TheChek News Flow

NEW YORK TIMES

Saturday

• The reaction from automakers and oil companies to GM’s announcement it will pivot to electric vehicles has been muted, but some see it as a calculated move to burnish the company’s reputation as the Biden administration prepares new fuel-economy standards.

• With nearly eight million people, or 11.7 percent of the population, having received their first coronavirus vaccine, Britain’s pace is the fastest of any large nation in the world, with only Israel and the United Arab Emirates moving quicker.

• When combined with the $900B in pandemic aid agreed to in December, the Biden administration’s proposed stimulus plan would be a bigger surge of spending in absolute terms and relative to the nation’s economic hole than any in modern American history.

• New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Indoor dining will resume with limited capacity starting February 14, more than a month after he banned it to combat a second wave of the coronavirus.

• American airstrikes and Iraqi forces killed the top Islamic State leader in Iraq in an attack aimed at stemming the group’s resurgence and at retaliating for a double-suicide bombing in Baghdad last week.

• Former US climate leaders are pressing President Biden on deforestation of the Amazon rainforest happening under the leadership of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who says the country won’t brook any interference.

• A New York judge ordered Trump’s family business and several associates, to give state investigators documents in a civil inquiry into whether the Trump Organization misstated the value of assets to receive bank loans and tax benefits.

• TSLA chief Elon Musk inserted himself into the battle between Wall Street and retail investors about GME, with a tweet that took a jab at hedge funds and supported the day traders who are shaking up the market.

• The unions representing the nation’s health care workers have emerged as increasingly powerful voices during the pandemic amid what they say are missteps on the part of hospitals and government agencies managing the crisis and providing supplies.

• The US now requires a negative coronavirus test for all arriving international travelers, prompting hotels to add testing suites and airlines to enhance mobile apps as they seek to manage the latest challenge to their comeback attempts.

• Major automakers are increasingly betting that millions of new cars and trucks over the next decade will be plugged into electrical outlets, not fueled up at gas stations, but the nation’s power grid may not be ready to handle the surge.

• Affluent investors increasingly see cryptocurrencies the way they see high-risk assets such as private equity and venture capital, raising the question of how a modern but volatile asset can fit into legal structures that date back a century or more.

• As governments and pharmaceutical companies rushed to develop coronavirus vaccines, promising drugs that could stop the disease early, called antivirals, were neglected because of a lack of funding or difficulties finding patients for trials.

• During year’s racial justice protests, the Trump administration directed law enforcement to focus on the antifa movement, diverting key resources when the threat of far-right groups, such as those involved in the Capitol siege, was growing substantially.

• A consortium of some of Canada’s largest companies has launched a rapid Covid testing program with the goal of protecting their 350,000 employees and publishing a playbook for businesses across the country on how to reopen safely.

• The European Union early Saturday abruptly reversed an attempt to restrict vaccine exports from the bloc into Britain via Northern Ireland, the latest stumble in the continent’s faltering vaccine rollout.

• China announced it would no longer recognize certain British travel documents, in retaliation for Britain’s decision last year to grant potentially millions of Hong Kong residents visas and eventually a path to citizenship.

WALL STREET JOURNAL

• “Americans’ incomes climbed for the first time in three months in December as a new round of government-aid efforts kicked in, priming the economy for stronger growth this year.”

• Story profiles Keith Gill, the Boston investor who helped push a horde of online followers on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum to buy GME, sparking a bizarre market rally that made and lost fortunes from one day to the next.

• With Democratic majorities in Congress, lawmakers from New York and New Jersey want a repeal of the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction as part of a pandemic-relief bill, but the Biden administration has yet to take any action, and may wait until later this year to do so.

• Investigators probing a massive hack of the US government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of SWI, initially considered the main target.

• In a bid to control its global image, China’s Communist Party is increasingly jailing Chinese citizens, many of them ordinary people with little influence, who use foreign social media to criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his government.

• The trading mania around companies such as GME presents a dilemma for Gary Gensler, likely to be the next head of the SEC, who will have to balance a trend of broader investor participation in the market with risks that could potentially spread.

• The tech industry has long stood out for lavish perks, many of which increased during the pandemic as people worked at home, but as companies figure out new hybrid work models, they’re also revising which perks should stay and which should go.

• H.O.T.S.: Golf got a boost from the pandemic because it was easy for players to socially distance, and changing demographic trends could maintain the trend; CVX’s careful strategy has helped it stay off the radar of activist investors and regulators; Wall Street may have been disappointed by JNJ’s coronavirus vaccine results, but the shot will still play a key role in battling the pandemic.

FINANCIAL TIMES

Weekend

• “US regulators and prominent political figures have leapt to the defense of an audacious band of amateur share traders at the end of a tumultuous week that challenged the old guard of Wall Street.”

• The arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny “clearly touched a nerve among Russians fed up with slumping living standards, the Kremlin’s patchy coronavirus response, and entrenched corruption” under president Vladimir Putin.

• Chinese military aircraft simulated missile attacks on a nearby US aircraft carrier during an incursion into Taiwan’s air defense zone three days after Joe Biden’s inauguration, a sign of growing tension between Beijing and Washington around Taiwan. • Big Read story about India says that “With the rate of coronavirus infections falling sharply, the country might be at an early stage of herd immunity that could allow the economy to rebound quickly, but health experts warn against complacency.”

• Hedge funds are turning their sights from corporate reports and data spreadsheets to online message boards in a bid to stay ahead of day traders who have started to beat them at their own game.

• Lex Column: Robinhood is failing to live up to its claim to democratize trading—and may not always have the balance sheet to back up its philosophy; Bloomsbury Publishing, which gave the world Harry Potter, is benefiting from the pandemic as people find shelter in books; Retail investors in Asia are getting in on the GME trend, buying stocks shorted by investment funds.

• Comment: “The financial industry will hope that the new energy of the locked-up retail investors doesn’t last beyond the first Covid jab,” says Merryn Somerset Webb. “But it might be better for the rest of us—and for capitalism—if the energy is sustained, and used in better ways.