The world’s largest private equity fund, backed by Japan’s Softbank Group and Saudi Arabia’s main sovereign wealth fund, said Saturday that it had raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics.

“The next stage of the Information Revolution is under way, and building the businesses that will make this possible will require unprecedented large-scale, long-term investment,” the Softbank Vision Fund said in a statement.

Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank, a telecommunications and tech investment group, revealed plans for the fund last October, and since then it has obtained commitments from some of the world’s most deep-pocketed investors.

In addition to Softbank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the new fund’s investors include Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment, which has committed $15 billion, Apple Inc., Qualcomm, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology and Japan’s Sharp Corp.

The new fund made its announcement during the visit of President Donald Trump to Riyadh and the signing of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of business deals between U.S. and Saudi companies. Son was also in Riyadh on Saturday.

After meeting with Trump last December, Son pledged $50 billion of investment in the United States that would create 50,000 jobs, a promise Trump claimed was a direct result of his election win.

Saudi tech access

The fund may also serve the interests of Saudi Arabia by helping Riyadh obtain access to foreign technology. Low oil prices have severely damaged the Saudi economy, and policymakers are trying to diversify into new industries.

The PIF signaled an interest in the tech sector last year by investing $3.5 billion in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber.

Saturday’s statement did not say how much the PIF had committed to the fund, but previously it had said it would invest up to $45 billion over five years. Softbank is investing $28 billion.

The new fund said it would seek to buy minority and majority interests in both private and public companies, from emerging businesses to established, multibillion-dollar firms. It expects to obtain preferred access to long-term investment opportunities worth $100 million or more.

Other sectors in which the fund may invest include mobile computing, communications infrastructure, computational biology, consumer internet businesses and financial technology. The fund aims for $100 billion of committed capital and expects to complete its money-raising in six months, it added.
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About 3 million Americans will enter the job pool this year as graduation ceremonies get underway at various colleges and universities across the United States. With unemployment at a 10-year low, 2017 is shaping up to be a good year for new grads. But as Mil Arcega reports, success for many will depend on a desire to keep learning and a willingness to go where the jobs are.
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About three million American university graduates will enter the job market this year. And with unemployment currently at a 10-year low, it’s a good time to be graduating, says Nicole Smith, chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW).

“We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates we’ve had since May of 2007, so what that means for the graduating class of 2017 is that the likelihood of getting a job is really, really good,” she said.

The U.S. Labor Department says unemployment for those with a four-year bachelor’s degree or higher is 2.5 percent, compared to the overall jobless rate of 4.5 percent. For those with a high school diploma or less, the average unemployment rate is 6.8 percent.

Demand for graduates with associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees is particularly strong in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to the latest survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

However, Smith says, a four-year degree is not necessary to compete in today’s economy.

“There are about 28 million jobs or so in the U.S. economy that are good-paying jobs; that are high-skilled jobs for people without a B.A,” she said.

While higher learning can give new workers the upper hand, Smith says almost a third of students with bachelor’s degrees are under-unemployed.

“So we have to do this cakewalk, this tightrope walk, to understand exactly what the market demands,” she said.

Options without college degree

A survey of the hottest employment sectors in 2017 shows some of the fastest-growing fields don’t require a four-year degree, according to Bankrate.com senior analyst Mark Hamrick.

“You don’t have to have a college degree for some of those technical jobs, where, let’s say, a kind of therapy might be involved — physical or occupational therapy,” he said.

Health care and service-oriented jobs aimed at the needs of a graying population are bound to remain strong as baby boomers — those born between 1946 to 1964 — continue to retire. But, Hamrick says, some skills are harder to learn in school.

“One of the skills which has been in strong demand really involves people skills — closing the deal, sales … business strategy; charting the course for a viable enterprise, that’s something that’s needed,” he said.

What is clear is that jobs that fueled the economy three or four decades ago are not the same jobs driving the economy today. In the 1970s, manufacturing accounted for nearly two of every five jobs; today, those manufacturing jobs account for fewer than one in 10.   

“The types of manufacturing jobs that remain are jobs that are really high-skill, high-tech, high-demand manufacturing jobs. So those jobs require a lot more skills than their predecessors did,” Smith said.

Life-long learning key

Today’s job market also differs from the past because rapid technological and societal change demands a commitment to life-long learning, which means that getting a degree is just the beginning, according to Smith.  

“Each year, there’s a new … version of technology that we must use,” she said. “So what the students need to be aware of is that they will need to come back to re-up their certification, to re-up their skills.”

Participating in today’s economy also means older and newer workers must be willing to move where the jobs are. Demand for workers is greatest where local economies are dynamic and where populations are growing, says Bankrate.com’s Hamrick. That means the exodus toward bigger cities on the East and West coasts will continue. 

“That’s a process that’s accelerating,” Hamrick said. “It’s not slowing down, and so having the right skills, going where the jobs are located — those are the keys to obtaining and maintaining employment.”

The most recent jobs report shows the U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs in April, and unemployment fell to 4.4 percent. That’s a sharp contrast to the dark days that followed the 2008 financial crisis, when the U.S. economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month and unemployment peaked at 10 percent. 
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A sizable majority of rural Americans backed Donald Trump’s presidential bid, drawn to his calls to slash environmental rules, strengthen law enforcement and replace the federal health care law.

But last month, many of them struck a sour note after White House aides signaled that Trump would deliver on another signature vow by edging toward abandoning the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Farm Country suddenly went on red alert.

Trump’s message that NAFTA was a job-killing disaster had never resonated much in rural America. NAFTA had widened access to Mexican and Canadian markets, boosting U.S. farm exports and benefiting many farmers.

“Mr. President, America’s corn farmers helped elect you,” Wesley Spurlock of the National Corn Growers Association warned in a statement. “Withdrawing from NAFTA would be disastrous for American agriculture.”

Within hours, Trump softened his stance. He wouldn’t actually dump NAFTA, he said. He’d first try to forge a more advantageous deal with Mexico and Canada – a move that formally began Thursday when his top trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, announced the administration’s intent to renegotiate NAFTA.

Farmers have been relieved that NAFTA has survived so far. Yet many remain nervous about where Trump’s trade policy will lead.

As a candidate, Trump defined his “America First” stance as a means to fight unfair foreign competition. He blamed unjust deals for swelling U.S. trade gaps and stealing factory jobs.

But NAFTA and other deals have been good for American farmers, who stand to lose if Trump ditches the pact or ignites a trade war. The United States has enjoyed a trade surplus in farm products since at least 1967, government data show. Last year, farm exports exceeded imports by $20.5 billion.

“You don’t start off trade negotiations … by picking fights with your trade partners that are completely unnecessary,” says Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer who produces corn, soybeans, oats and hay.

Many farmers worry that Trump’s policies will jeopardize their exports just as they face weaker crop and livestock prices.

“It comes up pretty quickly in conversation,” says Blake Hurst, a corn and soybean farmer in northwestern Missouri’s Atchison County.

That county’s voters backed Trump more than 3-to-1 in the election but now feel “it would be better if the rhetoric (on trade) was a little less strident,” says Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau.

Trump’s main argument against NAFTA and other pacts was that they exposed American workers to unequal competition with low-wage workers in countries like Mexico and China.

NAFTA did lead some American manufacturers to move factories and jobs to Mexico. But since it took effect in 1994 and eased tariffs, annual farm exports to Mexico have jumped nearly five-fold to about $18 billion. Mexico is the No. 3 market for U.S. agriculture, notably corn, soybeans and pork.

“The trade agreements that we’ve had have been very beneficial,” says Stephen Censky, CEO of the American Soybean Association. “We need to take care not to blow the significant gains that agriculture has won.”

The U.S. has run a surplus in farm trade with Mexico for 20 of the 23 years since NAFTA took effect. Still, the surpluses with Mexico became deficits in 2015 and 2016 as global livestock and grain prices plummeted and shrank the value of American exports, notes Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Mexico has begun to seek alternatives to U.S. food because, as its agriculture secretary, Jose Calzada Rovirosa, said in March, Trump’s remarks on trade “have injected uncertainty” into the agriculture business.

Once word had surfaced that Trump was considering pulling out of NAFTA, Sonny Perdue, two days into his job as the president’s agriculture secretary, hastened to the White House with a map showing areas that would be hurt most by a pullout, overlapped with many that voted for Trump.

“I tried to demonstrate to him that in the agricultural market, sometimes words like ‘withdraw’ or ‘terminate’ can have a major impact on markets,” Perdue said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I think the president made a very wise decision for the benefit of many agricultural producers across the country” by choosing to remain in NAFTA.

Trump delivered another disappointment for U.S. farm groups in January by fulfilling a pledge to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration negotiated with 11 Asia-Pacific countries. Trump argued that the pact would cost Americans jobs by pitting them against low-wage Asian labor.

But the deal would have given U.S. farmers broader access to Japan’s notoriously impregnable market and easier entry into fast-growing Vietnam. Philip Seng of the U.S. Meat Export Federation notes that the U.S. withdrawal from TPP left Australia with a competitive advantage because it had already negotiated lower tariffs in Japan.

Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports, thereby raising fears that those trading partners would retaliate with their own sanctions.

Farmers know they’re frequently the first casualties of trade wars. Many recall a 2009 trade rift in which China responded to U.S. tire tariffs by imposing tariffs on U.S. chicken parts. And Mexico slapped tariffs on U.S. goods ranging from ham to onions to Christmas trees in 2009 to protest a ban on Mexican trucks crossing the border.

The White House declined to comment on farmers’ fears that Trump’s trade policy stands to hurt them. But officials say they’ve sought to ease concerns, by, for example, having Agriculture Secretary Perdue announce a new undersecretary to oversee trade and foreign agricultural affairs.

Many farmers are still hopeful about the Trump administration. Some, for example, applaud his plans to slash environmental rules that they say inflate the cost of running a farm. Some also hold out hope that the author of “The Art of the Deal” will negotiate ways to improve NAFTA.

One such way might involve Canada. NAFTA let Canada shield its dairy farmers from foreign competition behind tariffs and regulations but left at least one exception – an American ultra-filtered milk used in cheese. When Canadian farmers complained about the cheaper imports, Canada changed its policy and effectively priced ultra-filtered American milk out of the market.

“Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult,” Trump tweeted last month. “We will not stand for this. Watch!”

Some U.S. cattle producers would also like a renegotiated NAFTA to give them something the current version doesn’t: The right to label their product “Made in America.” In 2015, the World Trade Organization struck down the United States’ country-of-origin labeling rules as unfair to Mexico and Canada.

Many still worry that Trump’s planned overhaul of American trade policy is built to revive manufacturing and that farming remains an afterthought.

“So much of the conversation in the campaign had been in Detroit or in Indiana” and focused on manufacturing jobs,” said Kathy Baylis, an economist at the University of Illinois. The importance of American farm exports “never made it into the rhetoric.”

 
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An OPEC panel reviewing scenarios for next week’s policy-setting meeting is looking at the option of deepening and extending an OPEC-led deal to reduce oil output, OPEC sources said Friday.

OPEC’s national representatives — officials representing the 13 member countries, plus officials from OPEC’s Vienna secretariat — met Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the market.

The two-day meeting, called the Economic Commission Board, was scheduled to finish Thursday but will conclude later Friday, two OPEC sources said.

“We have not agreed on final scenarios,” said one of the sources.

A second source said a deeper supply cut was an option depending on estimated growth in supply from non-OPEC and U.S. shale oil.

The meeting precedes a policy-setting gathering of OPEC and non-OPEC oil ministers May 25 to decide whether to extend their deal to reduce output beyond June 30.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other producers originally agreed to cut production by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) for six months from Jan. 1 to support the market.

Oil prices, trading around $53 a barrel, have gained support from reduced output, but high inventories and rising supply from producers outside the deal have limited the rally, pressing the case for extending the deal.
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After years of stagnation and high unemployment, the eurozone countries appear to be bouncing back with growth in the shared currency bloc, soaring higher than in the United States and Britain.

The eurozone grew at an annual rate of 1.7 percent during the first three months of 2017, while the bloc’s trade surplus doubled in March from the previous month. Unemployment is falling, albeit still stubbornly high at 9.6 percent.

“For a change, Europe is leading this upswing. It’s partly because of the connection between Europe and China, demand from China. But at the same time, we have also some domestic factors which are positive: there is a genuine improvement in domestic demand, particularly consumption. So the recovery is broad-based, and is more sustainable than in the past,” said analyst Lorenzo Codogno of LC Macro Advisors, also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

Some of the economies that suffered most in the 2008 debt crisis are bouncing back strongest — the so-called PIGS. Portugal hit a 10-year high with 2.8 percent year-on-year growth. Spain’s economy is forecast to grow 2.7 percent in 2017, and passed a crucial milestone last month as its GDP exceeded pre-2008 crisis levels.

“We’re seeing a cyclical recovery because we finally had the European Central Bank operating like a normal central bank and doing quantitative easing,” says analyst John Springford of the Center for European Reform.

With inflation in the eurozone hitting the central bank’s target of 1.9 percent, many economists expect the quantitative easing program to keep interest rates low to be wound down later this year. There are fears, however, that turning off the money could hurt the eurozone’s poorest performers.

Italy’s economy is still in the slow lane with annualized growth of just .8 percent.

“It’s growing very slowly, its banks still haven’t been sorted out and there’s a lot of political instability,” says Springford.

Meanwhile, Greece is back in recession and the familiar public sector strikes have paralyzed transport systems this week. Police joined the protesters over proposed cuts to in-work benefits and pensions. The government plans further cuts in return for the next tranche of EU bailout money. A decision by EU finance ministers is due Monday.

Economist Codogno says the structural problems underpinning the eurozone have not gone away.

“The eurozone cannot survive without additional major reforms, which means more integration, in terms of fiscal and eventually even political.”

Overshadowing the bounce-back is Brexit. Britain’s decision to leave the EU is weighing on its economy as growth slows and wages fall, says Springford.

“The pain is going to be largely borne on the UK side because it’s a smaller economy. The big question is whether the EU and the UK can negotiate a deal which minimizes the economic costs. And we’ve had a very bad start to negotiations with a lot of bad blood.”

Europe’s politicians hope economic growth can help stop the march of anti-EU populism that saw Britain vote to leave the bloc.

The election of pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron as French president has reinvigorated the French-German axis that has long been the eurozone’s driving force. Macron’s political honeymoon could be short, with French unions already voicing objections to his proposed reforms.
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