TheChek News Flow

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Macro :

- Stand-Pat BOJ to Embolden Yen Bears, Stoke More Stock Gains

- Talk of $140 Billion in Stimulus Is Underwhelming: China Today

- Bonds Will Clear the Way for Another Bull Run in Stocks

- Europe’s Gas Prices Show Market Fears Plunging Back Into Crisis

- *GOLDMAN SACHS LIFTS STOXX 600 6-MONTH TARGET BY 2.1% TO 480

Keep an eye on :

- ADBE US : Adobe Jumps on Strong Report and AI Potential

- ABI B B : Anheuser-Busch to Offer Aid to Wholesalers Amid Bud Light Row

- ALMA FH : Otava to Launch Mandatory Offer for Alma Media at EU9.10/Shr

- BCART BB : Biocartis Withdraws 2023 Outlook Over Cost Cuts, Reorganization

- CAVA US : Restaurant Chain Cava Almost Doubles After $318 Million IPO (+99% yesterday)

- CLA FP : Claranova Offers EU20 million Shares at EU1.75/Share

- COIN US : Coinbase Is Losing Crypto Market Share to Robinhood, Mizuho Says

- ACA FP : Credit Agricole Looking at Degroof Petercam: Les Echos

- DIS US : Disney CFO McCarthy Stepping Down on Medical Leave

- FLS DC : Jiangsu Rainbow to Buy FLSmidth’s Cargo Handling Ops For €8m

- GLPG NA : Galapagos Hires Huston From Gilead as CFO, COO as of July 1

- INTC US : Intel Set to Gain $11 Billion in Subsidies for German Chip Plant

- ITP FP : Interparfums Offers Holders 1 New Share for Every 10 Shares Held

- INRW SW : Interroll Lowers 1H and FY Expectations for Operating Result

- IRE IM : Iren Makes Non Binding Offer for Some Egea Assets

- ITV LN : ITV Mulls Deal to Buy All3media, Combine With ITV Studios: Rtrs

- LNZ AV : Lenzing Announces EU400M Capital Hike to Prop Up Finances

- MANU US : Man U Not Negotiating Exclusively With Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim:BBC

- MRL LN : Marlowe Considers Sale of Its Biggest Division by Revenue: Sky

- NHY NO : Elemental Cancels Bid for Alumetal as Norsk Hydro Reaches 68%

- RNO FP : Nissan COO Gupta to Leave Company, NHK Says

- ROG SW : FDA Approves Roche’s Columvi for Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma

- SHEL LN : Enap Signs Argentina Oil Contracts With Petronas, Equinor, Shell

- SOLB BB : Solvay EssentialCo to Issue €1.5B In New Bonds Post Solvay Split

- STLA IM : Stellantis to Unveil €25,000 EV in Fight for Mass-Market Buyers

- TTE FP : Eneos to Procure SAF Materials With TotalEnergies: Nikkei

- WTB LN : Whitbread aims for quick sale of sites to fellow operator

* Airbus Reinstated Sector Perform at RBC; PT 140 euros

* Colruyt Raised to Neutral at Oddo BHF; PT 31 euros

* Handelsbanken Raised to Overweight at Barclays; PT 115 kronor

* Lundbeck Raised to Buy at Handelsbanken

* Airbus Upside Risk Limited By Supply Chain Stresses, RBC Says

* GOLDMAN SACHS LIFTS EUROPEAN RETAILERS TO OVERWEIGHT FROM UW

The French luxury giant negotiates a €150 million ($161.31 million) sponsorship deal with the Paris 2024 Olympics

The final shape of LVMH’s likely Olympics sponsorship rests on Antoine Arnault, one of LVMH chairman and chief executive officer Bernard Arnault’s five children and heirs, in a high-profile deal that could test the 46-year-old’s marketing prowess.

All of Bernard Arnault’s five children hold important positions in LVMH, with each closely watched for any sign of pulling ahead of others to one day succeed the 74-year-old CEO, who has not indicated he plans to step down any time soon.

While Antoine Arnault has the most public profile, the other four are increasingly stepping into the public eye as they rise up the leadership ranks, including his older sister Delphine Arnault, who became CEO of the group’s second-biggest fashion label Dior in February.

Discussions on the Olympics deal, being negotiated by Antoine, revolve around promotions focused on LVMH as a group, its two biggest fashion labels — the Louis Vuitton and Dior brands — as well as champagne. It could cost France’s wealthiest businessman Bernard Arnault some €150 million ($161.31 million), a source familiar with the group’s negotiations has said.

With the event barely a year out, the late-stage negotiations between the Paris 2024 Organising Committee and the world’s biggest luxury group, which is also Europe’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of more than €400 billion, have generated much interest in France.

However, the behind-the-scenes role of the oldest of Arnault’s four sons, Antoine, hasn’t been widely known.

So far, it isn’t a done deal, Paris 2024 CEO Tony Estanguet said last Wednesday.

“It takes time, but we want to make sure that this partnership makes sense and is balanced,” he said.

Antoine, who is also CEO of Italian menswear label Berluti and chairman of knitwear brand Loro Piana, is the principal guardian of the luxury group’s image.

He has taken to the stage to bolster LVMH’s environmental credentials and hosted annual workshop tours for the public, for example.

In the sponsorship deal, his priority will be conveying LVMH’s role as a purveyor of craftsmanship and French heritage while avoiding overly conspicuous brand logo displays that could cheapen its image.

The group’s involvement in the Olympics will likely include high-profile social media and poster campaigns for its leading labels — similar to one of Arnault’s recent successes last November for Louis Vuitton, featuring soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi engaged in a game of chess at the outset of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Although Antoine Arnault’s work shepherding LVMH’s sponsorship of the Olympic Games is taking place behind closed doors, the outcome would be highly public.

“It will likely be the most-watched event in the history of television, in the history of the games — a spectacular event,” he said, on the sidelines of LVMH’s annual shareholding meeting in April, referring to the opening ceremony.

Steve Martin, global CEO of M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, said that while LVMH is already associated with France, a formal sponsorship of the Olympics would help to further differentiate LVMH from luxury rivals.

“I think it’s a very compelling way to do it — in their own backyard,” said Martin.

More tricky will be steering clear of controversy. The run-up to the Olympic Games has traditionally been rocky, with past games being troubled by questions over blatant commercialism, as in Atlanta in 1996, or snarled traffic, in the case of London in 2012.

In France, where street protests are not uncommon, there is concern the event could be marred by demonstrations.

LVMH itself was caught up in pension reform protests this spring, with images of Bernard Arnault appearing on placards and protesters swarming the group’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters, calling on the wealthy to contribute to financing the state pension system.

“If we get involved, it would be to help out,” LVMH fashion group CEO Sidney Toledano told Reuters.

“I don’t know if we will be thanked — but that’s ok, we’re not getting involved for self-gratification,” Toledano added.

The latest store will debut in Aspen, Colorado, on Friday, followed by a series of renovations and openings the rest of the year.

Hermès has been on a tear lately, opening or refreshing retail stores in several cities around the U.S. The biggest statement came last fall when the French luxury brand took the wraps off a seven-story, 45,000-square-foot luxury emporium on New York’s Madison Avenue.

While the newest addition in Aspen, Colorado, which opens on Friday, may not be the same size or scope, it is nonetheless a reflection of the company’s ability to blend into a community while remaining true to a heritage that dates to 1837.

The new store, Hermès’ 34th in the U.S. and second in the state of Colorado, features carpets reminiscent of moss, gray-blue Aspen stone floors, honey-colored local larch wood on the staircase and a bay window that offers a panoramic view of the neighboring mountains. It was designed by the Parisian architectural firm RDAI and features 16 métiers, or departments.

The ground floor features men’s and women’s silk collections, fashion accessories, perfumes and beauty along with the brand’s signature leather goods. The mezzanine, which is designed to look like a cabinet of curiosities, offers the equestrian collections, and the second floor houses shoes, men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, jewelry and watches.

The shop is filled with original artworks including a piece from Jean-Luc Favéro dedicated to piebald horses from the Émile Hermès collection that stands next to a photograph by Yann Stofer titled Horse in the Snow. There’s also a winter scene drawn by George Barbier in the 1920s and a special window designed by Mexican artist Raul de Lara.

Overseeing the opening of this store and the rest of Hermès’ retail plans in the U.S. is Diane Mahady, who took over on April 1 as president of the American division, succeeding longtime chief Robert Chavez, who moved into a new role as executive chairman.

Mahady has a rich résumé that includes merchandising roles at Coach, Louis Vuitton, Zegna and Saks Fifth Avenue. She joined Hermès two years ago as executive vice president, working closely with Chavez, whom she said continues to consult on real estate and other issues. “He’s an amazing colleague and really built the brand here,” she said in the first interview since her promotion. “So it’s great to have him as a resource.”

She said that although Aspen may be viewed as a winter destination, it has evolved into a year-round resort community. “Post-COVID-19, we have found that people have more flexibility in the way they live and we think Aspen will be a terrific market for us.”

It’s also indicative of Hermès’ willingness to try unconventional locations. That was evident when it opened a store last year in Austin, Texas — not in a luxury mall but on Congress Street, known for its lively music and restaurant scene.

“Austin’s been terrific for us,” Malady said. “We have a very loyal client base and we’re really a destination. What we look for in a store location is something where you can really express the brand in the right way. No two stores are the same. Sometimes we look for more trafficked environments, sometimes we look for something hyperlocal. Austin was a new market for us. But we feel we’re more integrated in the community being in that location.”

Hermès is also working on a location in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, another spot filled with trendy, youth-oriented boutiques. Until the space is ready, the brand is operating in a temporary location, she said, that is intended to express that Hermès is “a super humble, fun brand,” she said. “Sometimes people have a different perception of the brand, so [it’s important] for us to be able to show that we’re warm and welcoming, and not so serious.”

Since she became president, Mahady said she’s been asked numerous times how she is going to make her mark on the business, a question she finds almost puzzling.

“Everyone asks what I’m going to change,” she said. “But this is not a brand that needs to be changed. It’s a very healthy business with a terrific familial culture and very high retention rates here in the U.S. We’ve had explosive growth in the last two years, so now it’s really about how we prepare the brand for the future and ensure we can continue to deliver the level of service that is fundamental to the brand.”

What is also fundamental to the brand is its retail stores. With the exception of a few categories such as fragrance, watches and some home products, Hermès no longer wholesales and sells directly to consumers through its fleet of more than 300 stores in 45 countries as well as online.

In the U.S., the company opened a store in Naples, Florida, in February, and is now focused on Aspen, a market Mahady said is “a natural market for us.” Next up will be a second store in the Los Angeles market in Topanga, where she said Hermès is “a little under-penetrated.” It is slated to open in July.

“The West Coast is very important to us, between Hawaii, Los Angeles, Las Vegas,” she said. “So to be able to serve as more clients in Los Angeles area with a second store made a lot of sense.” She said to “create some energy” around the opening, Hermès will host a special experiential event, the Wings of Hermès, that will be a mixture of poetry and cinema. It will be held in Santa Monica from July 15 to 23, just before the store opens.

Then the focus will turn to Chicago, which is getting a facelift. “It’s a great market for us. We’ve been there since 1990 and we’re in a temporary store right now because we’re expanding the store on Oak Street. We’re adding a third level, which allows us to have a VIP room with enhanced services.” That is expected to open at the end of October, she said, at which point Hermès will being its interactive exhibit, Hermès in the Making, to the city. That installation focuses on the artisans who create the brand’s products.

The final project of the year will be the store at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, one of three in that city, that is being renovated and is expected to be completed in November.

“Each of our stores is very site specific,” she said. “So even though there are three stores in Vegas, they all have a very different personality, a different aesthetic, a different assortment.”

Looking ahead to next year, Mahady said Hermès will continue to invest in renovating some of its existing stores and opening others. A new unit is slated for Princeton, New Jersey, and the existing store in Atlanta is moving from Buckhead to the upscale Phipps Plaza.

Beyond that, Mahady said the company plans to add a couple of new stores in the U.S. annually, in combination with renovations. “We’re very deliberate in our rollout. It would need to be the right location in the right market.”

Turning to the U.S. flagship on Madison Avenue, she said sales have been “outperforming expectations” since the September opening. “We’re blessed to have a really diverse client base and there are a lot of great sales associates with loyal followings.” In addition, the design of the store, with comfortable seating areas throughout the interior and an outdoor garden, creates a “more residential feeling,” she contended. “Our clients like to spend the day with us. It’s an enjoyable experience, not transactional, and is really relationship building. We’re really happy with what we’ve been able to achieve here.”

Mahady said Hermès remains enamored with what can be achieved in physical locations.

“We love retail,” she said. “This is a sixth-generation brand and we control every aspect of the business. The average time we’ve worked with any of our suppliers is 20 years. People often talk about the scarcity of the brand, but it’s really because we’re maniacal about quality.

That’s been our business model and will continue to be our business model.

And in our own retail environment, we can most control it.”

So while the U.S. retail count is only about 10 percent of the global total, Mahady said there’s no rush to dramatically increase the number here.

“Part of the beauty of the brand is we’re selective in the distribution,” she said. “We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. It’s still challenging for us to keep up from a production standpoint, so we want to ensure that the existing stores get the best experience possible without taking on too much.”

Mercedes owners in the U.S. will soon add a new luxury to their already luxurious vehicles: ChatGPT. The automaker is adding OpenAI’s conversational AI agent to its MBUX infotainment system, though what it could possibly be needed for is hard to say.

U.S. owners of models that use MBUX will be able to opt into a beta program starting tomorrow, June 16, activating ChatGPT functionality. This will enable the highly versatile large language model to augment the car’s conversation skills. You can join up simply by telling your car “Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.”

It’s not really clear what for, though. After all, a car is a pretty well constrained environment. People need to drive, navigate, and control their media and the car’s basic functions, and certainly a voice interface is sometimes the safest or best option for doing so without taking their eyes off the road.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, excels in seeming human while performing a back-and-forth on any topic, and inventing new facts to keep the exchange running smoothly.

It can summarize and synthesize existing content, write or plagiarize code, or help you come up with wedding vows. Are any of these things you would want to do while driving, or even in the passenger’s seat?

Mercedes describes the capabilities thusly:

Users will experience a voice assistant that not only accepts natural voice commands but can also conduct conversations. Soon, participants who ask the Voice Assistant for details about their destination, to suggest a new dinner recipe, or to answer a complex question, will receive a more comprehensive answer – while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

Sure, a relatively complex query like “what’s a good independent sandwich shop on my route that’s within half a mile of a gas station” might stump a traditional voice interface. If you don’t have a passenger to look that up for you, it might be nice to have that capability. Who is asking for a new dinner recipe on the road? Is that really the best use case they could come up with?

As usual, the benefits of the technology are somewhat notional and surely no driver asked for this capability. Perhaps it is simply that Mercedes is tired of running its own voice interface service and would rather offload it to a third party. The interface prominently says (if you look closely at the top image) “Powered by ChatGPT in Microsoft AI,” in MBUX, in the Mercedes Me app — like a nested doll. Who’s doing what?

If you’re worried about privacy, you should be. Although Mercedes loudly expresses its concern over user data, it’s clear that it retains and uses your conversations:

The voice command data collected is stored in the Mercedes-Benz Intelligent Cloud, where it is anonymised and analysed.

Mercedes-Benz developers will gain helpful insights into specific requests, enabling them to set precise priorities in the further development of voice control. Findings from the beta programme will be used to further improve the intuitive voice assistant and to define the rollout strategy for large language models in more markets and languages.

It is a beta test, after all – learning what people use it for is kind of the point. And if you’re the private type, you probably don’t own a new Mercedes to begin with.

Litigation in the Bahamas has thrown a wrench into FTX fraud case in U.S.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the criminal charges against Sam Bankman-Fried should be split into two trials, after both prosecutors and the defense agreed that litigation in the Bahamas could delay the FTX founder’s case.

Bankman-Fried faces a total of 13 criminal charges connected to the implosion of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and was scheduled to go to trial on all the counts on Oct. 2.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered a separate trial on five of the charges that he tentatively scheduled for March 2024.

The trial in October will proceed on the other charges.

Prosecutors have twice expanded their case against Bankman-Fried since he was transferred to the U.S. from Bahamian custody in December, including new allegations that he conspired to commit bank fraud and bribe a Chinese official. He was originally charged with eight counts, in an indictment that alleged he stole billions of dollars from customers and lenders.

Bankman-Fried, 31 years old, had argued that without the consent of the Bahamas, the U.S. has violated the terms of his extradition.

The treaty between the two countries requires that a host country approve the charges before the transfer of custody and any additional charges brought after the extradition. The Justice Department had conceded that it can’t move forward on the newer charges unless the Bahamas consents.

A Bahamian judge earlier this week temporarily blocked authorities in the island nation from responding to the U.S. government’s request for that consent, which has thrown a wrench into the prosecution’s plans. Bankman-Fried is seeking to make additional legal arguments in the Bahamas against the added charges.

Prosecutors late Wednesday consented to splitting the 13 counts that Bankman-Fried faces into two different trials, a move the Justice Department had previously resisted.

Prosecutors told Judge Kaplan at a hearing earlier Thursday that the October trial would be a week or two shorter if it proceeds on a smaller set of charges.

The bulk of Thursday’s hearing focused on arguments by Bankman-Fried that most of the charges against him should be dismissed outright.

Kaplan didn’t rule from the bench on that request, but signaled he was unlikely to dismiss any counts before trial, given that defendants face a high legal bar for securing dismissal at the preliminary stages.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers mounted a range of arguments on why they think the charges are improper. They said that some of the charges were now legally invalid in light of a Supreme Court decision last month that narrowed the scope of the federal wire-fraud statute. They also said the government was attempting to make a criminal case out of matters that traditionally would have been handled through civil enforcement.

Prosecutors said their case was legally sound and met all the necessary requirements.

“You wrote great papers, made good targeted arguments,” Kaplan told the lawyers. “Now it’s my turn.”

The probe introduces uncertainty to the agreement between warring bodies that stunned the golf industry, which was already facing scrutiny under federal antitrust law

The Justice Department has notified the PGA Tour that it will review the Tour’s planned merger with LIV Golf’s Saudi backers for antitrust concerns, people familiar with the matter said, initiating a regulatory obstacle to the stunning deal that the warring golf bodies hope will stabilize the divided sport.

A review by the Justice Department—which had already been investigating the PGA Tour and other leading golf bodies for anticompetitive behavior—introduces uncertainty to the planned joint venture between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. It also makes it probable that any transaction that is hammered out between the rivals won’t take effect for some time.

One senior Tour executive told employees this week that the outcome of the blockbuster proposal, announced last week, likely won’t be known for at least a year, a person familiar with the remarks said. Regulatory review could extend even longer than that.

The official also said to them that it’s possible that the union between the Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund will fall apart entirely if the sides cannot settle on specific terms.

“We are confident that once all stakeholders learn more about how the PGA Tour will lead this new venture, they will understand how it benefits our players, fans, and sport while protecting the American institution of golf,” the PGA Tour said in a statement issued late Thursday.

The Tour and the Saudi PIF, along with Europe’s DP World Tour, last week called a sudden truce in the battle that has divided golf for the last year.

LIV Golf had poached a number of the top golfers, while the sides had sued and countersued one another.

Then, to the surprise of everyone except the small crew of people who negotiated the pact, they decided to combine their commercial golf assets in a new entity.

But the initial agreement contained only the broadest of frameworks—chief among them that the Tour and LIV would drop their litigation against one another, and that the PGA Tour would control the board of the new, yet-to-be-named business.

That left major details still to be worked out—all under a microscope from regulators who have spent a year studying the golf ecosystem already, and while LIV alleged the Tour was acting as an illegal monopolist to stifle a nascent competitor.

Further complicating matters, the PGA Tour said this week that its commissioner, Jay Monahan—who helped negotiate the PIF deal and is set to be the chief executive of the combined entity—has taken a leave of absence because of what the Tour has described as “a medical situation.” Tour officials have said that work on the deal will go on, without pause, in his absence.

Federal antitrust scrutiny had been widely anticipated in the wake of the announcement, which came on the heels of the existing Justice Department investigation into the PGA Tour and other golf institutions including Augusta National Golf Club.

Antitrust lawyers have been quick to point to potentially problematic aspects of the deal, including statements by Monahan, who told reporters that it would be good for the Tour “to take the competitor off of the board, to have them exist as a partner, not an owner.”

People familiar with the agreement have said it wouldn’t be surprising if the Justice Department examined the deal, but that regulators should be happy with it because it benefits everyone within the industry.

“Every single player in men’s professional golf is going to have more opportunity and growth,” Monahan said in unveiling the plan.

The Tour official speaking to employees this week acknowledged the earlier Justice Department investigation when discussing the matter with employees and said the body fully expects the agreement to be scrutinized by the European Commission and regulators in the United Kingdom, as well.

It could be awkward for both parties if the Justice Department were to nix the deal.

The Saudis have committed billions to LIV Golf, but it has garnered little interest from fans, media partners or sponsors.

It is unclear if LIV events will even continue if the merger succeeds. At the same time, the Tour had largely fought back against LIV over moral grounds that would be difficult to argue after agreeing to partner with PIF.

Nonetheless, both sides stand to benefit from their agreement to end their litigation against one another. Monahan had previously indicated to employees that the spending war between the two sides, including legal fees, is unsustainable, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. On the other side, the deal enables the Saudis to extricate themselves from a situation in which PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, would be subject to discovery and being deposed, an outcome they had sought to avoid by claiming sovereign immunity.

This isn’t the PGA Tour’s first time facing a federal antitrust inquiry.

But, unlike the last time, the politics are working against the Tour instead of for it.

When the Tour beat back an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission in the 1990s, it relied on powerful lawmakers who pushed to nix the probe. Now, influential lawmakers are lining up against the Tour.

While the Tour counted Capitol Hill as a powerful ally when it was battling LIV, fanning the flames of Saudi Arabia’s troubled record on human rights and how its golf enterprise was merely an exercise in sportswashing, those same politicians have pivoted to assail the Tour now that it has parked with its former enemy.

A bill has been reintroduced in the House of Representatives to strip the Tour of its tax exemption. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said earlier this week that he was opening an inquiry into the agreement and demanding documents from both parties.

And lawmakers previously broadly sympathetic to the Tour as it battled LIV have turned on it—becoming only more enraged after receiving a letter from Monahan in which he said the Tour had been left largely on its own to fend off the Saudis.

She agreed to the largest deal in the company’s history; ‘I tend to take a competitive approach to life’

She’s a second-degree black belt in taekwondo. She’s a ferocious pickleball player. And she plays hard when urging companies to list at Nasdaq rather than her nemesis downtown, the New York Stock Exchange.

“I tend to take a competitive approach to life,” Adena Friedman, the 53-year-old chief executive of Nasdaq, said in an interview this week.

Friedman now faces perhaps the biggest challenge of her career. Nasdaq said on Monday that it had agreed to buy software maker Adenza for $10.5 billion—the largest deal in her company’s history. If completed, it would crystallize Friedman’s vision of transforming Nasdaq into a financial-technology company, moving it far beyond its roots as a stock exchange.

Nasdaq shares tumbled on news of the cash-and-stock deal and remain nearly 10% below their price prior to the announcement. The onus is on Friedman to close the transaction, integrate Adenza into Nasdaq, and show that the steep price tag was worth it.

Even as the Adenza deal was coming together, Friedman was pouring her energy into another critical effort: Nasdaq’s bid to win the initial public offering of British chip designer Arm, which is likely to be the biggest IPO in an otherwise quiet year for listings.

In February, she flew to Japan to meet Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group, Arm’s parent company, and she later courted Arm management in a series of Zoom meetings, people familiar with the matter said. Her message, the people said, was that winning Arm was very important for Nasdaq.

Nasdaq and the larger NYSE compete for all major IPOs, and they often entice companies with marketing packages that include advertising time, lavish IPO parties and other perks. Nasdaq offered Arm a package valued at $50 million, which includes giving the chip maker access to Nasdaq-hosted events organized around the World Economic Forum in Davos, the people said.

The gambit worked. Arm plans to go public on Nasdaq in the coming months, the people said.

Its debut may help Friedman maintain her recent winning streak: For four straight years from 2019 to 2022, IPOs at Nasdaq raised more capital than IPOs at the NYSE, Dealogic data shows, although the two-century-old NYSE was long the dominant U.S. stock exchange.

Friedman is the mother of two sons in their 20s. She is married to a retired lawyer who teaches pottery. They live in Maryland, and Friedman commutes to New York during the week while spending weekends at home.

Since the pandemic, Friedman hasn’t spent as much time on taekwondo. But she’s taken up pickleball and she works out on her Peloton nearly every day, Friedman said in the interview. (The maker of her fitness device, Peloton Interactive, went public on Nasdaq in 2019.)

Friedman has gotten Nasdaq embroiled in controversy over hot-button social issues.

In December 2020, Nasdaq proposed a new rule requiring its listed companies to meet minimum diversity targets for their boards or explain in writing why they weren’t doing so.

For most companies, the targets are to have one female director and one director who is a racial minority or who self-identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.

Democratic politicians and much of corporate America applauded the plan, while conservatives blasted it as a thinly disguised quota. “We do not think Nasdaq should be using its quasi-regulatory authority to impose social policies,” a dozen Republican senators said in a February 2021 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, urging the agency to use its authority to block the rule.

Friedman said the rule was aimed at fostering transparency into how companies think about diversity. A divided SEC approved the rule in August 2021. Last year, Nasdaq began requiring companies to disclose diversity statistics about their boards under a related rule, and the diversity targets are set to take effect in phases starting later this year. Two right-leaning groups have filed a court challenge to block the plan, which may ultimately reach the Supreme Court.

Raised in Baltimore, Friedman had deep connections to finance. Her father, David Testa, was a longtime employee of T. Rowe Price Group who became the firm’s chief investment officer before retiring, and Friedman visited the T. Rowe trading floor as a child.

Friedman’s career at Nasdaq began almost exactly 30 years ago, on June 1, 1993, when she started as an intern. Fresh out of business school at Vanderbilt University, she started out writing product plans for arcane projects in Nasdaq’s trading division.

She rose through the ranks as Nasdaq became a listing destination for hot tech companies in the dot-com era, branding itself the “stock market for the next 100 years.” After Robert Greifeld became CEO of Nasdaq in 2003, Friedman worked closely with him on a series of deals that expanded Nasdaq’s footprint in electronic trading and overseas markets, such as its $3.7 billion merger with Nordic exchange operator OMX, which was completed in 2008.

Friedman left Nasdaq in 2011 to become chief financial officer of private-equity giant Carlyle Group. But her former boss soon began wooing her back. The two met over dinner at a Manhattan restaurant one rainy night in early 2014, Greifeld recalled in a 2019 memoir. “I explained to her that I was planning to be at Nasdaq for a couple more years, but after that, she would be a natural choice to replace me,” he wrote.

She rejoined Nasdaq later that year. In January 2017 she became CEO and began work on what became known as the “strategic pivot.”

Under Greifeld, Nasdaq pursued growth by acquiring markets. Its systems were processing a huge amount of trading volume, and Nasdaq derived much of its revenue from collecting transaction fees. But running stock and options exchanges had become a tough, low-margin business due to the rise of electronic trading and increased competition between market operators. Moreover, Nasdaq’s revenues depended on the ebb and flow of trading activity. Simply put, the exchange business wasn’t that attractive anymore.

Friedman presented her vision at a board meeting in San Francisco in August 2017. Her plan: Nasdaq would evolve into a provider of technology, data and analytics to the financial industry. If successful, the new direction would bring fatter profit margins and replace volatile trading revenues with more recurring, subscription-based income.

She axed assets that didn’t hew to her vision, dumping a money-losing future exchange and selling a struggling bond-trading platform in 2021 for a fraction of the price that Nasdaq had paid for it eight years earlier. And she pursued deals to expand Nasdaq’s presence in data and technology.

Until this week, her biggest deal was Nasdaq’s $2.75 billion acquisition of Verafin, a software firm that uses artificial intelligence to help banks detect money laundering and fraud.

The Verafin deal closed in early 2021.

Acquiring Adenza is meant to push Nasdaq further in the same direction. The company provides technology to banks and brokerages to facilitate trading, risk management and regulatory compliance. If the deal goes through, Nasdaq projects that its traditional core business of executing trades will account for less than one-quarter of net revenues.

Friedman is determined to prove that buying Adenza will pay off in the long run. “We paid an appropriate price for an exceptional business,” she said.

The Israeli weapons and spyware falling into the hands of despots

Two books raise serious questions about the country’s exports of intelligence weapons — but both fail to fully address the implications

Warfare is, among many things, a spectacular advertisement for weapons, especially in the age of television. Having watched Israel’s Iron Dome missiles streak over Tel Aviv hunting down Hamas rockets, the Ukrainian government contacted its Israeli counterpart last October, hoping to buy the air defence system to fend off the Iranian drones swarming their skies.

If they’d read Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory, they would have known not to bother. The tiny country’s weapons exports, which hit just over $11bn in 2021, are a means to an end, he argues. Despots and dictators are welcome to them, so long as they serve a geopolitical necessity.

Arming Ukraine may be a key foreign policy objective of the US, Israel’s military and financial patron. But Israel was not about to upset Moscow, especially with Russian forces so deeply entrenched next door in Syria. The answer was a firm no.

This complicated dance — perhaps immoral, perhaps necessary — is the subject of Loewenstein’s well-researched but tragically bloodless recounting of how and why Israeli weapons regularly show up in distant battlefields, often tipping the scales for unpalatable regimes with scant regard for human rights.

This is nothing new. Since its birth in 1948, the state of Israel has sold weapons to apartheid South Africa; Chile during the horror of the Pinochet years; Myanmar even after well-documented atrocities against its Rohingya minority. In exchange, Israel has sought support — especially on Palestinian issues — in international arenas such as the UN, and more recently, in convincing recalcitrant neighbours such as the UAE, and maybe soon Saudi Arabia, into recognising its existence.

Israeli officials defend these decisions as hard-nosed realpolitik. But to Loewenstein, an investigative journalist, this is a failure of Zionism, and a baton with which to bludgeon the Israeli state for its many, well-documented failures to place human rights, especially those of Palestinians at, or near, the centre of its foreign and domestic policies.

It is indeed revealing how complicated any criticism of Israel is that Loewenstein spends his first few paragraphs underlining his Jewish credentials, as if earning the right to critique the Jewish State. (The grandson of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and the son of liberal Zionists in Melbourne is now an avowed One-Stater.)

He argues that the Sparta-like reputation of Israel’s military in subjugating Palestinians and defeating larger neighbours, alongside the all-seeing mystique of the Mossad, drives demand for Israel’s “battle-tested” weapons.

Loewenstein probes deeper into the psyche of a military-industrial entanglement that has led to the dehumanisation of Palestinians (Ordering an air strike should be like ordering a pizza, one Israeli colonel is quoted saying), and how that extends to an official, and societal, disregard for the rights of all but Jewish Israelis.

But one wishes he had spent more time on the ground — the book reads much like the careful research of a voracious reader, rather than that of the tenacious reporter he is known to be. Nearly every page cites other sources, and he regularly pauses to criticise others’ coverage of this issue, slowing down a story that would have been better served with the voices of people who’ve suffered from Israeli weapons.

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It wasn’t just the Iron Dome that the Ukrainians wanted. Even before Russia invaded, they’d hoped to buy Pegasus, a cyberweapon made by Israel’s NSO Group, seeking to learn of Russia’s belligerent plans.

Built by the highly paid graduates of Israel’s signals intelligence units, the weapon can mirror the contents of a smartphone remotely — stripping away the encryption of apps such as Signal or WhatsApp.

This too, Israel denied. It reportedly even turned off the ability of Estonia, a Pegasus customer and ex-Soviet bloc nation, to use its $30mn purchase to surveil Russian phones. Meanwhile, Israel has enthusiastically and repeatedly approved its sale to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Mexico and others, despite overwhelming evidence that they’ve used it on dissidents, instead of terrorists or cartels.

In their book Pegasus, authors Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud promise to show how the encryption-piercing malware “threatens the end of privacy, dignity and democracy”.

Instead, they take us on a slightly plodding victory lap about a global consortium of journalists who in 2021 published a series of reports about how the weapon was being abused by governments around the world.

All The President’s Men this is not. There is barely enough on the central challenge posed by the very existence of commercial spyware such as Pegasus — who should be allowed to operate a weapon so sophisticated and powerful, who should such weapons be used on, and who should police the policemen?

This is a missed opportunity. Richard and Rigaud’s 2021 reporting, shepherded by the Paris-based Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, had immediate impact around the world. Relying on a leaked database of 50,000 phone numbers their unnamed source described as a potential target list, they described a global pattern of abuse by NSO’s customers, often countries buying for a few million dollars a technology they lack themselves.

The reporters confirmed infection on less than 50 of those phones, but the mere existence of a number on that list was enough to provoke alarm, diplomatic opprobrium at Israel and eventually, commercial problems for NSO.

French President Emmanuel Macron scolded former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett after his personal number popped up on that list; Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée’s phone was found to be compromised and India’s Rahul Gandhi tut-tutted about being surveilled by the Modi government.

The book comes alive only when it zooms in on the impact such insidious and all-encompassing surveillance has on its victims.

Pegasus not only mirrors a phone’s contents — be they encrypted messages or calendar invitations — it also turns on the camera and microphone secretly.

For instance, an Azerbaijani journalist who had previously been secretly videotaped in her own home having sex with her boyfriend, laments that photographs of a friend’s recovery from breast cancer were likely exfiltrated from her phone, alongside conversations with sources and documents that propelled her reporting.

It’s a graphic reminder of something we all suspect to be true — that our phones are now an extension of our minds, a warehouse of memories and a road map to our secret failures, foibles and dreams.

That this intimacy can be so thoroughly pierced by a software sold to Israel’s allies is worth exploring in detail. As is the underlying assumption that such technology is both necessary and the inevitable side-effect of widespread encryption — itself the result of the disclosures of mass surveillance made by Edward Snowden a decade ago.

Alas, Richard and Rigaud’s book is more interested in reliving their journalistic quest, rather than grappling with the more serious questions this sophisticated technology presents.

Both books raise serious questions that they don’t fully answer. This is a shame, because others have revealed eye-popping details of Israeli excess, from Ronen Bergman’s documentation of the hundreds of assassinations Mossad has carried around the world to activists such as Eitay Mack (cited extensively) who have used Israeli courts to force open secret archives that reveal the extent of the state’s involvement.

A deep documentation of Israeli weapons exports would make for sordid reading. These two books make a dent on the subject, but a full reckoning awaits.