US automaker stocks Ford Motor Company F, General Motors Company GM and Tesla Inc. TSLA are all down more than 32% in 2022 as the auto industry struggles to cope with continued supply chain disruptions and rising raw material costs. Unfortunately for struggling automakers, Bank of America analyst John Murphy said this week that commodity cost pressures remain at an all-time high for the time being.

Numbers: Murphy estimates that the current total commodity cost per U.S. vehicle produced is about $4,950, up about 124% over the past two years. Murphy said automakers have been able to raise average new-vehicle transaction prices so far to help offset commodity cost pressures, but they may not be able to follow through. this approach any longer. He predicts that U.S. auto ATPs will likely start to decline in coming years as production volumes recover.

Related Link: 5 Best Selling Electric Vehicles in the World in 2022

“As such, the compression of the gap between these two factors is expected to put pressure on operating margins/profits for automakers and suppliers, in addition to other additional costs currently manifesting in the value chain. , including premium freight, inventory storage costs and other operating inefficiencies with supply chain disruptions,” Murphy said.

Murphy said industrial metals and petrochemicals had the biggest impact on automotive raw material costs. Automotive steel prices are up 136% from April 2020, and steel accounts for 40% of the raw material cost of an average vehicle. Over the past two years, aluminum prices have increased by 83%, copper and brass prices by 88% and zinc prices by 188%.

How to play it: Despite rising cost headwinds, Murphy still sees buying opportunities among U.S. automakers. Bank of America has the following ratings and price targets for the stocks mentioned:

• Ford: Buy rating, target $32
• GM: Buy rating, target $95
• You’re here : Neutral rating, target $925

Take Benzinga: As rising costs weighed on auto margins, all three automakers managed to maintain growth despite supply chain challenges. In the last quarter, Ford posted 7.2% revenue growth, GM posted 10.7% revenue growth, and Tesla posted 80.5% revenue growth.

Photo: Courtesy of Ford

BY GRACE LIMA

A working committee has been set up to collate data on the local economy of the province of East New Britain as part of the Gazelle Agro-Industrial Special Economic Zone (GASEZ).

The committee is made up of 11 members representing different stakeholders in the province and has already prepared the first draft of the feasibility report.

GASEZ Chairman Sam Manikot said after the project was launched last month by Prime Minister James Marape, they established a group to collect and establish data to be used to inform potential investments and formulate policies for SEZ.

At the first board meeting earlier this week, Manikot said he was pleased with what the technical team has put together.

The team compiled detailed data on economic, environmental and risk assessments and provided some options on how the free trade concept will look like for the Gazelle district.

He said the report basically assesses the economic resources available to the province and what the committee has proposed under the special economic zone concept and the way forward.

“The team has been working on the report for over six weeks. We want to let the public know that’s how far we’ve come after launch.

Mr. Manikot said the project does not reinvent the wheel, but complements and concretizes the provincial government’s strategy on developing growth centers and spreading urbanization closer to the people in designated areas.

He said that for Gazelle there are three main growth centers including Lassul, Open Bay and Kerevat.

Mr. Manikot said that one of the items on the meeting’s agenda was the approval of the budget for the first 12 months.

He said the national government has commissioned these two economic zones to be pilot projects to help the government develop relevant policies which are currently absent.

The two economic zones in the province are the Rabaul tuna export zone and the Gazelle agro-industrial special economic zone.

Mr. Manikot said that within the policy framework, the relevant aspects to consider are the one-stop government support needed within its own approved funding requirements to align with other key stakeholders and the demand of the private sector.

“At the same time, the approval process can enable marketing investment opportunities with equal participation for the people of Gazelle and the rest of the province and the most important part is to use the Gazelle district as a study It is also a case for the government to adopt and declare its own laws that govern these SEZs.

This will provide a model for other provinces,” he said.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a blockchain-based method for performing financial transactions. Unlike a bank, which pays consumers interest for deposits, which it uses to make loans at a slightly higher rate, a DeFi transaction is mediated by a protocol, not an intermediary who collects additional fees for Services. DeFi removes the bank and instead executes transactions through a marketplace, theoretically saving money, speeding up the transaction, and adding security with a blockchain-based transaction.

The characteristics of the emerging technology are twofold: many lectures and confusion over language. The immersive computing folks continue to reject the XR catchall, instead emphasizing AR/VR. No one cares anymore, honestly. And there are far fewer conferences on augmented reality and virtual reality. They now concern Metaverse and Web3.

Current uses of web3 technology

web3 is an approach to decentralizing the Internet using peer-to-peer protocols to create a decentralized open network without gatekeepers like Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google. The term was introduced by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014 and popularized last year when major tech venture capital firms created multi-billion dollar funds for new Web3 projects.

A good example of the decentralizing power of web3 technologies is Otoy, a company you’ve probably never heard of as they work quietly in the background of the games and entertainment industry, helping to transform the work of artists, captured as code, in 60 frames per second of high resolution 2D or 3D images. This process is called “rendering”. Otoy adds an exclusive “secret sauce” of AI and machine learning to make the process faster and cheaper while eliminating the “noise” or errors that sometimes spoil the output. While you’re not using your computer at night, Otoy rents out your processing power. Producers pay for processing with render tokens (RNDR) which can be sold for cash on a crypto exchange and fluctuate in value based on demand.

Another notable web3 application is the Helium Wi-Fi network, which provides public Wi-Fi hotspots to customers who are paid to share their connection. These hotspots can reach 200 times farther than most Wi-Fi hotspots. Owners collect $HNT, a cryptocurrency that they can exchange for cash. Lime Scooters is a major user of the Helium wireless network.

The disruptive potential of Web3

We are already seeing web3 being used in the world of art and entertainment, which could be one of the biggest and most visible uses of NFTs or tokens, in the near future. The token gives users access to, and even financial interest in, the artwork, movie, or music. Studios and labels and distributors like Spotify and Netflix would be replaced by protocols that disintermediate them. The Bored Ape Yacht Club just raised $320 million through a virtual land sale to build a virtual world, Otherside, that doesn’t yet exist.

Finally, depending on the smart contract embedded in the blockchain record of the transaction, the owner may have to compensate the artist when the work is sold. Artists can now benefit if the value increases. Studios and labels could avoid Google and Amazon. Andreessen Horowitz just created another $4.5 billion web3 fund. It’s the fourth. They are doubling down on their crypto investments despite the market downturn in the spring of 2022.

Web3 and an open metaverse

For the better part of a decade, web3 had nothing to do with the 3D spatial internet, which is now called the metaverse. web3 and VR recently converged in Space Somniumwhich has its own cryptocurrency, CUBE and virtual land, just like Decentralized, whose currency is MANA. There are crypto games like Axie Infinity and the open-world game Sandbox, where users also buy “land” and own digital assets. We navigate these 3D worlds through our 2D interface, like a traditional video game like the Fortnite game metaverse.

Boson Protocol has created a retail system on Somnimum Space that they hope to expand to a wide range of metaverse retailers. Luxury goods manufacturers were among the first to seek web3 solutions. Their middlemen get a huge slice of their expensive goods and own the customer relationship.

Many people advocate an open metaverse, replete with protocols to enable e-commerce, user-generated content, and an open marketplace for the cross-platform sale of digital goods and services. These types of disintermediation technologies are not good news for companies like Meta. It will be much harder to monetize users without their data. On the other hand, consumers derive many benefits from centralization. Google and Apple charge for services that can be provided more cheaply than others, but not as easily or even as well.

An alternative meaning to web3

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, in their influential 2016 book The Fourth Transformation, outline four phases in the development of (1) PC (2) Internet (3) Mobile, and (4) new emerging space computing. This is distinct from web3, which sees three phases of the Internet, distinct from computing. Web1 (or is it Web 1.0?) was protocol-based (and a hassle to use) but open and decentralized. web2 (the current internet) is controlled by the centralized power of big tech companies like Amazon and Google, who make fortunes on our data, and user-generated content that we freely contribute. web3 seeks to change all that.

I was having lunch yesterday with a Microsoft executive who used “web3” so often in our conversation that I finally had to ask him what he meant. “To be perfectly honest,” he said. “I’m not sure. Everyone I talk to uses web3 instead of the word metaverse. The Metaverse is now owned by Meta. That’s why they chose that name. So true. Every time you say ‘metaverse’, you have to say Meta. Ironically, minutes before Facebook’s name change announcement, Zuckberg said his company was approaching its work in The Metaverse with “humbleness and openness,” not realizing he was doing the opposite by appropriating the word Meta a few minutes later.

In a May 2022 interview with Protocol, Janko Roettgers asked Zuckerberg if Meta’s brand “signals a desire to monopolize the metaverse.” Zuckerberg insisted that “in doing this and choosing this name, we were pretty clear about what we wanted the company to focus on.” Zuckerberg went on to explain that Meta is not a monopoly because Fortnite and Nvidia are working on their own versions of the Metaverse.

The alternate meaning of web3 seems to have been born out of the visceral reaction to the Meta Metaverse, as my contact at Microsoft did. It feels a bit like a capitulation to write “Meta Metaverse”. Web3 comes out of the language. For these reasons, the expression web3 can still subsume the word Metaverse.

Unlimited potential, unprecedented risk

Centralization exists for a reason. Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, have invested billions in centralizing platforms. I pay $2.99/month to Google and Apple respectively. I would pay more willingly. Also, incumbents aren’t going to sit idly by and do nothing. They have the resources and are also working on projects using this technology.

At the same time, it’s not hard to see how financial markets could be disrupted. There are trillions of dollars, if not entire economies, at stake. A market disruption of this magnitude would potentially create the next Google. These opportunities create powerful incentives for innovation. Web3 seems to be gaming-focused or have something to do with e-commerce, but it’s much more than that.

“There’s everything happening in what’s called web3. This is genius marketing, given that blockchain was in the tank and rising from an abyss a few years ago. Says Tony Parisi, a former Unity executive turned web3 consultant. “Yes, there is the usual marketing hype, but that’s because these massive and disruptive uses of blockchain are real. Great technology is being created right now. Crappy UX hinders mainstream adoption. Add to that all the theft and fraud. It’s hard to analyze everything. »

The very nature of cryptography is anonymity. It’s not the best thing for a market, because it removes liability. The creators of the Bored Apes tokens won’t be harmed if they take years to build a cheap, unattractive world you wouldn’t live in if the earth were free. Vietnam-based Web3 game Axie Infinity had to issue more digital currency to avoid a token crash following a $650 million crypto heist. Venture capitalists also got a share of their sales, generating revenue for them much sooner than they would be entitled to in a regulated market. The perverse incentives and lack of transparency have made cryptocurrency one of the most volatile and risky bets an investor can make, but it won’t be that way forever. And it is based on web3 technology.

This is a chapter of my next book Dissect the Metaverse (Fall 22) from quintess.

Ohen russia invaded Ukraine in February, it was not just Ukrainians who suffered. Prices of wheat, oil and other commodities that the two countries produce in large quantities have soared, inflicting severe hardship on cash-strapped countries that rely on imports. Some world leaders, however, have seen the bright side. “This crisis is a good opportunity for us,” Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, said in March. Likewise, last month, Alberto Fernández, the president of Argentina, declared that his country was “a reservoir of what the world needs right now: food and energy”.

Latin American economies are indeed more resilient to war than many other emerging markets. But households across the region are seeing their budgets strained by war-induced inflation. This shock comes on top of several recent misfortunes. And in the medium term, the outlook for some Latin American economies is stormy.

Even before the war, 2022 promised to bring its share of discomfort to the emerging world. At the start of the year, output remained below pre-pandemic trends in many economies, and debt burdens were significantly higher. Supply chain problems and rising prices have strangled household consumption, while rising interest rates in rich countries have diverted capital from poor countries, increasing financial pressure on businesses and governments who were already trying to make ends meet.

Latin America seemed to be among the most troubled places. In January the IMF predicted that its growth in 2022 would be the weakest of any region in the world. Inflation jumped in Argentina and Brazil. In its most recent forecast, the IMF has revised down its projections for economic growth in rich countries this year by 0.6 percentage point, and that of emerging economies by a full percentage point.

Against this backdrop, Latin America has done quite well over the past three months or so. Wheat and oil prices have risen more than 20% since the start of the war. This is good news for Argentina, the third wheat exporter in the Americas after the United States and Canada. High oil and gas prices are also giving a boost to hydrocarbon exporters, such as Brazil and Colombia. Although the outlook has darkened for most countries, IMF has revised upwards its growth forecasts this year for Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

Elsewhere in the emerging world, soaring food and energy prices threaten to turn a difficult macroeconomic situation into a dire one. In Sri Lanka, for example, the drain on hard currency reserves caused by rising oil import prices forced the government to default on its external debt in April. In much of Latin America, by contrast, foreign purchases of expensive commodities provided a steady inflow of hard currency, allowing individuals and businesses to buy imports on good terms. Many of the region’s currencies appreciated against the dollar, in stark contrast to most other emerging countries (see chart on next page).

This has given politicians some leeway to try to shield voters from the pain of high food and energy prices – a luxury that many other countries cannot afford. The Pakistani government, for example, is cutting fuel subsidies in a desperate attempt to avoid a fate similar to that of Sri Lanka. In Mexico, by contrast, increased revenues from oil exports helped offset some of the increased cost of domestic fuel subsidies. The governments of Colombia and Chile maintain subsidies, while in Peru the government has reduced the consumption tax on food and energy. Across Latin America, politicians have taken action representing about 0.3% of gdpon average, in an attempt to protect households from the effects of war.

All is not rosy. Even after its upward revisions, the IMF expects Latin America to grow slower this year than any other part of the emerging world except Eastern Europe. Brazil will likely struggle to grow more than 1% this year, despite high commodity prices. Expensive food and energy, while useful for exporters, fuel inflation. Consumer prices are rising at double-digit rates in Chile and Brazil, and are well above central bank targets in other major Latin American economies. Central bankers raised interest rates to prevent soaring prices translating into a wider loss of confidence in governments’ control of inflation – a significant risk in a region with a history of devastating inflation . But higher rates also weigh on investment and growth.

Conditions could deteriorate further if inflation in wealthy economies proves more persistent than expected, forcing central banks to raise rates more than markets expect. In the 1980s, when the United States made its last attempt to get a serious inflation problem under control, the consequences for Latin America were dire: a wave of debt crises and a lost economic decade. Macroeconomic policy across the Americas has since improved. But the combined pressure of several shocks today has left economies vulnerable.

The region cannot afford another crisis. Latin America suffered a larger decline gdp in 2020 than any other part of the world. The pandemic has led to sacrificed investments, missed school hours and lower productivity growth. This risks depressing economic growth in the years to come; indeed, the IMF estimates that in 2024, production across Latin America is likely to remain around 5% lower than the pre-pandemic trend. Recent hardships have fallen hardest on the poor.

In countries with extreme inequality, these unequally distributed costs could aggravate political instability. The elections in Colombia and Brazil should certainly yield winners ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the moment. And if governments remain unable to come to the aid of struggling Latin Americans – a daunting challenge given global headwinds, high commodity prices or not – then frustration in the region will only grow. ■

Bilateral trade increased by 25% between 2020 and 2021

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape in the Papuan capital, Port Moresby, on the final leg of his tour of the Pacific islands. Papua New Guinea is underdeveloped but has significant natural reserves, while China is already a major investor in the country and buys much of the country’s gas, minerals, timber and other resources. PNG. Bilateral trade increased from $3.21 billion in 2020 to $4.02 billion in 2021. Marape said talks with Wang focused on economic cooperation and a long-running free trade agreement. discussed. Marape also said he wants to shift PNG’s economy from commodity exports to more lucrative finished goods exports.

“Officials from China and Papua New Guinea are in the process of fine-tuning China-PNG free trade agreements,” Marape said on Friday (June 3). “The details of the free trade agreement are being finalized as we go along, so that Papua New Guinea’s interests are not suppressed or harmed, but maintained and enhanced.” The country is the third largest island country in the world with an area of ​​462,840 km2 and a population of around 9 million. Most Papuans are engaged in agricultural work. The national GDP is about US$35 billion with a per capita income of about US$2,500 per year.

Papua New Guinea is a member of China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, the most influential BRI project in PNG being the first demonstration base of “Juncao Highlands Rice Technology”, implemented by Lin Zhanxi’s team from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Juncao technology, which in Chinese means breeding mushrooms with herbaceous plants, has benefited 106 countries and regions by fighting poverty, soil erosion and desertification. It uses specific types of fungi to turn poor soils into more productive pastures. In Papua New Guinea, 8,600 farming households employing 30,000 people have benefited.

Marape said, “Mushrooms and rice, along with coffee, are now the most important high value crops in the highlands of PNG. Juncao is our grass for poverty alleviation and prosperity.

Besides agriculture, China and Papua New Guinea have also reached an agreement on PNG Power Grid Phase 2 project cooperation. The project was undertaken by a Chinese-funded company, which can build transmission and distribution backbones for the highlands and mountainous provinces of PNG. It is conducive to solving the “bottleneck” of the development of electricity supply shortage in PNG. Chinese companies have also contributed to the construction of a large number of infrastructure projects such as the new six-lane highway to the capital, other roads, bridges and several regional airports in PNG, many of which benefited from access to air travel for the first time.

Marape said PNG has learned from China to establish special economic zones and has achieved positive results, Marape said, noting that his country will continue to deepen bilateral pragmatic cooperation, speed up a free trade agreement with China. China and to facilitate Chinese investment in PNG.

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The Feast of Pentecost can inspire us to invite the Holy Spirit into our daily lives.

With Pentecost upon us, it is an opportune time to ask: How does your family experience the descent of the Holy Spirit?

To be clear, we’re not wondering if tongues of fire have fallen into your living room or if a white dove has landed on your windowsill. These types of Holy Spirit moments found in the scriptures—although stunning and powerful—are a different topic for another day.

Instead, we talk about your family living awareness of the power of the Holy Spirit within the four walls of your home – about intentionally inviting the Holy Spirit into your daily life. We’re talking about small habits that can lead to an amazing new chapter in your home.

To do this, we invite you to consider trying one or more of the following habits as a family.

1Pray “Come, Holy Spirit”

This one is easy. Just start praying this prayer together as a family in the evening or at the beginning of the day. You will be amazed at how, over time, this ancient prayer opens up your family’s understanding of the Holy Spirit.

“Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send your Spirit and they will be created. And you will renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit have instructed the hearts of the faithful, grant us that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and always enjoy his consolations, through Christ our Lord, Amen .

2Memorize the 7 gifts and 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit

Daily family life without knowing the 7 gifts and 12 fruits is like driving blindfolded. The Holy Spirit – through baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist and our prayer life – desires to help us, to intercede for us and to bless us with his gifts and fruits. Take the time as a family to (re)memorize them, study them and integrate them into your conversations. Gifts: fear of the Lord, piety, courage, counsel, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Fruits: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, fidelity, modesty, self-control and chastity (CCC 1832).

To start that, try this beautiful custom from Catherine Doherty, a Servant of God (1896-1985):

Make paper cutouts of doves or tongues of fire, enough for each member of the family. On one side write a gift of the Spirit, and on the other a fruit of the Spirit. Place them in a basket. Then, at a special family meal (preferably near Pentecost or on the day of Pentecost), read Acts 2:1-13 together, then have each family member draw one from Cart. Over dinner, ask each person to share with others the gift and fruit they received. Close the dinner by singing a hymn to the Holy Spirit such as “Come, Holy Spirit.”

3Double your quality family time from 37 to 74 minutes a day

Ha. Get your attention! You may have heard this description of the Holy Trinity before: the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that binds them together and that comes out of them.

In the “little Trinity” of your family, the quality time you spend together is when you deepen the bonds of love. A Google search reveals dozens of studies that state the obvious: distracted parents spend less and less time with their children (on average 37 minutes a day). Invite the Holy Spirit into that deficit in your family, and you will see a change.

4Get out the holy water!

Throughout Scripture we see that water is a symbol of the Holy Spirit – of the presence of the Spirit when the water came out of the rock (Ex. 17:6, Dt. 8:15, Wis 11 :4), until the baptism of Jesus, and the water that flowed from the side of Jesus. When we enter the church, we make the sign of the cross with holy water, and we should probably do this in our “domestic church” – our own house, or “Trinity House” – too.

If you don’t already have one, consider purchasing a holy water font to hang near your front door. Also, take out the holy water from time to time and bless your children, their rooms and your whole house with this effective symbol of the life and power of the Holy Spirit within the four walls of your house.

* * *

Let’s not let this Pentecost pass by our busy and often distracted families. Instead, let us raise the life of our “little Trinity” – our own families – to the Holy Spirit, “the artisan of the works of God, the master of prayer” (CC 741), and invite the Holy Spirit to renew our homes.

Come, Holy Spirit!

I was in grade 11 when I first considered becoming a teacher. I received the NC Teaching Fellows scholarship and went to UNCA after graduating, where I was basically a double major in English and Education. When I got my first full-time job with TC Roberson in 2006, I was excited, highly educated and experienced through the Teaching Fellowship program, and good at my job.

But the teaching was difficult and I was not remunerated in a sustainable way. I spent a month in 2010 tracking my actual working hours, inside and outside the school building; I was paid $8.14 an hour during this period, much less than what I earned in my part-time job. In addition, our salaries had been frozen for several years during the recession, and there was no indication that they would ever be recovered. When I decided to go to Chapel Hill to get my Masters in Library Science, I had no intention of going back to public education. But it took me less than two months in a student office instead of a teaching role to remember why I loved working in schools and to enroll in the Introduction to School Libraries course to my second semester. Maybe I’ll find my way back.