California lawmakers have passed a bill that, if signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsome, could “transform the way the service sector is regulated by creating a counsel to set wages and improve working conditions for fast-food workers.” The measure would, among other things, represent “an important step forward toward sectoral bargaining, in which workers and employers negotiate compensation and working conditions on an industrywide basis, as opposed to enterprise bargaining, in which workers negotiate with individual companies at individual locations” - NYTimes and WSJ
Busy as ever, the same state legislators also passed a new law “requiring apps and sites to install guardrails for users under 18,” the first of its kind in the U.S. Going well beyond the federal COPPA, California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act would, if approved by the Governor, require “online services for general audiences to proactively design their products and features to protect child users” and “to turn on the highest privacy settings by default for minors” - NYTimes
Honda and LG are teaming up to jointly build a new U.S.-based battery plant “for a slate of new electric cars” that Honda will unveil in the coming years. The plant “is one of about a dozen battery factories that automakers and their partners are planning or have under construction as part of an enormous push to ramp up sales of electric cars and trucks” - NYTimes and WSJ
Stocks closed down again to start the week, though just by a fraction compared to the mega-selloff last Friday after Chair Powell did what he’d been forecasting for weeks and affirmed that the Fed was committed to raising rates to get inflation in check. Fortunately for the Fed, that’s kind of what it wanted all along - WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Meanwhile, the central bank’s quantitative tightening (in the form of unwinding its $9 trillion balance sheet) is set to kick into high gear this week, when the Fed “will finally begin unloading the Treasury bills it started amassing almost three years ago” - Bloomberg
More back story on the abrupt departure of the Carlyle Group’s CEO, Kewsong Lee, the handpicked successor to the firm’s founders who—it now seems—just couldn’t quite stay on the sidelines during Lee’s tenure and ultimately helped show him the door - NYTimes
Peloton is reportedly delaying its 10-K reporting, “saying it needs more time to sort out accounting tied to the fitness company’s restructuring effort” in which it will rely on partners like Amazon for warehousing and shipping rather than doing so in-house - Bloomberg
As widely expected, Elon Musk’s lawyers are pulling out all the stops to draw Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko into Musk’s ongoing battle with Twitter over his withdrawn $44B bid to purchase the social media company - WSJ and TechCrunch and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Politico is reporting that the DOJ is in the “early stages of drafting an antitrust lawsuit against Apple,” though much about the suit—including whether it will be filed at all—remains unknown. Justice has been investigating Cook & Co. since at least 2020 over its App Store dominance - TechCrunch
It’d be awfully easy to overlook, but the little 2.5 story brick house in TriBeCa that’s housed a barbershop, footwear store, and a J. Crew over the years is much more than meets the eye (and well worth your time) - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
The Robins Kaplan Financial Daily Dose features top stories and latest news headlines in financial markets, banking, securities and technology topics.
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