Even though prices and borrowing costs are rising, the economy is still adding new jobs at a steady, slow rate.

The US Labor Department said on Friday that employers added 261,000 new jobs in October, while the unemployment rate increased slightly to 3.7%.

The news comes as voters still worry most about the economy before the midterm elections next week.

Even though the job market is strong, rising prices have hurt the public’s confidence.

Prices are rising at a rate that hasn’t been seen since the early 1980s. Inflation is a way to measure how the cost of living changes over time. From September 2017 to September 2018, inflation increased by 8.2%.

Since June, the rate has slowed because gasoline prices have decreased. However, the prices of groceries, medical bills, and many other things are still rising.

The issue has made it harder for Democrats to keep their slim hold on Congress, which was already hard enough.

The White House had said that some slowing down is healthy and to be expected as the economy returns to normal after the rush of activity when it reopened after a lockdown.

According to the government numbers, the job market is a little bit worse than it used to be.

Even though the unemployment rate went up from 3.5% in September to 3.6% in October. Companies added 261,000 jobs to the economy last month, which is much more than economists predicted. Healthcare and manufacturing companies helped to drive the hiring.

Even though wages didn’t keep up with inflation, they went up by 4.7% on average per hour over the past year.

Read Also: Fed under pressure as US job openings rise

Possible job loss ahead?

Analysts say that because prices are still going up quickly, more jobs will be lost next year as people spend less and the central bank raises interest rates to stop prices from increasing.

Since interest rates were close to zero in March, the Federal Reserve has raised borrowing costs six times. These changes have caused rates for home, car, and business loans to go up by a lot.

The bank wants to keep prices from increasing by making it more expensive for businesses and people to borrow money.

The US economy keeps creating a lot more jobs than the population growth can handle, which puts more pressure on wages and prices to go up.

The new economic realities have particularly hit industries, like housing and technology very hard. And reports of job cuts and freezes on hiring as companies prepare for a downturn.

On Thursday, payments company Stripe said it was getting rid of 14% of its staff. And Uber’s main competitor, Lyft, said it was getting rid of 700 jobs.

Elon Musk told Twitter employees that the company would cut many jobs. And Amazon said it would stop hiring for all corporate jobs.

But the fact that the job market is still strong has given people hope that the US can avoid a deep recession.

Dane Brecher helps run Plastic Crafts, a family-owned business in New York with 40 employees that his grandfather started in 1934.

Because of the higher interest rates, the business decided to pay cash for new equipment instead of taking out a loan like it might have done a few months ago.

But it doesn’t owe much money, and sales have been steady. So, even though there may be some signs of a slowdown, he doesn’t think it will be too bad.

After skyrocketing all summer, the wholesale gas prices in the UK and Europe has dropped a lot in the past few weeks.

Analysts say they don’t think prices will stay low for a long time.

This is primarily because of how the gas market works.

As gas prices went up sharply on foreign markets at the beginning of this year, energy costs for both homes and businesses increased significantly. So, the government stepped in and paid for some of the costs with money from taxpayers.

Until April, the government’s program to guarantee energy prices puts a cap on the average household’s annual bill at about £2,500. After that, people who drive more will have to pay more for gas.

Since then, wholesale prices around the world have gone down. For example, 550p per therm in August was the highest price for gas to be delivered the next day in the UK. Last week, it fell to only 38p.

So, the government will have to pay fewer subsidies than it would have if wholesale prices had stayed high.

But wholesale prices will likely go up again as the weather gets colder.

Forecasters at Cornwall Insight say that if the government doesn’t do more, the average household bill cap will go up to £3,700 in April and stay over £3,000 until the end of the year. So even though prices have decreased, customers will still have to pay more.

Hedging for energy companies

Most energy providers will only be able to take full advantage of the low prices right now if they buy a lot of their gas ahead of time at a higher price.

There is no set price for gas. It can be sold instead to be used in two years, the next month, the next day, or the following year. The price will depend on what you choose.

Businesses that think they will use a lot of gas usually buy a portion of what they will need months in advance if the gas price goes up without warning. Through hedging, they can fix some of their energy costs. Then, they can add more to that purchase if they run out of gas.

Prices for the day ahead are now low because there is a lot of gas on the market. So, anyone who buys now will save money because the prices have decreased. But those who bought ahead of time are different.

Jump in gas prices

After the rush for more supplies, European storage facilities are almost done. LNG tankers have been waiting to get to processing facilities off the coasts of Europe.

But the gas price for delivery in the middle of winter is much higher than that of gas right now.

At the start of this week, gas for delivery the next day was trading for less than 30 euros per Megawatt hour on the Dutch TTF platform, which is considered a European price standard. But in February, the gas price for delivery was more than 130 Euros/MWh. That shows that the market thinks supplies will be even tighter in the middle of winter than they are now.

This price is usually higher than the pre-COVID and Ukraine war prices. But the storage areas are full, at least for the time being.

Moving ahead

After cutting back on Russian imports through pipelines by a lot, Europe depends more on LNG shipped by sea.

Gas used to flow through the Nordstream 1 pipeline from Russia to Germany, but that stopped in September. Shortly after, a series of explosions caused much damage to the pipeline.

Russia stopped deliveries to Poland through the Yamal pipeline. And analysts worry that deliveries through Ukraine may also be in danger.

Read Also: BP profit jump sparks calls for bigger windfall tax

Because of this, there has been a massive rise in the demand for LNG. Consumers will refill their storage tanks with more LNG than usual next year. This could cause LNG prices to change for consumers.

European buyers will have to pay whatever the market says because of the reliance of LNG.

China is buying a lot less LNG than usual right now because the shutdown of COVID has hurt its economy. But when that demand rises again, prices will go up a lot.

People say that Elon Musk is a brilliant but crazy business leader. But, unfortunately, in his first ten days as CEO of Twitter, he has done more of the first than the second.

Mr. Musk convinced his wealthy friends to invest by saying that Twitter could be great if an intelligent person ran it. There would be a lot of free speech, and businesses would do well.

But in his first ten days as CEO, Mr. Musk showed that he needed to learn how to run a social media company.

But Mr. Musk’s first policies seemed to go against what he said in the summer.

He used to say he was a “free speech absolutist” and that Donald Trump would be allowed on the platform. Now, he says it will set up a “council” with “different” voices to make decisions about controversial moderation and permanent suspensions.

Mr. Musk was talking about a policy that looked much like Facebook’s, which deals with these problems with an “oversight board.”

Twitter verification for $8

But he did say that Twitter’s verification system would change significantly.

Users who want a verified blue tick account will have to pay $8 (£7) monthly. This is because reports of a $20 monthly fee upset some celebrities, like author Stephen King.

The company may have decided the price cut, but it suggested that the pricing needed to be thought through.

In a few days, the policy will go into effect. After that, anyone could pay for verification, and  would be prioritized in replies, mentions, and searches. In other words, accounts could now pay for prestige and to be boosted on the platform.

The policy announcement immediately made people wonder if it was accurate and fair. Since the user had paid their monthly fee, their content would float to the top.

Mr. Musk said his plan was a way to deal with the problem of bots on Twitter. Mass verification will take care of spam accounts. But money was also a factor. He thinks a Twitter subscription model is a way to make money.

Others asked what making the verification process public would do to stop the spread of false information.

How could Twitter ensure that everyone was who they said they were if anyone could use verification?

To properly check the expected flood of new accounts, Twitter would need a lot of people, and any of its 300 million daily active users could apply.

Job cuts

During Mr. Musk’s first week on the job, he asked managers to make lists of employees to let go.

On Thursday, less than a week after Mr. Musk officially bought the company. First, employees got an email telling them their jobs were in danger. Then, Twitter let go half of its 7,500 workers.

That massive cut in staff made more than a few people wonder what was happening. Why spend $44 billion on a company and then fire half of its employees?

The timing was also strange. Especially he the list of people to fire emerged so quickly.

Twitter told employees they would get an official confirmation email by Friday at 16:00 GMT, but many of them have yet to get it.

Musk said on Saturday that the new verification process would start, and anyone could apply to get a blue tick.

The New York Times then said the company has postponed the process until after the midterm elections.

Twitter knew that making such a significant policy change close to important elections could cause trouble.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter asked some of the fired workers to return to work because it was a mistake to let some of them go.

Read Also: Twitter: Musk will revamp the verification process

At times, it’s been hard to keep up, and it’s only been ten days. But the chaos shows that if Mr. Musk had the plan to change Twitter in the short term, it wouldn’t go as planned.

The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, fired thousands of employees last week, which caused a lot of trouble.

Many fired employees found out when they couldn’t get to their emails, which was a controversial way to do it. People were angry and frustrated, and some even sued Mr. Musk.

Musk fired most of the critics right away. In their place, Mr. Musk is said to have put together a small team of close friends and confidants and given them the job of making Twitter work the way he wants it to.

One of them seems to be Sriram Krishnan, a software engineer from India who used to work for Twitter but left the company last year.

Last week, Mr. Krishnan said on Twitter that he was “temporarily helping Mr. Musk.”

Since then, his name has been talked about in India, where many people are angry that former CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives with Indian roots were fired.

The relationship between Sriram Krishnan and Elon Musk

It’s also hard to say how close he is to Mr. Musk, but he has been referred to as Musk’s “inner circle” member many times.

In an interview with Marina Mogilko, who runs a YouTube channel called Silicon Valley Girl, Mr. Krishnan said that he and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, first met Mr. Musk when he helped with “something Twitter-related” a few years ago, and that’s how they “built a relationship.”

The couple also met Mr. Musk “several years ago” when they got a private tour of SpaceX’s headquarters in California.

But Mr. Musk’s appearance on a talk show hosted by the couple on Clubhouse in February 2021 was their most well-known interaction.

The wealthiest person in the world had just joined an invite-only app for an exclusive. So naturally, people on social media couldn’t believe it, and the show started to get a lot of attention.

As Mr. Musk talked about life on Mars, the possibility of aliens, and how one of his companies had wired up a monkey’s brain so he could play video games with his mind, the chatroom quickly reached the Clubhouse limit of 5,000 listeners at once.

Even though it’s now on other platforms, The Good Time Show remains a massive hit in the US.

On the company website, co-founder Marc Andreessen says that Mr. Krishnan is “possibly the only person in the world to have served in senior product positions in the three biggest social platforms of our time.” The 37-year-old has worked for Microsoft, Yahoo, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter.

On the other hand, Ms. Ramamurthy worked at both Facebook and Netflix before she started the two companies.

People have called them a “tech power couple” because they each have a lot of connections.

It all started in Chennai

Sriram Krishnan was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai into a middle-class family that he called “very traditional.”

His life changed when he talked his father into getting him a computer, a luxury in the late 1990s.

He couldn’t afford a dial-up connection but still needed the internet.

So, he bought books on how to code to teach himself the basics and work on them every night.

Mr. Krishnan met Ms. Ramamurthy online in 2002 while studying engineering at Anna University in Chennai. Before they met in person, the two people kept talking on Yahoo Messenger for a whole year.

Read Also: Twitter: How has Musk fared after 10 days in? 

A few months later, a Microsoft executive hired the couple after he saw one of Mr. Krishnan’s blog posts. This was their chance to shine.

Lord Wolfson, CEO of Next, wants the government to let in more foreign workers to make up for the lack of local workers.

Lord Wolfson, a well-known supporter of Brexit, said that the U.K.’s current policy on immigration was hurting economic growth.

He said that companies should have to pay a tax to hire foreign workers so that they would hire people from the U.K. first.

The government said it had done what it said it would do: to regain control of our immigration system.

Lord Wolfson calls for free trade

Lord Wolfson, a Conservative member, told the BBC. “We have people waiting in line to come to this country to pick crops that are rotting in fields and to work in warehouses that wouldn’t be open otherwise, and we’re not letting them in.

He said the government had to decide if the U.K. was an open, free-trading country or if, after Brexit. It wanted to be “fortress Britain” and close the drawbridge to foreign workers, which would be bad for the economy.

Wolfson pointed out that most British people have a “very practical view” of immigration.

He suggested using the market to solve labor shortages affecting the healthcare, hospitality, and logistics industries.

He said that companies that need foreign workers should be able to pay a 10% tax on the salaries of those workers to the government. This would ensure that only companies that couldn’t find U.K. workers would hire from abroad.

What the numbers say

According to data from the ONS, net migration to the U.K. will be about 239,000 in the year ending in June 2021. This was a slight drop from the previous year’s figure of 260,000. The number was caused by people coming from countries outside the European Union.

When the U.K. was part of the E.U., everyone born in an E.U. country could live and work in any other E.U. country.

But on December 31, 2020, E.U. citizens who came to the U.K. and U.K. citizens who went to the E.U. no longer had this freedom.

“No need to break down.”

A survey by the CBI business lobby group found that almost three-quarters of U.K. companies have had trouble finding enough workers..

The CBI said that almost half of the companies polled wanted the government to give temporary visas for jobs.

The U.S. turned down the aviation industry’s request for special visas for foreign workers to visit in the summer. As a result, people said that airport flight cancellations and delays are caused by a lack of staff in the industry.

The government has set up a skilled worker visa program for some jobs requiring more people. It also has a program for seasonal workers. For instance, people who pick fruit, and a Health and Care Visa for people who work in the medical field.

Lord Wolfson predicted a hard time in 2023. But he insisted that many businesses shouldn’t expect help from the government.

Lord Wolfson is one of the smartest business minds in the U.K. He said that next year would be hard, but there were reasons to be hopeful.

First, fewer people could find jobs than during the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s. When whole industries and regions lost jobs.

Second, he said that the prices predicted for future raw materials at the end of next year. It was already showing signs that there could be a strong recovery from a recession in 2024.

People can now pay less for their favorite shows while watching commercials as they get onto their couches for a bit of Netflix.

Netflix has started offering its “Basic with Ads” streaming service in 12 countries, with plans to add more.

It represents a significant shift for the internet behemoth, which helped create the subscription-based, ad-free streaming industry.

But the business had to take action when audiences left because of increased prices and new competitor products.

In announcing the new service, Netflix expressed confidence in having a pricing and plan for every fan.

The new package costs £4.99 per month in the UK and $6.99 in the US, which is about 30% less than the company’s least expensive ad-free option.

So, will they take the risk?

From South West London, Kaitlyn told the BBC she had no plans to change.

The 33-year-old claimed that moving to Netflix was “a desperate attempt to attract more people” that would damage the brand and that she was fortunate to be able to pay the cost of her subscription.

In the first half of the year, Netflix’s member base decreased by more than 1 million as the corporation pushed through its most recent price increases.

Its 220 million global accounts make just a minuscule portion of that, and the corporation recovered those losses throughout the three months leading up to September.

But a recent study by the Simon Kucher consultancy indicated that, especially in areas like China, India, and the US. Over a third of streaming subscribers were likely to cancel a subscription within the next 12 months.

More than a fifth had already taken action to eliminate one, with cost concerns being the biggest motivator.

Dominic Sunnebo, insight director at Kantar World Panel, said that Netflix, with ads, has a chance of helping it retain its audience due to concerns about the rising cost of living. His company’s research has found that quitting Netflix means quitting streaming entirely for many UK households.

To accept Netflix with ads or not?

Enders Analysis researchers, however, asserted that they did not anticipate that a significant portion of the company’s present subscribers would find the savings worthwhile nor that a sizable portion of new customers would be attracted by it.

But while Netflix once set itself apart from the competition by avoiding commercials. Research from Kantar and other organizations indicates that people are becoming more receptive to commercials.

Many of Netflix’s rivals already do so or intend to combine streaming with advertisements. Disney, for instance, plans to launch an advertisement-supported service in the US in December. The monthly price for the plan will be $7.99.

According to Netflix, users of its ad-supported plan would see four to five minutes of advertisements on average every hour.

Since they watch Netflix on family accounts, both 20-year-olds stated they were not particularly concerned about the cost.

Netflix claimed that the new option might be “positive for students” despite promises to push down on password sharing.

New audience for Netflix

But according to a US survey by DISQO, only 25% to 35% of non-subscribers were keen to sign up for an ad-supported service.

Even with a small audience, Netflix might still make money from it.

After Netflix announced its service, there was a “flurry” of interest from advertisers. However, some became “more reticent” when they learned how much the advertising would cost. According to Liz Duff, head of commercial and operations for Total Media.

However, she noted that some people were “eager to participate in the initial launch phase.”

Insider Intelligence predicts that Netflix will make $830 million in revenue from advertisements this year and more than $1 billion by 2024.

Read Also: Netflix reverse subscriber loss in Q3

However, forecasting expert Peter Newman issued a warning, stating that rather than widening the audience base. The new plan will mostly sign up members of Netflix’s current user base.

TikTok has told its users that some of its employees in China have access to users’ data in the United Kingdom and EU.

The social media giant said its “privacy policy” was “based on a proven need to do their job.”

Authorities like the UK and the US are looking into the situation. They are concerned that the Chinese government would have access to the data.

An official in the US said this week that the app should be banned in the United States.

TikTok says the rule is for “the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.”

Elaine Fox, the head of privacy for Europe, said on Wednesday that a global team helped retain the user experience.

Even though TikTok stores European user data in the US and Singapore, Ms. Fox said, “We give some employees in our corporate group in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the US remote access to TikTok European user data.”

She added that the company is trying to limit how many employees can see information about users in Europe. She said it should store as little data as possible about European users.

Ms. Fox also said that the plan was “subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and by using methods recognized by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).”

TikTok is under the microscopic lens

In the same week, a top official at the US agency in charge of keeping an eye on communications said that TikTok should be illegal in the US.

He also said that he didn’t think there was “any way to protect the data enough so that you could be sure it wouldn’t get back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party].” ByteDance, denied that the Chinese government runs it.

Authorities in the UK, the EU, and the US have looked at the app very closely.

In August, the UK Parliament closed its TikTok account because MPs were worried that information could be sent to the Chinese government.

Senior MPs and peers wanted the account shut down until TikTok gave “credible assurances” that Beijing couldn’t get any information.

Because of two privacy issues, the Irish Data Protection Commission, the app’s primary regulator in the EU, has also looked into it.

The watchdog is looking into how TikTok handles children’s personal information. And whether it has followed EU rules when sending personal information to places like China.

In 2020, a US national security panel told ByteDance to sell its American business. Due to worry that Chinese authorities might be given user data.

In June of this year, TikTok announced that it had moved the information of its US users to servers run by the American software company Oracle in Austin, Texas.

US national security concern

Last month, TikTok denied that a team at ByteDance in China planned to use the app to track US citizens.

TikTok said it had never “targeted” the American government, activists, public figures, or journalists.

Ms. Fox also said on Wednesday that the app doesn’t track where European users are.

Read Also: TikTok denies U.S. citizens’ tracking report

TikTok is a social media app growing the fastest worldwide, and almost 4 billion people have already downloaded it.

Sensor Tower, an analytics company, says TokTok has made more than $6.2 billion in gross sales from in-app purchases.