Can jewelry ever be truly conflict-free?
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What controversies are surrounding Microsoft and OpenAI?
Drama in big tech. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. Big tech is fighting. There are reports this morning that Microsoft is considering suing Amazon and OpenAI. Microsoft is apparently upset about a new deal between Amazon and OpenAI that does not use Microsoft's cloud platform. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has more. OpenAI and Amazon announced the $50 billion deal last month. OpenAI will use Amazon's cloud for a new product called OpenAI Frontier. OpenAI customers can use Frontier to build teams of AI agents, that is, bots that can operate independently without constant supervision from a human. The Financial Times is reporting that Microsoft is unhappy with this deal and says it violates an agreement it has with OpenAI that access to OpenAI's models has to be through Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.
The FT quotes a source familiar with Microsoft's position as saying, quote, we know our contract. We will sue them if they breach it. After OpenAI and Amazon announced their deal, Microsoft put out its own statement saying nothing about the announcement changed the agreement it has with OpenAI. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. We are now two months into a major supply chain disruption that is sweeping across the nation's yarn stores. There has been a major run on red yarn. And the shortage is down to a knitting pattern from 1940s Norway. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells has that. Tiffany Perry is helping one of her customers knit a red hat. She's the owner of The Artful Yarn outside of Cleveland.
It's got a triangle top. And then at the top, there is like two inches worth of a braid and a tassel at the end. It started out as a pattern signaling resistance to Nazis. In January, in Minnesota, it was adapted as a symbol of resistance against immigration raids. We definitely had a couple, three weeks where somebody was coming in every day to buy red yarn. Months later, this shop hundreds of miles away is still selling out. And one supplier says the demand for red yarn is five or ten times higher than normal. We keep always a few months supply for each color. And in one week, we were out of reds. Tobias Feeder co-owns a supplier called Malabrigo Yarn. We started dying as fast as we could and it's still out of supply.
Feeder's hand-dyeing company takes roughly six weeks to respond to a demand surge this big. Companies that dye yarn industrially can take up to three months. In Chagrin Falls, Ohio, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. The producer price index that measures inflation from the perspective of wholesalers shows prices went up seven tenths of a percent in February, 3.4 percent year over year. And this was before the war in the Middle East drove up oil and gas prices. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is meeting today to figure out what to do with interest rates. According to the Atlanta Fed's market probability tracker, markets now believe that the probability of the Fed raising interest rates at some point in the next three months is actually higher than
than the likelihood of it lowering rates.
The supply chains of gold and precious gems are notoriously difficult to track. They're often murky and involve human rights abuses and environmental devastation. The BBC's Mimi Swabi brings us the story now of one jeweler trying to change this by bringing women together from regions scarred by conflict. So which one's this one? That's the lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, from this Badakhshan region. Pure pigment. That's amazing. Can jewellery ever be truly conflict-free? Well, associations of women around the world are not only creating pieces with fully transparent provenance, but doing it in areas that have been marked by conflict or occupation. Gems and gold, the disproportionate value for something very, very small, makes it a really difficult material to work with because it can be smuggled, it can be moved very easily.
Pippa Small is a jeweller based in London. She's devised a system that links all these networks, creating responsible, traceable supply chains for gold and silver, which, in turn, help their transformation into jewellery.
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