Another day, another major U.S. restriction on Chinese tech. The Commerce Department is out with new rules “curbing Huawei Technologies Co.’s access to foreign-made chips.” The measures would “prohibit non-U.S. companies from selling any chips made using U.S. technology to Huawei without a special license” and places “potentially severe new limits on Huawei’s ability to source parts” – WSJ and Law360 and NYTimes
With that in mind, some timely thoughts on what the White House’s increasingly aggressive war on Chinese tech companies—including the above as well as Friday’s order to ByteDance to give up its American holdings and data—means for the future of the internet. Think “walled gardens” all over the place, for one – NYTimes
Meanwhile, TikTok’s not sitting around just waiting. On Monday, the company announced a new deal with music distribution company United Masters that “will allow artists on the video-sharing platform to distribute their songs directly from the app to streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube” – NYTimes
The unsurprising next move in the Citi/Revlon mistaken-payment debacle: Citi’s suing Brigade Capital Management’s for the return of the hedge fund’s share of “nearly $900 million payment that Citi said it paid by mistake to Revlon Inc. lenders” – WSJ and Law360
Oh yeah, and let’s not forget about some OCC and Fed fun for Citi, too – Bloomberg
Uber and Lyft are getting creative in an attempt to keep a California presence in the face of the state’s new gig-worker laws, and a “franchise-like model” in which they would “licens[e] their brands to operators of vehicle fleets” could be one way of accomplishing that goal – NYTimes
A new $200 million funding round for day-trading firm Robinhood has helped value the company at more than $11.2 billion, an increase of over $2.5 billion from just July thanks to record trading figures from June and the rest of lockdown – Bloomberg and Law360
Amazon, meanwhile, is looking to boost its already impressive cloud-services bona fides through a minority stake in Rackspace Technology – MarketWatch
Despite a longtime aversion to investing in precious metals, Berkshire Hathaway is following the goldbugs and throwing a half billion at “one of the largest gold-mining firms, adding to the list of big-name investors making wagers” tied to gold “at a time of significant economic uncertainty” – WSJ and MarketWatch
Ex-McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook is fighting the company’s efforts to claw back his severance, arguing in a Monday filing that “the company had information about his relationship with other employees when it negotiated his multimillion-dollar severance package” – WSJ
States suing Purdue Pharma for its outsized role in the opioid crisis have accused the company of causing more than “$2.15 trillion in financial damage on the U.S. economy while pushing highly addictive opioids on American for nearly two decades” – Bloomberg [and WSJ, on other drugmakers]
The early comments are in, and yeah, the public is generally not loving the SEC’s newly proposed plan to “effectively reduce institutional investors’ public disclosure of their holdings”—a move that would “eliminate about 90 percent of all 13-F filings” – NYTimes
Just no chance I could pass up The Atlantic’s “Fifty” photo series installment featuring my own backyard. Bonus points for the State Fair shots this year, when we’ll all be missing it – TheAtlantic
Stay safe.
