After more than half a year without a leader, the WTO is poised to welcome its “first woman and first African” to the role in the form of Nigerian economist and former finance minister Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. More on her and the challenges facing the world’s trade arbiter here - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Law360
The Federal Reserve and White House find themselves on the same page in their approach to keeping inflation in check as they work to dig the U.S. out of its Covid recession—namely, don’t worry about it. The tack is a departure from the decades of inflation obsession that marked economic strategy following the “monstrous price increases that plagued the nation in the 1970s” - NYTimes
Your periodic reminder that the quest for yield combined with investors’ “near-insatiable demand for even the riskiest corporate debt” means that some of the riskiest companies in the United States are seeing money pour in “at interest rates once reserved for the safest type of debt.” So that’s sure to end well - WSJ
North Dakota as an “unlikely next battleground” for Big Tech? No surprise to #PurdonNation, of course, but here’s a bit more background for the rest of you working through the details of a state lawmaker’s proposal to “stop Apple and Google from forcing companies in the state to hand over a share of their app sales” - NYTimes
Speaking of Big Tech, checking in on that brewing Apple vs. Facebook battle over privacy, tech and internet dominance, and (of course) money - WSJ
Goldman Sachs is hoping to capitalize on the recent Robinhood/small-investor moment in which we’ve found ourselves with its Marcus Invest venture—a “low-cost digital platform that allocates and automatically rebalances individuals’ wealth across portfolios of stocks and bonds based on the models developed by the firm’s investment-strategy committee” Put another way, Goldman’s still trying to make “Marcus” a thing - WSJ
Streetwise—long view (Britain’s bicycle-stock bubble of the 1890s, anyone?) firmly in mind—is here to reassure us that a burst Tesla bubble won’t “be a catastrophe for the country” - WSJ
A judge in Hawaii has ordered Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi to pay the state “more than $834 million for illegally marketing their blockbuster blood-thinning drug Plavix in a manner that put some users’ lives at risk” - Bloomberg
American Express disclosed in a Friday regulatory filing that a slew of federal agencies (DOJ, CFPB, OCC) are “examining its sales practices for its consumer and small business credit cards” – Law360
The weekend’s frigid snap that extended all the way down into deep Texas proved a gift to energy markets, “boosting demand for fuel and power” even as it threatened “oil-and-gas production in Texas” - WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
A father-son duo will be extradited to Japan for their alleged role in helping former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn escape Japan in 2019 following the Supreme Court’s refusal to block that transfer over the weekend - NYTimes
Appreciated this piece from a kindergarten dad who has embraced the lessons learned alongside his son’s virtual class this past year - NYTimes
Stay safe.
