(US) Tuesday Evening Papers Summary
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
-President Joe Biden has ordered officials to prepare for more releases from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve as he approved the sale of 15M barrels of oil in December and established a plan to replenish the dwindling emergency stockpile.
-Qatar’s energy minister has warned that while Europe should have sufficient gas for power and heating this winter, the tougher challenge will come in 2023 as reserves are depleted. Saad al-Kaabi said it would be “much worse next year” if there was a harsh winter, adding that the energy crisis could extend to the middle of the decade if President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine continued and gas “does not start flowing back again” from Russia.
-Goldman Sachs said it was pulling back from its highly touted foray into retail banking to focus on its traditional strengths serving big corporations and wealthy investors as part of a sweeping reorganization under chief executive David Solomon.
-Pakistan will ask international lenders for billions of dollars’ worth of new loans to rebuild the country after calamitous floods uprooted 33M people and pushed its cash-strapped economy even closer to insolvency. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Islamabad was not trying to reschedule its external debt, worth about $130B, but it did need “huge sums of money” for “mega undertakings” such as rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure damaged or washed away in a deluge scientists have linked to climate change.
-Amazon employees at a warehouse outside Albany, New York voted nearly two-to-one to reject the formation of a union, dashing hopes that a grassroots effort to organize workers would spread across the ecommerce giant’s facilities. Employees voted 406 to 206 against being represented by the worker-led Amazon Labour Union, labour officials said after tallying the votes on Tuesday.
-Netflix stemmed its subscriber losses in the third quarter, as popular programs including the fourth season of Stranger Things and Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story helped it add 2.4M members. The result was more than double the number of subscribers Netflix had forecast, leaving it with 223M paying members at the end of the third quarter, up 2.6% from a year earlier. The company expects to reach 227M by the end of the current quarter, according to its earnings release on Tuesday.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
-The Federal Reserve won't pivot until the labor market shows signs of cracking. But once the job market appears to be rolling over, everything will change. As income growth fades, high inflation will be less likely to feed a wage-price spiral and more likely to cause consumers to retrench. The Federal Reserve's barrage of 75-basis-point rate hikes can only continue as long as monthly employment reports continue to show solid job gains. It's politically acceptable for the Fed to cool an overheated job market, but jumbo rate hikes won't fly when the job market has already lost steam.
USA TODAY
-President Joe Biden will announce Wednesday he’s releasing 15M barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency reserves, one of the few actions he can take before next month’s midterm elections to show voters he feels their pain at the pump. The move completes Biden’s March directive to release 180M barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the largest sale in the reserve’s nearly 50-year history.
-More Americans are turning to buy now, pay later apps to afford everyday necessities, but an increasing share of consumers aren’t making payments on time, a trend likely to accelerate as the US economy inches closer to a recession. Traditional lenders, like banks and credit card companies, automatically dial back lending particularly to riskier borrowers when delinquencies inch up to limit future losses. But experts are divided on whether buy now, pay later firms will do the same based on whether they’re prioritizing user growth or profitability.
CAIXIN
-Chinese video game companies led by Tencent and NetEase are turning to global business expansion in search of fresh revenue sources as domestic growth plateaus and regulatory scrutiny tightens. They’re joining e-commerce platforms and online tutors as China’s internet businesses look beyond China for differing reasons. While weakening consumption at home is driving e-commerce platforms, video game developers are pushing out their business boundaries and creating more jobs abroad chiefly out of concerns over tightening domestic regulations.
THE NEW YORK POST
-Lee Zeldin has a shot at beating Kathy Hochul. Until recently, he was relatively unknown outside his Long Island congressional district, but he’s now on the cusp of playing David to Gov. Hochul’s Goliath. A series of surveys in recent weeks has showed the race tightening, and a big jolt came Tuesday when the Quinnipiac poll put him behind Gov. Hochul by just four points.
It’s a stunning development in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 2-1 and no GOP candidate has won a statewide race in two decades. But independents favor Zeldin by 20 points, the poll finds, and it shows him getting 37% support in the city, double what recent GOP statewide candidates got. As a Republican, Zeldin has no chance of winning the state with less than 30% in the five boroughs. If the numbers in the Q poll are right, and if Zeldin can hold the city support and add to his leads in the suburbs and upstate, he will pull off a remarkable upset.
-The US housing market remains in “free fall” after a survey showed a “disastrous” decline in homebuilder confidence, a prominent economist warned on Tuesday. Homebuilder confidence plunged for the 10th consecutive month in October, falling to its lowest level since 2012, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ monthly survey. The latest downtick came as mortgage rates spiked to levels not seen since the Great Recession.