8
SEPTEMBER 7, 2019
BUSINESS
When it comes to
the economy, are you
an optimist or pessi-
mist, bull or bear,
glass-half-full or
glass-half-empty kind
of person?
I ask because the
US jobs report re-
leased Friday is one
of those that, depending on your pre-
disposition, you will see as good, bad,
or meh.
If you skew upbeat, then the good
news is that employers added 130,
jobs in August despite rising concerns
about trade and weakening econo-
mies overseas. You’re also encouraged
that the jobless rate was unchanged at
3.7 percent (near a five-decade low),
some 590,000 more people were
working last month, and that wages
rose 3.2 percent over August 2018.
On the downside: Last month’s
jobs gains were below forecasts,
which ranged from 150,000 to
160,000 — and that included some
25,000 temporary Census workers
added to the rolls; the tally for June
and July was revised lower by 20,000;
and the monthly average increase for
2019 fell to 158,000, compared with223,000 in 2018.
“Thisjobsreporthadsomething
for everyone,” said Megan Greene, an
economist and senior fellow at Mossa-
var-Rahmani Center for Business and
Government at Harvard’s Kennedy
School.
The Labor Department’s release
didn’t change the widely held opinion
among investors and Federal Reserve
watchers that the central bank will
ease rates by a quarter point after its
next two-day meeting, which con-
cludes Sept. 18. That would follow the
quarter-point cut the Fed made at the
end of July to offset the risks to
growth from the US trade fight with
China, the Brexit imbroglio, and slow-
downs in China, Japan, and Europe
(let’s include the United Kingdom, for
now).
“The jobs report, despite its some-
what mixed messages... shouldn’t
send [the Fed] into panic mode,” said
Peter Ireland, an economics professor
at Boston College.
During a moderated discussion in
Zurich Friday, Fed chairman Jerome
Powell said the jobs data showed the
labor market remained strong and the
outlook for the economy was favor-
able.
“As we move forward, we’re going
to continue to watch all of these fac-
tors, and all the geopolitical thingsthat are happening, and we’re going
to continue to act as appropriate to
sustain this expansion,” he said.
Stocks edged higher because lower
rates are good for equities. The Dow
Jones industrial average gained 69
points, or 0.3 percent, to 26,797,
while the Standard & Poor’s 500 in-
dex was up 0.1 percent.
In the bond market, where inves-
tors are less sanguine on the econo-
my, the yield on the benchmark 10-
year Treasury note dipped to 1.
percent as the price rose. Bonds do
better when economic growth slows.
We are in what is known as the
late cycle of an expansion — in this
case, a record-long stretch of growth
that began a decade ago. That’s when
corporate profits come under pres-
sure, wages rise, and hiring slows
down.
How long will this late cycle last?
The key is consumer spending,
which drives more than two-thirds of
the economy. And in August, consum-
er confidence fell the most since De-
cember 2012 amid concerns about
rising tariffs, according to the Univer-
sity of Michigan consumer sentiment
index. While the index suggests
spending will continue to grow mod-
estly, any further deterioriation would
spell trouble for the economy.
In the late stage of an expansion,consumers start to run out of steam,
and lower interest rates may well not
be enough to keep consumption go-
ing.
“Canyou fix pent-up demand
when pent-up demand has been sati-
ated?” said Lisa Emsbo-Mattingly, di-
rector of research for global asset allo-
cation at Fidelity Investments in Bos-
ton. “It’s hard for rate cuts to solve
that.”
Jason Furman, a professor of eco-
nomic policy practice at the Harvard
Kennedy School, isn’t too worried
aboutthejobmarket.
“The biggest problem is not creat-
ing enough jobs,” said Furman, who
served as chairman Council of Eco-
nomic Advisers under President
Obama, noting that the economy
needs to generate just 77,000 jobs a
month to absorb new workers and re-
place retiring ones.
“It’s people not being paid
enough,” he said. “We need more pro-
ductivity growth. And workers to get a
bigger share of the productivity
gains.”
Bull or bear, that’s an idea most
people can get behind.Material from Bloomberg was used in
this report. You can reach me at
[email protected] and follow
me on Twitter @GlobeNewsEdRecession or expansion? Jobs report lets you decide.
Larry Edelman
By Jonathan Saltzman
GLOBE STAFF
Joel S. Marcus, the real estate ty-
coon credited with helping to turn
Cambridge into one of the world’s big-
gest biotech hubs, has lost a key battle
in a legal war against his son.
A federal judge in California on
Thursday dismissed a suit by Marcus’s
firm, Alexandria Real Estate Equities,
which had accused Steven Marcus of
trademark infringement and unfair
competition.
Steven Marcus, 41, the eldest of Jo-
el Marcus’s three children, started two
companies, London-based RUNLABS
UK and Dublin-based RUNLABS Ire-
land, that plan to house life science
firms in Europe.
Alexandria sued Steven Marcus in
US District Court in December, saying
he misused Alexandria’s name and lo-
go, an image of the Alexandria light-
house in ancient Egypt, in fund-raising
pitches emailed to venture capitalists
in California, including former Vice
President Al Gore. The younger Mar-
cus also allegedly falsely claimed his
startups evolved from Alexandria, ac-
cording to the suit.
But US District Court Judge Lucy
H. Koh, of California’s Northern Dis-
trict, ruled her court has no jurisdic-
tion because Steven Marcus’s compa-
nies operate strictly in Europe and Ste-
ven lives in London.
“The fact that the defendants do no
business in the United States remains
unrebutted,” she wrote in a 26-page de-
cision.
The court previously dismissed an
earlier version of the suit on similar
grounds but gave Alexandria an op-
Tycoon’s
lawsuit
against son
dismissed
JoelMarcusaccused
sonoftrademark
infringement
portunity to resubmit it with more evi-
dence. Koh was unimpressed with the
revisions and tossed the suit.
Steven Marcus’s firms issued a brief
statement, saying “RUNLABS is
pleased to see justice rendered.”
Patrick Gunn, a San Francisco law-
yer for Alexandria, said he was disap-
pointed in the ruling but was consider-
ing refiling the suit in the United King-
dom or Ireland.
“Although the case was dismissed,
it was a limited basis,” he said.
The legal war between Joel Marcus,
72, and his son may not be over, how-
ever.
Steven Marcus has asked the US
Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to
take Alexandria’s registered trade-
marks off the books. He says he came
up with the Alexandria name and logo
as an undergraduate student at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School and that they belong to him.
He also sued his father and Alexan-
dria in New York state court, alleging
that Alexandria owes him more than
$12 million for devising a new financ-
ing strategy for the company in 2013.
But a judge dismissed the complaint
last month.
Alexandria has filed another claim
against Steven Marcus in a California
state court.
Alexandria is a publicly traded real
estate investment trust that builds
commercial properties and leases
them to life science companies. It
owns and manages more than 22 mil-
lion square feet of lab and office space
across the countryj, including 4.8 mil-
lion in Cambridge. Joel Marcus, who
lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., is execu-
tive chairman and co-founder of the
Pasadena-based firm.
RUNLABS plans to provide offices
and shared laboratory space to life sci-
ence firms and is starting in Europe
with a 150,000-square-foot building
that Steven Marcus hopes to open in
Paris next year.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at
[email protected]
Marcushasasked
theUSTrademark
TrialandAppeal
Boardtotake
Alexandria’s
trademarksoffthe
books.
W
hile Serena Williams
was practicing her
powerhouse serve for
her next US Open
match, her husband and Reddit co-
founder Alexis Ohanian ran the court
on stage Wednesday morning in Bos-
ton.
A few hundred people gathered to
see him at Inbound, a marketing and
ideas conference underway in the
Seaport this week. But he didn’t come
to talk tech or the self-described
“front page of the Internet” he helped
create out of a Medford apartment al-
most 15 years ago.
He came to chip away at corporate
values undermining the importance
of paid family leave. It’s not just a
mom thing. More specifically, he
wants Americans to rethink how we
define fatherhood.
Dads should not be boxed into the
pay bills box. We can’t keep portray-
ing them on TV and film as emotion-
ally cold but funny, masculine, and
overworked.
His father, he said, only took one
day off work when he was born — a
vacation day, because fatherhood is
defined as providing, not presence, in
our country.
Companies don’t always offer pa-
ternity. There’s a stigma surrounding
dads and their duties.
Fatherhood, Ohanian believes,
should be embraced as actively
spending time with your family.
“It’s not babysitting if I’m taking
care of my daughter,” he said. “It’s
dadding. It’s parenting.”
For this reason, one of Ohanian’s
favorite subreddit communities is
Dad Reflexes. Basically, it’s a collec-
tion of GIFs and videos of dads catch-
ing their kids before they fall off sofas
or hurt themselves.
The posts range from funny and
terrifying to tender and sweet every-
day moments of dads and their chil-
dren.
It’s not newsworthy. It’s normal-
ization. And Ohanian believes we
need more dads on social media shar-
ing the little things, the wins and fails
and love of fatherhood with the world
to see dadding as more than mone-
tary and masculinity.
In another Inbound discussion
less than an hour later, “Educated”
author Tara Westover, a 2010 visiting
Harvard fellow, echoed the senti-
ment.
“I don’t know that we know what
the costs are to the really rigid gender
roles we enforce and how damaging
it has been for generations of people
to have an absent father,” Westover
shared on stage. “A friend said that in
a lot of ways the concept of a good fa-
ther has only been around for about
30 years. We don’t know what it
would be like if we took fatherhood as
seriously as motherhood.”
One of the strongest ways we can
do that, Ohanian believes, is by fight-ing for paid family leave for all par-
ents, not just moms. Workplace cul-
ture must take family life seriously.
He’s not just talk. He said as a
white man with power he’s using his
platform to create change.
For as sexist and racist as tech bro
culture can be, and Reddit and Face-
book are no exception, the two tech
giants have been offering four
months of leave for all parents for
years now. The policy wasn’t Oha-
nian’s idea. But he signed off on it.
Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Pin-
terest all have generous policies in
place. Tech companies, he says, have
taken the lead on this issue.
Average maternity leave in the US
is 10-12 weeks. In America, Ohanian
pointed out, nearly 1 in 4 women re-
turn to work within two weeks of
childbirth. We’re not even talking 14
days. According to PL+US: Paid
Leave for the United States, a non-
profit advocating for paid family
leave, a quarter of new moms return
to their jobs in 10 days. The United
States of Family Values America
doesn’t even have a federal mandate
on family leave.
“For a country that prioritizes and
prides itself on things like family val-
ues, this feels unconscionable. When
you think about the fact that a wom-an who had a C-section, who is still
bearing the wound, could be waiting
your table or taking a meeting, it feels
wrong,” he said.
When he and Williams went
through their 2017 pregnancy com-
plications, an emergency C-section,
pulmonary embolism, and a hemato-
ma showed him how real the struggle
can be for new parents. And they had
privilege.
“My wife nearly died in that pro-
cess, and in the weeks that followed,
there was no place I was going to be
other than with her and our daugh-
ter,” he told the crowd. “With all of
our wealth, with all of our support,
and even with the fact that I co-
signed the policy and could take time
and not have to worry about my job,
it was still an incredibly traumatic
time for our family. I cannot imagine
anyone in our country going through
that same thing without the minimal
guarantee that they would have a job
to come back to.”
Ohanian said he is set to have
conversations with lawmakers on the
left and the right to help ensure
Americajoins the rest of the industri-
alized world in passing a national
family leave bill.
Have the conversations not just
with your local representatives, butwith co-workers and friends, he en-
couraged. And fathers, he says, have
to take family leave when offered.
“Dads have to take advantage as
much as women,” he said. “This will
destigmatize a lot of women in the
workforce. If everyone takes time off
when they have a kid, it is no longer a
liability to have a uterus.”
Time off should not hurt your ca-
reer. Family leave should not be an in-
dicator of a lack of ambition.
Ohanian is a father at home and in
the office. He co-founded Reddit and
is dad to Olympia. And he won’t ad-
mit it, but he and Williams post pic-
tures of his daughter’s doll Qai Qai on
Instagram.
“Normalization matters,” he said.
“We are a community that is driven
so much by the meme, the ideas, the
mind viruses that spread.”
And it’s the little things, like see-
ing a dad braid his daughter’s hair or
sing to his son, seeing the late nights
and early mornings together, that re-
mind us what family values really
mean.
The bottom line between a parent
and child isn’t money. It’s time.Jeneé Osterheldt can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow
her on Twitter @sincerelyjenee.The father of Reddit on the
importanceoffamilyleave
PAUL KANE/GETTY IMAGES; INSET:CHARLES SYKES/INVISION/AP
Alexis Ohanian held his daughter, Olympia, as they watched wife and mom Serena Williams in a tennis
match in Australia in January. Inset: Ohanian and Williams attended a gala together in New York.Jeneé Osterheld
Fatherhood,Ohanianbelieves,shouldbeembracedasactivelyspending
timewithyourfamily.
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