Wednesday's economy stories

Here's a roadmap for Trump's morning tweets
President Trump had a busy morning on Twitter, focusing his attention on diverse topics ranging from Charlottesville to this weekend's Fox News' ratings. This week has seen him further diversify his retweet choices, granting a platform to a variety of different voices. A quick roundup of the eight missives he shared with the world:
The context: On its face, this is Trump pitting his working-class base against Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of both Amazon and The Washington Post — though, according to the FT, Trump's claim that Amazon is a job destroyer might be wrong.
Angry Bird maker Rovio plans to go public
The problem with Rovio going public isn't that the Finnish game maker is best known for its years-old hit, Angry Birds. The problem is that it is onlyknown for the Angry Birds franchise.
The company has proven itself adept at making the most of the hit game, to be sure, spawning years of sequels, merchandise galore, and even a blockbuster movie. The Angry Birds Movie, along with strong game sales, allowed revenue to nearly double last quarter, according to Rovio's earnings report Tuesday.

How partisan news covered Trump's latest Charlottesville remarks
Left-leaning news sites are still hammering on Trump and his administration's response to Charlottesville, while right-wing sites focus on the destruction coming from the "alt-left" and other stories. President Trump might have promised to bring healing and unity, but his off-the-cuff speech about Charlottesville yesterday only seems to have driven division.

Report: Canada gets refugees to work faster than anyone in the West
A unique program in which communities privately sponsor refugees arriving from the Middle East and elsewhere has resulted in Canada absorbing them into society — including jobs — faster than any country in the West, according to a comprehensive new report comparing 22 nations.
- What sets Canada apart: Its flexible labor market, decentralized settlement services and welcoming culture, which combine to get refugees into jobs rapidly, according to the report by the Tent Foundation and the Open Political Economy Network (OPEN). "There's a perception in the world that taking on refugees can be a burden to a country ... [but] they really do make serious contributions to the economy," Tent's Gideon Maltz told Axios.
Other main findings: Getting to work in most of Europe takes much longer, due to a highly regulated labor market that leaves asylum-seekers "in limbo for years," the report's authors write. Switzerland is the exception. Look where the countries stack up:
What Game of Thrones can teach you about economics
For an audio and text series, "Wealth of Westeros," AP's economics team is digging into market lessons embedded in "Game of Thrones." Today's episode: "What you don't know could get you killed," by Josh Boak, Paul Wiseman and Christopher Rugaber:
The NYT does a deep-dive into Breitbart
N.Y. Times Magazine cover story by Wil S. Hylton, "Steve Bannon once said it was the platform for the alt-right. Its current editors disagree. Is the incendiary media company at the nerve center of Donald Trump's America simply provocative — or dangerous?":
- Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler and MIT's Ethan Zuckerman "decided to build a colossal database called Media Cloud and spend the next decade hoovering up websites to see how information travels."
- "Among liberals, the largest circles were CNN and The New York Times, each shaded pale blue to indicate a center-left association."
- "But the other side of the image showed just one big red circle: Breitbart. It was three times the size of Fox News and maybe a dozen times larger than any other news source on the right."
- "If you wanted to know who was driving the Republican agenda in 2016, you didn't need to look much farther than the massive crimson orb."

Study: Higher minimum wages bring automation and job losses
As of the start of the year, 19 U.S. states had raised minimum wages, dramatizing a long simmering debate: Do minimum wages kill jobs, and make the working class worse off in the end? Or do they simply make them a little richer, with little or no loss to overall employment?
In a new paper, economists Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics and David Neumark of UC Irvine parse 35 years of census data and come down on the worse-off side: For lower-skill jobs like bookkeepers and assembly-line workers, they say, higher minimum wages encourage employers to automate — according to their calculations, a $1 increase can cost tens of thousands of jobs nationally.

Facebook redesigns the News Feed
Updates to Facebook's News Feed include:
- Better conversations via an updated comment style that makes it easier to see which comments are direct replies to another person. (The update makes comments look similar to iMessage texts.)
- Improved readability via aesthetic changes, like an increased color contrast, larger link previews, updated icons that are larger and easier to tap and circular profile pictures to show who's posting or commenting.
- Easier navigation experience via more prominent buttons, and increased visibility into where a link will take you before clicking on it and whose post you're reading or commenting on.
Why it matters: Facebook hopes these aesthetic changes will help users engage more with the platform, by making it easier to comment and communicate. It could also help consumers identify the news brands producing content on Facebook, which has been a priority for news groups lobbying Facebook for better partnerships.

Chinese investor ups stake in Community Health Systems
Tianqiao Chen, a Chinese online gaming magnate, has increased his ownership interest in for-profit hospital operator Community Health Systems, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Chen now owns more than 22% of CHS, up from 13.7% previously, and has invested $257 million.
What it means: Chen became an activist investor this past March, and his latest large investment could signal changes at the struggling hospital company. CHS' stock price was down 7% by mid-afternoon trading Tuesday following our report on the collapse of CHS.

Trump shares meme of train running over CNN
President Trump retweeted a meme of a train crashing into a human embodiment of CNN Tuesday morning, with the words "FAKE NEWS CAN'T STOP THE TRUMP TRAIN" above it. The tweet was later deleted.
Update: A WH official later told CNN that the tweet was "inadvertently posted" by the president and was "immediately deleted" once they noticed, per CNN's Dan Merica. In other words, it was a mistake.

He also shared this:
Taylor Swift victorious in sexual assault suit
"A federal jury [in Denver] found that a former radio show host groped singer Taylor Swift before a 2013 concert in Denver, and it awarded her a symbolic $1 in damages," per Denver Post's Kirk Mitchell:
- "Swift issued a statement thanking her attorneys and the judge 'for fighting for me and anyone who feels silenced by a sexual assault.'"
- Country deejay David Mueller sued Swift, her mother and her radio promotions manager, Frank Bell, seeking up to $3 million and claiming he was fired after Bell told the station the host had groped her.
- Key evidence, per the N.Y. Times: a photo from a 2013 backstage meet-and-greet "that showed Mr. Mueller's hand behind Ms. Swift and near her rear." He was 51; she was 23.
- Denver Post: "Swift countersued and sought the $1 in damages. She said she wants to serve as an example to other women who have been sexually assaulted."
- Swift's attorney Douglas Baldridge said after the verdicts were read, "That dollar is of immeasurable value."

The collapse of Community Health Systems
Just three years ago, Community Health Systems was the largest for-profit operator of hospitals with more than 200 facilities scattered in rural and suburban areas with growing populations. Now, the company is hemorrhaging money, sitting atop a mountain of debt and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy — all major reasons why CHS has lost almost 90% of its market value.

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