Good afternoon. Hope you have a chance to relax on this lazy (and, arguably, last) summer Friday. Maybe sit back and enjoy a beer and a hot dog while watching the U.S. Open, or daydream about those remaining vacation days (we’ve got suggestions on how to use them). There won’t be a newsletter on Monday. It, too, will be sitting back and observing Labor Day. —Megan Hess |
| no end to the damage | Harvey Made the World's Most Important Chemical a Rare Commodity | Much of ethylene, a colorless, flammable gas, comes from the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast. It’s one of the big reasons the damage wrought by the hurricane in the chemical communities along the coast is likely to ripple through U.S. manufacturing of essential items from milk jugs to mattresses. With Harvey’s floods shutting down almost all the state’s plants, 61 percent of U.S. ethylene capacity has been lost. |
| Here are today's top stories... | | U.S. employers added 156,000 jobs in August, though the nation’s unemployment rate — derived from a separate survey of households — ticked up to 4.4 percent, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. Average hourly pay for workers rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier, to $26.39 from $25.74. | | Harvey’s toll on the U.S. gas market. Next week, the government will release data showing how much stockpiles of natural gas expanded during the storm. The number will reveal whether Harvey had a bigger impact on gas supply or demand. In the meantime, the deadly storm has led to a rare release of oil from emergency U.S. stockpiles that President Donald Trump wants to slash. | | Russian homebuyers are fuming at Trump’s would-be Moscow partner. Demonstrators plan to gather Saturday at concrete apartment towers in the eastern outskirts of Moscow. Their families are supposed to be living inside, but are among the owners of some 5,000 units they say the developer failed to complete on time. The Russian property company in charge of the project was to be the partner in a separate venture: Trump’s failed bid during the 2016 presidential campaign to launch Trump Tower Moscow. | | The hot dog is slowly conquering Britain. It’s been a long time coming in a country that is famed for pork sausages and that never embraced the hot dog as America did, even though Europeans likely created it. Just as burgers are getting an upmarket makeover, some of the U.K.’s best chefs will compete for the title of Britain’s best hot dog next week. | | Pair a beer with that hot dog. From well-packaged cans to bottles to tap beers with clever names, here are some favorites of chefs, bartenders, sommeliers, and other restaurant professionals — people who are surrounded by these beers on the job and still seek them out as soon as they’re done with work. | |
| Preppy and Hipster: Not Mutually Exclusive | A New Golden Age of Tennis Fashion | Are those supersized wristbands that Rafael Nadal has taken to wearing? Or are they the cut-off sleeves of a toddler’s sweatshirt? For tentative answers to these and other questions, Bloomberg Pursuits compiled a list of notable names in men’s tennis style. | | |
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