America may soon be spending more on debt service than defence | Bill Ackman wants Harvard to name the students blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks so that he and other CEOs don’t hire them by accident | The fight over working from home goes global | Fearing Hamas Execution Videos, Schools Urge Families To Delete TikTok And Instagram

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America may soon be spending more on debt service than defence - The Economist

THE BOND market is sending a hopeful message about the strength of the American economy—and, perhaps, raising alarm about America’s unsustainable finances. The news is coming via surging rates on long-term bonds. When the Federal Reserve started raising its benchmark federal-funds rate in March 2022, long-term interest rates rose with it. This continued fairly steadily until the end of last year, when rates flattened out. Then in May, to the surprise of many investors, long-term rates began climbing once more. They show no sign of slowing. On October 11th the yield on ten-year Treasury bonds hit 4.7%, near a 16-year high.

Because bond prices and yields are inversely related, this is bad for bond investors, who are suffering “the greatest bond bear market of all time”, according to Bank of America. But it is also bad for Uncle Sam. When bond yields rise, the cost of financing America’s debt—now $26trn and growing—also goes up. In the fiscal year ending on September 30th 2023, interest payments on America’s debt totalled some $660bn, up from $475bn the previous year. As recently as May 2022 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan number-cruncher, had forecast such costs would be $442bn, or 33% lower.

This would not be such a problem if America were putting its fiscal house in order. But estimates released on October 10th by the CBO show that the federal deficit ballooned to $2trn (7.6% of GDP) in the year to September 30th, up from $900bn (3.5%) the previous year. If interest rates and deficits do not come down, fiscal hawks warn, the cost of servicing America’s debt could rocket, crowding out other spending. The CBO estimates that, even assuming a drop in rates, interest costs by 2028 will reach $1trn, or 3.1% of projected GDP—more than will be spent on defence.

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Bill Ackman wants Harvard to name the students blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks so that he and other CEOs don’t hire them by accident - Fortune

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, has asked Harvard University to reveal the names of students who signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the deadly conflict in the country.

Ackman put pressure on Harvard University in a post on X, saying he—and other high-profile CEOs—wanted to see the names so that “none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.”

A Harvard graduate himself, Ackman continues, “the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known.”

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The fight over working from home goes global - The Economist

REMOTE WORK has a target on its back. Banking CEOs, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic. For staff at America’s biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs, five-day weeks are back for good. Big tech firms are also cracking the whip. Google’s return-to-work mandate threatens to track attendance and factor it in performance reviews. Meta and Lyft want staff back at their desks, demanding at least three days of the week in the office by the end of the summer. With bosses clamping down on the practice, the pandemic-era days of mutual agreement on the desirability of remote work seem to be over.

Fresh data from a global survey shows how far this consensus has broken down. Across the world, employers’ plans for remote work fall short of what employees want, according to WFH Research, a group that includes Stanford University and Ifo Institute, a German think-tank, which tracks the sentiment of full-time workers with at least a secondary education in 34 countries. Bosses fear that fully remote work dents productivity, a concern reinforced by recent research. A study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than office-frequenting peers; another found that employees at a big Asian IT firm were 19% less productive at home than they had been in the office. Communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft showed that professional networks within the company ossified and became more isolated as remote work took hold.

Yet all the pressure from above has done little to dent employees’ appetite for remote working. They want to be able to work more days from the comfort of their living rooms than they currently do, according to WFH Research. On average, workers across the world want two days at home, a full day more than they get. In English-speaking countries, which have the highest levels of home-working, there is an appetite for more. And the trend is spreading to places where remote work has been less common (see chart). Japanese and South Korean employees, some of the most office-bound anywhere, want more than a quarter of the week to themselves. Europeans and Latin American crave a third and half, respectively.

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Fearing Hamas Execution Videos, Schools Urge Families To Delete TikTok And Instagram - Forbes

School leaders and psychologists fear for students' safety on social media as Hamas pledges to broadcast its murders of hostages.

Schools across the United States and Israel are urging parents to ensure their children delete TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Telegram “immediately” in anticipation of the terrorist group Hamas broadcasting videos executing hostages it has taken in its attack against Israel.

A Hamas spokesperson has warned that the organization will post murders of civilians it has captured if Israel targets people in Gaza without warning. In addition to at least 150 Israelis who were kidnapped, at least 20 missing Americans may be among the hostages taken by Hamas, the White House said Tuesday. The U.S. government has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization and several of its members as terrorists.

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