has taken to curb the growing influence of Chinese technology companies, and it is the first significant step Mr. Biden has taken to address a challenge left for him by President Donald J. Trump, whose administration last year fought to ban TikTok and force its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. TikTok, with an estimated 100 million U.S. users, fought back, suing the Trump administration over the impending ban in federal court.
In September, the Trump administration followed through with another executive order banning operations of TikTok and WeChat, the popular messaging service owned by Tencent. A judge granted an injunction of the Trump order, giving TikTok a lifeline until November.
At the same time, th
e Trump administration took on the role of dealmaker. It said TikTok could maintain U.S. operations only if it sold itself to a U.S. company and shed all Chinese-based infrastructure and ties. After rushed bids and jockeying by tech giants, Oracle and Walmart won their bid to buy a stake in the company for an undisclosed amount. Mr. Trump then rejected the deal that his administration had orchestrated.
TikTok’s woes subsided with Mr. Trump’s election defeat. Though the company is still under scrutiny with the Biden administration’s new executive order, analysts say the dramatic ups and downs for the company will significantly subside.
James Lewis, a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration has shown no easing of the government’s strong stance against China. But the new executive order lays out much more precise criteria for weighing risks posed by TikTok and other companies owned by foreign adversaries like China.
“They are taking the same direction as the Trump administration but in some ways tougher, in a more orderly fashion and implemented in a good way,” Mr. Lewis said.
On Wednesday, administration officials would not go into specifics about the future of TikTok’s availability to American users or say whether the United States government would seek to compel ByteDance to transfer American user data to a company based in the United States. Amid a number of successful legal challenges waged by ByteDance, a deal to transfer the data to Oracle fell through this year shortly after Mr. Biden took office.
Administration officials said that a review of TikTok by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body that considers the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, was still continuing and separate from the order.
Several apps, including TikTok, WeChat, and AliPay, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Biden’s order was meant to broaden one issued in 2019 by the Trump administration, which banned American telecommunications companies from installing foreign-made equipment that could pose a threat to national security. That order did not name specific companies, nor did the one Mr. Biden issued on Wednesday. The new directive also does not mention specific retaliatory measures that could be taken if an application is found to be a threat to national security.
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Lordstown Motors, an electric vehicle start-up that aimed to revive a shuttered General Motors factory in Ohio, said on Tuesday that it did not have enough cash to start commercial production of its electric pickup truck and might have to close its doors. In a regulatory filing, Lordstown said it would not be able to begin “commercial scale production” without raising more money from investors and lenders. It added that there was “substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern” — a legal phrase companies often use to alert investors that they might not survive.
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Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in pursuit of a novel effort to have Google declared a public utility and subject to government regulation. The lawsuit seeks to use a law that’s more than a century old to regulate Google by applying a legal designation historically used for railroads, electricity and the telephone to the search engine. If Google were declared a so-called common carrier like a utility company, it would prevent the company from prioritizing its own products, services and websites in search results.
Small-business owners were hit hard by the pandemic. But they are still feeling pretty optimistic, according to a new survey of 10,000 businesses conducted by Goldman Sachs and reported first by DealBook.
That positive outlook comes even as entrepreneurs stare down three big concerns:
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Inflation. Eighty-two percent of small-business owners are concerned about inflation, and 83 percent have experienced an increase in operating costs in the past few months.
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Hiring. Seventy-one percent of small businesses are hiring full-time or part-time employees, and 81 percent of those hiring say they are finding it difficult to recruit qualified candidates. (Why is it so hard to hire right now? Reasons include coronavirus fears, low wages, child care issues and expanded unemployment benefits.)
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Access to capital. The majority of small businesses that took a rescue loan from the Small Business Administration (82 percent) expect to exhaust their funding this summer, and less than a quarter are very confident that they will be able to maintain payroll without additional government relief. “If you have a bad financial statement from last year, which most do, you’re not able to qualify for an S.B.A. loan,” said Joe Wall, a managing director of government affairs at Goldman Sachs. “So that’s the immediate crisis that we see coming.”
Even with those worries, 67 percent of business owners think things are moving in the right direction. “People aren’t wearing their masks,” Mr. Wall said, a sign that vaccinations have helped business conditions improve, especially compared with this time last year. “So I think there’s a reason for them to be optimistic.”
A new bill being introduced on Wednesday will try to ensure that money promised to charity gets to the people who need it more quickly.
The bill, from Senators Angus King of Maine and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, would try to prevent money from being marooned indefinitely in donor-advised funds, which are akin to 401(k)s for philanthropy but have few regulations or requirements. More than $140 billion sits in these accounts. Another $1 trillion resides in endowments of private foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which are required to pay out only 5 percent of their assets each year, Nicholas Kulish reports for The New York Times.
The bill would close a loophole to speed giving to working charities: Foundations would no longer be able to meet the 5 percent annual payout requirement by giving to a donor-advised fund where there currently is no payout requirement. The bill also would prohibit foundations from counting the salaries or travel expenses of a donor’s family members toward the 5 percent minimum.
The proposed legislation would require that a donor who wants the full tax benefit right away would have to ensure that the funds are dispensed within 15 years. It does include a significant carve out for community foundations, which often support local institutions in smaller cities and towns across the United States. Under the bill, any donor could keep up to $1 million in a community foundation without falling under proposed new payout rules.
Stocks on Wall Street drifted higher on Wednesday and European shares were mixed, as traders awaited more data on inflation.
With an early gain of about 0.2 percent, the S&P 500 briefly climbed above its May 7 record in early trading.
Momentum in the stock market has stalled recently as investors try to gauge whether consumer price increases are temporary hiccups as businesses reopen and welcome consumers ready to spend or if the increases point to persistent problems, which central banks will have to address by easing stimulus measures.
A big jump in prices was reported in China on Wednesday, as the government said that prices charged by factories, farmers and other producers had soared 9 percent in May compared with a year earlier, when the pandemic held down expenses. But consumers remain largely unaffected: China’s Consumer Price Index was only 1.3 percent higher in May than a year earlier.
More light will be shed on Thursday, when the closely watched U.S. Consumer Price Index is released with the latest figures for May. Its previous monthly report showed prices rising at the fastest rate in a decade.
Ahead of that report, yields on U.S. government bonds fell, reflecting easing concerns in the bond market. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes dropped below 1.5 percent.
Also on Thursday, the European Central Bank will weigh in on this debate, as it will announce whether it will continue its accelerated pace of buying up bonds, a tool to reduce the cost of borrowing in the eurozone economy.
West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, rose above $70 a barrel, to its highest level in more than two and a half years. Analysts at ING pointed out a drop in oil inventories in the United States helped push the price higher. They also noted that the State Department had eased its pandemic travel warnings for a number of countries.
Last year, a Pennsylvania man amassed thousands of followers on Twitter by impersonating relatives of former President Donald J. Trump. In November, he even duped Mr. Trump, who messaged the man “LOVE!” while thinking he was writing to one of his sisters.
The New York Times later identified the man as Josh Hall, a 21-year-old food-delivery driver and Trump supporter, and showed that he had used the accounts to collect thousands of dollars for a fake political group.
On Tuesday, federal authorities arrested Mr. Hall and charged him with fraud and identity theft.
Mr. Hall pretended to be members of the Trump family “to fraudulently induce hundreds of victims to donate to a political organization that did not exist, and then pocketed those funds for his own use,” Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a news release.
Mr. Hall’s arrest is a rare instance of criminal charges filed against someone for creating fake accounts on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks are rife with millions of fake accounts, many of which impersonate politicians, celebrities and soldiers to scam people out of money. But few of the people behind the fakes ever face consequences.
Mr. Hall attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after he posed as five members of Mr. Trump’s family on Twitter, amassing more than 160,000 followers on the site. Over a year, he pretended to be, among others, Robert Trump, the president’s brother; Barron Trump, the president’s teenage son; and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator at the time.
He used the accounts to direct people to donate to a political group called Gay Voices for Trump. Mr. Hall later told The Times that the group didn’t exist. He brought in more than $7,300. The Justice Department said on Tuesday that Mr. Hall had kept the money.
Mr. Hall appeared in federal court in Harrisburg, Pa., on Tuesday, the Justice Department said. He could face up to 22 years in prison, the department said.
Mr. Hall could not be immediately reached on Tuesday. He told The Times last year that his fake accounts were clear parodies and that anyone should have known that, including Mr. Trump, by reading a few of their typically juvenile posts.
“There was no nefarious intention behind it,” Mr. Hall said. “I was just trying to rally up MAGA supporters and have fun,” he added, referring to the abbreviation for Mr. Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Volkswagen said on Wednesday that its former chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, would pay the company 11.2 million euros (about $13.7 million) for “breaches of due diligence” that led to the company’s emissions cheating scandal as part of a settlement with other former executives totaling €288 million.
The announcement came the same day that prosecutors in Berlin charged Mr. Winterkorn with lying to the German parliament about his knowledge of the carmaker’s emissions scandal, raising fresh questions about his role in a cover-up.
Mr. Winterkorn was once one of Germany’s most powerful men, but what he knew about of the emissions cheating has remained a crucial question for Volkswagen, even though he resigned in 2015, when the scandal first broke. Overall, the scandal has cost Volkswagen tens of billions of euros in fines, settlements and legal fees.
Prosecutors in Berlin said Wednesday that Mr. Winterkorn knew far earlier than he had acknowledged to a parliamentary panel in 2017 that the company had secretly equipped millions of diesel-powered VW cars with special software, known a defeat device, to cheat on emissions tests. The gimmick made the vehicles appear environmentally friendly and attractive to ecologically conscious consumers.
“In his testimony, the accused falsely claimed to have been informed of the defeat devices only in September 2015,” Berlin prosecutors said in a statement.
“According to the indictment, he had since May 2015 been aware that the engine control software of some VW vehicles had been equipped with a function to manipulate the exhaust values in testing,” prosecutors added.
The latest legal salvo against Mr. Winterkorn came as Volkswagen announced on Wednesday that it was facing fresh charges from French authorities for cheating on emissions tests.
Volkswagen’s decision to seek settlements from former executives is a turnaround for the company, which had previously been reluctant to publicly accuse former top managers of complicity in the emissions fraud.
In addition to Mr. Winterkorn, Rupert Stadler, the former chief executive of the Audi luxury car division, has agreed to pay €4.1 million. Most of the rest of the payments will be made by insurance companies providing directors’ and officers’ coverage. The settlement must be approved at the annual shareholders’ meeting next month.
Mr. Winterkorn, who still faces criminal charges in Braunschweig, a town near VW’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, on accusations of fraud related to the case, has long contended that he was not aware of any wrongdoing.
In early 2017, Volkswagen pleaded guilty in the United States to criminal charges that included conspiracy to defraud the government, violations of the Clean Air Act and obstruction of justice. The company paid $20 billion to resolve civil and criminal charges related to the scandal.
Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide talks to Sapna Maheshwari about the jump in the number of Americans skipping the supermarket to order online, and how stores and their workers are navigating the unknown future of groceries.
