Friday’s jobs report was not only 200,000 jobs below projections for November, but it marked the fifth straight month of a diminished pace of hiring in the United States and brought urgency to facing the reality that there “are roughly 10 million fewer jobs than there were in February.” The report showed the jobless rate falling to 6.7% from 6.9%, but largely because more people “gave up looking for work” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and Marketplace
If anything good came from the anemic numbers, it was an extra shot in the arm for renewed Covid relief measures. With that in mind, the Times considers what a roughly $900 billion stimulus package could do for the Covid-stressed U.S. economy. In short—it would help, but not do nearly enough to see us though this time of crisis - NYTimes and MarketWatch and Bloomberg
Talk about your basic logistical nightmares. Online shopping was already on the rise in the United States, but the pandemic has turned e-commerce into “a lifeline for consumers and companies,” bringing with it a strain never seen before in the form of an estimated 3 billion packages running through the nation’s shipping infrastructure during the holiday season - NYTimes
Chick-fil-A is jumping on the DOJ’s antitrust enforcement coattails and has accused “more than a dozen poultry suppliers in a federal lawsuit of inflating prices on billions of dollars of chicken that it bought” by illegally sharing “confidential bidding and pricing information with one another by phone and text messages” - NYTimes and WSJ
A record $7 billion outflow from one of Vanguard’s biggest ETFs is “stirring speculation over who was behind it and why,” especially because “trading volumes were below the one-year average and there were no obvious outsized transactions” that day. The current leading theory is that “a major holder of the fund executed a large over-the-counter trade” - Bloomberg
More on the recently resurgent Bitcoin, with the $20k milestone tantalizingly close at hand - WSJ
Airbnb’s goosing the price of its expected share offering ahead of this week’s IPO, a move that could push its potential valuation to the $42 billion range - Bloomberg and WSJ
The Federal Reserve is likely to unveil “new guidance about how long they expect to continue their current asset-purchase program” in coming weeks, as the central bank weighs the tough November jobs report against recent “very positive news about vaccines” - WSJ
Google researcher Timnit Gebru is accusing the company of firing her after she criticized “its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems.” Her “departure from Google highlights growing tension between Google’s outspoken work force and its buttoned-up senior management” - NYTimes
Nissan has followed GM’s about-face and is likewise withdrawing its support for the White House’s “efforts to roll back California’s ability to set tighter vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards” – Law360
After a nearly 20-year effort, proponents of new AML rules that would plug the current beneficial-ownership hole in the current U.S. anti-money laundering framework are finally getting their wish. Late last week, lawmakers announced a bipartisan agreement that would require companies to “report the true owners who benefit from [their] operations” - WSJ
Checking in with newish CEO James Daunt’s efforts to turn around the flagging bookseller Barnes & Noble, and we’ll say this—he’s not been sitting idly by. Daunt, who led a resurrection of the UK’s Waterstones, has empowered “store managers to curate their shelves based on local tastes,” “fired nearly half of the company’s New York-based book buyers,” and closed some of B&N’s “most iconic branches” that he dubbed “albatross stores” - WSJ
A long-planned merger between Sanford Health and Intermountain Healthcare has collapsed “one week after the exit of longtime Sanford Chief Executive Kelby Krabbenhoft” - WSJ
Since we’re all dreaming of a future that’s firmly not 2020, might as well join the Journal in thinking about what a drone-reliant future could mean for the work of architects and builders in a neighborhood near you - WSJ
Stay safe,
MDR
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