Vintage Auto Prices Down and Down

Vintage cars, from luxury classics to more garden variety, are coming down in price.

The trend started in August 2015 (peak point for the collector car market) after a steady climb from the depths of the recession in 2009. 

Prices dropped 8% since last year; 15% since the peak 2 years ago, according to Hagerty (vintage car insurance specialists). 

Cars are still selling (the numbers of cars sold is still up), and no one is forced to sell. Owners aren't in a panic. It's just that prices are doing what real estate agents are referring to as "normalizing" -- ie not holding the higher value of recent times. 

Seltzers Pop Up in the US

According to the experts, Seltzer is more pop-ular than it's ever been.

Of the 170m gallons of pop (and rising) consumed in the States every year, millennials are increasingly buying seltzer as a healthier option.

Among the brands in the now: La Croix (featured in a popular hip hop song recently), Polar, and hard seltzers like White Claw and Truly.

89% of Newspaper Reading is Still in Print, Researchers Find

That's compared with 7% of the news-reading time spent on mobile devices and 4% on computers, even though online publishers reach 2 or 3 times the amount of people print publishers do. The study used UK data, but it's likely not far off what North Americans do.

The time-spent-reading numbers also reflect revenues for the publishers. The brands studied took in 88% of their revenues from print, 12% from digital.

The research was the first ever done to comprehensively account for the time spent reading news.

According to the scientist, "My research shows that while print newspapers are read for an average of 40 minutes per day, online visitors to the websites and apps of those same newspapers spend an average of just 30 seconds per day. Scale those numbers up and you can see why newspapers still rely on print for the vast majority of the attention they receive."

One Limited Run Newspaper Pop-up Is Doing So Well, They're Continuing Indefinitely

Print is dead? Nope.

The New European was originally printed a few months ago as a 4-week newspaper aimed at the 48% of Britons who voted against Brexit.

But it didn't end. Readers are still interested and buying. As the editor, Matt Kelly, told Nieman Lab:

"Readers are very passionate about the product. They take photographs of themselves reading it and post them on Twitter. They leave copies once they’re finished with them in doctors’ waiting rooms and bus stops for other people to read. Writers are very keen to engage with the project for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s a newspaper and the truth is that a lot of journalists and writers feel that there’s something special about print. Secondly, it’s a visible articulation of their values. If you’re associating yourself with The New European, you’re making it very clear that you’re pro-European and there’s no ambiguity about that position."

Kelly said that they haven't run out of content ("something fabulous to write about" each week), and they're selling on newsstands for 2 pounds, and have a 20k subscription base that pays 20 pounds for 13 weeks.

They're seen as the "voice for that community," Kelly said, and buyers can demonstrate their interest visibly with the paper in a way they can't with a website (although they do now have a website, too).

Another benefit of print, he said, was that print means money (unlike a paywall website), so they can pay writers, and they have had a lot of interest from writers who are interested in anti-Brexit association, and also in being printed.

They're currently planning to continue until at least the end of the year, which will help with advertising -- one of the flaws of the pop-up publishing model is advertisers aren't that interested in something so short-term. They're now getting ad revenue especially from companies and people interested in Brexit issues and demonstration organizers.

Part of the continued interest has to do with the larger trend toward nationalism, and they have featured Donald Trump many times in recent issues. They're also thinking of starting other pop-ups, including one for people who want to leave Europe, "the complete opposite of The New European."

Discovery Buying Scripps

The trend of consolidation in the telecom and media industry continues as Discovery is making a deal to buy Scripps (Food Network and HGTV home improvement) for $11.9b (value of $90 per share), beating out rival Viacom who also wanted Scripps.

To own Scripps would mean Discovery will control 20% of the ad-supported pay-TV audience in the US and would take Scripps' content to 220 countries and territories. Discovery will also gain leverage in negotiating with advertisers and distributors.

There is analysis, however, that both are making the deal from positions of weakness after showing lower-than-predicted revenues.

Discovery has made attempts to buy Scripps occasionally over the past 9 years, but they couldn't agree on a price.

The industry is tending toward making big cuts in costs and increasing scale in the face of the current media consumption environment.

US Job Streak Continues, Pulling People Back

81 straight months of job growth now.

Since Trump, job numbers haven't shot up -- instead, they have maintained a the steady improvement taking place since the end of the Great Recession. (But new a recession warned about by Trump critics hasn't happened either.)

However, what is interesting economists most perhaps is that while new jobs continue to be added, the numbers of people taking those jobs isn't slowing down. There was talk that everyone looking for a job (and viably employable) was going to find a job, but instead it seems people who weren't looking for jobs before are being pulled into the workforce.

That includes blacks, Latinos, and teenagers, who have seen significant reductions in their unemployment rates. For white adults, the level is more steady. People with criminal records, also, may be finding an easier time getting a job, according to anecdotal evidence.

Not all sectors are hiring, though. The health care industry is really growing. Mining (including oil and gas) is also growing (or recovering from 2015/2016). Manufacturing is flat, though. Automakers continue to cut jobs. Retail, although it added thousands of jobs in June, is also down significantly this year (people are still talking about the effects of Amazon and other online sellers).

How much room there still remains for the U.S. jobs market to grow might be partially indicated by the pre-recovery employment rate for adults age 25-54 (a demographic used by the U.S. because it factors out baby boomer effects). Before the recession, the number of people working was 80%. When economic recovery began, that number was down at 74.8. It's now at 78.5.

Since people are available to fill the new jobs, wages aren't being pushed up. The average wage rose 2.5% last year, above the 2% for inflation, but still representative of a slowdown since 2016.

US Women Changing Pants

The business world is talking about how women especially are no longer much interested in buying pricey name brand jeans with big labels. Instead, they're buying spandex and yoga pants, and the smaller number of jeans they are buying are less expensive “economy” brands like H&M, Old Navy and Forever 21, as well as types sold at Walmart and Target.

Men are still buying jeans, and their most popular brand is still Levis, which are sold at $45 - $90  per pair.

Pepsi Is Doing Quite Well, Beating Their Rivals

Consumers want healthier food, and soft drinks have been down for years, but Pepsi seems to be doing fairly well with new products, "guilt-free snacks" like diet sodas and smaller soda cans (this is also done by their rivals).

Investors are taking note of Pepsi right now because of how much better they seem to be doing than Coke and other competitors.

One State Is Dropping Its Minimum Wage Back Down from $10 to $7.70

Missouri raised its minimum wage to $10 a couple months ago, in line with what a lot of cities and states (and provinces in Canada) are doing nowadays, but the governor is now saying that was a mistake.

"Despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people's pockets," Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens said this week. 

The raise up to $10 made a lot of minimum wage workers happy, but their employers had a tougher time. Some small businesses were profiled in local news. (For example, one St. Louis restaurant had to cut down hours they'd be open, going from 5 to 2 days a week for lunch, as well as having to reduce the size of their food portions and raise the price of entrees. This resulted in less customers coming in.)

Google Starts Removing Private Medical Records from Search

Google updated their policy for personal info, adding 'private medical records' to the things they remove from search results.

What else have they excluded so far? National or government issued identification numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and images of signatures.

The concern is that the information, which can be highly damaging if mistreated, can be leaked, hacked, or subject to errors.

Movement Growing: Fixing Things Instead of Buying New Ones

An example getting some attention right now is MIT graduate student, Peter Mui, who 8 years ago started a sort of club for fixing things.

They're called Fixit Clinics. They started out at MIT but spread over the country (there are 100s now), teaching people who want to learn how to fix things like toasters, tripods, kettles, and just about anything else ... rather than throwing them away and buying new ones.

One of the reasons the clinics are happening is because there aren't really repair shops in North America anymore. No one really fixes things.

A Google System on a Chip?

This week Google hired Manu Gulati, who designed Apple's custom mobile phone processor (SOC).

Why? People suspect it has to do with Google's new phone, Pixel. The phone, which competes with a couple of others at the top of the commercial cell phone market, has been reviewed positively, and has sold well over a million items, but analysts think Google thinks they need to do more: namely, they need to develop their own SOC, just like Apple's popular phones have, and just like Samsung, Huawei, and LG later did.

$15 Minimum Wage Could Cost State 382,200 Jobs

This is according to Ben Gitis of the American Action Forum.

The current wage in Illinois is $8.25, but lawmakers are thinking about making it $15 (by 2022). There is also a tax credit for small businesses (under 50 employees) that would give them some of the money back, but that credit is planned to be phased out as the higher wage is phased in, and small businesses would only save a max of around 5% in 2022, and then the tax credit would end in 2023.

The almost 400k figure Gitis got from a study (Meer & West, 2015) that found that a 10% increase in real minimum wage is associated with a 0.3 - 0.5% decrease in net job growth, so, for example, 3 years after such a wage hike, there would be around 0.7% less employment.

Since the Illinois $15 minimum wage represents an 82% increase, employment would be almost 6% lower according to that math. Gitis measured this against projections for the state's employment from IDES, which expects around 370k jobs to be created in Illinois between 2014 and 2022, just a few less than would be negated by the wage increase. In other words, Gitis concluded, the pay raise could cost more jobs overall than the state plans to create over the coming years.

Gitis' Report on AAF

5 Officials Charged with Manslaughter Over Flint Water Crisis

For failing to act during Flint, Michigan's water crisis, 5 government officials are being charged with involuntary manslaughter by the Michigan AG.

The officials are from the Department of Health and Human Services,Water Department, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. The District Supervisor and Emergency Manager, too.

Verizon Buys Yahoo

Verizon now owns Yahoo, ending its 20 years as an independent company.

Yahoo will now be combined with AOL and other Verizon services under a new subsidiary called "Oath" headed by former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

Yahoo cost Verizon $4.48b.

Click Farm Raided in Asia, 347,200 SIM Cards Found

A group of Chinese have been arrested in Thailand for operating a "click farm."

They were using hundreds of cellphones and thousands of SIM cards to run up "likes" and views on WeChat (the Chinese version of Facebook plus more).

10 Elephants Poisoned to Death

Near Zimbabwe's largest elephant park (Hwange National Park), another case of elephant poisoning has taken place. 10 elephants died of cyanide poisoning.

The first popular case was from 2013, when around 100 dead elephants were found by park rangers.

Read more: Drones Helping with Elephant Problems

Sears Canada Might Close

The company doesn't have enough cash to cover operations for the year, and hasn't been able to get the full amount of the loan they were looking for.

A couple of months ago, Sears Canada made a statement that they were in doubt the company could go on.

Due in large part in the shift towards online shopping, Sears Canada hasn't made a profit in 3 years. They are considering restructuring or selling the company.

Tech Stocks Continue Downward

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. 

The Pay TV Market in North Africa and the Middle East

17% revenue growth is expected between now and 2022, according to a recent report by Research and Markets.

Currently, revenues for these 20 countries is $3.5b. The 2022 number will be $4.1, and of the 20 countries, 5 countries will make up 75% of that revenue.

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.

The region is mostly serviced by TV operator Digiturk. They have a large margin over second-place beIN, and this is expected to continue.

Middle East and North Africa Pay TV Forecasts