The Fed’s May meeting minutes dropped on Wednesday, and they confirmed the central bank’s intent to “move ‘expeditiously’ to bring down the most rapid pace of inflation in 40 years, with most participants expecting as many as...more
White House officials are mulling over a plan that would “release one million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for as long as 180 days,” a move intended to ease sticker shock at the pump for Americans...more
3/31/2022
/ Activision ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Facebook ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Oil & Gas ,
Oil Prices ,
Russia ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) ,
TikTok ,
Ukraine
As Russian troops advance into Ukraine, we chew on more of what the conflict there will mean for the U.S. economy—from markets to commodities to “spook[ing] American consumers”...more
DOJ officials are investigating whether some activist investors—including “prominent short sellers . . . Carson Block and Andrew Left”—crossed lines in their efforts to expose “companies with shoddy or even fraudulent...more
Texas AG Ken Paxton has sued Facebook parent Meta accusing it of violating “a state consumer protection law by repeatedly capturing and commercializing biometric data in photos and videos for more than a decade without the...more
California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing has filed a state court action against Tesla that alleges “racial discrimination and harassment at the electric-vehicle maker[‘s]” Fremont factory, the company’s...more
Not that far removed from a gangbusters pandemic performance by his company driven by exercise-crazed consumer panic-buying its bikes and treadmills, Peloton founder John Foley has stepped down as company CEO and announced...more
A French appeals court cut a 2019 fine by more than half on Monday but still left Swiss bank UBS with a $2 billion penalty “for helping rich clients evade taxes” through what prosecutors called a “long-running scheme” that...more
The inflation train continued its runaway pace in October, with the CPI rising 6.2%—the “sharpest increase” since 1990. The news is challenging politically for the administration but also for policymakers at the Fed, who are...more
11/11/2021
/ Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ,
Boeing ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Disney ,
Elon Musk ,
Financial Markets ,
Initial Public Offering (IPO) ,
Price Inflation ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Tesla ,
Uber
Prompted by concerns over privacy, “government investigation, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes,” Facebook is planning to “shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of...more
11/4/2021
/ Apple ,
China ,
Data Collection ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Dow Jones ,
Facebook ,
Facial Recognition Technology ,
Financial Markets ,
John Deere ,
NLRB ,
S&P ,
Tesla ,
Yahoo! ,
Zillow
Facebook has issued a broad legal hold to employees instructing them to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” about its business following “intense media, legal and regulatory scrutiny over the social...more
A Mozambique-based tuna-fishing deal gone wrong has left Credit Suisse holding the bag to the tune of $475 million—the total in fines it will pay US and UK authorities to a foreign bribery investigation linked to the tuna...more
10/20/2021
/ Bitcoin ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Facebook ,
Financial Markets ,
Immigration and Nationality Act ,
IRS ,
Netflix ,
NYSE ,
UK Brexit ,
Unemployment ,
Wire Fraud
Apple has officially appealed the September verdict in its years-long battle with Epic Games that was set to “require the tech giant to tweak its strict App Store rules and force it to allow app developers of ways to pay for...more
10/11/2021
/ Apple ,
Banking Sector ,
Biden Administration ,
Climate Change ,
Competition ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Financial Markets ,
Hasbro ,
Oil & Gas ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Startups ,
Stock Markets ,
Tesla
Justice Department officials have filed a federal antitrust action against American Airlines and JetBlue, asserting that the “growing alliance between the two carriers had created a ‘de facto merger’ in the New York and...more
9/22/2021
/ American Airlines ,
China ,
Competition ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Facebook ,
Financial Markets ,
Google ,
National Security ,
Real Estate Market ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Social Media ,
Vaccinations ,
Zoom®
In what appears to be a serious black eye for the organization, the World Bank has canceled its prominent “Doing Business” report (which rates the “business environment of the world’s countries”) after an “investigation...more
9/17/2021
/ Airplane Accidents ,
Boeing ,
British Petroleum (BP) ,
Chevron ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Criminal Prosecution ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
E-Cigarettes ,
Energy & Climate Debates ,
Enforcement Actions ,
Exxon Mobil ,
Financial Services Industry ,
Fossil Fuel ,
Global Warming ,
Infectious Diseases ,
MassMutual ,
Oil & Gas ,
Opioid ,
Oversight Committee ,
Purdue Pharma ,
Retail Sales ,
Stock Trades ,
Unemployment ,
World Bank
As we anticipated, Fed Chair Powell—appearing virtually at the annual Jackson Hole gathering of Fed officials and watchers—signaled the possibility of central bank bond-purchase tapering as early as this year. More notable,...more
While not mandating vaccines for its employees, Delta Airlines announced on Wednesday that it would begin charging unvaxxed workers enrolled in its healthcare program a monthly $200 surcharge, require Covid testing, and...more
8/26/2021
/ Asset Management ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Delta Airlines ,
Department of Justice (DOJ) ,
Facebook ,
Fashion Industry ,
Financial Markets ,
Initial Public Offering (IPO) ,
Rental Assistance Programs ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Vaccinations
Robinhood, the trading app that helped facilitate the pandemic-era rise of meme stock craziness, has gone meme-level itself this week, with its shares rising more than 65% at one point on Wednesday before Nasdaq briefly...more
Big union news on Monday, with a NLRB hearing officer advocating for the Board to set aside the results of an early April union election at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama based on the ‘zon allegedly “illegally...more
U.S. insurance giants Aon and Willis Towers Watson have shelved their plans for a massive tie-up over an inability to resolve concerns raised by the DOJ’s antitrust division and a desire to avoid the lengthy timeline...more
A pair of the most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges announced this weekend that they’re taking steps to “curb a type of high-risk trading that has been blamed for sharp fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin and the...more
As previewed earlier this week, four companies associated intimately with the opioid epidemic—three distributors and one drugmaker—have finalized a deal with state Attorneys General in which they will pay $26 billion to...more
The Biden Administration has nominated prominent Google critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the DOJ’s antitrust division. Kanter is “a longtime antitrust lawyer who has represented companies that argue they have been harmed by the...more
Members of the OPEC+ coalition have reached a deal to increase oil production, a “move that could help ease the pressure on gas prices and inflation as economies around the world recover after pandemic lockdowns.” ...more
President Biden and a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal that would provide just shy of $600 billion in “new investments in roads, broadband internet, electric utilities and other projects” that form an important...more