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Wall Road is flawed to be bullish on European shares, strategist says

Wall Street is wrong to be bullish on European stocks, strategist says

A photo taken on December 29, 2020 shows the skyline of Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, with (RtoL) the Frankfurt Cathedral, the Main Tower with the Helabas head office, and the Commerzbank Tower.

DANIEL ROLAND | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON — Not everyone is bullish on Europe for the remainder of the year.

Peter Toogood, chief investment officer at financial services firm Embark Group, believes European stocks may well keep pace with U.S. stocks in the coming months, but that’s not to say he shares Wall Street’s optimism for the region.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley say Europe is well-placed to outperform all major regions this year for the first time in more than two decades. The investment bank believes U.S. markets are likely to be “choppier” in the months ahead, citing rising inflation, growing pressure on profit margins and a possible slowing of quantitative easing.

Meanwhile, there is a “compelling” case for Europe to be the best-performing region due to attractive valuations, stronger earnings-per-share growth and the launch of the EU’s massive post-Covid recovery fund.

Separately, analysts at Goldman Sachs have identified “inexpensive” stocks in Europe for the rest of the year, while JPMorgan has named “cheap” stocks to buy in the region if the market dips.

When asked whether he agreed with the view that European equities could soon decouple from the U.S., Toogood told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday: “No I don’t … I’m not buying it this time.”

“I’ll happily acknowledge that we’ll keep up … There’s going to be a Covid bounce, notionally, they are getting their act together, there is the recovery coming but it is going to be very late. We are going to be into the autumn and winter soon where I’m sorry (but) Covid is not going to go away,” he continued.

“So, no, I’m not buying it. I think they have come too late to the party in terms of the vaccines; very sadly, and therefore the recovery is delayed,” Toogood said.

To date, around 33% of EU citizens have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data. By contrast, nearly 48% of the U.S. population has received at least one vaccine dose.

‘What are you buying when you buy in Europe?’

The International Monetary Fund said last month that Europe’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic was on track to return to pre-crisis levels in 2022. The forecast was conditional on the region’s Covid-19 vaccine campaign, and as uncertainty persists over how the health crisis will evolve.

“I think the second problem remains: What are you buying when you buy Europe?” Toogood said, noting possible exceptions in the region among some “very strong” consumer brands.

“The banking sector? No, not really. I don’t see interest rates going anywhere in Europe for a very long time and they’ve been withdrawing globally, if anything. Most of the Europeans, in terms of banks and activities, are heading inward.”

Read more about China from CNBC Pro

“There’s a massive discount gap but that’s because a lot of the stocks in the U.S. are priced more highly because they simply grow better. There are no FAANGs in Europe I’m afraid,” he continued, referring to the acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet.

“So, there is trouble for the indices in Europe and the U.K. … That’s the reality. We haven’t got the disruptors and we don’t have the exciting industries. It’s Asia and America where that action sits,” Toogood said.

— CNBC’s Lucy Handley contributed to this report.

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World News

Why Asian People on Wall Avenue are breaking their silence

Why Asian Americans on Wall Street are breaking their silence

Alex Chi, Goldman Sachs

Source: Goldman Sachs

A year after the pandemic began in New York City, something snapped in Alex Chi.

The 48-year-old Goldman Sachs banker had been inundated with articles and video clips of horrifying, seemingly random attacks on Asian Americans in his home town. Then, in late March, eight people were gunned down in the Atlanta area — most of them immigrants from Korea and China — and Chi could stand it no longer.

The barrage of attacks forced a change in Chi, a partner and 27-year Goldman veteran. He became an in-house agitator of sorts, attending protests and rallying his colleagues around a simple idea: Silence is no longer an option.

“The message I’ve clearly put out to other Asian Americans is this: You have to start speaking up for yourselves,” Chi said in a recent interview. “We have to use this moment as an opportunity to finally make ourselves heard and change the narrative around Asian Americans in this country.”

This isn’t just the story of the political awakening of a single New York banker. It’s the story of thousands of Wall Street employees who are, many for the first time in their lives, connecting with co-workers in virtual chatrooms, over Zoom and in person to commiserate about being Asian in finance, and in America.

While Asian Americans make up one of the biggest minority groups in finance, comprising roughly 15% of the employees at the six biggest U.S. banks, few have made it to the operating committees of these institutions. Just one, former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, has led a top-tier bank.

Chi, who became a Goldman partner a decade ago, reaching one of Wall Street’s loftiest ranks, says he is one of the first Korean Americans to do so at the 151-year-old institution.

He believes Asian Americans at Goldman and beyond are now pushing back against the stereotype —rooted in a common cultural upbringing that stresses modesty and conflict avoidance and reinforced at times by workplace discrimination — that they are quiet, docile worker bees.

For the broader community, some 23 million people, the past few months have been the first time Asian American issues have reached the national stage in decades. The last time this has happened was probably in the early 1980s, when the beating death of Vincent Chin galvanized an earlier generation to form affinity groups, according to historians.

‘China virus’

The arrival of the coronavirus last year brought a surge in bias crimes against Asian Americans, especially in New York and California. Many of the assaults have been against senior citizens and women. The violence has shattered the sense of security for many in the group, according to the Pew Research Center.

But a silver lining to the racial scapegoating that accompanied Covid-19 has been that it has unified many Americans of Asian descent, the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S. They make up a significant portion of the corporate workforce in industries including finance, technology and health care, and are an emerging force in politics.

“There’s so many differences within Asians, but you’re treated as one group,” said Joyce Chang, chair of global research at JPMorgan Chase. “Now, being targeted for hate crimes, people are saying, we are being treated like a monolith, we may as well get organized.”

Lillie Chin, mother of Vincent Chin who was clubbed to death by two white men in June 1982, breaks down as a relative (L), helps her walk while leaving Detroit’s City County Building in April, 1983.

Bettmann | Getty Images

Chang says she studied the history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. while at Columbia University in the 1980s, including the vicious 1982 killing of Chin by two bat-wielding Detroit autoworkers who mistakenly assumed he was Japanese. The killers, who blamed Japan for the decline of the U.S. auto industry, were fined $3,000 and avoided prison.

Chang said the current period reminds her of that time. Both for the larger issues — in the 1980s, anxiety over Japanese economic might was common, while today the emergence of China as a global superpower has policymakers worried — as well as the response.

The first use of the phrase “China virus” by former President Donald Trump on Twitter in March 2020 led directly to an increase in online and offline anti-Asian abuse, according to a recent report in the American Journal of Public Health. Trump had nearly 90 million followers before getting booted from the platform.

A close-up of President Donald Trump’s notes shows where Corona was crossed out and replaced with Chinese Virus as he speaks during a White House briefing, March 19, 2020.

Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Now, people are forming pan-Asian affinity groups to help keep track of the bias attacks and boost philanthropy. One such nonprofit, the Asian American Foundation, launched this month and said it has already raised $125 million for AAPI causes over the next five years. It, along with JPMorgan and other organizations, have given money to Stop AAPI Hate, a new group that began tracking bias attacks in January 2020 after a rash of incidents in California.

Initially, it was journalists in New York and San Francisco who chronicled the attacks, which began in the early days of the pandemic and ramped up this year, occurring on a daily basis at times. Then Asian American celebrities including actors and athletes amplified the coverage. Posts on social media brought home the idea that even being famous and powerful didn’t insulate people from feeling vulnerable.

The movement has extended to the finance realm. At JPMorgan, Chang says that after the Atlanta shootings, attendance at an internal forum for Asian Americans had 6,100 participants, about 10 times larger than the typical attendance before the pandemic.

The sentiment of many of those I spoke with was something akin to shock. Several had had superlative careers on Wall Street, and yet here they were, reliving some of the same trauma from their childhoods they had believed was a thing of the past.

A demonstrator during a rally in Seattle on March 13, 2021.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Tom Lee, co-founder of research boutique Fundstrat and a regular CNBC on-air guest, said he faced “merciless anti-Asian attacks” growing up in a small town 25 miles from Detroit. That tough childhood helped him chart his own course as one of the best-known market prognosticators in the country, he said, because he had learned to tune out noise.

“It’s been easy to feel like Asians have a bit of a bull’s-eye on their backs,” Lee said in an interview.

Mike Karp, CEO of Options Group, a recruiting firm that has placed thousands of traders and salespeople on Wall Street in the past three decades, put it a different way.

“They thought they were part of the mainstream until this ‘Chinese virus’ stuff,” Karp, who is Indian American, said of his AAPI clients. “Now there’s a building resentment that people have, and they aren’t taking it anymore.”

West Coast bias

Distress over the violence she was seeing in San Francisco and the initial lack of national media attention moved Cynthia Sugiyama, a senior vice president at Wells Fargo, to publish a highly personal piece in March.

Sugiyama says she has been overwhelmed by the response to her column, published in the San Francisco Chronicle and LinkedIn, from colleagues and others who related to her experiences being harassed as a child, and her resolve to respond to the current moment.

“I’ve never before felt this sense of community as much as now,” Sugiyama said. “What makes this moment pivotal is that the surge in anti-Asian sentiment on one side has been met with a powerful swell on the other side from Asian Americans who are finding their voices.”

Cynthia Sugiyama, head of HR communications for Wells Fargo.

Source: Cynthia Sugiyama

Sugiyama, who manages human resources communications for a company of 264,513 employees, said that Asian American employees have flocked to internal forums to share their feelings and experiences.

According to employees at some of the biggest banks, one of the main topics being discussed is the difficulty Asian Americans have climbing the corporate ladder.

Wall Street hierarchy

The Wall Street model is to take in thousands of college graduates a year, placing them on the bottom of a hierarchy where analysts and associates grind out long hours in support of merger deals or trading activity. By design, few junior bankers make it to the vice president or director level, where annual compensation typically reaches several hundred thousand dollars. Fewer still make it to managing director, where pay packages often total more than $1 million a year.

For instance, at JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, about 25,000 employees identify themselves as Asian. While roughly 1 in 4 of the bank’s professional workers are Asian, just 10% are senior managers. At the very top of the organization, the bank’s 18-person operating committee led by CEO Jamie Dimon includes just one Asian person, Sanoke Viswanathan.

Park Ji-Hwan | AFP | Getty Images

Some have had the realization that the playbook used by Asian Americans to reach a certain level of workplace achievement isn’t enough anymore.

“Every bank is happy to hire a young Asian who will work double hard and is good at math and analysis,” said a Morgan Stanley employee who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. “As time goes on however, I noticed how most of the people I knew in Wall Street never really progressed past VP level, and many were laid off when cost-cutting rounds came.”

His explanation for this phenomenon is two-fold: Parents of Asian Americans drilled a set of principles into their children — study, work hard — that gets you past the first few hurdles at an investment bank, but that doesn’t necessarily help people advance beyond that. Further, little emphasis is given to so-called soft skills like public speaking and finding mentors, things needed at higher levels, he said.

Some corners of Wall Street are friendlier for Asian Americans than others, he said.

When it comes to stock research, people only care if an analyst makes them money, he said. With mergers advice, however, the client is always right, and sometimes owners of mid-sized and small companies didn’t want to work with nonwhite bankers, he said. In wealth management, Asian Americans often don’t have the social connections to help them succeed.

And, just as with Black and Latinx employees, Asian Americans are hindered because managers are more likely to support and promote people who look like themselves, he said.

‘A bit of bragging’

Lee, the Fundstrat co-founder, said that in his 24 years on Wall Street before striking out on his own, he often saw the careers of Asian Americans stall. What hampers them from progressing is an aversion to drawing attention to themselves and the clubby nature of banking at higher levels, he said.

“I’ve seen that the most successful people are the ones who do a bit of bragging,” Lee said. “Asians aren’t really good at that, and I think that hurts us, because it’s easy to not realize someone has a lot to offer if they aren’t bragging about it.”

Tom Lee, Fundstrat Global Advisors

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

Despite the general success of the cohort in the corporate setting, Lee says, Asian Americans haven’t been involved enough in other areas of civic life, especially politics.

That may be changing, however. Kamala Harris, who is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, became the first Asian American, Black and female vice president, and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is a front-runner for New York mayor. Asian American voters were a key constituency in the last presidential election, casting a record number of votes in states where President Joe Biden eked out narrow victories.

Still, some of the Asian Americans interviewed for this story said they felt invisible at work. Or worse, given the spike in harassment and violence, some felt like permanent foreigners despite having lived in the U.S. for decades. Most Americans can’t name a single prominent living Asian American, according to a recent survey.

A big umbrella

Part of what has hamstrung an Asian American political movement is that the construct itself has always been an imperfect solution, a term created in the late 1960s to consolidate smaller cohorts to gain leverage amid the wider Civil Rights movement.

Today, the term Asian American includes people from more than 20 countries across East and South Asia, each with their own languages, food and culture. People who have familial roots in China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea and Japan make up about 85% of all Asian Americans.

In fact, the presence of most Asians in the U.S. can be traced to the Civil Rights movement, which established that a race-based system of laws was unjust.

After an initial wave of immigration to the continental U.S. in the 1850s, Asians were seen as a “yellow peril” and explicitly excluded from coming to the U.S. for nearly a century by laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

That changed after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened up migration from Asia, Southern Europe and Africa, instead of solely favoring Western and Northern Europeans. The law would forever change the complexion of the country and happened only after the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson.

President Lyndon Johnson signs the liberalized U.S. Immigration bill into law. Attending the ceremony on Liberty Island, (L-R) are: Vice President Hubert Humphrey; first lady Lady Bird Johnson; Mrs. Mike Mansfield (wife of the Senate Majority Leader); Muriel Humphrey; Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Robert Kennedy, on October 4, 1965.

Bettmann | Getty Images

When Johnson signed the landmark immigration legislation in 1965, he was quoted as saying that the previous system “violated the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit.”

Seminal moment

Back at Goldman Sachs, Chi realized he had a part to play after the horror of the Atlanta shootings, at least within the confines of his 40,300-person firm. Some managers hadn’t been aware of the violence against Asian Americans, particularly in public areas like subway platforms.

Now, amid the company’s push to encourage more employees to return to Goldman’s headquarters in lower Manhattan, workers were speaking up, telling managers that they didn’t feel safe. Employees got permission to expense rideshares for their commute, and the bank invited public safety experts to offer advice, Chi said.

“In the past, they would’ve just sucked it up and done what they needed to do,” Chi said. “Now, our Asian American community here is speaking up, and they’re going to their managers and saying, ‘I’m not comfortable. Have you seen what’s going on?'”

CEO David Solomon meets with Asian partners and senior leaders of Goldman Sachs’ Asian Network

David Solomon | Goldman Sachs

Chi also reached out directly to CEO David Solomon, who quickly set up a roundtable meeting where he listened to senior Asian American executives air their concerns. When Solomon shared a photo of the event on social media and the bank’s internal homepage, it opened up the firm to many more discussions where managers acknowledged they hadn’t known what their Asian American employees were going through, Chi said.

“When I walked out of that room with one of my partners, we turned to each other and said, ‘Wow, this is a seminal moment, because here we are with our CEO, talking very openly about Asian American issues,’ ” Chi said. “That’s never happened before.”

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Shares Rebound as Wall Road Shakes Off Inflation Worries: Reside Updates

The buyers returned to central London last month. UK retail sales in April rose twice the rate forecast by economists.

Recognition…Mary Turner for the New York Times

The US stock futures rose along with most European stock indices on Friday as the data showed more signs of the European economy strengthening as it emerges from lockdowns and vaccines are introduced faster.

The S&P 500 is expected to gain 0.3 percent at the start of trading, according to the futures. The US benchmark index is down around 0.4 percent so far this week after concerns about faster-than-expected inflation unsettled markets.

The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.4 percent, led by gains in consumer goods companies. One of the biggest winners was Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods company that owns brands like Cartier and Montblanc. Richemont stock rose 5.3 percent after the company reported annual results of strong sales growth in Asia, particularly for its jewelry and watch brands.

Oil prices rose. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude oil benchmark, futures rose 0.7 percent to $ 62.38 a barrel.

  • UK retail sales rose sharply in April as unneeded stores were allowed to reopen. The sales volume rose by 9.2 percent compared to the previous month, announced the office for national statistics on Friday. It was more than double the forecast of the economists polled by Bloomberg. Shopping for clothing stores led to the resurgence.

  • Across the euro area, activity in the service sector increased in May. The purchasing managers index rose from 50.5 in April to 55.1 points, IHS Markit announced on Friday. A value above 50 indicates expansion. The index for the manufacturing sector has hardly changed compared to the previous month at 62.8.

  • “Growth would have been even stronger had it not been for supply chain delays and difficulty restarting businesses fast enough to meet demand, especially in terms of recruitment,” wrote Chris Williamson, chief economist at IHS Markit, in the report.

  • “The outlook for the euro zone is currently quite positive as growth and inflationary pressures mount,” ING’s economist Bert Colijn wrote in a note. He added that the economic recovery, which “started cautiously somewhere in January,” accelerated significantly in the second quarter of this year.

George Greenfield, the founder of CreativeWell, a literary agency in Montclair, New Jersey, applied for a loan from Biz2Credit in March. The initial amount he was offered was less than a quarter of what he was entitled to.Recognition…Ed Kashi for the New York Times

The government’s $ 788 billion relief effort to small businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic, Paycheck Protection Program, is ending as it began. The last days of the initiative are full of chaos and confusion.

Millions of applicants seek money from the scarce handful of lenders who still provide government-sponsored loans. Hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in the air waiting to find out if they will get their approved loans – some of which have been stalled for months due to errors or malfunctions. According to the New York Times’ Stacy Cowley, lenders are overwhelmed and borrowers are panicking.

The aid program should continue until May 31st. Two weeks ago, its manager, the Small Business Administration, announced that $ 292 billion in funding for the forgeable loan program was nearly depleted this year and that it would cease processing most new applications immediately.

Then the government tossed another curve ball: the Small Business Administration ruled that the remaining money, roughly $ 9 billion, would only be available through Community Financial Institutions, a small group of specially designated institutions focused on underserved communities.

A steel roll is packed and labeled.Recognition…Taylor Glascock for the New York Times

The American steel industry is making a comeback that only a few months ago would have predicted.

Steel prices are at record highs and demand is rising as companies ramp up production amid the easing of pandemic restrictions. Steel makers have consolidated over the past year so they can have more control over supply. Tariffs on foreign steel imposed by the Trump administration have kept cheaper imports out. And steel companies are hiring again, reports Matt Phillips of the New York Times.

It’s not clear how long the boom will last. This week, the Biden government began talks with European Union trade representatives on global steel markets. Some steel workers and executives believe this could lead to an eventual decline in Trump-era tariffs, widely believed to be the catalyst for the turnaround in the steel industry.

Record prices for steel will not reverse decades of job losses. Employment in the steel industry has fallen by more than 75 percent since the early 1960s. More than 400,000 jobs disappeared as foreign competition increased and the industry shifted to manufacturing processes that required fewer workers. The price hike, however, is fueling optimism in steel cities across the country, especially after job losses during the pandemic brought American steel employment to its lowest level in history.

  • Shareholders in Tribune Publishing, the owner of major city newspapers like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News, will vote on Friday on whether to sell the company to Alden Global Capital, a financial investor with a reputation for cutting costs and increasing costs should lower, approved jobs. Alden already has a 32 percent stake in Tribune, so the deal depends on approval from the shareholders who own the other two-thirds of Tribune shares. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a multi-billion dollar medical entrepreneur who owns the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers, has a 24 percent stake in Tribune with his wife, Michele B. Chan. Dr. Soon-Shiong has not publicly commented on how he plans to vote.

  • CNN said Thursday that its prime-time host, Chris Cuomo, gave inappropriate public relations advice to his brother, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, after a series of sexual harassment allegations threatened the governor’s political career earlier this year would have. CNN said Chris Cuomo would refrain from further similar talks with the governor’s staff. However, the network said it would not take disciplinary action against the anchor, whose program was CNN’s top-rated show in the first quarter of the year. Chris Cuomo apologized to viewers and colleagues at the start of the show on Thursday for the calls to the governor’s staff, saying, “It won’t happen again. It was a mistake. “But he also defended himself, saying that he” naturally “gave advice to his brother and that he was” family first, job second “.

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Inventory futures edge greater following a rebound day on Wall Avenue

Stock futures edge higher following a rebound day on Wall Street

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Source: NYSE

Stock futures rose early Friday after averages rebounded from a three-day losing streak the day before, led by technology stocks.

Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average showed an opening gain of around 65 points. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures also traded slightly higher.

The futures move followed a comeback day on Wall Street with the Dow gaining 186 points and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite ending the day 1.06% and 1.77% higher, respectively. Microsoft, Facebook, and Alphabet all gained more than 1%, while Netflix and Apple each gained more than 2%.

Stocks of Tesla and other speculative parts of the market rebounded as Bitcoin prices rebounded after a roller coaster ride on Wednesday. However, Bitcoin briefly went negative after the finance department called for stricter cryptocurrency compliance with the IRS.

A new pandemic low in unemployment claims also added to the mood on Thursday. Initial unemployment benefits for the week ending May 15 stood at 444,000, the lowest since March 14, 2020, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists polled by Dow Jones had expected 452,000 new claims.

“Thursday’s improvement in jobless claims confirms our view that April’s disappointing job report was more of a slip than a sign of slowdown, and we expect the labor market to see significant improvement in the coming months,” he said Scott Ruesterholz, Portfolio Manager at Insight Investment.

Despite Thursday’s rebound, the Dow is down 0.9% over the past week on track to see its fourth negative week in the past five weeks. The S&P 500 is 0.4% lower from the week, in line with the pace of the second negative week in a row. The Nasdaq Composite is up 0.8% and is positioned to break a 4-week losing streak.

Home Depot shares rose 0.66% in expanded trading Thursday after the retailer announced a new $ 20 billion share buyback program. Home Depot’s announcement came after the company reported first quarter earnings and sales on Tuesday that weighed on analysts’ expectations

– CNBC’s Yun Li contributed to this report.

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Business

Disneyland, Common Studios openings to spice up Principal Road companies

Disneyland, Universal Studios openings to boost Main Street businesses

Disneyland and Universal theme parks will reopen.

Paul Rovere | Getty Images

March was the best month for Michael Afram’s transportation company since closing California last year due to the pandemic. When the state eased some of its coronavirus restrictions and vaccination rates increased, the Carmel Shuttle Service began to recover.

“To give you an idea of ​​where we are, the revenue we booked for the entire month of March 2021 is one day in March 2020 before the shutdown,” said Afram. “So I think you can think of us as a thirtieth of where we need to go back.”

Before the pandemic, Afram made an average of 450 to 500 trips a day in the Los Angeles-San Diego area. A large percentage of his destinations were Disneyland, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld San Diego.

With California theme parks closed and air travel demand a fraction of 2019 demand, Afram’s business had massive financial success. With the reopening of Universal Studios on Friday and the opening of the gates through Disneyland on April 30th, companies like Afram’s are experiencing a small boom.

Full recovery will be slow, however, as these parks are being forced to limit their capacity and can only accommodate guests who are already resident in the state.

While bookings are strong in April and May, Afram doesn’t expect its business to fully recover until the second quarter of 2022.

“We survived the storm and see a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Unfortunately, [we] saw and suffered so much destruction and despair on the way to get to this point. “

Around 50% of Afram’s business was in the Anaheim resort area, which is home to Disney’s two California parks and the Downtown Disney mall. His shuttle company traveled to local airports, hotels, theme parks, restaurants, and other local tourist destinations in the area.

The other 50% included Greater Orange County plus Los Angeles, where Universal Studios are located, and day trips to San Diego.

“The impact Disneyland and Universal Studios have on our local economies is important to all of our small businesses and the surrounding industries,” said Sharon Quirk-Silva, Democrat, who represents California’s 65th Congregation District, which includes northern Orange County belongs.

“There will no doubt be a surge in economic growth across Orange County when they reopen,” she said.

A slow and steady rebound

Direct travel-related spending in California was $ 145 billion in 2019, up 3.2% year over year, according to a report by Visit California, a tourism nonprofit.

In fact, residents of other states and countries accounted for 6 out of $ 10 spent locally in 2019.

In 2020, California tourism spending fell to $ 59 billion, just 41% of the previous year’s spending. The last time the state’s tourism spending was below $ 60 billion was in 1996.

The Los Angeles tourism and hospitality sector supports more than 600,000 direct and indirect jobs, said Lawren Markle, senior director of communications at Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

“Of course, LA County’s 10 million residents support this sector and its jobs as we frequent our local theme parks and hospitality businesses,” he said. “And LA also welcomes approximately 50 million visitors a year, and their spending is also a big engine of economic activity.”

“We’re still well below pre-pandemic tourism levels, so we see the reopening of theme parks as a very public signal that things are getting back to normal in LA and that trips to Los Angeles are looking practical and enjoyable again,” he said .

For Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, a restaurant chain with seven locations in California, including one at Disneyland Resort, local restrictions forced the company to close its doors to indoor dining. It stayed afloat during the pandemic by offering take-away and delivery and because it owned the buildings where its restaurants are located.

Diane Vara, the company’s creative director, said the company was able to hit around 75% of what it did last year in 2019, but is looking forward to the influx of companies that comes with the opening of the theme parks and the state will go hand in hand.

Vara noted that Roscoe’s Inglewood location near Los Angeles International Airport often attracts travelers who come to business with luggage in tow right after their flight lands.

“This is great for us,” she said of the state reopening.

Pandemic pressure

Of course, Disney and Universal will also benefit from the reopening.

Last year’s shutdown resulted in Disney laying off tens of thousands of workers and limiting an important source of income for the media company. The Parks, Experiences, and Consumer Staples segment accounted for 37% of the company’s total revenue of $ 69.6 billion, or approximately $ 26.2 billion, in 2019.

A year later, revenue shrank to $ 16.5 billion, or roughly 25% of the company’s total revenue of $ 65.4 billion.

“That was probably one of the toughest things I personally had to do in my career,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney’s Parks, Experiences and Consumer Products division, in an interview with CNBC last week about the layoffs. “I’m very passionate about the performers here. I think they’re the real reason people come to these parks.”

D’Amaro said the company will have called back more than 10,000 employees when the Disneyland Resort reopens in late April. At the beginning, Disney’s parks will be occupied by around 15%. Mask wear and social distancing are required for guests visiting the park.

At Universal, too, revenue from theme parks declined in 2020. The Comcast-owned company said that theme park revenue fell 68.9% to $ 1.8 billion last year as the pandemic forced the closure of its California park, as well as its Florida and Japan parks will only be reopened with a limited number of visitors.

When the California park reopens, Universal guests must also wear masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines.

Universal Studios officials declined to comment.

“During my visits to Downtown Disney … I heard many of our constituents feel safer in the theme parks than in their own grocery store,” Quirk-Silva said. “We have supported our efforts to reopen our theme parks with hand washing stations, temperature checks and helpful staff who ensure that our residents are safely distanced.”

Florida parks are thriving

If the Florida theme parks reopening are any signs of this, there is a lot of catching up to do.

Universal’s two parks, Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios, have consistently reached capacity limits in recent weeks, and Disney’s four theme parks – Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios and Epcot – sell out days in advance.

Guests in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter as Universal Studios Hollywood welcome guests back to the theme park on Friday April 16 to experience the thrilling rides and attractions.

Al Seib | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images

To date, there have been no public reports linking Orlando parks to coronavirus outbreaks.

“We continue to deliver an amazing entertainment experience,” said Brian Roberts, Comcast chairman and CEO, during the company’s earnings statement in January. “And our guests are reacting, as our steadily increasing number of visitors and our latest financial results confirm.”

“What we’ve seen in this fourth quarter, particularly in Orlando, gives us even more confidence in the momentum our theme parks will experience when we achieve sustained recovery,” he said at the time.

While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis allowed theme parks to return to normal operations with limited protocols for physical distancing, Disney and Universal, among other things, continued to restrict participation and force the wear of masks.

California lawmakers are aiming for a broader reopening of the state in June. However, it is unclear how this will affect the capacity limits of the theme park. It also remains to be seen when California will allow non-residents to purchase tickets to its parks.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.

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The Wall Road Journal’s Inner Audit

The Wall Street Journal’s Internal Audit

For over a year, a dedicated editorial team at the Wall Street Journal analyzed the condition of the newsroom and produced a detailed, in-depth report on what the paper is doing right and, more importantly, what the paper is doing wrong.

There is a lot at stake. Subscriptions to The Journal are growing – but not fast enough. News Corp, the company that owns The Journal, wants the broadsheet to double its readership. The study, titled The Content Review, concluded that this goal would be difficult without major changes.

The journal needs to rethink how it collects news, what topics it covers and who its audience is. The report was intended to serve as a template for how paper should reshape itself for the digital age and secure its future.

But the company effectively put the report, which was finalized last summer, on hold. Most of the people in the newsroom didn’t see it.

What follows are some of the specific results.

Change is difficult in any news organization. In The Journal’s case, “the barrier we quickly found was fear.”

The newspaper needs to overcome its fear and become an “audience-centric newsroom,” the report says, a move many other newspapers and digital publishers have already taken.

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April 9, 2021, 3:29 p.m. ET

What content review is all about.

The journal needs to find better ways to connect with its audiences rather than relying on what the report calls its “strong readers,” the die-hard executives, heavy-hitting Wall Street traders and retirees who make up much of its audience turn off.

A traffic ceiling was set simply by the existence of this group. The paper doesn’t seem to break the 50 million monthly readership barrier when it needs twice as much.

Who is the journal’s audience?

The journal needs new readers – especially women, people of color and younger professionals.

However, according to the study, it will be difficult to reach these people as “diversity is not the focus of our reporting”.

The report found that of the 108 lead stories published over a three-month period, “only had one race as the main theme”. It added, “Nobody had gender as the main theme and none had LGBTQ-specific issues as the main theme of the story. As for the protagonist of a story, many of our stories do not have human protagonists. But when they did that, we found that 13 percent were black people. “

A lack of digital expertise is a fundamental problem, the report said. “We need editors who are more active in using Google Trends and Google Suggestions when assigning stories and who encourage people to do so within their beats and columns,” it says as an example.

Most of this section also gave specific recommendations such as: For example, improving “wellness coverage” while discouraging “win” stories, a category that often “underperforms” “page views”.

What the journal should and shouldn’t do.

The report made it clear how much more traffic and engagement each department would need to deliver in order to meet the journal’s goal of 100 million monthly readers. The report added that the newspaper must reach 55 million readers a month over the next year. Spread across the six main coverage areas – Corporate, Washington, Arts, Finance, National, International – each department needs to “bring about 1.9 million more non-subscribers to where we were last fall.”

What The Journal editors need to know.

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Business

Contained in the Combat for the Way forward for The Wall Avenue Journal

Inside the Fight for the Future of The Wall Street Journal

The report argued that the paper should attract new readers – especially women, colored people, and younger professionals – by focusing more on issues such as climate change and income inequality. His suggestions include: “We also strongly recommend stepping up efforts to include more women and people of color in all of our stories.”

The content review was not officially shared with the newsroom and its recommendations were not implemented, but it does affect the way employees work: A dead end about the report has led to a shared newsroom according to interviews with 25 current and former employees. The company avoided making the proposed changes because of a battle for brewery power between Mr. Murray and the new guy The publisher Almar Latour has contributed to a stalemate that threatens the future of the journal.

Mr. Murray and Mr. Latour, 50, represent two extremes of the Murdoch model employee. Mr. Murray is the tactful editor; Mr. Latour is the bold entrepreneur. The two rose within the organization at around the same time. When the moment came to replace Gerry Baker as top editor in 2018, both were viewed as Candidate.

The two men never hit it off, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Or as a manager who knows both well: “They hate each other.” The digital strategy report only increased the strain on their relationship – and with it the direction of the crown jewel in the Murdoch news empire.

Their longstanding professional rivalry is based on both personality and approach. Mr. Murray is more deliberate, while Mr. Latour is quick to act. But the core of their friction is still a mystery to those who are familiar with them.

In a statement, Dow Jones denied this characterization and said there was no friction between the editor and publisher. It also cited “record profits and record subscriptions” which it attributed to “the wisdom of its current strategy”. Both Mr. Murray and Mr. Latour declined to be interviewed for this article.

About a month after filing the report, Ms. Story’s strategy team was concerned that its work might never come to light, said three people with knowledge of the matter, and a draft was forwarded to one of the journal’s media reporters. Jeffrey Trachtenberg. He submitted an extensive article about it late last summer.

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Business

Bernadette Bartels Murphy, Pioneering Wall Road Dealer, Dies at 86

Bernadette Bartels Murphy, Pioneering Wall Street Trader, Dies at 86

Bernadette Bartels Murphy, a rare woman on Wall Street in the 1950s, whose work as a trader helped legitimize a once mocked approach to anticipating market trends, making her a respected voice in the financial world, and giving her a platform on television To give, died on March 3 in Nyack, NY She was 86 years old.

Her death was confirmed by her niece, Mary Ann Bartels. Mrs. Murphy died in her niece’s house.

Ms. Murphy began her career at the investment bank Ladenburg Thalmann & Company as a secretary – one of the few roles available to women in the financial industry at the time. But over time she became a trader and analyst, and found a national audience as a regular panelist at Louis Rukeyser’s long-running Wall Street Week, a public television appearance of her for 25 years.

Ms. Murphy worked as a secretary and found it was the work of the traders on her desk that interested her more. She began studying the movements of stocks and the overall market to anticipate future trends, an approach known as technical analysis.

At the time, this method of anticipating market movements was rejected by traditionalists who favored an approach called fundamental analysis: predicting a shift in stock price by determining the intrinsic value of a company and its stocks. They often mockingly referred to technical analysts as “chartists” for the graphs and data tables they looked through for their forecasts.

“I had to keep my diagrams in the bottom drawer of my desk,” Ms. Murphy recalled in an interview with an industry magazine in 1992. “In those days, technical analysis was not considered an acceptable discipline, not in a conservative company.”

To learn more about the business, she took courses at the New York Institute of Finance and began making her own charts. Using the trading floor around her as a training ground, she gathered information about the interactions between the various markets her company operated in, such as corporate and municipal bonds, stocks, and overseas trade orders. (After leaving Ladenburg, she worked for two other Wall Street firms.)

She also began sharing her ideas with colleagues and industry contacts in a newsletter, This Is What I Think, which became her calling card, prompting her company’s clients to ask their managers for their views on the deals they were considering. In the early 1970s, she was monitoring stock portfolios for clients and sharing her projections with them.

Its outbreak came in 1973 when a market crash and global economic downturn left stocks swooning in a 21 month long swoon.

“My readings were very accurate,” said Ms. Murphy in “Women on the Street: Making It On Wall Street – The Toughest Business In The World” (1998) by Sue Herera. For example, she expected a sharp dip in a popular group of stocks known as the “Nifty 50” which included household names like Coca-Cola and Polaroid.

“My timing was right, my expectation of what would happen to stocks was on the money, so I got calls from institutions and invitations to lunch,” Ms. Murphy said in the book. “And so started my business.”

Recognition…via Murphy family

In 1979 she appeared on Wall Street Week, which aired on Friday night.

Ms. Murphy was known within the industry for her contributions to trade groups and civic organizations. She has served at various times as President of the Chartered Market Technicians Association, the New York Society of Security Analysts, and the Financial Women’s Association. She was a charter member and governor of the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, trustee of Pace University, and a board member of the American Lung Association of New York City.

“Everyone in an organization was always trying to get Bernadette to join, which she often did because she was a social bee,” said Sheila Baird, founding partner of investment firm Kimelman & Baird, where Ms. Murphy was a primary market analyst for many years.

Bernadette Bartels was born on City Island in the Bronx on April 9, 1934, the son of Joseph Francis Bartels, a stationary engineer (maintenance of industrial machines and systems), and Julia (Flynn) Bartels, a Nurse. She was the youngest of four children. She is survived by her sister Julia Campbell.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Our Lady of Good Counsel (now part of Pace University) in White Plains, NY. She credited her father with using her education to make a career.

“I knew for a fact that I would achieve something before my wedding. That was my driving force, ”she said to Ms. Herera. “I wanted to be a fulfilled person, confident.”

In 1982 she married Eugene Francis Murphy, whom she met on Tiana Beach in Hampton Bays, New York, after saving her from a flood. The orthodontist Dr. Murphy died in 1997.

Ms. Murphy, who retired from Kimelman & Baird in 2015, encouraged women to pursue careers on Wall Street, whether speaking in high schools or colleges, or informally with friends and family members. One of them was Mary Ann Bartels, her niece, who became the executive director of Bank of America.

Mrs. Bartels recalled a story Mrs. Murphy often told. As a child, she said, she stopped at a waterfront arcade on City Island and put a coin in a machine to get her horoscope. “It was said that her element was fire, her color was red and ‘you are an aries, the aries – a trailblazer and a pioneer’,” said Ms. Bartels. “She told us this story so many times, and she really lived after it every day.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed to the research.

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World News

Inventory futures slip as Wall Road appears to rebound from dropping week

Stock futures slip as Wall Street looks to rebound from losing week

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Source: NYSE

US stock futures fell slightly on Sunday night as Wall Street appeared to be recovering from a lost week.

Futures linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 68 points, or 0.2%. Those for the S&P 500 were also down 0.2%, while those for the Nasdaq 100 were up 0.1%.

The movement in futures comes after the three major indices lost ground last week. The Dow and S&P 500 slid on Friday, ending the week 0.5% and 0.8% respectively, breaking two-week winning streaks. The Nasdaq Composite rose on Friday but ended the week down 0.8%.

The struggles for stocks came as bond yields rose again last week, putting pressure on tech and growth stocks that dragged the market back from its pandemic-triggered sell-off last year. On Sunday, futures rose at the price of the 10 year Treasury note, indicating lower yields.

Despite last week’s weakness, the S&P 500 and Dow are still near record highs, and the Nasdaq is not too far away. Darrell Cronk, chief investment officer of Wells Fargos Wealth and Investment Management, said the stock market is still on track for multi-year growth.

“If you went down the list and started putting check-check-check-check boxes, you’d look at this in a vacuum … and say it looks like an early recovery cycle that goes on for about a year and probably a number of years left to run, “said Cronk.

Optimism about markets and the path of the US economy has increased as vaccines roll out across the country. In the past few weeks, the American pace has increased. However, there has been an increase in Covid-19 cases in several states.

Over the weekend, the industrial sector produced an important corporate news item. The Canadian Pacific Railway announced that it is buying $ 25 billion worth of Kansas City Southern, creating a railroad giant connecting Canada, the United States and Mexico.

In terms of economic data, investors will take another look at the property market on Monday when the National Association of Realtors releases existing home sales for February. Economists polled by Dow Jones forecast a decline of 2.8%.

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World News

Wall Road rally pauses after shares hit document highs

5 things to know before the stock market opens March 5, 2021

Stocks were flat on Monday, with the Dow and S&P 500 hovering near record highs on optimism about the economic reopening.

The Dow rose about 10 points after hitting a daily high in the Open. The S&P 500 was down 0.1% and the Nasdaq Composite was down 0.2%.

Stocks, which will benefit the most from a quick economic comeback from the pandemic, drove the gains. American Airlines and United Airlines stocks rose 7% and 8%, respectively.

As part of the $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package that went into law last week, the IRS began processing $ 1,400 in direct payments for millions of Americans, which is expected to add juice to the already recovering economy.

Air traffic over the weekend hit its highest level in more than a year when the Covid-19 vaccine was introduced and Americans went back on vacation.

Stocks hit their lows when Italy, along with France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands stopped using the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University because of blood clot concerns.

The 10-year Treasury yield was trading at 1.616% on Monday after hitting its highest level in more than a year on Friday. The surge in bond yields has challenged growth stocks for the past few weeks, dragging investors into cyclical pockets of the market.

“Bond yields remain the main risk to the stock market,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Leuthold Group. “They are calm until this morning, however, and as the pace of their recent advance slows, investors can focus more on how low overall returns remain.”

“Investors will continually grapple with the fear of economic overheating and Fed tightening that have gripped markets over the past few weeks,” David Kostin, Goldman’s chief US equities strategist, wrote in a note. “We believe stock valuations should be able to digest 10-year returns of around 2% with little difficulty.”

Shares rose last week, the Dow rose 4% and the S&P 500 rose 2.6%. The S&P 500 and the Dow both closed at record highs on Friday. The Nasdaq Composite was up 3% last week despite a sell-off on Friday triggered by rising interest rates.

Investors will prepare for Wednesday when the Federal Reserve will make its rate decision. The central bank is expected to recognize much better economic growth. Bond professionals are also watching to see if Fed officials will tweak their interest rate outlook, which now doesn’t include rate hikes through 2023.

On the vaccine front last week, Biden announced that he would instruct states to question all adults for the vaccine by May 1. Biden also made a goal of allowing Americans to meet in person with friends and loved ones in small groups to celebrate the Fourth of July.

(Correction: In an earlier version of the story, Goldman’s Kostin title was incorrectly stated.)