*Delayed, Consumer Sentiment, Contract Workers, Bits & Pieces, and it's Columbus Day!
Economic Releases This Week
U.S. Trade Deficit - *DELAYED
Initial Jobless Claims - *DELAYED
Wholesale Inventories - *DELAYED
Monthly U.S. Federal Budget - *DELAYED
Soooo, what wasn’t delayed?
The Consumer Sentiment Preliminary reading. This is conducted by the University of Michigan.
Last month, the Index of Consumer Sentiment came in at 55.1. Mid-month October has it at 55.0.
The Index of Current Economic Conditions was 61, up from 60.4.
The Index of Consumer Expectations came in at 51.2, down from 51.7.
Evidently, the world is not coming to an end, at least not in the first part of October.
BTW, consumers are expecting inflation to be higher at 4.7% a year from now. Ouch.
The survey was created in the 1940s, and it used to be by telephone – the copper landline type. In 2024, it transitioned to email-based surveys.
It consists of 50 questions, getting at least 600 responses monthly.
It has five key “index questions”. They are:
Current household financial situation.
Expected household financial situation one year ahead.
Views about general business conditions one year ahead.
Views about general business conditions five years ahead.
Plans to make major purchases.
For reference, the number hit just over 100 in 2018 and 2019. It also hit a low of 50 in June 2022. That’s something to keep an eye on.
Only in California
At one time in California, you could work independently for yourself doing whatever you wanted. You would get a check for the agreed-upon amount, and at the end of the year, you would receive a 1099-NEC. That stands for Non-Employee Compensation.
You would then report your income to the IRS and pay the appropriate taxes.
Fast forward a decade or two, and now the number of skills in which you can be self-employed has been dramatically reduced in California.
The California legislature even tried to classify Lyft and Uber drivers as employees of Lyft and Uber. Voters overruled that, but did say the drivers had to have a wage floor, get sick days, and a health insurance stipend, among other things.
Fast forward to last week, and you can, as a 1099 contract worker for Lyft or Uber, become unionized, courtesy of the California state legislature and Uber and Lyft “working” with the state. Lyft and Uber agreed not to fight the union thing if the state lowered the minimum insurance requirement for drivers from $1,000,000 to $300,000.
Hmm. Sounds like a quid pro quo to me, but what do I know…
Bits & Pieces
Ahoy, Cap’n!
A team of bona fide treasure divers recovered over 1000 silver and gold coins off the Florida Atlantic Coast worth about $1,000,000.
Under Florida law, the state gets to keep 20% for “archeological purposes.” That’s convenient.
OpenAI aka ChatGPT has hit a valuation of $500,000,000,000.
That’s roughly Chevron’s value. But Chevron has $350,000,000,000 in revenue and profit of $30,000,000,000.
OpenAI has $13,000,000,000 in revenue and billions in losses. Wow.
In a completely unrelated note, Haagen Daz has a $17,600,000,000 valuation on revenue of $6,400,000,000 and profit of just over $500,000,000.
So, will more people eat ice cream, or use ChatGPT?
Headline: “L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Looks Like a Disaster Movie”. Ouch.
The occupancy rate of sound stages in L.A. fell from over 90% in 2016 to just over 60% in 2024. It kind of feels like when the aerospace industry left the state in the early 1990s.
It wasn’t pretty. What else is vacating California?
Who was this self-educated, self-made man who started his career in the shipping/brokerage business?
He never had a formal education, but was well-read in the subjects of geography, history, and astronomy.
His father and mother owned a cheese stand, and his dad also worked as a wool weaver.
He joined a merchant ship at the age of 14, sailing the region and then becoming a successful buyer at the age of 22 for several well-known Spanish merchants.
At the age of 27, he married well, securing the hand of the daughter of a nobleman.
As a buyer for one of the wealthiest merchants, he spent a good deal of time traveling and securing contracts for various commodities.
Because of his various connections made during his career, his education, and helped by some sales skills and smooth talking, he managed to talk some rich and powerful VC folks to fund an exploratory voyage that would enable their merchant company to establish a new trade route.
Money is always an incentive, and the upside was huge on this deal.
He secured funding just on the threat that he would take his idea to a competitor. Sounds like Silicon Valley to me.
He negotiated a contract that included royalties and finder’s fees, got the series A funding, secured his transport, hired the first round of employees, and set off in 1492.
Depending on the language or country he was in, his name in 16th-century Genoese was Cristoffa Corombo; in Italian, Cristoforo Colombo; and in Spanish Cristóbal Colón.
But we know him as Christopher Columbus.
Today, October 13, is Columbus Day in his honor, although he landed in the Bahamas on October 12. Ironically, he never landed in North America. In fact, he was always convinced he had landed in China in the Far East since that was the objective. He never thought there would be a land mass in the way.
It was Amerigo Vespucci who recognized that North America was not China. Hence the name “America”.
Just remember, the mail isn’t coming today and your banker is sending their ‘out-of-office’ greeting, but the 4th quarter has started, and would you believe… a new year is right around the corner?
