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The World
World leaders at Davos discussed “how to prevent the threat of another cataclysmic pandemic,” which they dubbed “Disease X.” News of the seminar “ignited a heated debate on social media, where “conspiracy theories proliferated, with some warning that potential measures could parallel the shutdown orders put in place” during the COVID pandemic. (USA Today)
China Lab Mapped Deadly Coronavirus Two Weeks Before Beijing Told World: Chinese researchers “isolated and mapped the virus” that causes COVID-19 “at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.” (Wall Street Journal)
China and India “are bolstering satellite networks to monitor military moves in the region.” China operated 136 reconnaissance satellites in 2022, up from 66 three years earlier. India “has launched a series of radar imaging satellites (RISAT), expanding the fleet from 12 satellites in 2019 to 16. Japan and South Korea also seek to expand their satellite fleets with an eye on China and North Korea.” (Nikkei Asia)
China's population fell for a second consecutive year last year, with official data saying the total population “dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023. That was well above the population decline of 850,000 in 2022, which had been the first since 1961 during the Great Famine of the Mao Zedong era.” (Reuters)
Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani “vowed that his country would ‘not set any limits’ on using its missile capabilities against enemies whenever necessary.” He told reporters, “We are a missile power in the world. Wherever they want to threaten the Islamic Republic of Iran, we will react, and this reaction will definitely be proportionate, tough, and decisive.” (New York Times)
President Biden “convened top congressional leaders at the White House to underscore Ukraine’s security needs,” but GOP leaders “used the face-to-face moment with Biden to push him for tougher border security measures, with the speaker telling the president that GOP lawmakers were demanding ‘substantive policy change.’” (Associated Press)
Earlier Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson “voiced his skepticism of a deal being crafted in the Senate to pair border and migration policy changes with Ukraine aid, and said that now is not the time for comprehensive immigration reform.” (The Hill)
But “leading Senate Republicans are warning their House colleagues not to play political games with the current immigration negotiations because they won’t get a better deal down the road under a potential second Donald Trump presidency.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters, “To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t. You got to get 60 votes in the United States Senate.” (NBC News)
A divided Supreme Court debated whether and how to curtail the power of federal agencies, with liberals urging the court to defer to the judgment of government experts, and conservatives saying judges should not systematically favor government regulators over private companies, industry or individuals in litigation. The high court was considering challenges to federal rules requiring commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitors. But the court’s decision has the potential to significantly limit the flexibility of federal agencies to regulate vast swaths of American life, including the environment, financial markets, public health and the workplace. (Washington Post)
The FAA said that “inspections of an initial group of 40 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes have been completed, a key hurdle to eventually ungrounding the planes.” The FAA said last week that 40 out of 171 grounded planes needed to be reinspected before it would consider lifting the grounding order. (Reuters)
Boeing 737 Malfunction Leaves Antony Blinken Stranded In Switzerland. (Forbes)
The American Cancer Society says new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. are expected to top two million for the first time this year, “driven in large part by an alarming increase in cancers among younger Americans.” (Axios)
Economy
Global stocks drop as hopes fade for early interest rate cuts: Global stocks and bond markets retreated as investors scaled back expectations of swift interest rate cuts in the eurozone, the UK and the US. The worldwide sell-off came after European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde signalled that borrowing costs would come down in the summer rather than spring. It also followed the first rise in UK inflation in 10 months. Lagarde said market expectations for an ECB rate cut this spring were “not helping” the fight against inflation. (Financial Times)
Argentina’s President Javier Milei “accused western leaders of abandoning ‘the values of the west’ in a high-profile address to the World Economic Forum, marking a dramatic debut on the world stage.” Milei said that “collectivism” and “radical feminism” have resulted in “a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and therefore to poverty.” (Financial Times)
Half of Japan firms look at restructuring to boost performance. (Reuters)
Retail sales “increased more than expected in December, boosted by motor vehicle and online purchases, keeping the economy on solid ground heading into the new year.” The Commerce Department said retail sales rose 0.6% last month, outpacing economists’ predictions of a 0.4% increase. (Reuters)
Fed’s Beige Book Shows Strong Consumer, Cooling Labor Market (Bloomberg)
JPMorgan Chase now fights off about 45 billion attempts a day by hackers to infiltrate its systems. That’s double what it was last year, highlighting the escalating cybersecurity challenges the bank and other Wall Street titans are facing. JPMorgan Chase now invests $15 billion a year and employs 62,000 technologists to fortify its defense against cyber crimes, said Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase’s asset and wealth management division, at the World Economic Forum. (CNN)
Saudi Arabia will continue to seek stronger economic ties with China, Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Alibrahim said. In an interview at Davos, Alibrahim said, “We have a strong trade relationship with China. And we think it's very wise to continue strengthening that relationship with China as well as our other partners.” (Nikkei Asia)
Technology
Google CEO: Job Cuts Will Continue Through 2024. Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the company’s recent wave of layoffs for the first time, warning staff in an email that cuts would continue throughout the year, according to a person with direct knowledge of the email. Google in the past week laid off more than 1,000 people across teams including hardware, ad sales and Google Assistant, mirroring recent job cuts at other major companies such as Amazon and Meta Platforms. Google had 182,381 employees as of September, meaning the cuts are tiny on a percentage basis. A year ago, it cut 6% of its staff at the time, or 12,000 people, but Pichai said cuts this year wouldn’t rise to that level. (The Information)
Apple’s new App Store payment policies are stirring outrage among software developers who say the iPhone maker is skirting the intention of a court ruling. Apple issued new policies that require developers to pay it a 27% commission if they use an alternative payment method, much like the company did in the Netherlands and South Korea in response to legal rulings over related issues in those countries. With this change, Apple is effectively saying “we refuse to back down,” said Fiona M. Scott Morton, a former antitrust official in the Obama administration. “It’s a clear statement by Apple that they intend to fight.” (Wall Street Journal)
The ban on imports of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 will be reinstated today after a federal appeals court denied Apple’s motion for a stay while it appeals a U.S. International Trade Commission ruling that went into effect last month. (CNN)
Chinese firm Transsion, “the top smartphone seller in Africa, posted the highest annual growth in smartphone shipments in 2023 of the top five phone makers in the world.” Transsion “shipped 95 million units of smartphones last year, 30.8% more than it did in 2022.” That topped Apple’s 3.7% growth, “while Samsung, Xiaomi and OPPO each shipped fewer phones” in 2023 than in 2022. (Semafor)
Samsung turns to artificial intelligence to revive stagnant smartphone market (Financial Times)
Verizon will take a $5.8 billion charge “to write down the value of the division that offers such services to a range of companies from small retailers to multinational corporations.” The division “generated $22.5 billion of revenue over the first nine months of 2023, down 2.9% from a year earlier.” (Wall Street Journal)
The slowdown in electric vehicle sales “has led General Motors, Ford Motor and Volkswagen to walk back ambitious targets for those vehicles. And sales of hybrids are robust, underscoring what may be the enduring reality check of 2023: Many Americans are hugely receptive to electrification, but they’re not ready for a fully electric car.” (New York Times)
Smart Links
Big banks to pay $9 billion tab to cover last year’s bailouts (Axios)
Big pharma wants in on the fast-growing online prescription market. (STAT News)
Investors raise billions to buy discounted stakes in start-ups (Financial Times)
Sheryl Sandberg to Leave Meta Platforms Board After 12 Years. (Wall Street Journal)
Amazon will invest in Diamond Sports as part of a bankruptcy restructuring agreement (Associated Press)
Tesla’s Cybertruck is having trouble living up to the hype (The Verge)