Despite a very rough patch of late, Disney CEO Bob Chapek has won reappointment as top Big Mouse exec. Chapek “could remain at the helm of Disney until at least 2025” and has a lot to tackle, including a flagging stock price,...more
6/29/2022
/ Acquisitions ,
Anti-Fraud Provisions ,
China ,
Digital Currency ,
Disney ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Pinterest ,
Social Media ,
Stock Markets ,
Wal-Mart
Elon Musk and Twitter brass struck a deal on Monday in which Musk will spend $44 billion to “take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters” and take it private....more
Tesla delivered $3.3 billion in profits during the first three months of 2022, a massive increase from the sub-$500M figure during the same period a year before. Still, the company also told investors on Wednesday that “it...more
Not that far removed from a gangbusters pandemic performance by his company driven by exercise-crazed consumer panic-buying its bikes and treadmills, Peloton founder John Foley has stepped down as company CEO and announced...more
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%,...more
Unilever kicked off the hostile takeover season on Monday by confirming that it remained interested buying out the joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer—GSK Consumer Health—despite GSK’s rejection of three previous...more
Markets fell again on Friday after the November jobs report failed to hit predicted marks. Still, the news wasn’t all bad, as the numbers also showed that the country’s unemployment rate dropped and “the overall participation...more
The tortuously negotiated and much-anticipated infrastructure bill that will commit $1 trillion to rebuilding the “nation’s roads, ports and power lines” officially became law on Monday. Here’s another look at what the final...more
Prompted by concerns over privacy, “government investigation, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes,” Facebook is planning to “shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of...more
11/4/2021
/ Apple ,
China ,
Data Collection ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Dow Jones ,
Facebook ,
Facial Recognition Technology ,
Financial Markets ,
John Deere ,
NLRB ,
S&P ,
Tesla ,
Yahoo! ,
Zillow
The SEC was out Monday with a long-awaited report on the meme-stock frenzy that helped propel GameStop and a handful of other “little-regarded” companies to meteoric rises in the depths of our first Covid winter. The report,...more
10/20/2021
/ Amazon ,
American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 ,
Apple ,
China ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Cybersecurity ,
Financial Markets ,
Internet Memes ,
Investors ,
Publicly-Traded Companies ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Starbucks ,
Stocks ,
Zillow
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is shuttering its grand experiment in the Chinese marketplace, citing “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirement.” The pull out “completes the fracture...more
10/15/2021
/ Amazon ,
Chapter 11 ,
China ,
Climate Change ,
Financial Markets ,
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ,
Johnson & Johnson ,
LinkedIn ,
NHTSA ,
Tesla ,
USTR ,
WTO
Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds more flights to start the week, though its operations were closer to normal after a weekend that saw the carrier nix almost 2000 flights. The company blamed a mix of weather problems, “air...more
Jobs Report Friday! Here’s what analysts are looking for in the numbers, with the Delta variant’s impact on the recovery still looming large - MarketWatch and NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg Elon Musk & Co. are decamping from...more
10/11/2021
/ Biden Administration ,
BlackRock ,
China ,
Comcast ,
Corporate Taxes ,
Cryptocurrency ,
Economic Injury Disaster Loans ,
Financial Markets ,
Institutional Investors ,
SBA ,
Tax Avoidance ,
Tesla
Friday’s sudden end to the years-long Meng Wanzhou drama (she, the Huawei scion and exec who had been under house arrest in Canada and the subject of possible extradition to the U.S. who was released and returned to China)...more
The Federal Reserve wrapped its September Open Market Committee meetings on Wednesday with the anticipated news that it would soon start to slowly taper its asset purchasing and is prepared to raise interest rates as early as...more
Justice Department officials have filed a federal antitrust action against American Airlines and JetBlue, asserting that the “growing alliance between the two carriers had created a ‘de facto merger’ in the New York and...more
9/22/2021
/ American Airlines ,
China ,
Competition ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Facebook ,
Financial Markets ,
Google ,
National Security ,
Real Estate Market ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Social Media ,
Vaccinations ,
Zoom®
Fascinating new wrinkle on the corporate debt crisis washing over China in recent years, with reports that “troubled Chinese property giant Evergrande” sought to “strong-arm” its own employees earlier this year to lend the...more
9/20/2021
/ Apple ,
China ,
Corporate Taxes ,
Financial Markets ,
Internet Streaming ,
NTSB ,
Tax Reform ,
Tesla ,
Theranos ,
TikTok ,
Whistleblowers
We thought that more regulatory action was in the offing for Wells Fargo, and the OCC definitely delivered, hitting Wells on Thursday with an additional $250 million fine for “unsatisfactory remedial progress” in addressing...more
9/10/2021
/ Amazon ,
Biden Administration ,
China ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Federal Reserve ,
Financial Markets ,
Fines ,
Ford Motor ,
OCC ,
OSHA ,
Ponzi Scheme ,
Wells Fargo
Welcome to B-Day, the beginning of the grand cryptocurrency experiment for El Salvador, which “became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday.” Predictably, “the launch got off to a bumpy...more
Forget Big Brother and meet Big Parent, as Beijing released new strict limits “on how long minors can play online video games” on Monday. The rules, which bar kids and teens from online gaming on school days and limit them to...more
8/31/2021
/ China ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Jury Selection ,
NLRB ,
Online Gaming ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Starbucks ,
Unions ,
Video Games ,
Zoom®
Fresh off her Senate approval as newest commissioner to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan—“a prominent critic of Big Tech”—has been named chair of the Commission. President Biden’s decision to make the 32-year-old Khan...more
6/16/2021
/ Acquisition Agreements ,
Administrative Appointments ,
Aircraft ,
Biden Administration ,
China ,
Data Protection ,
EU ,
FTC Commissioners ,
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ,
Insider Trading ,
Kodak ,
Lumber Industry ,
McGraw Hill ,
Retail Sales ,
Silicon Valley ,
Southwest Airlines ,
Subsidies ,
Tariffs
Ailing e-truck startup Lordstown Motors found itself facing more challenges on Monday, as founder & CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned “after an investigation by the company’s board,” just weeks after the...more
6/15/2021
/ 5G Network ,
Airbus ,
Amazon Marketplace ,
Antitrust Provisions ,
Biden Administration ,
Bitcoin ,
Boeing ,
China ,
Debt ,
Electric Vehicles ,
Elon Musk ,
G7 ,
Inflation Adjustments ,
International Trade Disputes ,
Junk Bonds ,
NASA ,
Outer Space ,
Proposed Legislation ,
Recessions ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Subsidies
In a significant departure from decades of restrictive population management efforts, China’s ruling party will now permit couples to have three children—“ending a two-child policy that has failed to raise the country’s...more
6/1/2021
/ Acquisition Agreements ,
Amazon Marketplace ,
Anti-Money Laundering ,
Beverage Manufacturers ,
China ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Deutsche Bank ,
Economic Development ,
Financial Services Industry ,
Infectious Diseases ,
Inflation Adjustments ,
Lyft ,
MGM ,
OECD ,
Open Source Software ,
Private Equity ,
Uber
Struggling movie studio mainstay MGM is shopping itself hard to Amazon in hopes that the prospect of bringing “James Bond, Rocky, RoboCop and other film and television properties into the e-commerce giant’s fold” is enough to...more
5/18/2021
/ Aluminum Sales ,
Amazon Marketplace ,
Apple ,
China ,
Cryptocurrency ,
EPIC ,
Inflation Adjustments ,
Kodak ,
Martin Act ,
MGM ,
Steel Industry ,
Supply Chain ,
Trade Wars
Despite the reemergence of inflation and bubbles as the concerns-of-the-day that caused markets to quiver their way to a 3-month low yesterday, Fed officials remained committed to their “wait and see” strategy on removing...more
5/12/2021
/ Antitrust Violations ,
App Store ,
Apple ,
Artificial Intelligence ,
Bankruptcy Court ,
Biden Administration ,
Census ,
CFTC ,
Chapter 11 ,
China ,
Clean Energy ,
Commercial Bankruptcy ,
Consumer Price Index ,
Criminal Investigations ,
Deutsche Bank ,
Federal Reserve ,
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ,
Google ,
Inflation Adjustments ,
Job Creation ,
Legislative Agendas ,
Mobile Apps ,
NRA ,
OCC ,
Renewable Energy ,
Sales Commissions ,
True Lender ,
UK ,
Unemployment ,
Whistleblower Awards