Friday’s “anemic” jobs report (just 49,000 jobs added in January, and precious few of those in the private sector) “underscored the pandemic’s brutal damage to the job market” and likely made President Biden’s sale of his $1.9 Trillion Covid Relief measure quite a bit easier in the process - NYTimes and Marketplace
The Journal gets graphic with us to demonstrate the extent to which these Covid times have helped tech giants like Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple get even “more dominant” than they were a year ago. None of this should come as a surprise to regular readers, but seeing it laid out this clearly is still staggering - WSJ
More on HNA Group’s seemingly inevitable path to bankruptcy—the completion of what would be the “biggest corporate collapse in recent Chinese history” for a company that “began as a regional airline in China’s southern province of Hainan and grew to own large stakes in Hilton Hotels, Deutsche Bank, Virgin Australia and others” - NYTimes
Because Boeing seems incapable of having nice things, the struggling aviation giant’s newest headache is its new 777X model. Unlike other models with “apparent design missteps or quality lapses,” the 777X’s “troubles stem from the pandemic’s hit to the international travel and broader market fallout, and a stiffer regulatory posture following Boeing’s missteps tied to a hazardous flight control system that led to two fatal crashes of its smaller 737 MAX jets” - WSJ
The recent meme stock drama has done more than shine a spotlight on hedge funds and Robinhood. It’s also exposed the “normally obscure corner of the financial markets: the clearinghouse that processes U.S> stock trades”—the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. The DTCC “processes nearly $1.7 trillion of securities trades each day” and ensures that “shares are delivered to the buyer and cash is delivered to the seller” as part of a two-day process that many are complaining is just too long in 2021 - WSJ
Fascinating stuff from the Times, which read former longtime GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s book (so you don’t have to) and interviewed him about his 17-years at the helm of a sinking ship—GE stock “plunged some 30 percent” on Immelt’s watch, and “it has only gotten worse” since Immelt was pushed out in 2017 - NYTimes
The CFPB is reportedly investigating Venmo’s debt-collection tactics (profiled in the Journal in 2019 and 2020), which allegedly includes threats to “dispatch debt collectors on users who withdraw their accounts, even when those users are victims of scams” - WSJ and Law360
Meanwhile, over at the DOJ, the Feds have dropped a criminal probe of Ford’s emissions certification process. Since 2019, federal authorities had been probing issues “related to estimations surrounding so-called road load, which deals with the friction between a vehicle and the surface it drives on,” but they’ve apparently dropped the matter without charges – Law360
After a brutal go of it early last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund “rebounded from a loss to record an 844 billion yen ($8 billion) third quarter profit” thanks to Masa Son’s basked of “golden eggs” - Reuters and WSJ
Elon’s happy Twitter fingers have driven Dogecoin—the 8-year-old cryptocurrency that famously began as a joke—to insane new heights - WSJ and Bloomberg
A look at the role that defamation lawsuits with eye-popping damage models are playing in the fight against disinformation - NYTimes
Your Big Game ad recap - NYTimes and WSJ
Fully endorsing this nod to “Party Down,” a short-lived 2009-10 sitcom about a catering crew that’s chalk full of actors you’ll recognize from their more recent projects. So good - NYTimes
Stay safe.
