As expected, the CPI update for June made waves on Tuesday, with prices climbing some 5.4% last month—the biggest increase in over a decade. The jump led Federal Reserve and White House officials to issue statements to assure markets looking for a reason to drop that yes, inflation is on their radar and, no, it’s not out of control - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Investment giant TIAA will pay nearly $100 million to resolve charges from the SEC and the NY Attorney General’s office that it “relied on its reputation as a trusted and objective financial adviser to profit off of clients through fraudulent and manipulative sales practices,” including encouraging investors to move money out of employer-led retirement plans and into different plans that earned TIAA more money - NYTimes and WSJ and Law360
The Times introduces us to David Hamamoto, the former Goldman Sachs exec and Wall Street dealmaker who decided to grace e-truck-maker Lordstown Motors with his attention and his SPAC’s cash only to find himself at the eye of a storm in which Lordstown is burning “through hundreds of millions of dollars in cash” and facing a plummeting stock price and a pending class-action lawsuit - NYTimes
A deeper dive into the recent, very public split between Beijing and fintech after years in which the Chinese government offered a full-throated endorsement of the tech companies that helped them become “influential lenders and money managers in a country where smartphones became ubiquitous before credit cards.” With this recent reversal, the key question is what regulation will “do to an industry that has thrived precisely because it offered services that China’s state-dominated banking system could not” - NYTimes
Easy come, easy go for Broadcom, which a day after the Journal broke the news of a possible deal for software company SAS, announced that talks were off - WSJ and Bloomberg
A new 787 Dreamliner production issue is forcing troubled U.S. planemaker Boeing to slow production of its “popular wide-body jets” - WSJ and NYTimes
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, rival Airbus is hoping to capitalize on Boeing’s misfortunes by holding its customers’ feet to the fire to “live up to their ironclad contractual obligations”—pandemic be damned. That approach (and Boeing’s well-publicized 737Max struggles) helped Airbus deliver 3 times as many planes as Boeing last year and twice as many this year, “tipping one of the world’s most entrenched duopolies into something looking more like a monopoly” in the single-aisle jet market - WSJ
On “mental time travel,” “time biases,” and “effective altruism”—that is, just some light mid-week reading to start your day - NewYorker
Stay safe and get vaxxed,
MDR
