MID-DAY UPDATE: Unemployment rate rises, oil prices drop, global recovery slowing
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Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.
It is definitely not good news: The unemployment rate is back up, to 9.1 percent. The Labor Department reports employers added just 54,000 jobs last month which is the fewest in eight months.
Oil is falling nearly 2 percent after the government said the U.S. unemployment rate increased to 9.1 percent.
The pace of growth in the U.S. services sector picked up modestly in May after a sharp drop in the previous month, according to an industry report released Friday.
The global economic recovery is slowing although it’s unlikely to turn into a double dip recession, OECD chief Angel Gurria said on Friday.
European and international lending officials have completed a visit to Athens reviewing Greece’s finances “positively,” the Finance Ministry said on Friday.
President Obama heads to a Chrysler Plant in Cleveland today. Chrysler is about to become more of an Italian automaker than an American one. Fiat says it’ll buy the Treasury Department’s remaining stake in Chrysler for $500 million. That’ll give Fiat a 52 percent stake in Chrysler.
The social coupon marketing company Groupon hopes to raise $750 million later this year. Groupon has 7,000 employees, and it’s issued more than 70 million coupons.
Word of still another website being hacked — but the outcome here has a positive spin. London’s Telegraph reports Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency has been hacking an online magazine used as a recruiting tool by al-Qaeda. One of the issues was supposed to feature instructions on how to — quote — “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom.” But the paper says the Brit anti-terror team was able to replace the page — with a bunch of cupcake recipes published by the Ellen DeGeneres talk show.
Here in Los Angeles customs agents announced a big bust yesterday. They’ve seized almost 2,000 counterfeit karaoke machines. The machines say they’re made by the digital storage company SanDisk. But SanDisk says it doesn’t make karaoke machines. A customs spokesman says the knock-off machines will be destroyed. So sadly, they’ll never be able to play knock-off versions of Neil Diamond songs.
We started with Chrysler — let’s end with Mazda. A newspaper in Tokyo reports the Japanese carmaker is planning to end its joint venture with Ford, and stop building cars in the U.S. Now you might think that would mean you’ll be getting your Mazda, if you buy one in the future, from Japan. Not necessarily. How about a Mexican-made Mazda? Ah, the wonders of globalization.
You can read the rest of today’s stories from the Marketplace Morning Report here.
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