Business News

On the occasion of the holding of the Formula 1 Grand Prix on Saturday, the striking croupiers at the Casino de Montréal decided to make a “brilliant strike” by blocking access to the car park for the establishment’s employees, thus slowing down their activities. .

• Also read: PK Subban having fun at the Montreal Grand Prix

• Also read: F1 drivers’ favorite hostel

• Also read: Canadian Grand Prix: Even the stars have their fun

With this measured leverage, which does not harm the organization of the motor sport event, the demonstrators force the casino employees to have to park directly on the premises of the facility.

“We wanted to create a stir at the Grand Prix, but without harming the spectators who paid for an expensive ticket. We’re getting the message across that we need to end the casino dispute by focusing on the health of croupiers and croupières,” said Jean-Pierre Proulx, union adviser at the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

According to the union, management at the Casino de Montreal sent a formal notice to protesters by 9 a.m. Saturday, urging them to put an end to this bargaining chip.

Remember that the 545 croupiers at Casino de Montréal have been on an indefinite general strike since May 21st due to the stalled negotiations on their employment contract, which expired on March 31st, 2020.

The dispute mainly concerns the croupiers’ working conditions, including the break time, which they consider insufficient.

Fox News contributor Brian Brenberg discusses new reports that Twitter will give Elon Musk user details about spam and fake accounts as the $40 billion deal to buy the social media company continues to stall.

Elon Musk criticized the Democratic Party in part two of an in-depth interview with the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley Club.

Musk took the opportunity to explain his feelings about the Democratic Party, its relationship with unions, and Tesla’s exclusion from an electric vehicle event at the White House because the company is non-union.

Musk specifically criticized the Democratic Party’s strong relationship with the union leadership.

“The general public is unaware of the extent to which unions control the Democratic Party. There’s no need to speculate on that point,” Musk told interviewers.

SPACEX BURNS STAFF WHO CRITICIZED ELON MUSK: REPORT

Neither of Musk’s two most prominent companies — Tesla and SpaceX — are unionized. Musk has attributed this to the Bay Area’s “negative unemployment” — typically, workers at Tesla have several other job opportunities to pursue, Musk claims.

He continued, “Last year Biden held an EV summit that Tesla specifically wasn’t allowed to attend, but the [United Auto Workers] was. So Tesla made two-thirds of all electric vehicles in the United States.”

The UAW is one of the most organized and politically powerful unions in the United States, with influence in both political parties.

“So if you intentionally exclude us from an EV White House summit — but include the UAW — that tells you everything you need to know,” Musk said.

FILE PHOTO: A Tesla vehicle drives past Tesla’s primary vehicle factory in Fremont, California on May 11, 2020. (REUTERS/Stephen Lam/Reuters Photos)

He reiterated, “They have so much power over the White House that they can exclude Tesla from an EV summit – madness.”

Musk has taken issue with Biden, who at the EV Summit praised GM CEO Mary Barra for leading the “EV revolution” in a quarter in which GM shipped just 26 electric vehicles. “This is next-level madness,” Musk said.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

The Tesla CEO has voiced his dislike of the UAW in the past.

In March he attacked the United Auto Workers over embezzlement allegations against one of its former officials.

In response to the news, Musk quipped that the UAW’s slogan should be, “Fight for the right to embezzle auto workers’ money.”

FOX Business’ Caitlin McFall contributed to this report.

Stocks Are Strongly For Sale, But Are They Cheap? Discounts are not always the same bargain. Much depends on the original price and quality of the goods. And even with last week’s falls on Wall Street, it’s hard to say the market is broadly cheap. But value appears to be developing in some corners of the market, potentially rewarding the hunt for good bargains during the last few weeks’ Everything Must Go clearance event. The speed, depth, and breadth of price declines following the S&P 500’s 5.8% loss last week, which took its overall decline to nearly 24%, has led to rare extremes in sell persistence and oversold readings. A week ago, this column asked if market conditions were “so bad it’s good” based on the likelihood of a reversal, concluding that things “probably aren’t quite there.” But now we’re very close by a variety of metrics, making a meaningful bounce more likely very soon. Washed Out The percentage of S&P 500 stocks trading above their respective 50-day moving averages was essentially as low as it gets, comparable to readings from significant market bottoms 20 years ago. Importantly, the comparable number of stocks above their 200-day moving average has not yet reached such “extreme extremes” due to the speed of this decline. And broader downside momentum is stretched but has room to fall further. The pain has been so widespread that less than a quarter of index members are still within 20% of their 52-week high. As Thrasher Analytics’ chart shows, this became even worse in the Covid crash – a five-week collapse of 35% – as well as the 2007-2009 financial crisis, an 18-month onslaught that took the market in one to 12 years -Indicate deep. Many of the damage assessment studies now look like this, showing that by typical standards the market is unusually washed out, the kind of setup that is a clear buy in an uptrend market but is less reliable in aggressive downtrends like in 2000. 2002 and 2008-’09, multi-year pullbacks that coincided with sharp recessions and featured successive waves of corporate distress. Buying opportunity nearby? By definition, when stock prices fall, potential returns rise, which promises nothing about timing or path, but large declines begin to tip the odds in a buyer’s favor. Market tech Jonathan Harrier (@jonathanharrier on Twitter) points out that on Thursday, 42% of S&P 500 shares hit a new 52-week low, only the 10th time since 1985 that total surpassed 40%. In each of the previous cases (most of them in 2008 and 2020) there was generally further downside – for example an average of 7.6% over the next month – but futures yields were quite a bit better than average in the following months. Still, last week may have been a short-term crescendo of catalysts. Beginning Friday the 10th, the tape picked up an overheated CPI report, a leaked Federal Reserve intention to raise short-term interest rates by 0.75 percentage point instead of the expected 0.5 percentage point, an eventual hike of three quarters of a point and hawkish Talk from Chairman Jerome Powell, all of which resulted in one of the hardest quarterly options and futures expirations on Friday. What was always a narrow, rocky road to a possible soft economic landing was almost universally heralded as even more treacherous and unlikely after the Fed essentially admitted that it would have to moderate demand and employment quite a bit until inflation expectations (mostly a proxy for gasoline) prices) are convincing withdraw. But if you squint, could it be that it was also a short-term peak in the stagflation panic? Crude oil fell 10% for the week and large-cap energy stocks fell 17%, copper and soft commodities turned around and the two-year Treasury yield fell sharply, ending below where it was right before the headlines of the year The Fed’s decision to launch an outrageous rate hike. The market is lagging the week, battle-hardened and war-weary, yes, but also more battle-hardened and emerging with cleaner investor positioning (Morgan Stanley says long-short hedge fund equity exposure last week hit its lowest level since April 2009, shortly after the system was almost imploded). It is difficult to make such judgments, and the week after June – this coming week – has been consistently negative for the last few decades, down 25 of the last 32 years. Difficult to assess how relevant after an expiry week of -5.8%; last year the week of expiry was down 1.9% in June and the following week the S&P gained 2.7%. Towards the end of the month, equities are likely to see some significant portfolio rebalancing after having massively underperformed bonds this quarter and month. Are stocks cheap? Moving beyond the technical tea leaves and market rhythms and back to whether lower prices mean value for money, here’s where the price-to-earnings multiple of the S&P 500 sits right now. AP/E slightly below 16, well below pre-Covid high and not far above where it bottomed closer to 14x in previous severe sell-offs in 2016, 2018 and 2020. In the long run, this is essentially fair value, not cheap. Various models incorporating interest rates and inflation might reflect it at the top end of the market, so investors might be lucky if the damage stopped there, like a pendulum halting midway through its swing. Many will say that this valuation depends on the reliability of earnings forecasts, which have largely held up and are viewed by most as likely to fall. That makes intuitive sense, but all previous valuation lows also came at times when the earnings picture was seriously challenged – which is why valuations collapsed in the first place. In any case, non-energy S&P earnings estimates are already falling for the second through fourth quarters, Barclays says, slipping 3 percentage points over the past few months. Stocks’ resilience to further erosion will be another test here. Away from the marquee index, it looks significantly cheaper. The equal-weight S&P 500 ended the week at 13.1 times expected gains; it bottomed out at 12.9 in December 2018 and 11 in March 2020. Smaller stocks are becoming much more cheap (and/or signaling a nasty earnings slump), with the S&P small cap 600 ending 10x gains a few Outlier scrapes above March 2020 low. Select blue chips are sure to show up in rating screens as well. JPMorgan Chase, not far above 9 times expected earnings, is down close to the P/E ratio it hit when CEO Jamie Dimon bought shares in February 2016 to help hit a low for a brutal multi-month correction. Best Buy is trading at under 8 times earnings and with a 5% dividend yield, which seems to be pricing in scary things for the consumer. Perhaps this is justified given the way consumers have overdone it since 2020 with durable goods and a precarious retail future; After all, value traps are a real danger when buying cheap. But for those who believe the economy may be more resilient than now feared, the bargains are starting to fill up.

For independent sex workers, the real danger of the Formula 1 Grand Prix is ​​not the clients who come to Montreal to seek sexual services, but the increased police surveillance they will face throughout the weekend.

• Also read: Why do we think Grand Prix rhymes with sexual exploitation?

• Also read: The Canadian Grand Prix: ‘It’s a 20th-century event’e Century”

“For us, F1, it just means more police surveillance,” says Melina May, a sex worker and activist with the Autonomous Committee on Sex Works (CATS).

“But we don’t want our work to be monitored any more. What we keep asking for is that it be decriminalized and recognized so that we have access to job assistance programs and labor standards.

“If we’re recognized as workers, we’re really protected,” she says.

fear of the police

Investigators from the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) have been on site for a few weeks.

“They go around hotels, Airbnbs, taxi companies and Ubers to train them to spot victims of exploitation,” says Melina May. On weekends, police officers conduct operations by posing as customers to get their hands on the pimps to get and help the girls in the industry.

However, according to CATS, this increased police surveillance during the Grand Prix is ​​not the solution to ensure the protection of sex workers.

• Also read: Abolishing prisons: the solution to sex worker safety?

First, customers may offer meeting places outside of the police force or refuse to reveal their identity, knowing that buying sexual services is illegal in Canada. Women are even more isolated and therefore at risk of violence.

And then these “infantilizing” operations create stress and fear.

“When you arrive at the hotel you think you’ll meet a customer there and you’ll meet a police officer, it’s traumatic. Me, that worries me,” pleads the activist.

“It sends the message that we are prey, victims who need rescuing while the government puts no real mechanism in place to protect us.”

The same vigilance as usual

Without denying the existence of sexual exploitation – during F1 or any other time of year – Melina May distinguishes it from sex work.

“All the better if F1 brings in more customers, more men asking for sexual services,” she says.

“But we will have the same vigilance as usual. I already rigorously screen clients, I am already taking measures to protect myself given the lack of state aid,” she underlines, citing Émilie Nicolas’ column published in Le Devoir on Thursday.

“Violence against women during Formula 1 is not only in sex work,” she says. “There is also a higher risk of harassment for hostesses, waitresses or other downtown workers […] because there’s just going to be more toxic masculinity in Montreal this weekend. Point.”

LONDON — The price of bitcoin fell below $20,000 on Saturday for the first time since late 2020, in a fresh sign that the cryptocurrency sell-off is deepening.

Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, fell below the psychologically important threshold, falling as much as 9% to below $19,000 and hovering around that mark, according to cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk.

The last time bitcoin was at these levels was in November 2020, when it was on course for its all-time high of nearly $69,000, according to CoinDesk. Many in the industry had believed it would not go below $20,000.

Bitcoin has now lost more than 70% of its value since hitting that peak.

Ethereum, another widely used cryptocurrency that has tumbled in recent weeks, experienced a similar tumble on Saturday.

It is the latest sign of turmoil in the cryptocurrency industry amid larger turmoil in financial markets. Investors are selling riskier assets as central banks raise interest rates to combat accelerating inflation.

According to coinmarketcap.com, a company that tracks crypto prices, the total market value of cryptocurrency assets has fallen from $3 trillion to under $1 trillion.

A spate of crypto meltdowns has erased tens of billions of dollars in value from currencies and prompted urgent calls for regulation of the freewheeling industry. Bipartisan legislation regulating digital assets was introduced in the US Senate last week. The crypto industry has also ramped up its lobbying – it flooded $20 million in convention races for the first time this year, according to records and interviews.

Cesare Fracassi, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin who leads the school’s blockchain initiative, believes Bitcoin’s fall below the psychological threshold isn’t a big deal. Instead, he said the focus should be on the latest news from lending platforms.

Cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network announced this month that it was pausing all withdrawals and transfers, with no indication of when it would allow its 1.7 million customers access to their funds.

“There is a lot of turbulence in the market,” Fracassi said. “And the reason prices are falling is because there are many concerns that the sector is overleveraged.”

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced on Tuesday that it has laid off about 18% of its workforce, with the company’s CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong blaming some of the blame on an upcoming “crypto winter.”

Stablecoin Terra imploded last month, losing tens of billions of dollars in value in a matter of hours.

Crypto had permeated much of popular culture prior to its recent slump, with many Super Bowl ads promoting the digital assets and celebrities and YouTube personalities routinely promoting it on social media.

At 66, Didier Schraenen still pursues his passion with the same fire in his eyes. However, despite his extensive record in Formula 1600, he never stood on the top step of the podium at the Gilles-Villeneuve circuit.

• Also read: PK Subban having fun at the Montreal Grand Prix

The Mont-Saint-Hilaire native is overtaken by young wolves who respectfully try to bag the old trucker. The man who doesn’t know the word ‘retirement’ will be looking to assert himself again this weekend of the Canadian Grand Prix.

“I have something unfinished. Despite the 15 podiums I have here […], I never won. That’s missing in my family tree, as they say,” Schraenen said on the phone after qualifying on Saturday morning.

“I have expected a lot from my supporters over the past 33 years. My first race here was in 1988 in the Honda Michelin Series. It was my very first race in life,” the 32-year-old recalled at the time.

The sports commentator was Canadian Formula 1600 champion in 1998, 1999, 2006 and 2009

The young are growing

Schraenen admits that the young drivers in his series are “sharper” than before. Despite their age, they come from karting with a lot of experience.

“These are very special situations. When I was in Tremblant for the first event of the season, which I won, the two youngsters next to me (Connor Clubine and Callum Baxter) were 18 and 15 years old. Thirty-three together and multiplied by two, that’s my age,” the veteran recalls with a laugh.

To add an extra layer, Schraenen’s number 94 car, designed in Quebec 25 years ago, predates most of its competitors.

“The rest of us come in with our handcrafted cars, with an old driver in there, and we drive in front. It’s not just the driver who can be proud,” added the man who clocked the third-best time on Saturday.

Experience plays a big role, but so does attitude. Didier Schraenen has to elbow the newcomers who have nothing to lose.

“It keeps me young,” says the embattled sixty-year-old.

A signage is on the outside of a Capital One Financial Corp coffee shop on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. installed in Walnut Creek, California, USA.

Bloomberg | Getty Images

A former Amazon Web Services employee has been convicted of hacking into Capital One and stealing the data of more than 100 million people in one of the largest data breaches in the United States nearly three years ago.

Paige Thompson, who worked as an engineer for the software giant until 2016, was found guilty on Friday of seven federal crimes, including wire fraud, which carries up to 20 years in prison. The other charges, illegally accessing a protected computer and damaging a protected computer, are punishable by up to five years in prison. A jury found Thompson not guilty of aggravated identity theft and access device fraud after 10 hours of deliberations, a press release said.

Prosecutors argued that Thompson, working under the name erratic, created a tool to look for misconfigured accounts on AWS. This enabled it to hack into the accounts of more than 30 Amazon customers, including Capital One, and mine that data. Prosecutors argued Thompson also used her access to some of the servers to mine cryptocurrency, which went into her own wallet.

“She wanted data, she wanted money, and she wanted to show off,” Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Friedman said of Thompson in closing arguments during the week-long trial.

Capital One agreed in December to pay $190 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging the violation, in addition to an earlier agreement to pay $80 million in fines. The stolen data included about 120,000 social security numbers and about 77,000 bank account numbers, according to the complaint.

An attorney representing Thompson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US District Judge Robert S. Lasnik set Thompson’s sentencing date of September 15.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

CDC advisers voted Saturday to recommend Covid vaccines for the youngest children Source: Ron Harris/Associated Press

Scientific advisers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began a meeting Saturday to decide whether the benefits of Covid vaccines outweigh the risks for children under the age of 5, one of the last groups of Americans to campaign for the shots have qualified.

The meeting, which will be streamed live here, began at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. Advisors are expected to vote yes, despite reservations over the lack of data, particularly regarding the efficacy of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine.

Earlier this week, another panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration unanimously backed the vaccines. The FDA on Friday approved the Moderna vaccine for children ages 6 months to 5 years and the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 6 months to 4 years. (Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine has been available for children ages 5 and older since November.)

On Friday, CDC advisers heard evidence of the vaccines’ effectiveness in the youngest children. But the committee repeatedly pressed Pfizer for its estimates, noting that three doses of that vaccine would be needed to protect children, compared to two doses of the Moderna vaccine.

Both vaccines are safe and both produced levels of antibodies similar to those found in young adults. When the committee’s approval was quickly given the green light by the agency’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, follows, States are preparing to start vaccinating children next week.

Among the challenges facing the CDC panel Saturday is the difficulty of recommending two very different vaccines for the same population.

“Executing these two rollouts will be incredibly challenging,” said Katelyn Jetelina, a public health expert and author of the widely read newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist.

“There’s going to have to be a lot of proactive communication about the difference between the two and the implications of emphasizing one over the other,” she said.

In its clinical trials, Moderna found that two injections of its vaccine, each at a quarter of the adult dose, produced antibody levels at least as high as those seen in young adults.

The company estimated the vaccine’s effectiveness against symptomatic infections at about 51 percent in children aged 6 to 24 months and 37 percent in children aged 2 to 5 years. Side effects were few, although about one in five children had a fever.

Based on this data, the FDA approved two doses of the Moderna vaccine four weeks apart.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine also generated a strong immune response, but only after three doses, company officials told scientific advisers on Friday.

Two doses of the vaccine were insufficient, they said, justifying the FDA’s decision in February to delay approval of the vaccine until regulators had data on three doses. Two doses may not have been enough, as the company only gave children a tenth of the adult dose with each injection, some advisers said.

The vaccine has an overall effectiveness of 80 percent in children under the age of 5, Pfizer scientists claimed on Friday. However, that calculation was based on only three children in the vaccination group and seven receiving a placebo, making it an unreliable metric, CDC consultants noted.

“We should just assume that we don’t have efficacy data,” said Dr. Sarah Long, an infectious disease expert at Drexel University College of Medicine. But dr Long said she was “comfortable enough” with other data showing the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Three doses of the Pfizer vaccine produced antibody levels comparable to those seen in young adults, suggesting it’s probably just as effective.

“The Pfizer is a three-dose series, but as a three-dose series it’s quite effective,” said Dr. William Towner, who led vaccine trials for Moderna and Pfizer at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California.

Any vaccine would be better than none, added Dr. Towner added. He predicted that some parents might choose Moderna because it’s easier to take kids to a pediatrician for two shots than making sure they get three doses.

The Pfizer vaccine was approved in November for children ages 5 to 11, but less than 30 percent in that age group have received two shots. Parents of the youngest children may be more willing to choose a Covid vaccine if it can be offered alongside other routine vaccinations, said Dr. towner

“That’s the area that a lot of people are unsure about right now,” he said. “I hope there will be a guide to that.”