There’s a lot to do on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday

The consumer is back – but for how long?

Black Friday and the current Cyber ​​Monday shopping bonanzas have major political significance this year, with the retail events shaping up to be a major recession And inflation indicators.

So far, so good. Bargain hunters showed up in droves for Black Friday salesand Cyber ​​Monday is expected to be too even bigger. But as consumers show signs of scaling back their spending, will this splurge be enough to save retailers’ Christmas and prevent the US economy from shrinking or even shrinking? fall into a recession?

The White House is paying attention. Consumers have become pessimistic about the economy, data shows. At the same time, President Biden’s voting numbers have fallen, with the economy seen as a glaring weakness.

Biden’s advisers are pushing back. They did last weekend pointed at strong Black Friday data as a sign of the economy’s resilience. Yet inflation remains a particular sore point among voters. According to The Washington Post, the White House has done so started tracking inflation complaints posted on social media.

The Fed will also be watching. Inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2 percent target, prompting Fed Chairman Jay Powell to signal that policymakers are likely to continue raising borrowing costs for longer in an effort to cool prices. This month’s retail data could be a factor in how the central bank approaches its interest rate policy next year.

Here are some Black Friday tips, including where people shop and how the pastime is changing.

The American consumer still spends:

• According to Black Friday figures, sales in the US increased by 2.5 percent compared to last year The Wall Street Journalciting Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online sales.

• Store traffic increased by 2.1 percent in the same period. Will that be enough?But to save America’s beleaguered malls or the commercial real estate industry?

• Online shopping was the big winner. E-commerce sales increased by 7.5 percent to $9.8 billion. according to Adobe Analytics.

But Black Friday looked different than previous years:

What to watch: The rise of the so-called social commerce, which is big in Asia. TikTok is trying to bring this practice to the US and turn the short video app’s users into buyers.

There’s a new addition to Wednesday’s DealBook Summit: Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen will join Andrew for a wide-ranging video interview on US-China relations, Taiwan independence and chip diplomacy. For more information about the event, click here.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Israel and Hamas could extend their ceasefire. Hamas said it would try to extend the lull in fighting after releasing Israeli hostages last weekend. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said he is open to a continuation if more hostages are released. Separately Elon Musk met today with Netanyahu and families of hostages as he faces accusations of amplifying anti-Semitism against X.

President Biden will skip the UN climate summit. A White House official said the president will not attend COP28, which starts Thursday in Dubai and is expected to include King Charles III, Pope Francis and leaders from more than 100 countries. No reason was given, but aides suggested Biden’s work on the Israel-Hamas war and Ukraine were behind the decision.

TikTok’s parent company is reportedly planning to withdraw from video games. ByteDance, the Chinese internet giant, will do that lay off hundreds of employees in its gaming division and wants to sell titles, according to Reuters. It’s also allowed sell a studio it bought for $4 billion. It’s a black eye for ByteDance, which had tried to compete with a rival Chinese tech titan, Tencent.

Disney’s latest animated film doesn’t live up to expectations. It was predicted that “Wish” would do that earn up to $50 million at the worldwide box office during its debut weekend, behind the latest film ‘Hunger Games’ and ‘Napoleon’. That’s bad news for Disney, where expensive films — “Wish” cost an estimated $200 million, excluding marketing costs — have underperformed.

The SEC is on trial

The Supreme Court will hear a landmark case this week that could shape the future of the SEC’s internal enforcement division and have serious implications for how other regulators operate.

It all started with an enforcement action against a hedge fund manager. About a decade ago, the SEC charged George Jarkesy, an investment advisor and conservative media personality, with securities fraud. Jarkesy was found guilty in an administrative proceeding supervised by an administrative judge. But he won a later challenge to that lawsuit in federal court, saying the Seventh Amendment guaranteed the right to a jury trial.

The SEC has challenged that ruling. The agency argues that the right to a jury trial is limited for civil actions and that Congress did not err in setting up the agency this way. However, Defendants argue that this proceeding is weighted in the agencies’ favor.

Most judges have shown a tendency to limit the power of their agencies and this is just one of many cases questioning the power of federal regulators. The Supreme Court is also considering the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and whether it should overrule a principle that requires judges to defer to agencies’ interpretations of administrative rules.

The regulators are on edge. Some, including the FTC, may bring civil proceedings in internal courts under the supervision of administrative law judges. But If the Supreme Court rejects the SEC’s defense of its administrative process, other agencies would become vulnerable to similar challenges.

An earlier ruling had already made legal challenges from the regulator more likely. In unanimous Supreme Court rulings last year on two related cases against the SEC and FTC, the justices said companies should immediately sue the authorities in federal court instead of waiting for the administrative case to be completed first.

Executives and business groups want the Supreme Court to go further. The Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and others filed an amicus brief calling on the justices to do so prevent the excess of a huge ‘administrative state’. Executives and investors, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, have also weighed in, arguing that the SEC’s internal processes “lead to unequal and unjust outcomes.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday. A decision is expected before the end of this period in June.

The road to the real estate industry’s big fight

Last month, a jury in Missouri returned a verdict that promised to change the $100 billion buying and selling of American homes. The National Association of Realtors and two major real estate agents were ordered to pay at least $1.8 billion for artificially inflating real estate commissions.

If the verdict stands, it could rewrite the American real estate industry. And according to The Wall Street Journal too started with a phone call by a consumer advocate in Minnesota:

George Farah, then a partner at Cohen Milstein, took the call from the attorney who had spent decades investigating industry practices. Farah says he’s comfortable talking to advocates about case ideas and has sometimes had to listen to a 45-minute monologue about how squirrels in the park are creating a shortage by hoarding nuts.

But this time, Farah immediately saw the potential for a major antitrust lawsuit. “Come on, this is just right here,” he remembered thinking. “I was stunned to see that it hadn’t happened yet.”

Farah, who has since started his own firm with a few other attorneys, said he reviewed every rule in NAR’s roughly 175-page handbook and settled on the requirement that homes listed on a multiple listing service must advertise the compensation offered to the buyer. intermediary. Plaintiffs’ attorneys would eventually argue that the rule, combined with a few others, allowed the industry to conspire to keep commissions high, in part by allowing buyer’s agents to steer clients away from homes where sellers offer a lower commission.

“He generously ignored me, which is his prerogative. And he lost almost all the money he had invested.”

— Christine Lagardethe president of the European Central Bank, about how her son lost large investments in cryptocurrencies despite her many warnings about the risks.

The coming week

Data on oil, climate change and inflation will be in the spotlight. Here’s what you need to check out.

Tomorrow: The Conference Board releases its latest consumer sentiment report. Workday, CrowdStrike and Intuit also report results.

Wednesday: The Fed’s latest “beige book” report, detailing economic activity in 12 regions, will be released soon. To this end, Germany, which is teetering on the brink of a recession, will announce its consumer price data for November.

Salesforce, Snowflake and Dollar Tree also report.

Thursday: The COP28 will start in Dubai, coinciding with an OPEC+ meeting, which has been postponed by four days amid disagreements about possible cuts in oil production. The price of Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, fell this morning after falling more than 10 percent in the past month due to weakening demand and a relative easing of geopolitical tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas.

Inflation hawks will be watching two releases on both sides of the Atlantic. First up is the Eurozone CPI for November. Then there’s the so-called core Personal Consumption Expenditures Index deflator, the Fed’s favorite measure of price developments.

READING THE SPEED

Offers

• Investors plan to continue with a public offer for the shares of OpenAI employees, testing confidence in the artificial intelligence startup’s future after last week’s leadership drama. (FT)

• Jeff Zucker’s proposal to buy The Telegraph newspaper, a bid backed by Abu Dhabi, is likely to do just that lead to further research of the emirate’s media investment strategy. (FT)

Policy

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