Tag Archive for: Commodity

Burberry, commodity stocks drag FTSE 100 to over 5-week low; inflation worries linger

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The London Stock Exchange Group offices are seen in the City of London, Britain, December 29, 2017. REUTERS/Toby Melville

London’s FTSE 100 fell on Thursday, dragged down by heavyweight commodity stocks and Burberry Group after an underwhelming earnings update, while fears of a spike in inflation as the economy recovers hurt demand for equities.

The blue-chip index (.FTSE) slipped 2.3% to its lowest level since April 7. Luxury brand Burberry (BRBY.L) tumbled 7.7% to the bottom of the index after it reported lower annual sales, hit by store closures and reduced tourism due to the pandemic. read more

Oil majors BP (BP.L) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L), and miners (.FTNMX551020) were among the biggest drag, tracking falls in crude and commodity prices.

The domestically focussed mid-cap FTSE 250 index (.FTMC) declined 1.5%.

Globally, stocks slipped after a shocking rise in U.S. inflation bludgeoned Wall Street and sent bond yields surging on worries the Federal Reserve might have to move early on tightening.

“Inflation has really returned with a vengeance this week as a key concern for investors… and now, the market finds itself in a bit of a panic,” said Connor Campbell, a financial analyst at Spreadex.

“There is probably feels of choppiness to be found, and I don’t know whether the market falls back to an acceptable level in the eyes of investors before they start to buy up again.”

After rising 10.9% this year by last week on reopening optimism, the FTSE 100 has pared some of those gains in the last few sessions on worries that central banks might tighten their ultra-loose monetary policies sooner than expected to curb inflation.

BT Group (BT.L), Britain’s biggest broadband and mobile provider, slid 3.8% after it reported lower earnings for the year to end-March and forecast adjusted revenue to be broadly flat this year. read more

Canadian computer chip designer Alphawave IP Group’s shares (AWE.L) tumbled 15% in their London market debut. read more

However, cyber security adviser NCC Group (NCCG.L) gained 6.5% after it proposed to buy the intellectual property management business of Iron Mountain Inc (IRM.N).

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Moderation Is The Commodity

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Last week, Santa Clara University hosted a gathering of tech platform companies to discuss how they actually handle content moderation questions. Many of the participants in the event have written essays about the questions that were discussed at the event, which we are publishing here. This one is excerpted from Custodians of the internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. forthcoming, Yale University Press, May 2018.

Content moderation is such a complex and laborious undertaking that, all things considered, it’s amazing that it works at all, and as well as it does. Moderation is hard. This should be obvious, but it is easily forgotten. It is resource intensive and relentless; it requires making difficult and often untenable distinctions; it is wholly unclear what the standards should be, especially on a global scale; and one failure can incur enough public outrage to overshadow a million quiet successes. And we are partly to blame for having put platforms in this untenable situation, by asking way too much of them. We sometimes decry the intrusion of platform moderation, and sometimes decry its absence. Users probably should not expect platforms to be hands-off and expect them to solve problems perfectly and expect them to get with the times and expect them to be impartial and automatic.

Even so, as a society we have once again handed over to private companies the power to set and enforce the boundaries of appropriate public speech for us. That is an enormous cultural power, held by a few deeply invested stakeholders, and it is being done behind closed doors, making it difficult for anyone else to inspect or challenge. Platforms frequently, and conspicuously, fail to live up to our expectations—in fact, given the enormity of the undertaking, most platforms’ own definition of success includes failing users on a regular basis. Read more