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The World
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan defended her approach to antitrust enforcement at an event Monday, as the agency has attracted a barrage of criticism from the business community. “The role of the FTC is not to have our own personal philosophical beliefs about the virtues of big versus small. It’s really about the statutes,” Khan said during a Q&A session at The Economic Club of New York. “Congress, when passing the antitrust statutes, was setting out a policy preference, in many cases, for competition over monopoly,” Khan said. “That said, the statutes don’t prohibit being a monopoly. They only prohibit becoming a monopoly through illegal tactics. And so that’s the sort of thing that we look at.” Khan later added that the FTC views mergers through the paradigm of competition, “but there are certainly instances in which you need to have big firms to be able to deliver the types of services and scale that we need.” (CNBC)
Israel's parliament ratified the first bill of a judicial overhaul sought by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after last-gasp compromise efforts collapsed and failed to ease a constitutional crisis convulsing the country for months. The amendment limiting the Supreme Court's powers to void some government decisions if it deemed them "unreasonable" passed by a 64-to-0 vote after opposition lawmakers abandoned the session in protest, some of them shouting: "For shame!" (Reuters)
Israeli startups act to relocate over judicial shakeup, survey finds: Nearly 70% of Israeli startups have taken action to relocate parts of their business outside Israel, a survey released on Sunday by an Israeli non-profit organization on the government's planned judicial overhaul found.
Medical Association announces 24-hour general strike Tuesday in healthcare system. (Times of Israel)
U.S. Weighs Potential Deal With China on Fentanyl: The Biden administration is discussing lifting sanctions on a Chinese police forensics institute suspected of participating in human-rights abuses, people familiar with the matter said, in a bid to secure Beijing’s renewed cooperation in fighting the fentanyl crisis. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during meetings in Beijing last month proposed setting up a new working group with China to try to resuscitate stalled talks on combating fentanyl. Chinese officials, however, stuck to their long-held position that the U.S. must first remove the sanctions on the police institute as a precondition for restarting joint counternarcotics work, the people familiar said. (Wall Street Journal)
Election shows Spain still has little interest in reembracing far right: If election night here proved anything, it’s that Spain — a nation with some of the most recent memories in Europe of extreme-right repression, from the Francisco Franco era that ended in 1975 — still has little interest in reembracing the radical right. Vox only marginally underperformed expectations in Sunday’s race, winning a handful fewer seats than some analysts predicted. But when compared with its last national showing in November of 2019, the result stood as a stark defeat. The party slipped from 15 percent to 12 percent of the vote and lost 19 of its 52 preliminary seats. In one region where Vox is already co-ruling in local government — Castilla y León — it lost five of its six seats. (Washington Post)
Japan bakes as residents warned of once-in-a-decade, life-threatening temperatures: The national weather agency says the stifling heat will last until at least early August, with spot temperatures likely to cross 40 degrees Celsius. People have been urged to take precautions and stay home if possible, with emergency services prepared for a rush of patients needing treatment. (South China Morning Post)
Heat wave expands across the U.S., as Southwest continues to swelter: The heat wave roasting much of the U.S. for weeks is expanding its reach to the Great Basin, parts of the Rockies, and will eventually extend eastward across the Plains, Midwest and East Coast by the end of the week. As of Monday evening, heat alerts stretched in patches from South Florida, where yet another "Excessive Heat Warning" was in effect for Miami, northwestward to Montana. This affected over 80 million people, and more alerts are expected to be issued as the heat dome responsible for this weather sprawls out further, before eventually retreating southward and sticking around through August. (Axios)
Economy
US regulator reports rising number of flawed audits: US regulators have seen a jump in the number of flawed audits carried out by global accounting firms, according to figures released on Monday night that point to the difficulties of high staff turnover and hybrid work. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said that its inspectors found deficiencies in 30 per cent of audits carried out by the US businesses of the global network firms — the Big Four of Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and EY, plus Grant Thornton and BDO — last year. That was up from 21 per cent of audits inspected in 2021. There was an even bigger increase in failures in the work of the firms’ non-US businesses, where the deficiency rate rose to 31 per cent from 17 per cent. (Financial Times)
The South Korean economy grew faster than predicted in the second quarter, despite a decline in exports. Quarterly growth in the April-June period came to 0.6%, up from 0.3% the previous quarter, according to the Bank of Korea. Gross domestic product contracted 0.4% in the fourth quarter of last year. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Cerberus Capital Management and Highgate missed two months of payments on a $415 million loan for 30 Courtyard by Marriott hotels, another sign of spreading trouble in commercial real estate. Cerberus and Highgate have requested an extension of the floating-rate loan, which matured in July, according to a servicer report. (Bloomberg)
Stripe will hire at most 1,000 new employees through 2024, which would represent an increase of 12% from its current headcount. (The Information)
Technology
Apple faces $1 bln UK lawsuit by apps developers over app store fees: Apple found itself the target of a 785-million-pound ($1 billion) class action lawsuit brought by more than 1,500 apps developers in the UK over its App Store fees. The commissions of 15% to 30% that the company charges some app makers for use of an in-app payment system has been criticized by apps developers and targeted by antitrust regulators in several countries. (Reuters)
TikTok takes on Spotify, Apple Music as it expands into music streaming: TikTok launched its music streaming service this month in Indonesia and Brazil — its second and third-largest markets. It is also testing TikTok Music in Australia, Mexico and Singapore. “There’s already this large installed base of users which TikTok can convert into paying TikTok Music subscribers – with a relatively low customer acquisition cost,” Jonathan Woo of Phillip Securities Research told CNBC. Tatiana Cirisano, music analyst at MiDIA Research, said that a heavy TikTok user may just “be willing to switch over to TikTok Music.” (CNBC)
Job applicants are battling AI résumé filters with a hack. The concept is simple: Copy a list of relevant keywords or the job description itself, paste it in a résumé and change the font color to white. The hope is that AI bots or digital filters in applicant tracking systems read the white text and surface the résumé for human review. Because keywords are in white, the résumé will look normal to human reviewers. (Washington Post)
Study finds ChatGPT boosts worker productivity for some writing tasks: Amid a huge amount of hype around generative AI, a new study from researchers at MIT sheds light on the technology’s impact on work, finding that it increased productivity for workers assigned tasks like writing cover letters, delicate emails, and cost-benefit analyses. The tasks in the study weren’t quite replicas of real work: They didn’t require precise factual accuracy or context about things like a company’s goals or a customer’s preferences. Still, a number of the study’s participants said the assignments were similar to things they’d written in their real jobs — and the benefits were substantial. Access to the assistive chatbot ChatGPT decreased the time it took workers to complete the tasks by 40 percent, and output quality, as measured by independent evaluators, rose by 18 percent. (MIT News)
Smart Links
A ‘she-cession’ no more: After COVID dip, women’s employment hits all-time high. (Chicago Tribune)
Wall Street Is Bracing for a Fresh Deluge of Treasury Bills. (Bloomberg)
Bayer to take €2.5bn writedown on falling glyphosate prices. (Financial Times)
Credit Suisse fined $388mn over Archegos collapse. (Financial Times)
IPO Market Awakens From Long Slumber. (Wall Street Journal)