TheChek News Flow

Japan’s Nikkei NIK, -0.20% slipped 0.2%, while the Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -0.03% was about flat and the smaller-cap Shenzhen Composite 399106, +0.38% rose 0.4%. Taiwan’s Taiex Y9999, +0.27% was flat while stocks edged down in Malaysia FBMKLCI, -0.62% . Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, South Korea’s Kospi and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 were closed.

Among individual stocks, Nissan 7201, -3.14% sank in Tokyo trading after its vice chief operating officer — who had been tasked with the auto maker’s recovery from scandal — said he will step down. E-commerce company Rakuten 4755, -2.27% also declined.

U.S. stocks closed mixed on Tuesday, with only the Nasdaq COMP, +0.08% managing to post another record-high close. The S&P 500 SPX, -0.02% and Dow Jones Industrial DJIA, -0.13% finished with tiny losses.

U.S. markets will reopen Thursday, but most European markets will stay closed until Friday.

Investors have been encouraged by plans for an interim U.S.-Chinese trade deal despite having seen few details.

U.S. recession fears have faded after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times. The central bank appears set to keep them low for a long time.

Energy markets were closed for the holiday.

In currency markets, the dollar USDJPY, -0.03% edged up to 109.39 yen from Tuesday’s 109.38 yen.

Japan’s population fell by more than a half-million people as the country’s efforts to shore up its dwindling birthrate come up short.

Japan has 512,000 fewer people this year than last, according to an estimate released on Tuesday by the country’s welfare ministry. That’s a drop of more than the entire population of the city of Atlanta.

The numbers are the latest sign of Japan’s increasing demographic challenges.

Births in the country — which are expected to drop below 900,000 this year — are at their lowest figure since 1874, when the population was about 70 percent smaller than its current 124 million.

The total number of deaths, on the other hand, is increasing. This year, the figure is expected to reach almost 1.4 million, the highest level since the end of World War II, a rise driven by the country’s increasingly elderly population.

That gap between births and deaths has put Japan in a demographic squeeze. As the number of births goes down, there are fewer young people entering its work force. That means fewer people to replace retiring workers and support them as they age, a situation that poses a serious threat to Japan’s economic vitality and the security of its social safety net.

Japan is not the only country facing the problem of how to cope with a shrinking society. It’s not even the country with the lowest birthrate: That title goes to South Korea. And other countries — from China to the United States — also face declining birthrates, which could spell trouble down the road.

But Japan is the world’s grayest nation: Almost 28 percent of its residents are over 65.

Japan has had some time to address the effects of its declining population: The country has been consistently shrinking since 2007. That year, the country’s population dipped by around 18,000 people. Since then, however, the losses have rapidly accelerated, crossing the half-million mark this year for the first time. Across the nation, whole villages are vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities.

There’s no end to the decline in sight: The government estimates the population could shrink by around 16 million people — or nearly 13 percent — over the next 25 years.

In response, Japan has made efforts to push up its fertility rate — the average number of births per woman — from its current level of around 1.4 to a target of 1.8, still short of the 2.1 considered necessary to hold the population steady.

The government has moved to encourage births by increasing incentives for parents to have more children and reducing obstacles that might discourage those who want to.

But the incentives are proving insufficient as more people in Japan are putting off childbirth — or not having children at all — to take advantage of economic opportunities. Or conversely, because they are worried that economic opportunities do not exist, and they cannot afford children.

Even for those who do want to be parents, however, the hurdles remain daunting.

Demand for day care in the country far outstrips supply, making it difficult for working mothers to juggle their careers and their children. And working fathers who want to take advantage of the country’s generous paternity leave can find themselves stigmatized by an entrenched cultural belief that a man’s place is in the office, not in the home.

Adding to the government’s worries, marriage is on the decline. The number of marriages dropped by 3,000 year-on-year to 583,000, according to the data released Tuesday, part of a steep decline over the last decade.

As births continue to drop, Japan has tried to promote robots as a supplement for its shrinking work force.

It has also committed to accepting limited numbers of immigrants to handle vital work such as caring for the elderly. This year the country began issuing more than a quarter million visas to immigrants who will do such work.

The tests, from companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry, have become popular holiday gifts, but the military is warning service members of risks to their careers.

In an internal memo, Pentagon leadership has urged military personnel not to take mail-in DNA tests, warning that they create security risks, are unreliable and could negatively affect service members’ careers.

The letter, which was reported by Yahoo News, was sent on Friday. It does not name any particular DNA testing companies, but counsels broadly against buying ancestry and health tests promoted with military discounts and other military incentives.

Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that the memo had been sent.

“We want to ensure all service members are aware of the risks of Direct to Consumer (DTC) genetic testing,” he told The New York Times over email.

Over the past decade, millions of Americans have purchased DNA tests through companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry with the hopes of connecting with relatives, finding out more about their family origins and learning about how their DNA could affect their chances of developing certain health conditions. In recent years, the tests have become popular holiday gifts.

Commander Robertson said that the tests might provide inaccurate results and have negative professional consequences. “The unintentional discovery of markers that may affect readiness could affect a service member’s career, and the information from DTC genetic testing may disclose this information,” he said.

Genetic tests have more serious employment implications for members of the military than the average office worker, said Frederick Bieber, an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, who served as an Army Reserve officer at the DNA Identification Lab in Rockville, Md.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act — known as GINA — prohibits discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes. It does not apply to members of the military, however.

“The military can make decisions about operational readiness,” Dr. Bieber said, whereas “in the civilian world there are prohibitions about it.”

If a DNA test shows that someone has carrier status for sickle cell trait, for example, he said it could limit advancement in some aviation specialties.

The memo was written by Joseph D. Kernan, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, and James N. Stewart, the assistant secretary of defense for manpower. They warn that the tests “could expose personal and genetic information, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission.”

The memo does not get into what specifically these risks might be, and Commander Robertson declined to elaborate.

In a statement, a spokeswoman from 23andMe said that the company took great care to protect customers’ privacy.

“Our FDA-authorized health reports have been tested to be over 99% accurate,” she said. “All of our testing is done in the U.S., and we do not share information with third parties without separate, explicit consent from our customers.”

An Ancestry spokeswoman said that the company had not targeted military personnel with discounts. “Ancestry does not share customer DNA data with insurers, employers, or third-party marketers,” she added.

The Pentagon does not advise against genetic testing altogether. But service members were encouraged to get genetic information “from a licensed professional rather than a consumer product,” Commander Robertson said.

With Italians’ appetite for snack food growing, Barilla and Ferrero are in a pitched battle to make sure their cookies come out on top.

MILAN — As Marianna Farina and her husband did some Christmas shopping on a windy night in Milan, she noticed lots of people walking around with small brown packages of cookies.

“I was curious,” she said. “Because I had heard about the cookie wars.”

She had found her way to a promotional pavilion set up to hype the introduction of Pan di Stelle Biscocrema, a new hazelnut cream-filled cookie by the venerable Italian breakfast brand, famous for its round cocoa cookies dotted with 11 white sugar stars.

About a month earlier, Nutella, the juggernaut of hazelnut spreads, had encroached on Pan di Stelle’s turf by introducing, after what the company said were 10 years and 120 million euros (about $133 million) in research and development, Nutella Biscuits. Ms. Farina had tried and liked them. Now she bit into the Pan di Stelle cookie. She liked it, too.

“It’s a tough one,” she said.

In the popular imagination, Italy is a country of ripe tomatoes, fresh pasta, virgin olive oil and other staples of the Mediterranean diet. In practice, increasingly corpulent Italians — and especially Italian children — are united by an insatiable hunger for snack food.

Children eat cookies for breakfast. So do many of their parents. The supermarket aisles are full of breakfast cookies and snacks called merendine, which, generally speaking, are industrialized miniatures of traditional Italian cakes and tarts. It’s all more Hostess than homemade, but, in a country of regional cuisines, it is also the sugary, sticky stuff that binds.

The populist leader Matteo Salvini has made a habit of bingeing on Nutella on social media. He once shared a picture of a cake made from Pan di Stelle cookies and Nutella spread; more recently he posted a picture of himself in a supermarket torn between Pan di Stelle and Nutella Biscuits. (This was considered news because he had temporarily sworn off the Nutella cookie when he found out that they were, in part, made with Turkish hazelnuts.)

When the government considered a sugar tax on snacks this year, the country’s rival populist, Luigi Di Maio, the foreign minister and leader of the Five Star Movement, had a meltdown and immediately put a stop to it. A budget that passed on Monday includes a sugar tax, but it applies only to sodas.

And so the Christmas cookie battle between two cultural and culinary touchstones, Pan di Stelle and Nutella, and their superpower parent companies, the pasta giant Barilla and the chocolate giant Ferrero, strikes right at the Italian aorta.

“When it comes down to Barilla and Ferrero, there can be a war,” said Michele Boroni, a marketing expert in Milan. “It’s a competition between Italy’s last food giants that have remained Italian.”

The civil war, with competing philosophies on health, deforestation, liberty and cream filling, has roots in the postwar boom.

The website Merendine Italiane, an authority on Italian snacks, reports that the first Italian snack was a miniature version of the Motta Panettone Christmas cake in the 1950s.

In 1964, the Italian and global junk food landscape was transformed by Michele Ferrero, who created Nutella. By 1984, the cocoa-hazelnut spread had permeated Italian culture, even appearing in the 1984 film “Bianca,” in which Nanni Moretti, the darling director of the Italian left, eats in the nude out of a shoulder-height vat of Nutella. An ode to Nutella, written mostly in pig Latin (“Nutella Nutellae”), has sold 1.5 million copies since it was published in 1993.

Yet the breakfast cookie market was cornered by Barilla and its white-bread, family values-promoting subsidiary, Mulino Bianco, whose very name has become synonymous in Italy with storybook perfection.

In 1983, it introduced Pan di Stelle as chocolate breakfast biscuits. It also acquired fanatics. Silvia Proserpio, a 41-year-old graphic designer in Milan, eats them every day for breakfast, and sometimes after lunch.

“It’s all about the stars,” she said. “The stars make you think of something beautiful, outer space, or a dream.” She also didn’t mind the sugar rush.

For the most part, the two companies respected each other’s borders.

But in January 2018, Barilla made a move. It introduced jars of Pan di Stelle Crema, a spread made from “100 percent Italian hazelnuts and ‘dreamlike’ chocolate,” the company’s news release said.

Ferrero was not about to let the aggression go unanswered. The company raised the stakes in early 2019 by quietly dipping across the Italian border and testing Nutella Biscuits in other countries. In April, it rolled out the cookie in France to start spreading buzz and demand among Italians living and traveling abroad.

“This is our modus operandi,” said Claudia Millo, a Nutella spokeswoman.

And then, as it unleashed a take-no-prisoners publicity campaign, with ads for the cookies papering subway stations, glowing on television screens, hanging from the rafters of Rome’s main train station, they brought Nutella Biscuits home to Italy in November.

It was an enormous success. Nutella sold 5.9 million boxes of cookies in its first four weeks, according to IRI, a sales data company.

A month later, Pan di Stelle answered, unveiling Pan di Stelle Biscocrema during a press event at a rooftop bar in Milan decorated with star-shaped lights and catered with the cookies, which are topped with a solid star made of cream.

“They’re a gem, a piece of art,” said Julia Schwoerer, the deputy chairwoman of the Mulino Bianco and Pan di Stelle marketing division.

But Barilla, which has invested in a foundation dedicated to environmental sustainability and better nutrition (including, of course, plenty of grains), wants to make it clear that the cookies are occasional treats, not daily bread.

“This should be only a tiny part of your overall diet,” said Luca Di Leo, the head of media relations for the company. “That’s why it’s a small pack.”

Unlike Pan di Stelle’s two-cookie rationing approach, Nutella gives you a whole bag and essentially bets you can’t eat just one.

Barilla has promoted its rejection of palm oil, a saturated fat that has also prompted devastating deforestation. Nutella knows you like it.

(Italian environmentalists blame both sides — but especially the full-scale Nutella offensive — for the aggressive planting of hazelnut trees, which, to keep the cookies and spreads coming, has made the country’s biodiversity a casualty of war.)

To visit Nutella headquarters in the hazelnut-dotted hills of Alba is to enter Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Waterfalls of chocolate and avalanches of chopped hazelnuts along the production lines fill the pavilion. But mobile phones are checked in a locker, photographs are forbidden, and officials refuse to speak on the record. (The company said Mr. Ferrero, the company’s founder, gave two interviews in his life. One was published posthumously.)

Only pens without caps are allowed for fear of contaminating batches of a chocolate spread that dominates two-thirds of the global market. Workers and 40 rotating pistons bottle the spread under an enormous “We are Nutella” sign. (They are not, however, Nutella Biscuits, which are produced in Basilicata.)

But around Alba the brand loyalty was nearly absolute.

Nizzi Modica, a 20-year-old babysitter, said that when it came to a choice between the two new cookies, “I would always choose Nutella.”

Back at the Pan di Stelle pavilion in Milan, workers retrieved giant cookie-shaped lamps blown by the wind and gave Ms. Farina a souvenir Pan di Stelle pen. (“Oh, it’s definitely war,” she said.) But as workers scurried to get the cookies to safety, the one thing they said they could not tolerate was any mention of the Nutella Biscuit enemy.

“We are not allowed to say the word,” said Federica Galeti, who managed the Pan di Stelle booth in Milan. “It’s a rule.”

The video-on-demand giant will give its two top executives fattened pay packages in 2020 — each of them worth about $34.6 million, a new filing shows.

Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings will get $34 million in stock options on top of his $650,000 salary next year, according to a Monday SEC filing. That marks an increase from his total 2019 pay of $31.5 million.

Chief content officer Ted Sarandos — who has led Netflix’s original programming to dozens of primetime Emmys and six Oscars — will collect a whopping $20 million salary and some $14.6 million in stock options. His 2019 package was also worth $31.5 million.

Chief product officer Greg Peters will also see his pay jump next year to $18.9 million in salary and options from $16.8 million for 2019, filings show. Chief financial officer Spencer Neumann, who joined Netflix this past January, will get about $11.5 million in salary and options next year, the filing shows.

The hefty raises come amid a roughly 42 percent rise in Netflix’s stock price over the past year to a Monday closing of $333.10. The streamer also racked up 17 Golden Globe film nominations this month, led by the critically acclaimed dramas “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story.”

Platform released Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ for limited time in cinemas

The chief executive of Cineworld has accused Netflix of leaving Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman with “meaningless” box office income after releasing the film in cinemas for a short period before streaming it.

Mooky Greidinger, who heads the world’s second-largest cinema group, said the US streaming service, which financed the Oscar-winning director’s film, had prevented it from becoming a box-office hit. Netflix put The Irishman out in cinemas on November 1 in the US and November 8 in Britain, then streamed it from November 27.

“The Irishman lost a lot of box office. A Scorsese released properly in cinemas would have generated a nice income,” he said.

Mr Greidinger’s accusation highlights a long-running stand-off between cinema owners and Netflix. Since September, Netflix has released 10 films in cinemas but few for more than a week before they are uploaded to its platform. In November, it announced it was buying the Paris Theater in New York and was in negotiations for the Egyptian in Los Angeles, where it plans to hold screenings and special events.

Netflix said all the major cinema companies were offered its films. Many, including Vue, Odeon and Cineworld, declined to show them, deeming the release window too short.

This month UK-based Cineworld announced a $2.1bn acquisition of the 165-strong Canadian cinema chain Cineplex, just 18 months after it completed a $3.6bn reverse takeover of US cinema group Regal.

The deals form part of a wider consolidation across the film industry as streaming services such as Netflix increase film production.

Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at research firm Exhibitor Relations, said cinemas and streaming platforms were lining up for a “war of the eyeballs”.

“We are talking about cinema versus streaming and it’s happening right now. Pulling all of that talent towards streaming is a huge deal for cinemas,” he said.

He added that audiences were tired of “lazy sequels” and that in order for cinema to thrive, studios needed to up their game.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, global box office revenues for 2018 were $41.1bn, up 1 per cent on 2017. Spending on TV and film at home increased 16 per cent to $55.7bn.

Mr Greidinger said: “[The Irishman] was released in a very small number of cinemas worldwide, cinemas that do not care about keeping the window between the theatrical release and the auxiliary market release and the movie did nothing at the end of the day. People can see it in on Netflix and that’s it.”

Netflix said Mr Scorsese’s film was shown in 35 countries and that some cinemas showing it were taking bookings for screenings in February next year. More than 26m people watched The Irishman in its first week on Netflix’s platform.

Cinema executives have blamed an uneven film slate for poor sales in 2019. While films such as Avengers: Endgame broke box office records, other films that were expected to do well such as Men In Black: International and Dark Phoenix, the X-Men film, flopped.

In its latest trading update, Cineworld said revenues for the full year would be below expectations because of weaker box-office sales.

Mr Greidinger said that while cinemas could not control the films on offer, Cineworld had undertaken an extensive refurbishment programme in order to keep customers coming. It spent $90m in the first six months of 2019 on upgrades to screen technology including 13 4DX screens, which have simulated smells and weather effects as well as vibrating seats.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said the deal, which was financed with $2.3bn of bank debt, was a “defensive” move that would leave the company with a net debt of 3.7 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation at the end of 2021. Cineworld is targeting net debt of less than three times adjusted earnings by the same deadline. 

In an op-ed in The New York Times, Mr Scorsese wrote that he would have preferred for his film to play for longer in cinemas but that they were too crowded with franchise films.

“You might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the film-maker intended her or his picture to be seen,” he wrote.

Agents claim a post-election bounce, but underlying problems remain

Browsing property websites is a Christmas Day tradition with me — along with ordering everyone out of the kitchen and smashing the meat thermometer. Last year, I was one of the 1.5m people who excused themselves from festivities and logged on to Rightmove. Like the shepherds at the nativity, we were just the first on the scene. Between Christmas Day and January 2, Rightmove traffic was up 231 per cent.

For many, I suspect the festive urge to scroll through pictures of other people’s houses is brought on by a confrontation with the inescapable truth. We look around the lunch table — teenager squeezed up against the wall, granny sinking in a deck chair — and think, we’re going to need a bigger place. 

The Yuletide traffic surge is a UK property market indicator. “If the phones don’t start ringing in the weeks after Christmas, then something is wrong,” says Roarie Scarisbrick, a buying agent at Property Vision.

This year the pressure is really on. Since the Conservatives returned a majority in this month’s general election, estate agents have forecasted great things in 2020: price rises and a bumper year in sales. 

Are they right? I doubt it.

The overhanging uncertainties of 2019 are still overhanging. Brexit looks sure to go ahead on January 31, but the long-term trading arrangement with the EU is unclear. Given that the government has made an extension to the transition period less likely, the spectre of a no-deal Brexit — and the catastrophic effect this could have on the UK economy and housing market — has returned. 

Aside from the overhanging uncertainties, there are the underlying facts. In parts of the country, the property market has slowed to a crawl. House prices are high, lending is constrained and wage growth has been weak — with real wages still lower than in 2008. Unless any one of those things changes, the logjam is unlikely to break free — and certainly not in London.

The data tells the story. In the first seven months of 2019, 53,500 homes were sold in the capital, according to the Land Registry — 27 per cent fewer than in the same period in 2014, when 73,450 homes sold. 

That sounds like a lot, but the 2014 figure was no great shakes. Between 1997 and 2007, only one year failed to record 80,000 sales in the first seven months. In the first seven months of 2002, the Land Registry chalked up 100,880 sales.

In London, house prices are so high — and transaction costs so onerous — that many homeowners have no option but to stay put. In 1988 the average household moved once every 8.63 years, according to Zoopla. In 2017, it was once every 23 years.

Which means most of us logging on to Rightmove this Christmas will be looking, but not buying. And this includes me. My wife and I bought our first flat in north London 18 months ago, but the gap between flat and house prices has widened in recent years, and it is difficult to see when we will be able to trade up to a house. 

I can only describe my urge to log on to property portals at Christmas as a kind of self-flagellation. Prices where I live have fallen. But even if we sold our flat, to buy a three-bedroom house down the street would require our salaries — both mine and my wife’s — to rise by more than 43 per cent.

That would be quite the Christmas bonus.