It’s Prime Time for Women Workers

Plus: Your dentist bill might be saved by a Halloween candy shortage. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

July 24, 2023

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TOGETHER WITH

Good morning.

Bye Bye Birdie.

Elon Musk is in the beginning stages of rebranding Twitter to X. Though maybe a little too early-2000s for our taste, a new identity could be exactly what the platform needs to start clawing back the $30 billion in valuation it’s lost since Musk purchased it last year. The web domain X.com now links to Twitter, and the Roman numeral for 10 may have already replaced the iconic blue bird by the time you read this. Musk plans to make X an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, but for now, it feels more like Malibu Stacy in a new hat.

Morning Brief

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Women are back to work.

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Climate consensus eludes G20 nations.

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Beware the sugar shortage.

Labor

Women Are Driving America’s Prime-Age Labor Comeback

(Photo Credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash)

Three years after the pandemic contributed to a massive wave of layoffs, furloughs, career breaks, and retirements, the US workforce has finally returned.

With a higher share of both the male and female population either employed or seeking jobs, the labor market is sitting pretty — for now. However, the Fed’s intent to squash inflation with more interest rate hikes could return tens of thousands back to the unemployment line.

Back to the Old Grind

The US unemployment rate sat at 3.5% in February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — anything between 3% and 5% tends to be what nations hope for. But after covid swept the world, joblessness in the US skyrocketed to 15% in just two months. US unemployment has since retreated to 3.6%, and much of that can be attributed to a peak in women joining the labor market. The percentage of women in the workforce during the prime age for work — between 25 and 54 years for all sexes (Google it, Don Lemon) — hit an all-time high last month of just under 78%, according to the BLS.

For starters, women are having fewer children, freeing many of them to seek work outside the home. In 2022, roughly 3.7 million babies were born in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control, a 15% drop from 2007. But working parents have also been lucky. Because job openings have outpaced the pool of available workers by nearly 2-to-1, employers need to concede to better pay, benefits, and schedules while hiring:

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William Rodgers of the Institute for Economic Equity at the St. Louis Fed told The Wall Street Journal that employers “are more apt to be willing to work with candidates — in this case it’s working with moms, or parents in general. Tight labor markets can help to punish those who discriminate in hiring and compensation.”

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Americans also are getting paid more these days, and after two years, wages have finally begun to outpace inflation. This means people are now less hampered by strict budgets and can splurge a little, which in turn could help avoid a recession that looks far less likely and ominous than it did a year ago.

Don’t Get Too Excited: The Fed has already raised interest rates 10 times since March 2022 and plans at least one more before the end of 2023, which could put a lot of folks out of work, especially in sectors with low job security like entertainment and construction. In the Fed’s most recent forecast, the unemployment rate is expected to rise to 4.1% by the end of the year followed by 4.5% for the next two years.

– Griffin Kelly

Climate

Saudi-led Bloc Blocks G20 Fossil Fuel Deal

Just like global temperatures, tensions among the G20 nations are heating up.

After several days of debate at a summit among member countries in the Indian state of Goa, a motion to reduce fossil-fuel use was ultimately blocked by a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia, according to both a summary document released this weekend and sources who spoke with the Financial Times.

Renewed Discussions

This summer has already seen multiple days breaking all-time global average temperatures. In the US, prolonged heatwaves continue to bake large swaths of the South and Southwest, while the Midwest and Northeast endure heavy smoke billowing down from massive Canadian wildfires. To prevent potentially irreversible and devastating consequences, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls for global emissions to be cut by 43% by 2030 — lest temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels (temperatures have already risen 1.1 degrees).

In April, the G7 — that’s the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the EU, which cumulatively account for roughly a quarter of all global emissions, according to the IEA — agreed to accelerate their transition to renewable energy, and achieve net-zero in energy systems by 2050. But broader cooperation among G20 nations, responsible for about three-quarters of global emissions, has proven difficult. China and Russia — which both target 2060 for net-zero goals — have consistently opposed acceleration calls in past global summits. And in the latest push to scale back fossil fuels to favor renewables, Saudi Arabia and aligned countries, it seems, have their own set of ideas:

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Instead of retreating from fossil fuels, Saudi and aligned nations favored scaling up the development and implementation of carbon-capture technologies, sources told the FT.

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Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, South Africa, and Indonesia — all major fossil fuel producers — opposed the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by the end of this decade, Reuters reported.

Captured Audience: Carbon-capture technology, however, isn’t viewed by most experts as a substitute for reducing emissions. Speaking with The Daily Upside earlier this summer about carbon capture technology, Howard J. Herzog, senior research engineer in the MIT Energy Initiative who has spent decades developing the technology, said carbon-removal tech should ideally be used to capture the 5%-10% of emissions that will be difficult to eliminate: “[Y]ou’re not going to be able to do business as usual and expect these technologies to remove all the carbon emissions from the air. It’s just too expensive. You’ve got to reduce emission-center sources, it’s the No. 1 thing to do.”

– Brian Boyle

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Agriculture

A Sugar Shortage is Crimping the Candy Supply Chain

You may want to give candy the “toilet paper in March 2020” treatment.

It’s every sweet-tooth’s worst nightmare: A sugar shortage is hitting the candy supply chain — putting the industry’s all-important Halloween season in peril, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

Candy Crushed

Candy makers have faced tight supplies and rising prices for at least the past year, thanks in part to a twenty-year decline in US sugar cane and sugar beet farms, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, extreme weather is expected to contribute to a decrease of more than 2% in domestic sugar production during the next crop year, according to the USDA. That sent raw US sugar cane prices to hit nearly 43 cents per pound in May, the highest rate since January 2011. Meanwhile, prices of refined sugar beet, which accounts for just over half of US sugar production, remain not far off from all-time highs seen last year — with most of the 2023-to-2024 harvest already sold in advanced contracts, according to major agricultural lender Rabobank.

The sugarflation has unsurprisingly crunched production. Spangler, the makers of Dum Dums, Sweethearts, and Necco Wafers, is already anticipating a sugar slump, the company told the WSJ. Who’s to blame? Depends on which link of the supply chain you ask:

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The National Confectioners Association, which represents sugar-using companies like candy makers, points to US agricultural policies that impose steep tariffs on any buyer that imports more than 15% of their sugar — arguing that lowering the tariffs could help ease prices when domestic sugar is in short supply.

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The American Sugar Alliance of farmers and processors says the tariffs are fine, and blames foreign governments artificially lowering prices with hefty subsidies for the sour market dynamics.

Free Samples: Either way, sweetmakers simply can’t find sugar fast enough. Texas-based Atkinson Candy told the WSJ they had to turn to Colombian imports after domestic suppliers ran dry. “We were down to the point where we were about to run out,” Atkinson said. “We would’ve been going to Costco.”

– Brian Boyle

Extra Upside

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No diving: Americans look to keep cool, but public pools are disappearing.

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I see nothing: F1 allegedly threatens to block Vegas clubs’ race views if they don’t pay exorbitant fees.

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