The flurry of recent bid-sweetening activity from Frontier and JetBlue has prompted Spirit Airlines to delay today’s planned shareholder vote on the Spirit/Frontier mashup. Spirit stakeholders will now vote on the deal on July 8. The pause gives Spirit’s management time to meet with JetBlue to talk through the new offer - Bloomberg and NYTimes and WSJ
Speaking on a panel alongside the BOE and ECB central bank presidents in Portugal this week, Fed Chair Powell confirmed that the Fed was committed to fighting inflation. But he and his colleagues also painted a bleak picture about the odds of ever going back to the “low-inflation era that prevailed before 2020” and acknowledged pain ahead as they work hard to “slow down consumer and business demand” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Marketplace
With all that rosiness in mind, some piling on: U.S. consumer spending was down more than expected in Q1 2022, increasing just .5% from January to March, a “sharp downward revision from the government’s earlier estimate of .8 percent growth, and a slowdown from the 0.6 percent growth in the final quarter of 2021” - NYTimes and WSJ
A Journal investigation of CEO stock sales—particularly through “prearranged trading plans”—is raising the specter of insider trading, with “academic researchers [suggesting] some corporate insiders might be using nonpublic information to game the preset trading plans” - WSJ
Newsletter start-up Substack is the latest tech/media company making cuts, announcing on Wednesday that it has laid off 14% of its staff as “part of an effort to conserve cash amid an industrywide funding crunch for start-ups” - NYTimes
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, one of the Republicans on the Commission, is making a play for Google and Apple to remove short-video social media app TikTok from their app stores, “citing concerns that the popular Chinese-owned video app could send American data back to Beijing.” It’s not expected that the letter will lead to any direct action, in part because the FCC “does not regulate the app stores” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Law360
UBS has reached a deal with the SEC in which it will pay $25 million to resolve allegations that “the firm sold roughly $2 billion of a complex investment strategy without properly explaining the risks to its advisers and clients.” At issue was the Yield Enhancement Strategy—dubbed YES—that UBS offered between 2016-17 without giving its advisers “adequate training or oversight” on the approach – Law360 and WSJ
Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Mark Tritton is out after less than 3 years at the helm. Company shares have fallen nearly 80% in the past year, and recent sales have “plunged by a quarter compared with the same period last year.” Tritton will be replaced on an interim basis by independent director Sue Gove - WSJ and MarketWatch
A BVI Court has ordered the liquidation of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital “after creditors sued the [firm] for failure to repay debts” - WSJ and Bloomberg
Fellow “Contact” nerds rejoice—Vulture has given us the definitive oral history of the Carl Sagan/Ann Duryan-driven story of Dr. Ellie Arroway and her encounter with the stars (and McConaughey) - Vulture
Stay safe,
MDR
