After months of drama that we dutifully catalogued right here, the U.S. plan to “force the sale of TikTok’s American operations” to Oracle and Walmart “has been shelved indefinitely.” The forced sale has “languished since last fall in the midst of successful legal challenges to the U.S. government’s effort by TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance Ltd.” - WSJ
Chinese tech giant Huawei has filed a 5th Circuit lawsuit asking the court to review “an FCC ruling last year that found the company poses a national security threat” and blocking American telecom companies from “accessing a multibillion-dollar fund to buy Huawei-made telecom gear.” The suit calls the FCC’s order “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion” - WSJ
The White House convened a meeting of CEOs from American companies—including Walmart, Lowe’s, and JPMorgan—along with the head of the US Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday as part of its effort to push the $1.9 trillion Covid-relief and minimum-wage hike measures currently being debated in Congress - NYTimes
Some in finance are suggesting that blame for the recent meme-stock craze extends beyond easy villains like Robinhood and WallStreetBets to the Federal Reserve and its recent deep commitment to “keeping interest rates near rock bottom while buying government bonds to bolster the economy.” So how does that work, exactly? The theory is that such aggressive intervention by the central bank fuels “irrational exuberance” among investors that “runs the risk of inflating bubbles in markets” - NYTimes
Speaking of the Fed, new data released by the central bank shows that its Main Street Lending Program—“which was designed to provide emergency support to mid-size U.S> companies during the pandemic”—lent out “just 3% of its potential capacity.” Besides a slow start, the MSLP struggled because “the banks that acted as intermediaries didn’t feel adequately compensated to take on the riskiest borrowers” - Bloomberg
How the Chinese government’s smackdown of Ant Group has caught a group of some of the world’s biggest investors in a sort of purgatory now that the company isn’t going public, thanks to the investors agreeing to terms “that were highly favorable to Ant” and that “limited their ability to cash out” in exchange for what appeared to be a very likely “multibillion-dollar windfall” - WSJ
After an overdue, George Floyd-induced reckoning with race and imagery last summer, Quaker Oats has rebranded its Aunt Jemima line as the “Pearl Milling Company” - NYTimes and WSJ
Eli Lilly CFO Josh Smiley has resigned following “allegations of an inappropriate personal relationship between Mr. Smiley and an employee” that an independent investigation deemed to be a matter of “poor judgment” by Smiley - WSJ
The Upshot considers the new bipartisan proposals (at least, similar ideas from both sides) that would send money directly to parents of children under 17 each month in an effort to tackle persistent issues of poverty and inequality that the pandemic has only exacerbated - NYTimes
Business-software provider Salesforce.com is shrinking its real-estate footprint in response to Covid-induced changes in the way its 54,000 global employees do their jobs, highlighting the pandemic’s “lasting impact on how companies manage their workforces” - WSJ
Dealbook’s ARS wades into the murky waters of SPACs, the “biggest thing in the financial markets of the moments,” and concludes that they’re “rife with misaligned incentives between the sponsor and other investors, particularly those that come after a merger” - NYTimes
The SEC is broadening the power of its enforcement staff to “launch investigations, an early sign that it plans to become more assertive under the Biden administration” - WSJ and Law360
Awww. You guys. Canada misses us. [Sort of] - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
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