The long-standing unease between CBS and the Redstone family bubbled over into a “corporate declaration of war” yesterday, with CBS suing controlling shareholder Shari Redstone and her family’s holding company to prevent (or at least dictate the terms of) a CBS/Viacom re-merger – CNN and NYTimes and WSJ
Companies hoping to secure exemptions from White House metal tariffs are finding that navigating the approval waters is, to put it mildly, challenging – NYTimes
A Journal expose has crunched the numbers and found that there’s no solid correlation between CEO pay and company performance, a mismatch problem it attributes in part to boards “benchmarking the average compensation for leaders at a peer group of companies and setting performance targets accordingly” – WSJ
We’ve been watching the subprime auto loan storm brewing for some time now, and a Fitch report yesterday indicates that we’re feeling the first few drops, with defaults at a higher rate than seen during the financial crisis. The trend is causing lenders to pull back on financing to applicants with “shaky credit histories and requiring higher standards for loans that they bundle and sell on to investors” – Bloomberg
Chili’s restaurant revealed this weekend that it was the victim of a cyberattack that compromised credit and debit card information of customers who ate at the some of the chain’s locations between March and April – Law360
Some thoughts on what the White House’s reversal on ZTE could mean for talks set to occur this week between Chinese and American trade officials – NYTimes and WSJ
The Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge to Dodd-Frank’s “spoofing” ban—a rule aimed at criminalizing the process of “entering bogus orders that are meant to move the market” – Law360
Following news that Tesla’s benching its head engineer for a while, Elon Musk unveiled a reorganization plan to employees on Monday aimed at “changing its structure to improve communication, combine functions and get rid of activities that aren’t ‘vital to the success’ of the company’s mission” – Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Streetwise tracks the very different meaning of CPI figures in US and Europe—thanks to the regions’ distinct treatment of housing (and some health care) data—and the effect the difference has caused in Fed and ECB rate hikes and inflation concerns – WSJ
Turns out the ice cores scientists have mined from Greenland for evidence related to climate change also offer surprising insight into the state of the Roman economy, thanks to a pretty solid correlation between lead emissions and peace & prosperity within the Roman Empire – NYTimes