SAO PAULO, Brazil – After replacing the state-controlled oil company’s CEO with a retired general, the Brazilian president blasted its pricing policies and said they should be changed to lower gas and diesel prices, causing a 21% drop Monday in the company’s shares on the São Paulo Stock Exchange.
By Milan Sime Martinić
The Las Vegas Review-Journal stated that the draft of new legislation being considered by the state’s governor refers to the current government model of trying to attract new businesses as “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries,” proposing its “alternative form of local government” to make the state into a high-tech development zone.
If the law were to go through, companies in Nevada would be able to set up in their zones of operation with their own local taxes, government services, schools, police, and courts of justice.
The types of businesses that would be able to obtain such a deal from Nevada would be limited to specific innovative technologies, according to the Review-Journal, including blockchain, autonomous technology, the Internet of Things, robotics, A.I., wireless technology, biometrics, and renewable resource technology.
Nevada has some of the U.S.’s largest, emptiest counties that could be put to use this way. The bill proposing the new approach to tech government is not in it’s final form, but reports are that officials in the counties affected were initially skeptical despite investment requirements of over $1 billion in the first 10 years.
By Milan Sime Martinić
Continuing a trend of European businesses moving independently to protect the Amazon, France’s BNP Paribas announced it will no longer finance companies that buy cattle or soy produced on deforested or converted Amazon lands after 2008. The measure also applies to deforested lands in Brazil’s Cerrado region, a threatened tropical savanna eco-region covering 20% of Brazil that has lost half its land to agricultural clearing.
PNB said it will only finance those who adopt a Cerrado strategy of Zero Deforestation by 2025, promoting criticism from environmentalists that it is weak action that gives deforesters a 5-year free pass in an area they see spiraling into a collapse of its biodiversity.
The immediate move to fight Amazon deforestation, however, will also affect Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Guyana, and French Guiana, which hold parts of the Amazon forest along with Brazil. An area the size of the state of Maryland was lost to deforestation in 2020.
By Milan Sime Martinić
A global increase of 2.4% in Brazilian instant coffee exports in 2020 occurred alongside a 39% drop in exports to the Arab bloc, with Saudi Arabia accounting for 33% of the decrease, according to numbers made public by ABICS, the Brazilian Instant Coffee Industry Association.
Despite the Arab purchase drops, Brazil remains the top producer and exporter of instant coffee. Global instant coffee consumption climbs at a rate of around 3% per year. Addressing the decrease in Arab purchases, ABICS Director Aguinaldo Lima noted 2019 was already a record year for Brazil and that imports fluctuate from year to year. Saudi Arabia has been a longtime top importer of Brazilian instant coffee, said Lima, pointing out that it contributed to the 2019 record exports.
By Milan Sime Martinić
The move, which will first affect Brazil, Canada and Indonesia before being tried out in the US in a few weeks, is part of a company goal to “lower the temperature and discourage divisive conversations” globally, and was announced by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at a January conference. The change will initially impact only a small percentage of users as the company explores different ways of classifying political content and finding a balance for the types of things that people want to see.
By Milan Sime Martinic
Millions of American workers believe they are bound by contracts they are not actually bound by, according to University of Maryland Smith Business School’s Evan Starr, and this means less earnings for workers. Starr spoke at length on the subject at the recent Aspen Institute summit and to us on Twitter.
While non-competes are required by employers to protect trade secrets, they are found everywhere, including regular minimum wage workers and volunteers. Around 20% America’s 130 million workers are in a non-compete right now, and 40% have signed a non-compete at some point in their lives.
What Starr has found is that workers are acting as though they are bound by employee contracts based solely on their false belief that the contracts are always enforceable. In many states the contracts are not.
“[W]orkers are chilled just by the existence of the contract regardless of whether it’s enforceable or not, and when you ask workers, ‘What do you know about the law,’ most of them don’t know what the law is, but their default is they believe that contracts they put their name on are enforceable, and they abide by them, even in states like California where they wouldn’t be enforceable if they went to court.
“When it comes to workers choosing to move between jobs what we see is the use of these provisions appears to be what matters, not necessarily their enforceability in court.”
And, according to Starr, one of the results is workers making less money throughout their careers.
“I did one study where we tracked workers over 8 years of their career. We had every single worker in 30 states over roughly a 20-year period, and what we found was that if you start your career in kind of an average enforcing state, you are going to earn 5% lower earnings relative to a non-enforcing state like California, over those 8 years, regardless of where you end up, regardless of where you go.”
Numbers are uncertain as to exactly how many Americans are affected in this way, because states vary so much in regards to non-compete enforceability.
“There’s tremendous heterogeneity across the US in what states will do. In some states you can be fired from your job, and if you get sued over the violation of a non-compete it can still be enforced even though you were fired. In other states it won’t be enforced, and everyone else is kind of in the middle.”
But Starr said it was safe to say that many millions of Americans assume they are bound by non-binding contracts. In California, to use a state he studied recently, there are approximately 20 million workers, so around 4 million may be involved in non-binding contracts. Those numbers can be roughly extrapolated to the rest of the 130 million U.S. workers who live in the other states.
“And that number is most certainly an underestimate given that non-competes are used for workers in states that wouldn’t enforce them for such workers, even though they would enforce them for other workers,” Starr added.
Starr et al’s ‘Noncompetes in the U.S. Labor Force’
The drop started last Friday, and continued over the weekend and on Monday. The big tech stocks, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, which have been on a long upward trend, have dropped significantly.
The drop is considered possibly overdue given the high out-performance and positioning of the stocks.
17% revenue growth is expected between now and 2022, according to a recent report by Research and Markets.
The 17% gain in revenue will be from 5m new pay TV homes, bringing the number of pay TV homes to almost 20m by 2022, a 4% change from 2016.
A week after Trump said the U.S. would leave the Paris Climate Agreement, the governor of California made an agreement with China to develop more green tech.
People are talking widely about states possibly making lots of climate deals now that the U.S. is out.
Who is Tencent? It’s the largely unknown (maybe because it’s pretty media shy) parent company of China’s ubiquitous WeChat social media app.
Their market cap is $330b, more than JPMorgan Chase.
500m people in China (of 650m total) use WeChat for communicating, finding goods and services, getting directions, and paying for things.
Who else is on the top 10 list?
Google is still #1, for the last 11 years. It’s market cap is around 600b.
After that, there’s Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, AT&T, Visa, Tencent at #8, IBM, and McDonald’s.
According to Igor Drozdov, the board chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, who spoke at Russia’s SPIEF economic forum this year, new technologies will allow more people “to earn real money using intellectual property institutions.”
He also talked about tech that would be developed in order to protect IP, describing projects similar to what Microsoft is currently working on.
“Currently, works of authorship are analyzed by humans, but as artificial intelligence technologies become more and more sophisticated, they can at one point analyze texts just like humans, making AI expert evaluation possible.”
According to Alexei Kutrin, speaking at the SPIEF economic forum this week, “The oil sector should be fully privatized in the next 7-8 years. No state companies are required there now as the statehood brings more harm than benefit to those companies.”
He added that oil companies are able to deal with business issues without assistance from the state.