Stronger-than-expected GDP figures for the 4th Quarter and 2021 on the whole was welcome good economic news for the U.S. on Thursday after weeks of volatility and renewed supply-chain issues. Q4 growth clocked in at 1.7%, putting U.S. economic expansion at 5.7% for the year—the highest mark since 1984—“an impressive feat, though one that also reflects the depth of the damage inflicted by the coronavirus the year before” - NYTimes and WSJ
Stocks liked that news (at first, at least), but couldn’t sustain the optimism and closed down for a third straight day, apparently favoring fears of coming rate hikes more than reveling in an impressive year of growth - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Apple delivered strong quarterly results and then some on Thursday, announcing “an 11 percent increase in revenue and a 20 percent jump in profit in its most recent quarter.” Those figures beat analyst expectations and translated into $34.6 billion in profit “off record revenue of $123.9 billion in the three months ending in December” - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and MarketWatch and TechCrunch
Robinhood, by contrast, reported losses even worse than expected. Shares of the brokerage made famous during meme stock craze dove 10% in postmarket trading on the poor performance - WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Top Masa Son deputy Marcel Claure is decamping from SoftBank and is COO role “following a dispute over roughly $2 billion in possible compensation.” Claure had expressed discontent in recent months over the expected big payday he didn’t get “for various cleanup jobs, including straightening out SoftBank’s investment in WeWork” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Welcome to the crypto party. Good luck making any sense of it - NYTimes
While you’re at it, have fun trying to find an ETF that would directly hold bitcoin. On Thursday the SEC again rejected a proposal for a fund that hoped to deliver the first spot Bitcoin ETF—the sixth such effort denied since November, when the Commission rejected VanEck’s spot Bitcoin ETF - Bloomberg
The FCC moved this week to ban state-owned Chinese telecom operator China Unicom from operating in the United States. The agency’s commissioners expressed concerns about the company’s ability to “access or reroute American communications and engage in spycraft” - NYTimes and Law360
Dipping (briefly) into the mind of half of the dynamic filmmaking Coen duo to understand how a “shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of [a] Shakespeare play” became his latest project—and a solo one, no less - NYTimes
Stay safe, get boosted, and have a great weekend,
MDR
