US Economy Added 263K Jobs in Nov.; Tesla Unveils New Heavy Duty Semi Trucks | NTD Business

Thank you for watching NTD Business. Coming up tonight, President Biden signs a bill to avoid a nationwide rail strike. It means train commuters and products will stay on track next week. New jobs reports released today. 263 thousand jobs added, beating expectations. What does it mean for inflation? We have analysis. And electric car maker Tesla unveiling its new heavy-duty semi-trucks. Elon Musk says they're more powerful than their diesel counterparts. That and much more coming up on NTD Business. Great to have you with us. Don Ma here. Breaking news. Just now, Twitter CEO Elon Musk says they will make public how Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story. It's dropping right about now. There's also a live Q&A session afterwards, Musk said. Musk has been hinting he wanted to release Twitter's internal discussions and how he decided to censor the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop. Musk said at that time, quote, this is necessary to restore public trust. And President Biden signed legislation today to avert a nationwide rail strike. He says the rail system is the backbone of our supply chain and the economy can't risk a full shutdown. From clean water to food and gas and every other good, rail shutdown would have devastated our economy. Without freight rail, many of the U.S. industries would literally shut down. The House and Senate both passed the legislation earlier this week. Without their action, a rail strike could become a reality as soon as next week, which would not only disrupt services for up to 7 million commuters, but would also have impacted the transport of food and farm products. One sticking point that wasn't part of the legislation was paid sick leave for rail workers. The House passed the sick leave measure, but it failed in the Senate. President Biden said Friday this legislation at least averts a rail strike, but he says he'll go back to the table to get sick leave covered, not just for rail workers, but as well for all workers. President Biden's plan to cancel billions of dollars in student debt is headed to the Supreme Court. The justices Thursday agreed to hear the White House's case to push ahead with debt relief after a lower court blocked the program. In August, Biden announced the government would forgive up to $20,000 for student borrowers. Last month, the Court of Appeals blocked the debt relief from going forward. Also last month, a Texas federal judge ruled the program unconstitutional and likewise issued a nationwide halt to the program. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates Biden's debt cancellation program would cost taxpayers about $400 billion. The justices say the program will remain blocked until the case is decided. A new watchdog report says federal officials forgave over a billion dollars worth of PPP loans given to top law firms and accounting offices. The analysis states those firms might not actually have needed the money to save jobs during the pandemic. Here's the story. An astonishing $1.4 billion in forgiven PPP loans flowed to the largest and most successful law and accounting firms across America. That's when an investigation by Open the Books allegedly found. The analysis found that federal officials forgave over $800 million in Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, loans handed out during the pandemic to more than 100 of the nation's top law firms. In another, almost $640 million were reportedly given to hundreds of elite accounting offices. As described by the Department of Treasury, the PPP was established in 2020 to provide small businesses with the resources they need to maintain their payroll, hire back employees who might have been laid off, and cover applicable overhead. The new report says that it is an open question whether many of the firms needed a taxpayer's subsidy to save any jobs during the COVID pandemic. Many racked up record revenues while their equity partners made millions of dollars. NTT reached out to the Federal Small Business Administration but didn't hear back before broadcast. Elon Musk suspended Kanye West from Twitter yesterday. Musk says the rapper has gone too far. Meanwhile, a day earlier, Musk held an event where he showed a monkey allegedly operating a computer through a chip implanted in the animal's brain. Here's the story. Elon Musk suspended Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, from Twitter just a few days after he reinstated the rapper and fashion designer. On Thursday, Alex Jones Infowars posted a podcast in which Ye praised inventions allegedly coming from Adolf Hitler. Invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician. You can't say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I'm done with that. I'm done with the classifications. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. Ye reportedly also said that the Holocaust didn't happen. Later that day, he posted this picture on Twitter, showing the combination of a swastika and the Star of David. Elon Musk reportedly told Ye that he had gone too far. His account is now suspended. President Biden on Friday responded to Ye's remarks, saying the Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. Before getting suspended from Twitter, Ye reportedly showed support for the fashion brand Balenciaga, which recently was under fire for including child pornography messages in their ads. The rapper was also in the process of acquiring Parler, a social media company that promotes itself as a free speech platform. However, on Thursday, the company tweeted that the company has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler. And over at Neuralink, one of Musk's other companies, the tech billionaire hosted an event on Wednesday, showcasing a monkey allegedly controlling a computer through a chip implanted in the animal's brain. The company live streamed the event. This is telepathic typing. So to be clear, he's not actually using a keyboard. He's moving the cursor with his mind. On the same day, Musk reportedly said that the company aims to begin implanting its neural devices in humans within the next six months, pending regulatory approval. Reporting by Aryan Pasdar, NTD News. And an update on the January 6th saga. A recent filing in the case of a defendant reveals that Google gave the FBI location data for over 5,000 cellular devices. Those devices were near the US Capitol that day. The defendant, David Ryan, is asking the court not to use the Google location history evidence. His lawyers argue the information was obtained by a geofence warrant that was too broad. It allows law enforcement to search a database of digital location data to find mobile devices in a certain area, and by extension, their owners. Ryan's lawyers called the warrant a phishing expedition. They said instead of looking for specific users or accounts, the warrant forced Google to scour accounts to generate leads for the government. The government, though, disagreed with Ryan's lawyers this week. It argues the warrant was tailored to the greatest degree possible and was supported by probable cause. The state of Florida is divesting two billion dollars of assets from the investment management company BlackRock. This is over the company's push for Environmental, Social, and Governance Standards, or ESG. Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Petronas announced Thursday that the Florida Treasury will immediately begin to freeze all securities and investments managed by BlackRock. This includes 1.4 billion dollars worth of long-term securities and 600 million dollars of short-term investments. Critics of ESG say it's a movement to advance a progressive political agenda. Petronas criticized BlackRock's push for ESG, saying, quote, it's undemocratic of major asset managers to use their power to influence societal outcomes. The Florida CFO says he doesn't believe BlackRock will deliver maximized returns and that the Florida Treasury will relocate the investments elsewhere. And the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in November. That's according to data released from the Labor Department this morning. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 percent. Employment growth was widespread, both in the goods-producing and service-producing sectors. Average hourly earnings have risen 5.1 percent over the past year. And now joining me to talk about the jobs report is economist Brian Dmitrovic with the Laffer Center. So, Brian, I just want to get your first reactions. 263,000 jobs added, beating expectations, is something to be happy about? Yeah, absolutely it is. I mean, there are plenty of job openings in this country, way more than are being fulfilled. So if the economy is responsive to job openings, that can only be a good thing and a natural outcome of private market forces. So, Brian, you seem optimistic, but participation rate fell about 186,000. How are you looking at this? Well, that continues to be distressing. I mean, that's been the story of the economy in the 21st century, specifically since the Great Recession. I mean, we went from 67 when Bill Clinton left office, 67 percent of the labor force, now down to 62. And that's over 10 million people who just quit on the economy because of the Great Recession and its long aftermath. And so we've been building up this sentiment of people who are not working and we're just reducing the productive capacity of the economy. It's very contrary to the spirit of mass prosperity. If we make it easier for people to work and earn money, making productive goods and services, inflation will go down. So I guess that goes hand in hand with wages, average hourly earnings up 6, 10, 7 percent this month. Do you think that contributes to inflation at all? Well, no, I think it's a symptom in that the employers can't hire more people even though they want to. So they're trying to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of their current workforce. So they're paying them more and more. Wages aren't driving inflation. What the increase in wages are indicating is that firms that really want to produce can't get the labor they need to produce the goods and services. And so there's a supply problem. There's not enough goods and services. And that's what's driving inflation. So I guess then the question is how do you bring people back into the workforce? I mean, tax holidays would work. I mean, you know, Social Security tax right off the bat is a 15 percent tax on anyone joining the above-board workforce. How about a holiday from that? We had that under Barack Obama. We didn't do it correctly, but tax holidays would be very good. Lower marginal tax rates, clearing out regulation, lessening government spending that brings people into fake production, that of the government, all those things on the fiscal side. We saw it under the Donald Trump tax cut. Sure enough, in 2018, 2019, the labor force participation rate started ticking up a full point. What can the new Congress do to bring people back? Well, I think government spending has really got to go down because government spending, again, just takes people out of the workforce. I think marginal tax rates as well, if they were cut, there would be much greater after tax return to employing labor and capital, more people would be employed. I think those kind of classical supply side solutions would work very precisely in 2023. How's the overall health of the economy looking at this month's jobs report? Well, I think the dynamism of the American economy is still very clearly present. When you have 260 some thousand people pressing into the workforce, people really want to work and employers really want to hire them. We can only imagine that many more people want to work, not only because there are so many job openings, but because there are so many barriers to getting good work. You have to lose your means tested benefits. You have to subject yourself to marginal tax rates and the social security tax. If we cleared out those very large impediments to work, I think you start seeing many times the factor of job entry that we just saw this month. Okay, I see. All right. Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure speaking to you today. Thank you. Electric car maker Tesla unveiled its new heavy-duty semi-trucks on Thursday. It was the first Tesla reveal since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Here's the story. Electric car maker Tesla unveiled its new heavy-duty semi-trucks on Thursday. The trucks delivered to PepsiCo had also completed their first cargo run. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who spoke at the company's Nevada plant, the battery-powered truck has three times the power of their diesel counterparts and could reduce highway emissions. It's a beast. So, Tesla, we don't make slow cars. This thing has crazy power relative to a diesel truck. I mean, actually, especially if you're not towing anything, you could zip around. It looks crazy, basically. It looks like an elephant moving like a cheetah. Clips from Tesla showed the truck tested in different weather and road conditions. Musk said test runs were conducted between Tesla's Sparks Nevada factory and its plant in Fremont, California. Tesla said the over 80,000-pound truck was able to drive 500 miles on a single charge. However, it didn't give a breakdown of the cargo it was carrying. Tesla did not offer updated forecasts for the truck's pricing or production plans. PepsiCo had ordered 100 trucks in 2017 when initial prices and plans for the vehicle were announced. Brewer Einhaser Busch, UPS and Walmart were among other companies that had reserved the semi. And real estate behemoth Blackstone has taken a hit. So many investors have tried to leave Blackstone's Real Estate Investment Trust, also known as BREIT, that it has locked investor withdrawals. In other words, investors gave their money to Blackstone so it could invest it into real estate for them. And now, the company won't let all the investors get their money back. Only about 43% were able to withdraw. And they withdrew around 1.3 billion dollars. 1.3 billion dollars is a lot of money. Analysts say Blackstone may sell assets to get the money to cover investor withdrawals. On Thursday, Blackstone sold its ownership of two Las Vegas casinos for 1.27 billion dollars, very close to the 1.3 it owes. This is bad for the firm and its reputation. The fact that so many are withdrawing and that it had to freeze more people from doing so. Analysts believe there could be a snowball effect. The remaining investors may want to follow suit after seeing all this happening. And the thing is, Blackstone doesn't seem to have done anything wrong. It's beaten the rest of the market by far. It's reported a hefty 9.3% year-to-date return. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones U.S. Select-to-Reach Total Return Index plummeted 22% over the same amount of time. The CEO of real estate investment firm Rastegar Property, Ari Rastegar, believes investors are leaving for other reasons. When the global markets begin to correct at the rate that they are and interest rates rising at the velocity that they've been rising, it creates a lot of instability in the marketplace and creates a lot of need for liquidity for people in general. So in these types of funds where they're asking for these withdrawals, I would posit that the vast majority of them are because these individuals are invested in other parts of the stock market and have investments in other modalities and have other real cash needs. So putting it in another way, Rastegar says they need their money back so that they can pay for basic human needs because the economy isn't doing so well. Rastegar sees nothing wrong with the fund itself. But how could the fund simply prevent investors from withdrawing their own money? Don't the investors own their money, just like the people who put their money into FTX? In this case, though, it's a lot less sinister. Attorney Trey Lovell from the Lovell Law Firm says freezing withdrawals is part of their pre-written agreement. They do that for a very good reason. They need to protect the integrity and the strength and the value of the company. And if there is a mass exodus of investment, of capital coming out, it could affect adversely the company as well as the existing shareholders. So they need to have controls in place that allow them to try to honor redemption requests to the extent that such doesn't expose any risk to the company and the existing shareholders. Blackstone told its investors that it would freeze withdrawals if they rose above 2% of its monthly net asset value. So essentially, this is perfectly in line with what's supposed to happen. So in a sense, Blackstone is simply a victim of a bad economy. In the public square and public opinion, it's just never good if you can't allow your investors to get their money out. Typically, when a company doesn't allow it, people get scared. They think it's for something nefarious or something negative, but oftentimes it's not. Lovell says Blackstone needs to educate and persuade the public that the fund is doing well and that it simply wants to protect everyone. The Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust makes up around 17% of the entire firm's earnings. And actor Tom Hanks is supporting our nation's veterans with a new brand of coffee. He's created an ethically-sourced, sustainable coffee brand called Hank's For Our Troops. All the profits go to active-duty military and veterans organizations. Hank's For Our Troops features products like First Class Joe in both medium and dark roasts for $16 a bag. Other offerings include coffee pods and instant coffee sticks. Hank's For Our Troops plans to start shipping the products just in time for the holidays. For more information, go to givehanks.com. And Indiana Jones is grabbing his hat and returning to the big screen once again. Lucasfilm released a teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Thursday. Harrison Ford returns as the hero archaeologist, known for his quick wit, fast feet, long whip, and fedora. The trailer is light on details, but the new installment will introduce several new stars to the franchise, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Antonio Banderas. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is slated to open in theaters on June 30, 2023. It'll mark the fifth installment in the film franchise. And Adidas is left with just three of its seven sponsored teams in the World Cup. But the German sportswear maker is sticking to its sales outlook for the tournament nonetheless, a spokesperson said today after Germany's shock exit. Adidas is trying to stay positive about the World Cup. That's despite just three of its seven sponsored teams still being in the soccer tournament. One of its biggest sides, Germany, crashed out on Thursday. But the sportswear company said Friday it's still expected World Cup sales of around $421 million. Adidas said sales were currently higher than those at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Adidas might be upbeat, but Germany's HDE retail association was not as optimistic. A spokesman from the group said Germany's exit would hurt the firm. It said without the German team, history showed that interest in fan merchandise usually dropped quickly. Four-time champions Germany were knocked out of the World Cup despite a 4-2 victory over Costa Rica in their last group match. Football shirts for the German team were on sale by the following day with a 50% discount on Adidas' online shop. There was some consolation for the brand though, with Spain and surprise package Japan both going through. The pair are on the Adidas team, as is fellow survivor Argentina. And Pantone has revealed its colour of the year for 2023, and it's Viva Magenta. Pantone says the crimson tone balances warm and cool and is an unconventional shade for an unconventional time. The company said the shade, rooted in the primordial, reconnects us to original matter and invokes the forces of nature. Pantone has named a colour of the year annually for more than two decades now. The company is known for creating the Pantone matching system. It's used to identify and match colours in industries like painting, graphic design and fashion. The colour of the year announcement is accompanied by a new Miami exhibition that opens to the public Saturday. And that's all the stories we have today from the NTD business team and myself, Don Ma. You can follow me on Twitter too if you're there. If you have any news tips or feedback for the show, you can email us at business at ntd.com. That's all for today. Thank you for watching. I'll see you on Monday.