Category: Business Insider

Last summer, when I told my then-girlfriend that I had just hired a real-estate agent to help me buy an apartment, her response annoyed me: "Sounds like a scam."

I didn't understand her suspicions. She had never purchased a home, and as a lawyer, I just assumed I knew how the system worked: The buyer has an agent, but the seller pays a commission (typically 6% of the sale price) that's split between their agent and the buyer's agent. So it's like I get free help to guide me through the morass of homebuying.

I quickly learned how foolish I was, and how right she was. Three months later, when I bought my Brooklyn apartment, I ended up being my own agent. In the coming years, with real-estate agents facing pressure from sites like Zillow and from the National Association of Realtors' agreeing to an industry-shifting $418 million price-fixing settlement in March, it's likely that a lot more people will do what I did and represent themselves. That's because commission splitting may soon be a thing of the past.

If you're thinking about buying a home, ask yourself the following three questions: Do you have an internet connection? Do you have at least a seventh-grade reading level? Do you like saving money? If you answer yes to all three, you're in fantastic shape to be your own agent.

I wish someone had told me this before my house-hunting journey began.

The thought of buying a home has always terrified me, but as New York City rents were ticking up by the millisecond in a historic housing crisis, I felt like it was now or never.

For months I searched on my own, first zeroing in on my ideal neighborhood and then fumbling through the harrowing math exercise of deciding just what my price limit was. I even made custom maps on StreetEasy, plotting down to the block where I envisioned my future life.

But having grown up hearing the NYC apartment market likened to the Hunger Games, I had no idea how to actually go from looking to buying, and — I thought at the time — I desperately needed help. So when a close friend vouched for an agent who had represented her in several deals, I was ecstatic.

Then I met my agent, and things began to feel off.

The best part of having an agent was realizing just how much I had already figured out on my own. He said he'd want to know what my "requirements" and "nice to haves" were, so I made a chart, listing dozens of items. At least 900 square feet: requirement. In-building gym: nice to have. In-unit laundry: really nice to have. Looking at the list and the map, the agent told me what I'd known months before meeting him: "You might need to be more flexible." Strike one for Captain Obvious.

Do you have an internet connection? Do you have at least a seventh-grade reading level? Do you like saving money? If you answer yes to all three, you're in fantastic shape to be your own agent.

But also: Wasn't an agent there for my pickiness? I knew that what I wanted was at the very outer limit of my budget, especially at a time with record-low inventory. But my list of "must haves" truly were the things I needed for buying an apartment to make sense. The list was already a small fraction of what I would have written when I started looking (farewell, pipe dreams of river views and sprawling private decks). And where I looked had already expanded far beyond the spots I ideally wanted. I wasn't asking for the impossible, just something very particular and very hard to find. Wasn't that the whole point of having an agent, someone paid to pluck for you your personal paradise from the endless haystack of units you don't want or can't afford?

Rather than find this magical listing, however, my agent went into sales mode, trying to explain to me why I should settle for places I had already ruled out. He was always very responsive and polite (until he wasn't, more on that later), sending me leads as soon as he saw something promising come on the market. But with a few exceptions, the "leads" my agent "found" were always things I'd already seen on StreetEasy, sometimes weeks earlier. Strike two.

In fairness, all agents have a disadvantage here, because the internet has come to democratize homebuying. For many years, even though sites like Realtor.com existed, buyers were at the mercy of agents to know what was for sale. This was because, a 2005 antitrust lawsuit from the US Department of Justice lays out, Realtors used their control of the listing services to strangle the nascent online housing market and punish agents who listed homes publicly. All that ended in 2008, when a massive settlement opened up the floodgates of public listings. These days, most agents largely have the same listings the rest of us do.

So my agent wasn't going to find me my dream house, and the work of hunting was basically on me. But I still needed his expertise to vet the apartment and negotiate a deal that would surely come with reams of byzantine paperwork. Didn't I?

According to Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, many of us don't. Homebuying, he says, is "not rocket science." But the real-estate industry has made it hard for many buyers to understand just how little having an agent can help. "I call it the 'Alice in Wonderland' world, because things are not as they seem. And when you understand them, they don't make much sense."

For me, I finally climbed out of the rabbit hole and woke up when my agent led me into a bidding war.

The apartment was bright, airy, just a few blocks from McCarren Park, and more than 1,200 square feet — practically a mansion by Williamsburg standards. But there were worrying signs. The unit's bottom floor was below street level, and the block itself was in a flood zone. After touring the unit with the agent, I had a bunch of questions. The inquiries I parroted, most of which I'd learned from Googling, were pretty straightforward: Any pending or anticipated building repairs, assessments, or compliance measures? For example, in New York City, larger buildings need to periodically erect costly scaffolding to inspect their facade — you want to know if that's around the corner. But to almost every due-diligence question I asked, my agent said, "That's something for the lawyers in diligence."

It turned out that almost all the things that really concerned me — from the condo association's financial health to the building's historical flood data — were to be investigated after the sale had been negotiated, after my agent had done his part.

I've read tweets from reply guys longer than bidding documents.

Despite my concerns, my agent prodded me to go for a bid. He kept telling me that the apartment might sell very quickly, that we had to move soon. So we put in a bid. And when I saw it, I was shocked — not at the amount, but at the document. The whole thing was maybe a third of a page, summarizing the apartment's location, the amount of the offer, and a few other easy-to-understand details (like cash offer or mortgage). I was expecting something massive, confusing, and formal, but, again, it turned out that was for later, something for a lawyer to review, not the agent. I've read tweets from reply guys longer than the bidding document.

The bid almost worked. It was down to me and one other buyer, someone very similarly situated and with a similar bid, according to my agent.

This is when he finally struck out. When I made my bid, I went to the absolute maximum of what I felt comfortable spending, leaving zero wiggle room. But now my agent said that wasn't enough. He knew my finances and kept telling me how he knew I could afford to go higher. "What's 50k really going to mean to you over the lifetime of the apartment?" But I knew that was $50,000 more than I was willing to spend, $50,000 more than I thought it was worth. Buying a house can make even the largest sums seem negligible if you're not careful. But $50,000 is still $50,000. When I held firm, my agent couldn't hide his exasperation. He said something about me needing to "get serious." I realized he wanted the deal to go through more than I did. After all, that was the only way he got paid.

I lost the bidding war, and a couple months later I was cosmically relieved I had. During record-breaking rains in New York City last fall, the corner with that apartment flooded several feet above street level. I imagined just how awful it would have felt to have overextended myself to buy that apartment only to end up financially and literally underwater.

Brobeck described the real-estate industry as "rife with conflicts of interest," including many scenarios far worse than what I faced. Where my agent was merely pushy, others have gone on to "double-dip" on payments from both buyers and sellers, to drive up the price their client pays to increase the commission, and even share confidential information from one client with another. The National Association of Realtors' own 2015 report says, "The real estate industry is saddled with a large number of part-time, untrained, unethical, and/or incompetent agents."

I didn't want to pay someone who I felt was working against me, especially when I didn't see what they were bringing me in return. So I fired the agent and had a go on my own. I typed up my own bid form (all of 174 words) and kept an eye on StreetEasy, and a few weeks later I toured an open house.

The price was out of my budget, but the unit had been sitting on the market for a few months. So I came in with a low bid, the sort of tactic my agent had discouraged. Rather than toss it out, the seller and I negotiated. By the time they said "best and final," the seller had carved six figures off the asking price. Not bad for my first negotiation. Just before closing, while on a walkthrough with the seller's agent, I asked how my representing myself had affected things. He was candid: "Not splitting the commission meant they could do $50,000 lower." Like so many sellers, the prior owners had baked my agent's 3% commission into the selling price, and without it, I could save the difference. $50,000 is $50,000.

The class-action settlement with the NAR is going to make it a lot harder for sellers to be forced to pay for buyers' agents. Going forward, for people like me without an agent, a savvy seller may pay just 3% of the sales price to their own agent instead of 6% to be split with a buyer's agent. Some homebuyers may still want an agent, especially those who don't feel comfortable representing themselves or don't have the time, but faced with the prospect of paying directly for agents who offer less and less of an edge, I expect many more people will go their own way, and save tens of thousands of dollars in the process. Experts estimate that nationwide, after the NAR settlement, buyers may save up to $30 billion a year.

A few weeks after I moved into my new apartment, I ran into my ex-girlfriend. I told her I had bought a place, and she was thrilled for me. Then I sheepishly added: "So, that whole agent thing, turns out you're right. It was a scam after all." She just beamed more broadly.

Albert Fox Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, a New York-based civil-rights and privacy group.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/b0rWS3J
via IFTTT

• If you're going to pitch to Mark Cuban, you better do it by email.
• Cuban said in his MasterClass course that he's "literally invested $100 million in email pitches."
• "Some of them, I still have not met the people," Cuban said.

It turns out you can still pitch to billionaire Mark Cuban even if you don't get invited to go on Shark Tank.

"For me, I'm always accessible via email. I mean, my email is available publicly. And so I get email pitches all the time," Cuban said on his MasterClass course "Win Big In Business," which was released on February 22.

"I've literally invested $100 million in email pitches that people have sent me. Some of them, I still have not met the people," he added.

In his MasterClass video, Cuban said that he preferred to take pitches via email instead of phone because he's able to give "more comprehensive responses."

"If we do it by phone, I'm going to forget half the stuff that we talked about because I've got so much going on. If we do it via email, I can search for it always," he said in the course.

Cuban told BI that he doesn't keep track of the number of investments or the amount of money he has dispensed specifically over email.

He also said he would be open to doing calls if investors were writing him a check or if he was closing a deal.

"It depends on the circumstances. There isn't one rule," he said. 

Cuban also said in his Masterclass that he's trying to find a way to integrate meeting transcripts from his company, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, and all correspondence about their business projects into a large language model. He added that down the road, this might morph into the company's "own version of ChatGPT."

That said, while Cuban might love email and extol the virtues of it, he's also just one of many top executives who've relied on it to conduct business.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in his 2014 book, "How Google Works," that "most of the best — and busiest — people we know act quickly on their emails." Also in 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook told ABC he was receiving about 700 to 800 customer emails in a day, and that he read most of them.

While some may question if Cuban could fully assess a founder's credibility via an email, he told BI that this pitching method has been effective for him so far.

"It's easy to search for them online. And it's just as easy to judge credibility based on the responses I get and the questions I'm asked," Cuban said, adding that he spends about three to four hours a day on email.

"It's not fail-proof, but it has worked for me," he said.

And Cuban has the track record to prove it.

The businessman revealed on Monday that he is paying over $275 million in taxes this year.

The sheer heft of his tax bill also means that Cuban could single-handedly fund the annual salaries of all the lawmakers in Congress for nearly 3 years.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/PwTZg2X
via IFTTT

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle seem like lovely people. Despite some harrowing experiences throughout their love story, they appear to be well-meaning, and they have two very cute kids. All in all, they're … fine. They are also incredibly famous. But this combination of decency and notoriety does not necessarily translate to them being great business people or top-notch media moguls, as evidenced by companies throwing millions of dollars at them, with, let's say, mixed results.

Netflix announced on April 11 that two new shows from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are in the early stages of production. The first will be a series "curated" by Meghan that, according to its vague logline, "celebrates the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining, and friendship." The second will be about professional polo, shot at a championship in Florida. Film crews followed Harry around playing in a polo match this month.

These productions are part of the deal the pair signed with the streaming platform in 2020, reportedly worth $100 million. It has resulted in some hits, or rather, a hit: a multipart documentary called "Harry and Meghan" about the duo's romance, turbulence with the royal family, and their move to the US. It became Netflix's most-watched documentary debut. (If you haven't seen it, the early episodes are quite good, in my opinion, but by the end it drags.)

H&M's deal with Netflix has also produced some misses. Netflix dropped "Pearl," an animated children's series Meghan created through her and Harry's production company, Archewell Productions, before it even premiered. Netflix executives reportedly turned on the idea because they figured kids wouldn't really care who made the show, even if she was a duchess. Two other documentary series the pair put out on Netflix, "Heart of Invictus" and "Live to Lead," didn't break through. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Netflix had also rejected at least two TV ideas from Meghan and Harry and that the company was unlikely to renew their deal with them in 2025. Netflix did not return a request for comment for this story.

Despite the misfires, Netflix is having a better time with the couple than Spotify. The audio-streaming company signed a deal with Harry and Meghan in 2020 reportedly worth $20 million. After a long stretch of radio silence, the couple finally came out with "Archetypes" in 2022, a 12-episode podcast hosted by Meghan about women and "the labels that try to hold women back." In 2023, Spotify and the royal couple said they had agreed to part ways. The pair reportedly didn't get paid the full $20 million because they didn't produce enough content.

After four years outside the official orbit of the royal family, as The WSJ notes, the documentary and Harry's memoir "Spare" are the only impactful things Harry and Meghan have produced. It's hard not to look at all of this and say, OK, Harry and Meghan seem nice, but if I ran a company, I probably would not be making big deals with them.

The $100 million at the time sounded like a good idea, and who knew that the two of them would be such duds on camera?

While Spotify has already washed its hands of the Sussexes, Netflix is still trying to work with them. As Michael Pachter, a managing director at Wedbush Securities who's covered movies, entertainment, and tech for two decades, explained, it's because they've still got that $100 million deal. It's one of many such agreements Netflix signed with big names when it was trying to better establish itself and get eyeballs, including with Barack and Michelle Obama, Ryan Murphy, and Shonda Rhimes.

"The $100 million at the time sounded like a good idea, and who knew that the two of them would be such duds on camera?" Pachter said.

It's possible one or both shows could take off like their personal documentary did. There's still juice in the Meghan and Harry storyline. Netflix may be hoping there'll be some halo effect from "Suits," the 2010s-era legal drama Markle was in that recently became a Netflix hit.

The shows being proposed now will likely be relatively inexpensive to make — it's not wildly costly to pay a camera crew to film Harry playing polo or Meghan cooking something in her kitchen (if that's what her show turns out to be). Productivity prospects may be better here because Meghan and Harry won't really have to do much of anything extra except exist as themselves. Harry won't need to come up with a podcast concept, which he reportedly struggled to do with Spotify — he just has to ride a horse. And maybe just keeping on good terms with the Sussexes is worth it in case more drama erupts from the royal family. Perhaps Prince Harry decides to try to get back into the royal fold and documents that. A public breakup with Meghan and Harry may also be a mess Netflix doesn't want to deal with.

But barring some juicy new development or a sudden turnaround in viewer interest, Netflix could decide to throw in the towel, but unlike Spotify, the streamer might not be able to recoup any of the $100 million from the Sussexes.

"Netflix can cancel this anytime they want and just pay them the unpaid amount," Pachter said. "And maybe they will do that if they keep messing around with the formula and can't find anything. They're not going to waste their time if nobody watches it."

The what-to-do-with-Meghan-and-Harry issue is also illustrative of a broader point: Celebrity-driven media is a tough business. Plenty of people are famous for one thing — acting, singing, being good at a sport, being born into a very wealthy British family that happens to own a lot of land and jewels — and then have a hard time parlaying that into something different. It feels like nearly every celebrity has a podcast, but only a handful have broken through — like "SmartLess" Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes or Joe Rogan's show. The list of stars turned failed talk-show hosts is endless and includes Magic Johnson and Chevy Chase.

Working out which celebrities can cross over is hard, and there's no clear formula that guarantees success. If there were, everyone would be implementing it.

Media companies founded by Reese Witherspoon and LeBron James have had some successes, but they haven't been guaranteed hit factories. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of Hollywood studios' so-called "vanity deals" with celebrity-backed productions flopped or were canned, including with stars such as Alicia Silverstone, Nicolas Cage, and Demi Moore. More recently, the Obamas have received multiple accolades for some of their productions, though they haven't hit a bunch of commercial home runs. Just this week, CNN canceled its fairly new talk show with Gayle King and Charles Barkley.

Working out which celebrities can cross over is hard, and there's no clear formula that guarantees success. If there were, everyone would be implementing it.

Despite their trials and tribulations, Meghan and Harry are still at it. Archewell Productions continues to exist. Meghan is launching some sort of lifestyle venture called American Riviera Orchard that, so far, is mainly a website and an Instagram account. She's filed a number of trademark applications that would indicate she may plan to dip into skincare, cosmetics, yoga mats, and accessories for pets. The former actor has experience in the lifestyle space — in her previous life, she ran a blog called The TIG. This week, the brand released its first product — 50 jars of jam sent to Meghan's friends. Is Meghan Markle the new J.M. Smucker? Sure, maybe, and then she can show everyone how she made that jam on her hit Netflix show.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/xYXmDhB
via IFTTT

• YouTuber Kate Kaden warned against "blackout shopping," a trend of buying unnecessary items.
• Kaden promotes frugal living and advises on consistent money-saving methods.
• She suggests creating a budget, shopping only once a week, and decluttering your house. 

There's a phrase for going into a store, buying loads of things you don't need, and forgetting to pick up the one thing you did.

It's called "blackout shopping," and it's one of the worst things you can do if you're trying to save money, according to Kate Kaden, a YouTuber who gives advice on "frugal living."

Kaden is one creator in a movement of many on social media who are encouraging young people to save their money rather than spend it as soon as it hits their accounts.

Living below your means is the best way to save money consistently, Kaden told Business Insider. But there are many things we do in day-to-day life that hinder our chances of doing this.

One of those is "blackout shopping," Kaden said, when we go out for something specific but get tempted into picking up impulse purchases around the store.

"There was a trend for a little while where it was almost cute to overspend at Target, for example," she said. "You go in for a bottle of shampoo, you come out $200 later, you've forgotten the shampoo."

On TikTok, there are dozens of videos that come up under the search terms "blackout shopping" or "blacked out while shopping."

Kaden said it became "kind of a running joke" on there.

"But now, as things have gotten tighter and more expensive, I would recommend avoiding blackout shopping," she said. "It's not going to be funny anymore because now we can't put food on the table or put a roof over our heads."

Consumers are feeling more optimistic about the US economy, according to a recent report by McKinsey, and retail sales increased 0.7% in March compared to the previous year. This is despite prices rising faster than the Federal Reserve's inflation target of 2%.

Around 40% of consumers want to "splurge" over the next three months, the McKinsey report found, with Gen Zers and millennials being the most likely to want to treat themselves. But as Kaden knows too well, that comes at a cost.

Kaden started making content five years ago when she became a single parent.

"I was like, oh, hey, how am I going to do this? This is scary, this is terrifying," she said.

She turned to YouTube and found a few content creators there sharing advice for single moms. She found it so helpful that she started budgeting, saving, and finally investing in her retirement.

"I started sharing everything that was working, and that's where it kind of blossomed," she said.

Some of Kaden's most popular videos are about consistent ways to save money, things people should stop buying, and how to form a "frugal cocoon."

"That is just helping protect yourself from all the temptation," she explained.

Overall, consistency is key, Kaden said, doing the "same things over and over again."

A good place to start is a budget and, as Kaden calls is, "to know what you owe."

"To save money, you've got to know how much you're spending," she said.

After totaling all household expenses, Kaden said you should turn your savings into another one — putting the same amount away each month.

Then, write up a grocery list and only shop once a week. If you can, Kaden recommends arranging a grocery store pickup rather than going into the store because that way, you avoid temptation.

Doing this, you also won't shop as your "fantasy self," Kaden explained, buying tons of items for new recipes they don't end up making and fresh produce for a super healthy lifestyle you don't lead.

"They're going to get all these vegetables and fruit this week, and then it all rots and just wastes all the food," she said. "So shop for where you're really at and what you're going to do."

For those who struggle with impulse buying online, Kaden said decluttering her house was an eye-opener.

"You'll look at all the stuff that you have spent money on that you're never going to use ever again, and all the stuff you have wasted," she said. "It might kind of curb you from spending on more stuff."

Many people have a blind spot about their outgoings and only realize they're out of money when their card gets declined. This is usually a result of denial or fear over finances or simply not making it a priority yet, Kaden said.

With her channel, Kaden hopes to make frugal living "fun and lighthearted" and provide people a way out of feeling so stressed about money.

"I know people hate this word, but the budget has been the key for me, and the budget for me is not restrictive at all. It's been permission to spend," she said.

If you still want to order DoorDash, for example, you can incorporate that into your budget — set aside $100 or so for eating out, and you can spend it how you like.

"It's scary or intimidating, especially for the people that claim they don't know how to do it, they don't know how to do math, that kind of thing," Kaden said. "But if you do it, it's going to change your life."

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/4Wiumyn
via IFTTT

• Elon Musk apologized to laid-off Tesla employees for incorrect severance packages, CNBC reported.
• The rare apology comes after the EV maker said at least 10% of the workforce was being laid off.
• Some workers previously told Business Insider they were offered two months' pay as severance. 

Elon Musk apologized in an email to some laid-off Tesla employees after their severance packages were found to be "incorrectly low," CNBC reported.

"As we reorganize Tesla it has come to my attention that some severance packages are incorrectly low," Musk said in the brief email sent Wednesday, per the outlet. "My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately."

Some employees were offered two months of severance, which would be paid through June 14, five laid-off workers previously told Business Insider.

Sixty days' pay is the minimum that companies with more than 100 employees must give laid-off workers if there is no 60-day notice period before mass job cuts, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

The Tesla CEO sent an all-hands email Sunday night announcing the automaker was cutting more than 10% of its workforce. Some employees only learned they'd been affected after turning up for work on Monday. Some were told by security that if their ID badges didn't work, they no longer had jobs.

Ezekiel Love, who only joined Tesla in Austin about a month ago, was one such worker. He now says he can't pay rent after losing his job.

The mass layoffs come as Tesla faces a sharp slowdown in sales and rising competition from domestic manufacturers in China, its most important market outside the US.

Tesla also lost some senior executives amid the layoffs. Drew Baglino, who'd been with the company for 18 years and was most recently its head of powertrain and electrical engineering, resigned and said he'd made the "difficult decision" to leave.

Rohan Patel, public policy and business development VP, also announced his exit on Monday.

Musk is also grappling with lawsuits filed by four former executives of Twitter, now X, who are suing him for $128 million in unpaid severance. The plaintiffs, who were fired after Musk's Twitter takeover in 2022, are former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former legal chief Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett.

Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/zG0dWbL
via IFTTT

• Chinese businesses are holding back from converting their foreign exchange earnings into the Chinese yuan.
• This is due to the yuan's weakness against the US dollar and higher offshore interest rates.
• The potential for "yuanisation" remains, given China's expanding trade ties and financial infrastructure.

China has been trying to expand the clout of the Chinese yuan amid a broader trend to diversify away from the US dollar.

However, even Chinese businesses aren't sold on the yuan right now.

Official data from the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, shows that foreign exchange deposits rose from $778.9 billion in September to $832.6 billion in March.

This means some Chinese businesses have been holding back from converting their foreign exchange earnings into their home currency.

This development appears to be primarily due to weakness in the yuan — which has hit five-month lows against the US dollar after losing nearly 2% to the greenback this year to date. The longer-term trend was even more negative, as the yuan has fallen 5% since the start of 2023 — discouraging many Chinese companies from converting their dollar earnings to the yuan.

Chinese exporters are also biding their time to convert their earnings because interest rates outside the country are high. They are parking their US dollars offshore in deposits that earn them 6%, compared to 1.5% on yuan deposits at home, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Becky Liu, the head of China macro strategy at Standard Chartered, told Reuters that Chinese exporters likely need a "confirmation of the Fed rate cut including a clearer dollar softening trend" before they'll be willing to convert more of their offshore dollar earnings to the yuan.

While Chinese businesses are hanging onto their dollars due to yuan weakness, this trend also illustrates the challenges facing currencies like the Chinese yuan in a world dominated by the US dollar.

It also proves it's not so easy to displace the mighty US dollar as the world's top reserve and trading currency of choice. And that, in turn, is good news for the US: It means the US can maintain its economic clout, and borrow quickly and cheaply for its industrial policy and social programs.

More talk than action on de-dollarization last year

Recent data from the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, confirmed the dollar is still king. That's even amid discussions about de-dollarization that were fuelled by concerns over the greenback's power following sanctions against Russia that shut it out of the dollar-based global financial system.

The IMF data, published in late March, showed the US dollar accounted for nearly 60% of global foreign reserves. The greenback's share of global foreign reserves also edged up 0.2 percentage points in 2023 over a year ago — in contrast to the yuan's share, which fell over the same period for the second straight year, according to an ING bank analysis.

This is in part because Russia used to hold about one-third of global yuan reserves before 2022, when it invaded Ukraine. Moscow had to use some of that money to plug its budget deficit last year, contributing to a fall in the yuan's share in the world's global reserves.

However, this doesn't mean "yuanisation" is off the agenda, Dmitry Dolgin, the chief economist for Russia and CIS countries at ING, wrote in a note published on April 10.

After all, China is still promoting the yuan's usage globally, including through the broadening of bilateral swap lines and the growth of China's yuan-based CIPS messaging system as an alternative to SWIFT.

"It appears that China's expanding trade ties and financial infrastructure suggest that the potential for further yuanisation has not been exhausted," Dolgin wrote.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/pCjSV8P
via IFTTT

• After studying in Japan, Xian Jie Lee moved to a village called Ryujinmura in the mountains.
• He rented a farmhouse and renovated it to live in then purchased the house next door to list on Airbnb.
• The guesthouse now rents for $190 a night and he offers tours to his visitors for $40 to $270.

Singaporean Xian Jie Lee, 33, moved to Japan in 2012 to study political science. He loved the country so much that he decided to stay, and he started a desk job at an IT company.

Within a few months, Lee realized he was unfulfilled and quit to start a tour guide company with a friend called Craft Tabby. While running that in Kyoto, Lee met 72-year-old tea master Shu at a tea festival.

Shu served Lee some wild tea he'd picked in the Wakayama mountains and Lee was amazed by how good it tasted. "It was so full of energy," Lee told Business Insider.

Shu suggested Lee visit Wayakama. When he visited, Lee was blown away by the forests of cedar trees, waterfalls, and steep hillsides that were draped with mist. When the pandemic struck, Lee knew exactly where he wanted to go.

Shu told Lee that he could rent a farmhouse in a village called Ryujinmura. He would need to renovate it himself to live in it, but Lee knew the cost of the rent and renovation would be similar to what he paid to rent his apartment in Kyoto.

In December 2020, Lee moved and became one of the youngest residents in the village.

Renovating the rental

Lee loved the farmhouse with its thatched roof and sliding wooden doors, but he soon learned the renovation would be more challenging than he first thought. "I removed the tatami (traditional straw floor covering) in the inner room and fell through the floor," Lee said.

As Shu grew up in the area, he knew of a carpenter who'd once worked with his father. The carpenter was delighted that Lee wanted to return the farmhouse to its former glory, so while he said he'd charge for his son's labor, he worked for free.

The carpenters helped demolish and remove the old wood and redo the entire floor. Lee lived in the kitchen for three months while the wooden floors were installed. Then he switched rooms and they renovated the kitchen and bathroom.

It was Lee's home, but it became a community project

Shu introduced Lee to the local charcoal maker, who provided charcoal for his fire, and the paper maker, who made all the traditional washi from mulberry trees for the shoji screens.

Once the house was finished, Lee started to clear the overgrown land. He replanted the rice fields, cleared the tea bushes of weeds, and started to grow corn and tomatoes.

While the neighbors shared tips on how to grow the crops, Lee still had a few learning curves. Holes in his fence allowed wild deer to help themselves to the heirloom rice plants, and when he tried to fix the pipes that fed the rice fields with mountain water, an error meant he had to hike up the steep hillside to fix them a second time.

Lee was a fast learner, and some of his neighbors asked if he could also manage their rice fields. Lee's friends from Singapore would often visit to help. He also started posting on YouTube, and some people who watched the videos volunteered to help him, too.

Creating a new life and business in the mountains

Lee thought he'd split his time between the mountains and Kyoto. "I started liking this place more and more and these days, I seldom return to Kyoto," Lee said.

He knew that if he were going to stay, he'd need to expand the tour business. "I thought that if I had a guesthouse, I could run tours from here," Lee said.

The owner of the empty 120-year-old farmhouse next door to Lee's rental agreed to sell it to Lee and two of his friends. The second house also needed repair, and its purchase and renovations cost $25,000 in total.

Lee paid for a craftsman to reinstall a sunken hearth in the floor at the center of the house, while another craftsman created handmade shoji screens. Since they intended to use it as a guesthouse for up to five people, they decided to install a wooden floor rather than tatami mats.

Lee and his guests both enjoy unique experiences

While renovating the guesthouse, Lee turned his own home into a café three days a week to earn extra income. He served dishes to hikers who had been enjoying the trails. "It was quite tough because I was dealing with the renovations and planting rice while running the café," Lee said.

When Lee listed the farmhouse on Airbnb in August 2023, he closed the café, but he now serves food to his guests.

Guests renting the two-bedroom guesthouse for $190 a night can meet the resident goats and Ryujin chickens, borrow a paddleboard, or swim down the Hidakagawa River in front of the farmhouse.

Lee also offers tours to his guests priced from $40 to $270 where you can hike to six secluded waterfalls, take a traditional washi paper-making class, or participate in a tea-making workshop.

Lee has also been able to participate in unique experiences himself. He and some of the volunteers were recently invited to take part in the lion dance at the local harvest festival. "We didn't know what we were doing, but the neighbors helped show us what to do," Lee said.

The villagers were thrilled they'd taken part. "The most surprising thing for me was how open everyone was to have us involved," Lee said. "Then also when they told us how happy it made them."

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/GYdabpO
via IFTTT

• Joe Biden on Wednesday painted a dire picture of China's economy to US steelworkers.
• Calling China "xenophobic," Biden unleashed some of his harshest comments ever about Beijing.
• Bashing China fits well into Biden's new election cadence of hyping up the US economy as a lasting, dominant force.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday pitched his version of US-China relations to steelworkers in Pennsylvania — that Beijing isn't only failing to catch up, but struggling on its own.

As he spoke at the US Steelworkers union headquarters in Pittsburgh, the president's hyperbolic rhetoric sounded almost Trump-esque.

"They've got a population that is more people in retirement than working," Biden said of China. "They're not importing anything. They're xenophobic. Nobody else coming in. They've got real problems."

Those were some of the harshest comments Biden has ever made about China, though it's unclear how the president calculated his retirement figures. China fields a labor force of about 780 million, or more than half its 1.4 billion population, with urban unemployment reportedly at around 5%. But the country is indeed aging rapidly and bound for an imbalanced population, with around 300 million people expected to retire in the next 10 years and fewer births than deaths.

Biden, running for his second term in the White House, has reason to amp up the anti-China talk even as Washington and Beijing try to cool tensions this year. He and his opponent, former President Donald Trump, have long campaigned on being tough on Beijing, and Trump has been pledging major tariffs on foreign goods.

Instead of posturing himself a Mr. Fix-It, or a lone warrior fighting the good fight against a strong Beijing, Biden on Wednesday told blue-collar workers that the competition, as it stands, already favors America by a landslide.

His message in Pittsburgh was clear — China is in trouble. He told the steelworkers that he often asked world leaders if they would "trade places" with China and its problems.

"Trump simply doesn't get it," he said. "For years I've heard many of my Republican, even Democratic friends say that China is on the rise and America has been falling behind."

"I've always believed we got it all wrong," Biden added. "America is rising, we have the best economy in the world."

Boasting that the US economy is robust has been a key pillar of Biden's reelection campaign, as his Republican opponents claimed throughout his term that the US economy struggled under him.

There's another rhetorical implication to Biden jeering at China's problems. By playing up America's position and downplaying China's, Biden shied away from a common narrative that a rising China will clash, or even go to war with the US as the former catches up.

"I want fair competition with China, not conflict, and we're in a stronger position to win the economic competition of the 21st century against China or anyone else," Biden said.

Meanwhile, he announced the tripling of a 7.5% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum. China, powered by state funds, has been producing large quantities of steel and selling it on the US market for cheap, which Biden called "cheating."

China's Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

The president also pledged to block the $14.9 billion sale of US Steel to the Japanese Nippon Steel, once again hammering home the upsides of investing in an already powerful American economy.

"American-owned, American-operated by American union steelworkers, the best in the world," Biden said.

The metals industry provides more than 120,000 jobs in Pennsylvania and some $33 billion in economic output, per an April 2023 report published by the Pennsylvania Steel Alliance.

Pennsylvania, a vital swing state for the 2024 election, voted for Biden by a 1.2% margin in 2020.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/OT4QcXg
via IFTTT

• Tesla shares have tumbled 62% from their peak as investors gear up for a growth slowdown.
• The stock drop has fueled an estimated $166 billion decline in Elon Musk's net worth.
• The Tesla CEO is now worth about $174 billion, down from $340 billion in November 2021.

Tesla's mounting troubles have dealt a heavy blow to Elon Musk's net worth.

In November 2021, the Tesla CEO held the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and seemed untouchable with an estimated fortune of $340 billion. He was more than three times richer than Warren Buffett at that point.

However, Musk's net worth has plunged by about $166 billion since then to $174 billion at Wednesday's close. The key driver has been Tesla stock, which has tumbled from a split-adjusted peak of $415 in 2021 to $155 — a 62% decline.

The share-price slump has slashed Tesla's market capitalization from north of $1.2 trillion to below $490 billion. Musk's net worth has taken a big hit from the decline because his 13% stake in the automaker makes up a big chunk of his wealth.

Musk's start to this year has also been dismal relative to his peers in the 12-digit club. He topped the Bloomberg rich list with a $229 billion fortune in January, but his net worth has crashed by $55 billion, or 24%, since then.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO now ranks fourth in the wealth rankings, behind LVMH's Bernard Arnault, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.

Moreover, Musk is the only one of the world's 13 richest people whose net worth has declined this year. He's lost more money on paper than anyone on the list has gained, including Zuckerberg who's up almost $50 billion.

Tesla's stock has tumbled in recent months due to mounting concerns about the company. Musk told employees over the weekend that more than 10% of the company's global workforce would be laid off, signaling demand for EVs is faltering.

The automaker delivered fewer cars than expected to customers last quarter, and has made price cuts that threaten to erode its profit margins.

Moreover, Musk is fending off fierce competition from Chinese rivals like Buffett-backed BYD, and has repeatedly underscored the painful impact of higher interest rates on customer demand.

Musk's fortune isn't completely tied to Tesla. He also owns an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX, the space exploration company valued at $180 billion in December, and a roughly 79% stake in X after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it last year.

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/8YvtRJP
via IFTTT

• Nine Google employees were arrested after protesting the company's contract with Israel.
• The company fired 28 employees in California and New York.
• Another employee was fired last month for protesting the same contract in New York.

A small group of Alphabet employees' long-simmering protests against the Google parent company's work with Israel ended with more than two dozen terminations on Wednesday.

Google fired 28 employees who participated in office protests in New York and California on Tuesday, the company said on Wednesday.

The employees occupied Google offices in Sunnyvale, California, and New York City. They were protesting Project Nimbus, Google's $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon that provides services to Israel's government.

"Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take action," a Google spokesperson said. "These employees were put on administrative leave, and their access to our systems was cut."

Nine workers were arrested after they refused to leave the offices. Five of the arrests were in Sunnyvale and four were in New York. Police in both locations confirmed the figures to BI.

A representative for the New York Police Department said the four people in New York were charged with criminal trespassing. A representative for the Sunnyvale police department said the arrested individuals received citations for trespassing. Charges have not yet been filed, the district attorney's office in Santa Clara County said on Wednesday.

Chris Rackow, Google's head of security, wrote in an internal memo on Wednesday that the protests were "extremely disruptive" and that they "made coworkers feel threatened."

The company had 182,502 employees as of December 31.

Protests against Project Nimbus

Small groups of Google employees have voiced dissent against Project Nimbus, a joint contract with Amazon that provides artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to Israel's government and military.

Last month, a Google employee protesting the contract was fired for disrupting a talk in New York by the company's head of Israel.

More than 100 people, including Google workers, protested the project outside the company's New York office in 2022. The protest came after the resignation of a Google employee who had spoken out against Project Nimbus.

The tech group No Tech for Apartheid said it organized Tuesday's protest as part of its campaign asking Amazon and Google to scrap Project Nimbus. No Tech for Apartheid says the tech companies' contract enables the Israeli government to surveil and displace Palestinians. The contract — the details of which became public in 2021 — drew additional scrutiny after Hamas launched a series of terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, killing 1,200. Israel responded to the attacks with a months-long offensive that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians.

A Google representative told BI the company supports governments in countries it operates in with cloud computing services.

"We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy," a Google spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said the work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military projects relevant to weapons or intelligence services.

Protestors complied with arrests

Sunnyvale Police Department Captain Dzanh Le told BI there were between 80 to 90 protesters outside the building in Sunnyvale on Tuesday, with a few occupying a room in Google's complex. Bloomberg reported that some protesters congregated near the office of Google's cloud CEO.

Le said the police department received a call from Google around 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday saying the protesters refused to leave. The protesters refused again when the police came and were then arrested on suspicion of criminal trespassing. Le said the protesters complied with the arrest.

One of the employees arrested in Google's New York City headquarters, 23-year-old Hasan Ibraheem, told BI the protest started around noon Tuesday when a group of employees sat in the office with a banner and started giving speeches and reciting chants.

Ibraheem said the group was asked to leave multiple times throughout the day but continued the chants and speeches every 15 to 20 minutes, until about 6 p.m. By 6:45 p.m., he said the remaining group was informed that they no longer had access to the building and couldn't work.

The police arrived around 9:30 p.m. and arrested the remaining four Googlers, Ibraheem said. The workers were released from the station at 2 a.m., he said.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

Are you a Googler? We want to hear from you. Email the reporter using a non-work device at aaltchek@insider.com

from All Content from Business Insider https://ift.tt/ry4ZFUv
via IFTTT