Aaaand we’re back. Hope all have stayed safe and healthy. Let’s get to business.
Friday’s Jobs Report saw the U.S. recovery thrown in reverse, with employers cutting 140,000 jobs in December amidst “rising coronavirus cases and delayed government aid.” The decline was the first “since last spring’s mass layoffs and followed five straight months in which hiring had slowed.” The figures capped a year in which a Covid-addled economy lost more than 9 million jobs - NYTimes and WSJ and Marketplace
New rules out this weekend from China’s Ministry of Commerce aim to “punish global companies for complying with Washington’s tightening restrictions on doing business with Chinese companies” and allow Chinese officials to “issue orders saying that companies do not have to comply with certain foreign restrictions.” The measures are seen as a counter to recent White House actions against Huawei and other Chinese companies and a warning to the incoming Biden administration – NYTimes and WSJ
NCR Corp. is in negotiations with Cardtronics to buy the ATM operator, “seeking to snatch it away from a pair of investment firms including private-equity giant Apollo Global Management Inc. that earlier agreed to buy” the company - WSJ
The Times looks back on a rough first week of full Brexit for Britain, with implications of the new deal “being felt by businesses up and down the country as food deliveries are delayed for not having the right customs paperwork, logistics companies halt shipment of goods, and retailers discovery their supply chains might be obsolete.” In other words, headache-city for Boris and his mates - NYTimes
A consideration of Twitter and Facebook’s moves last Friday to silence the outgoing president and what they do to crank “up the heat on a free-speech debate that has been simmering for years” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and TechCrunch
Last week, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion to end a DOJ criminal investigation into its “737 MAX debacle,” but a spate of other legal and business challenges remain for the U.S. planemaker (and the Saturday crash of one of its 737-500s into the Java Sea won’t help its cause any) - WSJ
Another scandal-plagued entity—Deutsche Bank—has reached a deal with U.S. federal authorities in which it will pay $130 million to resolve “allegations that it violated laws against bribery by using middlemen and hiding its payments to them as part of a global effort to win business” - WSJ and Law360
Swiss lender Credit Suisse Group has legal matters on the mind as well, revealing Friday that it “has set aside an extra $850 million to cover litigation in the U.S. over residential mortgage-backed securities, bringing the total amount to almost $1.2 billion and pushing the bank’s results for the last three months into the red” – Law360
Procedural bickering over what prosecutors will be allowed to show jury members has given us more insight into damning emails involving ex-Theranos-CEO Elizabeth Holmes, including evidence of exchanges that the Feds suggest reveal her knowledge of and role in perpetrating the fraud at the blood-testing startup - Bloomberg
We almost hate to even bring it up, but yeah. Bitcoin hit 40k - Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Meet Dr. Linda Zall, the woman who—it turns out—acted as Mother Nature’s spy (thanks to some moonlighting for the CIA) for the better part of the last 3 decades - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
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