TheChek News Flow

• “The national political conventions over the last two weeks set the battle lines for the election’s remaining weeks—Joe Biden is focusing on Trump’s virus management, while the president is hammering a law-and-order message.”

• For the first time since March, big-budget movies are being released again in theaters, but the willingness of Americans to return to theaters is uncertain, and for studios, releasing blockbuster films “is like stepping off a ledge without knowing where the ground lies.”

• India has the fastest-growing coronavirus caseload of any country in the world, with more than 75,000 new infections per day—crowded cities, lockdown fatigue, and a lack of contact tracing have augmented the problem in this country of 1.3B people.

• During his two years in office, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his inner circle, including his sons, have become engulfed in a growing number of criminal and legislative investigations, with the latest involving his wife, who may have taken money from an aide under investigation.

• The House Foreign Affairs Committee announced it would move to hold Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in contempt of Congress for defying its subpoenas related to the State Department’s participation in Senate Republicans’ investigation targeting the Joe Biden and his sons.

• + MSFT: Microsoft has largely avoided antitrust scrutiny in Washington even though it is valued at more than $1.6T, more than Google or FB, partly because of the “quietly effective Washington influence operation” it has built under chief Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith.

• A Trump administration program that is supposed to cover testing and treatment for uninsured people with Covid-19, using money from the federal coronavirus release package passed by Congress, has not lived up to expectations, with some hospitals unsure how to bill patients and others not participating in the program at all.

• New York City residents moving because of the pandemic are driving up demand for homes in nearby suburbs, and the exodus raises unsettling questions about how fast the city will be able to recover from the pandemic.

• Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising new concerns in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the US: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

• Story profiles Heather Boushey, who is unofficially one of the top economic advisors to Joe Biden, and who is among those arguing against the persistent assumption in Washington that programs that benefit the poor and middle class are bad for the economy.

• Top Democrats are warning that the problems afflicting the US Postal Service pose a threat to more than voting rights—a slowdown in services, they say, will also hurt seniors who rely on letter carriers for Social Securit checks, medications, and other critical mail.

• A new wave of layoffs is washing over the US as several big companies reassess staffing plans and settle in for a long period of uncertainty—as companies brace for years of pandemic-related disruption, thousands of furloughed workers are told they won’t be coming back.

• Story says the World Health Organization “spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a system of defenses against a pandemic—but the virus moved faster than the WHO, exposing deep flaws in its rules and bureaucracy.”

• The Treasury Department began implementing Trump’s plan to allow payroll tax deferral, which he says will help the economy weather the pandemic-induced recession, but employers are wary of the tax postponement, which begins next month.

• Officials tried to contain the spread of the coronavirus amid natural disasters this week as California announced a new framework for reopening and as universities continued to contend with outbreaks.

• Local health departments called on the CDC to rewrite its Covid-19 testing guidelines, pushing back against recent changes that declared close contacts didn’t necessarily need to get tested if they weren’t showing symptoms.

• The Pentagon is cutting the number of US forces in Iraq to about 3,500 troops, officials said, a reduction Trump is expected to tout as progress toward winding down what he has described as endless wars.

• Chinese coronavirus vaccine maker CanSino is in talks with several countries to secure emergency approval for an experimental coronavirus vaccine before large-scale safety and effectiveness trials are completed.

• With Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe stepping down for health reasons, his replacement will have to manage a transition in the world’s third-biggest economy without upending the years of political and economic stability that Abe and his policies ushered in.

• Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen will ease restrictions on imports of US beef and pork, clearing the biggest obstacle to free-trade talks with Washington; American officials regarded the restrictions as the main barrier to closer trade links.

• Story profiles JB Straubel, TSLA’s former chief technology officer, who pioneered its lithium-ion battery powertrain design and is now trying to source the nickel, cobalt, and lithium needed for car batteries by collecting and repurposing those materials from cellphones and other electronic devices instead of mining them.

• + TSLA: Investors have been scooping up call options tied to the shares’ continued advance—the ratio of put options bought relative to call options on Tesla hit a record low on August 21, according data provider OptionMetrics.

• “The pandemic pummeled tourist hubs across the country this summer as families shunned the usual vacation hot spots, canceling flights and scrapping plans for beach getaways—but for some rustic destinations within a day’s drive of big US cities, the coronavirus crisis unleashed a boom.”

• H.O.T.S.: Investors should be wary of expert predictions of how Covid-19 and federal stimulus will affect the direction of consumer prices; Sales at PZZA have benefited from the pandemic, but turnaround efforts could mean years of upside; GPS has managed to almost double its e-commerce revenue, but performance at its namesake brand and Banana Republic continue to lag.

FINANCIAL TIMES

• Front page story reports on the resignation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who held the position longer than anybody else in the country’s history; his departure “will trigger a race for the leadership of his ruling Liberal Democratic party just as Japan struggles to deal with Covid-19, a severe economic downturn, and disputes with China and South Korea.”

• German chancellor Angela Merkel warned Russian president Vladimir Putin not to intervene militarily in Belarus, saying the people in that country should be allowed to demonstrate and express their opinion without outside interference.

• Big Read piece on Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who is in a coma in a Berlin hospital, “was campaigning to unseat United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin, when he was poisoned—and his supporters are pointing fingers at the Kremlin.”

• Lex Column: There is evidence that during Shinzo Abe’s last term, Abenomics did have some positive effects—but it did not boost inflation; The story of UK challenger bank Amigo is in part that of disrupters writ large—many pushed the envelope, leaving regulators scurrying to catch up, while investors had already bailed; Online streaming and drive-in theaters have gotten a boost during the pandemic, but investors shouldn’t expect moviegoers to return in large numbers to indoor venues.

• Comment: There is evidence that historical returns have been higher in private equity than in the stock market, says Merryn Somerset Webb—but that could be because private equity managers can use illiquidity to smooth returns.

Saturday

• Major-shareholder relatives of Goya Foods chief Robert Unanue, whose praise of Trump led to a boycott of the brand, were angry that he planned to speak at the Republican National Convention, though “logistical problems” kept him from doing so.

• TSLA chief Elon Musk’s fortune crossed the $100B mark Friday as the automaker’s shares continued a major rally that has seen its market cap quadruple this year.

• Neuralink, a privately held company founded by Elon Musk, unveiled a working prototype of a brain-implant device, which the billionaire tycoon believes can cure everything from blindness to quadriplegia, and which he said will also allow people to control phones or computers with their minds