Amazon is in talks to start streaming sports on Prime

• Rob Price
 

• 5h
• 1,911

Sports sports sports. Grant Halverson/Getty Images

Amazon is continuing on its mission to stop you having any reason to ever need any other company. Its latest target: Live sports.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the online retail giant has been in talks with a number of major American sports organisations, as well as traditional media networks that show sports, over acquiring rights to broadcast games online live.

Amazon has apparently been discussing some kind of "premium" sports package as part of its Prime subscription service, the WSJ's unnamed sources said.

Organisations Amazon has been in talks with include the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball, ESPN, and others.

Through Prime, Amazon already offers subscribers on-demand movies and TV shows, including exclusive original content like newly launched motoring show The Grand Tour, starring Jeremy Clarkson. But broadening this to sports could give it a key advantage over rival Netflix, which has so far refused to touch live sports.

We've heard reports that Amazon is interested in sports before. Back in September, Bloomberg reported that the company was chasing the rights for everything from the French Open tennis championship to professional rugby, with a focus on sports with "global appeal."

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

If the company does manage to acquire the rights to sufficiently high-profile sports and leagues, it could help it assert superiority over other on-demand video streaming services — and would also present an unprecedented threat to traditional TV and cable companies that also show live sports.

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Investors are ditching bonds at the fastest rate in 3 years

• Ben Moshinsky
 

• 8h
• 1,587

John Gress/Reuters

The past week has been brutal for bond funds.

Investors ditched bonds at the fastest weekly rate since 2013, according to analysts from Deutsche Bank, on fears high interest rates and inflation will make a return.

Markets expect US President-elect Donald Trump to ramp up fiscal spending, in turn boosting inflation and wiping out fixed-income investors.

In contrast, stocks and shares have hit record highs in anticipation of a surge of economic growth from higher government spending.

"Expectations of a looser US fiscal policy added fuel to the reflationary fire, triggering a bond sell-off across regions and classes on the one hand while also arranging for a strong return of equity inflows on the other hand," Deutsche Bank said in a note to clients.

The sell-off has been concentrated in emerging markets, which includes areas such as Latin America. Adjusting for currency movements, emerging market funds saw their biggest outflows since 2004.

Here's the chart:

Deutsche Bank

And here's the move into stocks:

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank argued that there is a long way to go before this rotation away from bonds into stocks is complete.

"If such stimulus in combination with reduced business regulation were to lead US GDP growth higher (as our US economists expect), we could finally see a normalisation of flows whereby money rotates out of over-allocated bond funds ($1tn of inflows since 2009) and into DM equities ($400bn of inflows since 2009)," Deutsche Bank said.

Here's bond market surge since 2009, spurred by low interest rates and central banks' asset purchases:

Deutsche Bank

This could spell trouble for emerging markets that rely on debt to fuel their economies. As investors flee bonds, the yield increases, making it more expensive to refinance existing debt.

Societe Generale on Monday argued that bonds represent the "Achilles' heel of global markets," citing a bond market collapse as one of the biggest "Black Swan" risks in global markets.

SocGen said that bond prices, which move inversely to yields, could see further drops. "Such a scenario could have very negative spillover, not least to emerging markets," the bank said.

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More: Bonds Deutsche Bank Donald Trump Inflation 

Oil prices rise in anticipation of planned OPEC-led production cut

• Reuters

• 15h
• 177

File photo of an employee walking past oil tanks at a Sinopec refinery in Wuhan, Hubei province Thomson Reuters

By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices rose to their highest level since October on Tuesday as the market priced in a potential output cut led by producer cartel OPEC, although analysts warned that a failure to agree a cut could lead to a ballooning supply overhang by early 2017.

International Brent crude oil futures rose as high as $49.43 per barrel early on Tuesday, their highest since Oct. 31, and they were trading at $49.33 per barrel at 0110 GMT, up 43 cents, or 0.9 percent, from their last settlement.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were up 44 cents, or 0.9 percent, at $48.68 a barrel.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is trying by Nov. 30 to bring its 14 member states and non-OPEC producer Russia to agree on a coordinated production cut to prop up the market by bringing production into line with consumption.

"With investors becoming more optimistic about OPEC reaching an agreement on production cuts, oil prices should continue to edge higher in trading today," ANZ bank said on Tuesday.

Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients that the chances of an OPEC cut had increased as producers needed to react to eroding supply and demand fundamentals, which the bank said "have weakened sharply since OPEC announced a tentative agreement to cut production."

Should OPEC and other producers, especially Russia, fail to agree a cutback, Goldman said it expected an oil supply surplus of 0.7 million barrels per day (bpd) for the first quarter of 2017.

(Reporting by Henning Gloystein; Editing by Richard Pullin)

Read the original article on Reuters. Copyright 2016. Follow Reuters on Twitter.

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SILICON VALLEY CEO: People are 'lashing out' because technology is destroying more and more jobs

• Oscar Williams-Grut
 

• 6h
• 16,481

Tien Tzuo, the cofounder and CEO of Zuora. Zuora/Marc Rettig

The CEO of a $1 billion (£810 million) Silicon Valley software company believes the world is approaching a tech-driven employment crisis that already contributed to Donald Trump's surprise victory in the US presidential election.

"Technology is changing the workforce — it's changing the employment market," Tien Tzuo, the cofounder and CEO of Zuora, told Business Insider during a recent interview in London.

The World Economic Forum believes the world is undergoing a fourth industrial revolution, driven by the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence that automate more and more jobs. The WEF estimates that these trends will destroy 5 million jobs by 2020.

Tzuo said: "There are less manufacturing jobs. You talk about the fourth industrial revolution — that's not letting up. It's going to obsolete more and more jobs at a faster and faster pace. The workforce is not able to keep up with it in terms of the locations, the skills, and all these other issues."

Some 57% of all jobs in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's member countries are at risk of automation, according to research by Citi and Oxford University. The research also found that, unlike previous major advances in technology, computing advances are actually destroying more jobs than they create.

If we don’t solve this, there's going to be a class of population that's going to hold us back from moving towards the future.

"If we don't solve this," Tzuo said, "there's going to be a class of population that's going to hold us back from moving towards the future — rightfully so, because society needs to deal with their issues."

Tzuo isn't the only one raising alarm about what technology is doing to employment. Lord Adair Turner, the former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe and the ex-head of Britain's financial watchdog, told Business Insider earlier this month that "we may be at a turning point in the nature of capitalism" because of "the fundamental nature of technology."

BT Group CEO Gavin Patterson has also warned of challenging changes in the global jobs market, telling a conference recently: "It's quite possible that 80% of the jobs that people do today won't exist in the future."

Tzuo, who was an early employee of Salesforce before setting up Zuora, linked Trump's shock election victory in the US to the tech-driven labour-market trends.

"You're moving from a $50-an-hour manufacturing job because you're in a union to a $12-an-hour job at Walmart or Starbucks that's nonunion," Tzuo said. "It doesn't work! People are blaming trade and immigration as a result, but it's not that. Immigration is not taking away jobs. Trade in the US has actually shrunk over the last four or five years. When everything is a service, what is there to trade?"

On Trump voters, he said: "It's not that these guys are all racists and sexists — sure there's some fringe factor of that, but that's not the core issue. The core issue is they need a future. Without a future, they lash out in different ways."

But Tzuo added: "The trend towards globalisation is inevitable. There might be some ups and downs, one step forward, two steps back, but it's not like the pendulum is swinging permanently the other way. We've just got to work through some social issues."

"I think as a society we've got to figure out how do we create jobs for people and if there literally are going to be fewer jobs, then how can we establish a minimum wage or basic income for folks. How exactly you do that depends on the society, the rules."

Tzuo at Zuora's recent Subscribed conference in London. Zuora

The California-based Zuora provides businesses with software designed to allow them to easily accept subscriptions. Founded in 2007, the company has grown in line with the rise of the so-called on-demand economy — services like Uber and Deliveroo — subscription services such as Netflix, and the cloud-computing industry, which typically sees businesses and people rent software hosted in the cloud rather than buy it.

Zuora processes about $35 billion (£28.2 billion) worth of transactions for more than 800 customers around the world and employs 600 people globally. The company has raised over $240 million (£193.7 million) in funding to date and was valued at over $1 billion (£810 million) in its most recent funding round.

Tzuo told Business Insider that he did not think Trump's election would damage Silicon Valley's tech economy, despite the president-elect's promise to stand up for many of the people damaged by technology trends and his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

"I'm not going to go work for Google, chase my high-tech dreams, because of Trump?" Tzuo said. "That's not computing."

He was speaking with Business Insider at Zuora's Subscribed conference in London last week. Britain is a major international market for the company, which works with the likes of British Gas, the Financial Times, Brandwatch, and The Telegraph.

Tzuo said the Brexit "does create more headaches" for Zuora in the UK "but in the short term it doesn't change our strategy."

More: Zuora Technology Donald Trump Brexit 

Canada plans to experiment with giving people unconditional free money

• Chris Weller, Tech Insider

• Mar. 4, 2016, 3:57 PM
• 165,116

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.Blair Gable/Reuters

Finland and The Netherlandshave already shown their interest in giving people a regular monthly allowance regardless of working status, and now Ontario, Canada, is onboard.

Ontario's government announcedin February that a pilot program will be coming to the Canadian province sometime later this year.

The premise: Send people monthly checks to cover living expenses such as food, transportation, clothing, and utilities — no questions asked.

It's a radical idea, and one that has been around since the 1960s. It's called "basic income." In the decades since it was first proposed, various researchers and government officials have given basic income experiments a try, with mixed results.

Folks at the Basic Income Canada Network, the national organization promoting basic income, have high hopes.

"We need it rolled out across Canada, and Quebec, too, is in the game," said chair of BICN, Sheila Regehr, in a statement. "So there's no reason why people and governments in other parts of this country need sit on the sidelines – it's time for us all to get to work."

Ontario officials haven't decided when or where exactly it'll roll out the program, nor how much each person will receive. When it does start, the money will come from a portion of Ontario's budget set aside for the experiment.

In Finland, a small social-democratic country, people will receive an additional 800 euros, or just shy of $900. In various cities throughout The Netherlands, people receive an extra $1,000.

Ontario at least doesn't seem to be spinning its wheels. Canada's federal minister of families, children, and social development, Jean-Yves Duclos, formally endorsed the experiment early last month, saying that basic income merits a genuine discussion.

"There are many different types of guaranteed minimum income," Duclos told The Globe and Mail. "I'm personally pleased that people are interested in the idea."

In theory, basic income should work.

While one knee-jerk reaction is to argue that free money creates a lazy working class, research suggests the opposite is true. Supported by the financial safety net, people in one 2013 studyactually worked 17% longer hours and received 38% higher earnings when basic income was given a shot.

In a country like Canada, where healthcare and retirement savings are already highly socialized, it isn't far-fetched to think a steady income paid for by the taxpayers could roll out smoothly.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misattributed the pilot program to the Basic Income Canada Network, not the province of Ontario.

Read the original article on Tech Insider. Follow Tech Insider on Facebook and Twitter. Copyright 2016.

SEE ALSO: Here's the salary you have to earn to buy a home in 19 major US cities

More: Canada Basic Income Income Inequality Government

What Happens When You Give Basic Income to the Poor? Canada Is About to Find Out

• November 15, 2016

 by NATALIE SHOEMAKER

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Ontario is poised to become a testing ground for basic income in 2017 as part of a pilot program. Hugh Segal is the special advisor to the Canadian province and a former senator. He believes a supplemental income of $1,320 a month could provide a viable path to poverty abatement—effectively replacing welfare programs and a system he described as “seriously demeaning” in a paper discussing this basic income pilot project.

Segal suggests this pilot project would provide real evidence to whether basic income is the solution to poverty many governments have been seeking. It would answer many of the burning questions and concerns regarding such a system:

• Can basic income policies provide a more efficient, less intrusive, and less stigmatizing way of delivering income support for those now living in poverty?
• Can those policies also encourage work, relieve financial and time poverty, and reduce economic marginalization?
• Can a basic income reduce cost pressures in other areas of government spending, such as healthcare?
• Can a basic income strengthen the incentive to work, by responsibly helping those who are working but still living below the poverty line?

In the United States, welfare programs are the staple of big government—a Republican nightmare. Paul Ryan has indicated he wants to phase-out these entitlement programs, however, he’s also concerned about solving the poverty issue in America. If Ontario’s proposed three-year project provides compelling evidence that basic income could do both, we may have a bi-partisan solution.

Segal is a conservative. In his view, welfare programs help alleviate some of the symptoms of poverty, but provide no long-term program to get people out.

“Testing a basic income is a humane and useful way to measure how so many of the costs of poverty (in terms of productivity, health, policing, and other community costs, to name only a few) might be diminished, while poverty itself is reduced and work is encouraged,” Segal says in the report.

A guaranteed income would provide a floor no one would fall beneath and citizens would receive it regardless of employment status. Conservatives like it because it provides an elegant solution that could replace the welfare state and the left love it because it provides a greater social architecture.

However, many question how giving people free money could fix many of our socio-economic issues. But we won’t know if we don’t try—if we don’t do the research to find a solution, which is what Segal suggests.

"There cannot be, nor should there be, any guarantees about what results a pilot might generate,” Segal writes. “The objective behind this endeavor should be to generate an evidence-base for policy development, without bias or pre-determined conclusion."

This test of basic income won’t be the first. Researchers and governments across the globe have started implementing similar tests to see what happens when you give people no-strings-attached cash. Finland, the Dutch city of Utricht, and Kenya all have plans to create programs to test this system. Segal believes a program in Ontario could add to this growing body of research.

"This Ontario initiative takes place at a time when other jurisdictions, in Canada and abroad, are working in different ways toward a Basic Income approach to better reduce poverty,” he wrote. “The opportunity to learnfrom and engage with these other initiatives should not be overlooked, nor should approaches being tested elsewhere be necessarily re-tested here."

A study in Manitoba, Canada done back in the 1970s provides us with an idea of what a community receiving basic income would look like. Many believe people would stop working, and become lazy. They would be half right, some people did stop working in Manitoba. But when you look at the data a little closer, we begin to see how poverty starts at an early age and how basic income could help them get out.

Allow me to explain: People in the town received a set income of $9,000 a year (by today's standards) from the government. Evelyn Forget, an economist and professor at the University of Manitoba, who looked over the data from the study says there was a 9% reduction in working hours among two main groups of citizens.

Here’s the kicker: New mothers were using their additional income to extend their maternity leaves and spend more time with their infants, and teenage boys were using that income to stay in school.

“When we interviewed people, we discovered that prior to the experiment, a lot of people from low-income families, a lot of boys in particular, were under a fair amount of family pressure to become self-supporting when they turned 16 and leave school. When Mincome came along, those families decided that they could afford to keep their sons in high school just a little bit longer,” Forget told PRI in an interview.

Poverty affects all of us in some way (at some point 3 in 5 Americans experience it personally in their lifetime). All of us pay for its upkeep through taxes and can see how it wears down the institutions within our local communities. Basic income could be the solution. We have some data; we need more in order to make the proper call.

Ontario’s experiment will show what would happen if people between the age of 18 to 65, living below the poverty line, received a monthly income of $1,320 ($1,820 if they are disabled). Would they be better able to save and find work?

“There’s no magic bullet,” said Jennefer Laidley of the Income Security Advocacy Centre. “So it’s key that government is now exploring various solutions — reforming existing social assistance programs, improving the quality of work, and considering basic income.”

Africa's largest economy is stuck in a painful recession

• Will Martin
 

• 7h
• 1,139

Vancouver, British Columbia, CAN; Nigeria defender Josephine Chukwunonye (6) and United States forward Abby Wambach (20) after a collision during the second half in a Group D soccer match in the 2015 FIFA women's World Cup at BC Place Stadium.Michael/ChowUSA Today Sports

Africa's biggest economy Nigeria is stuck in a painful recession with no end in sight, according to the latest official data released on Monday.

Gross domestic product shrank by 2.24% in the third quarter of 2016, following a 2.06% contraction in the second quarter, and a 0.36% shrinking in the first quarter, according to data released by the country's National Bureau of Statistics.

That extends the country's recession, which started in Q2, into a third quarter. Nigeria's ongoing recession is its first in 20 years. The continued recession is even deeper than expected, with economists polled by Bloomberg in the run-up to the data's release forecasting a contraction of just 2%.

The big driver of the slump in the Nigerian economy, which was one of Africa's great success stories until recently, has been the persistently low price of oil over the past 2 1/2 years. Nigeria relies heavily on oil and is the largest producer of the commodity on the continent, producing roughly 2.4 million barrels a day. Given that the price of oil has slumped from more than $100 a barrel in 2014 to roughly $48 now, it is perhaps unsurprising that the country has struggled to find economic growth.

The Nigerian oil industry's problems have been made even worse by a series of major disruptions in the oil-rich Niger Delta area, caused largely by a militant group calling itself the Niger Delta Avengers. Most notably, the group attacked a Chevron offshore facility in May and the underwater Forcados export pipeline operated by Shell in late March. The production disruptions caused by these attacks and others have wreaked havoc with the already stricken industry.

The Avengers activities seemed to dwindle over the summer, but they have re-emerged in the past couple of months, and over the weekend vowed to blow up more oil facilities in the Niger Delta region because of an ongoing dispute with the government regarding criminal charges against a former militant leader called Government Ekpemupolo, Nigeria Today reports.

The mining sector has also been a big issue for the country's economy. Output was more than 20% lower than in the same period in 2015, the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics said (emphasis ours):

"In real terms, Mining and Quarrying sector slowed by – 21.64% (year-on-year) in the third quarter of 2016 which was 22.77% points lower than rates recorded in the same Quarter of 2015, also 4.45% points lower than rates recorded in second quarter of 2016. The contribution of Mining and Quarrying to Real GDP in the third quarter of 2016 stood at 8.34%, showing a decline of 2.06% points relative to the corresponding quarter of 2015 and also a decline of 0.07% points relative to the second quarter of 2016."

Nigeria could now be set for its first full-year recession since 1991, with Dr Yemi Kale, the head of Nigeria's statistical agency saying in a tweet that "Nigeria needs…growth in Q4 of 4.32 per cent to avoid full year negative growth."

Nigeria's economic picture is made even worse by spiralling inflation — which as Business Insider's Elena Holodny reported last week — has hit an 11-year high.

Consumer prices rose by 18.3% year-over-year in October, according to data from the central bank, accelerating from the previous month's rate of 17.9%.

This was the highest rate since October 2005, and the 12th consecutive month it accelerated. The rate was in line with the median Bloomberg estimate.

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More: Nigeria Recession IMF Niger Delta Avengers