Opening Bell: 9.2.16

Carl Icahn’s kid ready to make a move at dad’s firm (NYP)
The billionaire investor’s son, Brett Icahn, is angling for management responsibilities in order to stay on at his father’s publicly traded firm, The Post has learned. In addition to overseeing a new pool of money, Brett, 37, wants some say at Icahn Enterprises before his 80-year-old father is ready to retire. “Carl will be around another 20 years,” said Russell Glass, who was president of Icahn Associates before leaving to form RDG Capital Management. Brett and investment partner David Schechter, who manage the firm’s Sargon portfolio, are advising the firm while they work to finalize the terms of a new deal, sources said. Their latest agreement expired on July 31.

Payrolls in U.S. Rise by 151,000 in August; Jobless Rate Steady (Bloomberg)
Payrolls climbed by 151,000 last month following a 275,000 gain in July that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 180,000. The jobless rate and labor participation rate held steady, while wage gains moderated and hours worked were the lowest since 2014.

Putin Says Russia’s Self-Sufficiency Lets It Sit Out the Dash to Sell Bonds (Bloomberg)
“There have been enough people willing to buy our financial instruments,” Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast. “We simply don’t have the need today with the government’s reserve funds of about $100 billion. This is pointless, bearing in mind the cost of borrowing.”

Elon Musk and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good $779 Million Day (Bloomberg)
He suffered one Thursday, when his fortune, on paper, shrank by $779 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That was due to two factors: drops in the companies’ stock prices; and Wednesday’s regulatory filing showing he has put up an additional $489 million of his Tesla and SolarCity stock as collateral to secure personal borrowings. The pledged shares are stripped out of his total net worth calculation because they’re not immediately available to him. The borrowing is for personal liquidity; he doesn’t even accept the $37,584 minimum-wage salary Tesla is required to pay him.

Will Wall Street file suit over the Fed’s stress tests? (NYP)
Big banks and their trade groups are weighing a possible legal challenge against the Federal Reserve’s annual “stress tests,” which is supposed to assess how well the financial firms would weather another financial crisis, according to a report. The Fed stress tests, which were put in place after the 2008 financial crisis, are a closely watched benchmark that affects the banks’ ability to deploy their capital. The annual exams are also expensive, data-intensive and time-consuming — not to mention stressful — for firms that have to deal with the burden.

Ireland to Appeal EU’s Apple Tax Ruling (WSJ)
Ireland’s government Friday agreed to launch an appeal in European courts against the European Commission’s ruling that it should recoup €13 billion ($14.57 billion) in allegedly unpaid taxes from Apple, according to state broadcaster RTE. The decision followed three days of talks between ministers from the right-of-center Fine Gael party, which leads the government, and ministers from the Independent Alliance, a much smaller grouping.

Good Technology Investors Sue J.P. Morgan, Claiming Conflicts (NYT)
Silicon Valley start-ups often have to grapple with the competing interests of their founders, investors and employees. Now add one more to the list: their bankers. The extent to which start-ups can be influenced by investment banks was highlighted on Thursday by the case of Good Technology, a mobile security software maker that was acquired last year by BlackBerry for a fire-sale price of $425 million. In an amended suit in Delaware Chancery Court, Good’s shareholders said that J. P. Morgan, the start-up’s banker, had faced so many conflicts of interest in its dealings with the company that it led to Good selling itself for less than it was worth.

Escaped slaughterhouse cow runs wild in Australian city (UPI)
A cow escaped an Australian slaughterhouse and ran wild through the streets of a Queensland city before being stopped by police. Caboolture resident John Good captured video Wednesday of the cow running along a busy intersection after it escaped from the abattoir. "Police actually had to cordon off streets, because it was charging people and destroying fences," Good said. The chase came to an end when police euthanized the cow. "Eventually the cow was put down, because 2 [tranquilizer] darts didn't calm it enough," Good said.

Pamela Anderson calls porn a ‘public hazard’ (NYP)
Pamela Anderson is speaking out against pornography. “This is a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness given how freely available, anonymously accessible and easily disseminated pornography is nowadays,” she wrote in a joint op-ed with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal...Summing up their views, the duo wrote, “Simply put, we must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers — a boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.”