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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The Greek Parliament approved another round of tough economic cuts and austerity measures Thursday to assure itself another installment payment of European bailout funds.

Greece may have again faced bankruptcy in July without the payment.

More cuts for pensioners

All 153 lawmakers in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ leftist coalition voted for the cuts; all 128 opposition members voted no.

More than 10,000 Greeks weary of the nation’s economic problems, including elderly pensioners facing more cuts, marched outside Parliament against the measures.

Several dozen young marchers wearing masks broke away from the crowd to throw gasoline bombs at police, who responded with tear gas.

Greece desperately needs about $8 billion of bailout money from its eurozone lenders in order to make a scheduled debt payment.

Tax hikes part of deal

In exchange, the government agreed to EU demands for more austerity measures, including tax hikes and programs aimed at easing poverty.

With Thursday’s vote, Greek officials hope they can renegotiate payment terms on the nation’s massive debt payment — nearly 180 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product. The International Monetary Fund calls this number unsustainable.

Greece has been relying on international bailouts since 2010, when the outgoing conservative government badly underreported the country’s debt.
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the nation’s economic growth can rise to 3 percent annually if taxes and regulations are cut.

The Treasury secretary spoke Thursday to a Senate committee in his first congressional testimony since he was confirmed in the new job. Mnuchin’s boss, Donald Trump, says tax and regulatory reform will boost the economy, and he made the promise of such changes a key part of his campaign for president.

Recently, annual economic growth has been at 2 percent or lower, and most economists say that is due to a large number of retirements by aging workers and meager productivity growth.

Trump’s efforts to change taxes have been moving slowly in Congress, where they face strong opposition from Democrats, and skepticism from some of his Republican allies who worry that cutting taxes will make government debt problems worse.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration says it has notified Congress it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

In a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the administration plans 90 days of consultations with lawmakers over how to rewrite the agreement followed by negotiations with Canada and Mexico that could begin after August 16.

Renegotiation of NAFTA was a key promise of Trump’s during his presidential campaign, when he frequently called the treaty a “disaster.”

Lighthizer told reporters NAFTA has helped strengthen the U.S. agriculture, investment services and energy sectors, but it has hurt U.S. factories and resulted in well-paying manufacturing jobs being sent to Mexico.

Lighthizer said in the letter that NAFTA needs to be updated to more effectively address matters involving digital trade, intellectual property rights and labor and environmental standards.

At a news conference Thursday at the State Department with Mexican officials and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other U.S. officials, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico “welcomes” the renegotiation of NAFTA.

“We understand that this is a 25-year-old agreement when it was negotiated,” Videgaray said. “The world has changed. We’ve learned a lot and we can make it better.”

Commerce Department Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement, “Since the signing of NAFTA, we have seen our manufacturing industry decimated, factories shuttered, and countless workers left jobless.  President Trump is going to change that.”

VOA State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed to this report
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Call them the unrecovered — a handful of states where job markets, nine years later, are still struggling back to where they were before the recession.

That’s true in Mississippi, where job numbers and the overall size of the economy remain below 2008 levels. Unlike states that have long since sprinted ahead, Mississippi is struggling with slow economic growth and slipping population in a place that’s rarely at peak economic health.

Miguel Brown, despite family ties to his hometown near the Alabama border, is working on oil rigs off the shore of Texas, chasing higher wages.

“It’s rough,” said the 49-year-old Brown. “There’s not a whole lot of jobs in Meridian, especially that pay anything.”

Not only Mississippi, but also Alabama, Michigan, New Mexico and West Virginia are still short of pre-recession job levels by multiple measures. That contrasts with states including Colorado, North Dakota, Texas and Utah, where employment numbers have soared. Nationwide, job numbers surpassed pre-recession peaks in the middle of 2014, about the same time Mississippi was saddled with the nation’s highest unemployment rate.

Emilia Istrate, who produces a yearly report on how local economies are faring for the National Association of Counties, said the recovery has been widespread but “uneven.”

“It explains why so many Americans don’t feel the national economic numbers. It’s because they live in one of these places that is still in recovery or struggling,” Istrate said.

Mississippi numbers

Growth has long lagged in Mississippi, and jobless rates are high even in good times. The unemployment rate fell to 5 percent in March, the lowest since the U.S. Labor Department began the current system of measurement in 1976. But at the same time that the Magnolia State’s unemployment rate was at a record low, it tied for the ninth highest among the states.

Mississippi suffers from a cluster of ills that make it an economic laggard. Only 53 percent of Mississippi adults were working in 2016, the second lowest share of any state. Mississippi’s economy depends on slow-growth sectors, including government employment. While nearly 30 percent of Americans older than 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 21 percent of Mississippians do.

The overall size of Mississippi’s economy was smaller in 2016 than it was in 2008, and people are beginning to vote with their feet: The state’s population has fallen in the last two years.

“I think the population is falling because of the economy,” said state economist Darrin Webb. “People have had to go where the jobs are.”

Education options

That doesn’t mean things haven’t improved for many people. Economists have long advised that a better-educated, more productive workforce could eventually spur growth. The state’s community colleges last year began offering not only adult education classes to high school dropouts, but also free training leading to career certification.

Kathryn Winfield, 37, was one of the first graduates.

Returning to the labor force after two years spent caring for her dying father, she earned her high school equivalency degree and became a certified nursing assistant. After nearly a decade making the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour working as a cashier, Winfield is now making more than $13 an hour helping care for nursing home patients. She said the additional pay allows her to better provide for her three kids.

In some ways, Mississippi’s economy has healed from the scars of the recession. Archie McDonnell Jr., the CEO of Citizens National Bank, said loan demand has rebounded above prerecession highs at Meridian’s largest financial institution, and the bank’s profits have more than tripled from their bottom in 2011.

“People just decided, the recession’s over, I’ve got to get back to running my business and investing and doing things,” McDonnell said.

McDonnell said he’s hopeful about investment in Meridian, noting a $50 million museum being built downtown, an investor seeking to redevelop a derelict 16-story art-deco skyscraper into a hotel, and new ownership at the city’s mall.

The number of Mississippians who report being employed could top the precession high when April data is released Friday. But employer payrolls, another way to measure employment, leveled off last year and remains about 1 percent below where they were before Mississippi’s economy headed south in early 2008.

It is not just the number of jobs, but what they pay. Workers made an average of $669 a week in Meridian and surrounding Lauderdale County in late 2016, compared to $739 statewide and $1,027 nationwide. 

Good wages are the reason that Brown says he has left his hometown of Meridian.

“These are my roots,” Brown said. “Meridian will always be home, without a doubt, but you’ve got to make ends meet and you can’t do it here.”
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