Aurelia Butler

(Reuters) -A shortage of West Coast port workers has forced the busiest U.S. ocean trade gateway to largely shut on Friday, after months of strained labor negotiations between the union dock workers and their employers.A substantial number of ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach workers, including operators needed to load and unload cargo, failed to show up on the job starting Thursday evening, according to the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents employers. The PMA said the missing workers were a result of a coordinated action by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to withhold labor as contract talks drag on. “The action by the union has effectively shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach,” the PMA said in a statement.Instead, the ILWU said the slowdown was due to thousands of union workers attending a monthly membership meeting on Thursday evening and observing the Good Friday holiday the following day. “Cargo operations are ongoing as longshore workers at the ports remain on the job,” ILWU Local 13, which represents union members at both the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, said in a statement.Operators at the Port of Long Beach decided to temporarily close four of the seaport’s six terminals when workers did not show up on Friday morning, port spokesman Lee Peterson said, adding that regular operations at the seaport were expected to resume on Saturday.Port of Los Angeles officials were communicating with the ILWU and PMA, along with federal, state and local officials, to “support a return to normal operations,” said the group, which is managed by a unit of the City of Los Angeles.Union workers at the ports have been on the job without an employment contract since the previous agreement expired on July 1, 2022, and the labor dispute has forced major retailers to shift cargo to East and Gulf Coast ports to avoid disruptions.The ILWU and PMA have recently said they reached a tentative agreement on key negotiation sticking points and were committed to resolving the contract matter expeditiously as the administration of President Joe Biden continued to meet with the groups to help facilitate a deal. More

(Reuters) – (This April 5 story has been corrected to clarify that Neuchips did not beat Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) in one category of testing as it didn’t compete in the categories previously described, and Qualcomm’s results and rankings have been rectified in paragraphs 6-8) Artificial intelligence chips from Qualcomm Inc beat Nvidia Corp in two out of three measures of power efficiency in a new set of test data published on Wednesday.Nvidia dominates the market for training AI models with huge amounts of data. But after those AI models are trained, they are put to wider use in what is called “inference” by doing tasks like generating text responses to prompts and deciding whether an image contains a cat.Analysts believe that the market for data center inference chips will grow quickly as businesses put AI technologies into their products, but companies such as Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc’s Google are already exploring how to keep the lid on the extra costs that doing so will add.One of those major costs is electricity, and Qualcomm has used its history designing chips for battery-powered devices such as smartphones to create a chip called the Cloud AI 100 that aims for parsimonious power consumption.In testing data published on Wednesday by MLCommons, an engineering consortium that maintains testing benchmarks widely used in the AI chip industry, Qualcomm’s AI 100 beat Nvidia’s flagship H100 chip at classifying images, based on how many data center server queries each chip can carry out per watt.Qualcomm’s chips hit 227.4 server queries per watt versus 108.4 queries per watt for Nvidia.Qualcomm also beat Nvidia at object detection with a score of 3.8 queries per watt versus Nvidia’s 2.4 queries per watt. Object detection can be used in applications like analyzing footage from retail stores to see where shoppers go most often.Nvidia, however, took the top spot in both absolute performance terms and power efficiency terms in a test of natural language processing, which is the AI technology most widely used in systems like chatbots. Nvidia hit 10.8 queries per watt, while Qualcomm ranked second at 8.9 queries per watt. More

Signs the US labour market is cooling have raised hopes that the worst inflation problem in decades is improving, but economists warn further action is still needed from the Federal Reserve to fully contain price pressures.Data released on Friday bolstered the view that the world’s largest economy, while still resilient, is gradually losing some of its momentum. US jobs growth in March remained strong and the unemployment rate fell to a multi-decade low, but the latest figures show the pace of hiring is decelerating and wage growth easing.Combined with data earlier this week, which also reflected dwindling demand for workers, economists say the slowdown that the US central bank has been trying to engineer since last year via sharply higher borrowing costs is under way.Economists are still debating whether that steady progress will give way to a painful recession — especially if the Fed continues to raise interest rates as many economists expect, or the credit crunch associated with the recent banking turmoil is bigger than expected.“What we’re looking at is an environment where the effects of Fed tightening and the efforts to slow the economy are beginning to take hold,” said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. “While things seem to be slowing in an orderly way for now, we think we will see economic conditions weaken fairly sharply in the back half of the year.”

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Friday’s data, which also showed that companies are pulling back both on workers’ hours as well as their use of temporary employees, capped a week of fresh evidence that economic activity is indeed moderating.US jobless claims data, which tracks new applicants for unemployment aid, not only surpassed expectations on Thursday, but figures over the past 12 months were revised notably higher as part of an annual review by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That suggests a weaker labour market than initially thought, economists say. Moreover, for the first time in two years, the number of job openings fell below 10mn, data out on Tuesday showed. Separately, US manufacturing activity in March slumped to the lowest level in nearly three years.According to fed funds futures markets, traders do expect the Fed to plough forward with another quarter-point rate rise in May, which would align with projections published by the central bank last month. Those showed most officials anticipate the federal funds rate peaking between 5 per cent to 5.25 per cent this year and for that level to be maintained at least until 2024. The benchmark policy rate currently hovers between 4.75 per cent to 5 per cent.Praveen Korapaty, chief global rates strategist at Goldman Sachs, is among those to endorse another rate rise, noting that “nothing has collapsed” in the economy just yet.“There’s deceleration, but we want that deceleration. You don’t want to be running the economy as hot as it’s been a couple of months ago,” he said. “I would have been somewhat more concerned if you did not see a cooling of the labour market because that would mean the Fed would have to do a bit more in terms of hikes.”

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Although not his base case, Marc Giannoni, who formerly worked at the Fed’s regional banks in Dallas and New York, warned the central bank could implement an additional rate rise in June should the economic slowdown again stall.“This labour market is just still incredibly resilient and incredibly strong,” said Giannoni, who is chief US economist at Barclays.While Yelena Shulyatyeva, senior US economist at BNP Paribas, said this week’s data is “consistent” with a so-called soft landing — whereby the Fed tames inflation without outsized job losses — she warned that a mild recession is still the most likely outcome in the second half of the year. Clouding the outlook is the extent to which the banking sector now pulls back on its lending activity in the aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion, which last month forced the Fed and other government authorities to intervene to stem the panic.Shulyatyeva, who expects one more rate move from the Fed next month, estimates the resulting tightening of financial conditions is roughly equivalent to half a percentage points’ worth of rises.Additional reporting by Harriet Clarfelt in New York More