President Biden made fighting inflation one of the cornerstones of his State of the Union last night, highlighting the economic progress the country’s made in the past year while stressing efforts to stem rising prices. The problem? There’s a lot contributing to inflation that’s entirely out of his (and the Fed’s) control – NYTimes and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

Take, for example, a land war in Europe further disrupting already stressed supply chains - NYTimes and WSJ

Exxon has joined rivals Shell and BP in cutting its last remaining ties in oil and gas projects in Russia. The company’s holdings there amount to just 2% of its global production, making its departure an easier pill to swallow than that of Shell and BP, which had much larger Russian investments to consider - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

Apple, Boeing, and Ford also announced on Tuesday that they were pausing sales to and operations in Russia due to its invasion and military actions in Ukraine - NYTimes and Bloomberg and Mashable and TechCrunch

In fact, these days it seems crypto is the one field taking a more nuanced view toward dealings with Russia – Law360 and Bloomberg

In testimony at the 1MDB-criminal bribery and money-laundering case of former Goldman Sachs colleague Roger Ng, “star witness” Tim Leissner admitted he “lied a lot” during what’s expected to be days of cross-examination. Leissner “has already pleaded guilty to charges related to the fund,” and Ng’s attorneys are using his checkered past and admissions of lying about his marital status and to federal prosecutors to challenge his credibility - NYTimes and Bloomberg and Law360

The U.S. Trade Representative announced plans to “realign[] its trade policy toward China, looking at all existing tools and potentially new ones to combat Beijing’s state-led nonmarket practices” as part of its annual trade agenda released yesterday, but it offered “few details on what specific measures constituted its realigned China policy” - WSJ

Two years of strong pandemic-era growth has helped Target push revenue past the $100 billion mark for the first time. That strong performance “helped offset higher supply-chain costs and spending on wages” for the Minneapolis-based retailer, which announced some starting salaries as high as $24/hr. this week in an effort to attract and retain workers - WSJ

Nvidia acknowledged this week that hackers “stole proprietary information when they breached the company’s networks and have been leading the data online.” Nvidia said it first learned of the hack on February 23, which posed as a ransomware attack but  has not, as yet, resulted in the employment of malware - Bloomberg 

Now look, we Minnesotans aren’t exactly known for shying away from the big storms ourselves, but there’s something about the “local collectivity” in this piece on our fixation with TV’s big weather coverage that definitely rings true - NYTimes

Stay safe, and get boosted,

MDR