TheChek News Flow

NEW YORK TIMES

• Front page story reports “Some companies are beginning to restore cuts they made to managers’ salaries and bonuses, a sign that some industries—and their white-collar workers—are benefiting from glimmers of a recovery while millions of others continue to endure job and income losses.”

• Billions of dollars in federal funds earmarked for boosting nationwide Covid-19 testing remain unspent months after Congress made the money available, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.• The US economy picked up momentum this month as firms shook off the effects of the pandemic-induced downturn, though recoveries in other parts of the world slowed, according to new surveys of purchasing managers.

• The Trump administration and the European Union agreed Friday to a limited tariff rollback, providing relief to American lobster exports and to a range of European items, and providing a boost to strained US-EU trade relations.

• A Trump administration medical commission found that nursing homes need an aggressive federal approach to the Covid-19 crisis, including supplying personal protective gear, assisting with staffing shortages, and offering rapid coronavirus testing.

• Story says Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to cancel a substantial portion of Americans’ $1.5T in federal student debt—while maintaining the loose lending standards that contributed to its rapid growth.

• Investors in Israel and the United Arab Emirates are moving to strike deals in a business environment transformed by the recent diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries.

• A decades long effort to eke out more profit by keeping inventory low left many manufacturers of items such as paper towels unprepared when Covid-19 struck, and production is unlikely to ramp up significantly any time soon.

• The rapid adoption of remote work and automation could accelerate inequalities already in place for decades, and economists say the resulting ‘K’ shaped recovery will be good for professionals—and bad for everyone else.

• Natural gas prices have shot up 66 percent since late June, and speculators are betting they will keep climbing, but the companies that control the country’s spigots aren’t so sure, and some are holding back on moves to ramp up production.

• Keith Krach, the Trump administration’s undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, encouraged university endowments to divest Chinese stocks and disclose Chinese assets held in their index funds.

• H.O.T.S.: “Shares of the leading online sports betting companies have skyrocketed as investors wager on the future of wagering”; Even before the global pandemic, UBER and LYFT shares were generating largely disappointing returns since going public, and their premium had already waned; Amid the excitement over STMP, the market is starting to see the greater potential of a century-old competitor usually associated with the US Postal Service.

• “The eurozone’s economic rebound from the pandemic is losing steam as a recent rise in Covid-19 cases across the bloc triggered local lockdowns and raised doubts over the strength of the recovery.”

• Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is set to travel to Germany for specialist medical treatment as the country’s most prominent critic of the Kremlin remains in a coma after a suspected poisoning led his relatives to claim his life was in danger should he remain in Russia.

• The coronavirus is spreading faster in Spain than in the rest of Europe, forcing the country to race against time to control the outbreak before people return to school and work after the summer holiday season.

• Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erodgan said the country has made a major natural gas discovery in the Black Sea, in what he said could be a means to help improve the country’s troubled economy and its energy security.

• Hong Kong will formally challenge a US demand that it change the way it labels exports as the city seeks to manage the international fallout from Beijing’s imposition of a stringent new national security law in the territory.

• Big Read piece on Huawei says “Washington’s latest sanctions have been likened to a ‘death sentence’ for the Chinese telecom group, removing its access to essential parts, but that judgment could be premature if Beijing decides to intervene.”

• Lex Column: Bayer often chooses to settle legal claims, but it will take robust action when it comes to weaker ones; “The problem for retailers is that doing customers’ shopping and delivering it to their door is mostly unprofitable”; As Beijing’s influence grows, expect its brokers to take a larger share of deals left on the table by foreign rivals.”

• Comment: “A banking crisis, while not inconceivable, does not feel imminent,” says John Plander. “The underlying problem in property may be seen as an extension of the corporate sector’s wider problem with excessive debt.”

• +/- AMZN: Executive Jeff Wilke, who has been with the company for 20 years and was once considered a possible successor to chief Jeff Bezos, will retire next year as he completes two final projects: rolling out the Amazon Go convenience stores and bringing the technology to Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary.

• Craft distilleries in the US expect to lose about 40 percent of their sales because the coronavirus has made it harder to pour drinks for visitors touring their facilities.

• Trump will speak each of the four nights of the Republican National Convention to deliver an uplifting message to the American people, a campaign adviser said on Sunday.

• Scientists say an asteroid 6.5 feet in diameter is on a direct collision course to Earth, projected to hit a day before the presidential elections in November.

• TikTok said that it has removed more than 380,000 videos in the US for violating its hate speech policy so far this year, and that it has a zero-tolerance policy on hate groups and on content that denies the Holocaust, slavery, and other tragedies.