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The World
EU leaders agreed to co-ordinate with allies over potential sanctions against Russia in the event of an invasion of Ukraine, and charged the bloc’s officials with preparing measures that could include cutting Russian banks off from the international Swift network. Under pressure from the US to join Washington in warning of crippling financial restrictions against Moscow aimed at deterring President Putin from any military action, they agreed in a closed-door meeting in Brussels to draw up options for potential sanctions. (Financial Times)
Europe’s foremost central banks took diverging policy paths a day after the Fed set the stage for rate rises in 2022, differing approaches that underscore the challenges for policy makers as they balance surging inflation and renewed risks to growth from the fast-spreading Omicron variant. The Bank of England became the first of the world’s major central banks to raise its benchmark interest rate since the pandemic began, while the ECB said it would phase out an emergency bond-buying program while ramping up other stimulus measures to keep the 19-nation eurozone’s recovery on track. (Wall Street Journal)
The Bank of Japan decided to wrap up some of its emergency COVID monetary stimulus measures during a two-day policy meeting that ended today. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Democrats began to concede that they may not be able to adopt a roughly $2 trillion package to overhaul the country’s health care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws before the end of this year, threatening a major political setback for the final piece of President Biden’s economic agenda. (Washington Post)
France will block entry to UK tourists, tightening its border restrictions in an effort to slow the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. (Financial Times)
Delta Air Lines chief warns of hit to air travel from Omicron, expects 1Q22 will be affected as restrictions increase. (Financial Times)
Emory University has mandated COVID booster shots for students and staff. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Goldman Sachs orders New York bankers to cancel parties. (Financial Times)
The US has put China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 affiliated biotechnology research institutes on an export blacklist for allegedly helping the Chinese military to develop “brain-control” weapons. The US commerce department on Thursday put the research institutes on the “entity list”, which bars US companies from exporting technology that originated in America to the Chinese institutions. “China is choosing to use these technologies to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups,” said Gina Raimondo, US commerce secretary. (Financial Times)
KPMG is one of several big businesses in Hong Kong encouraging staff to vote in what the government is billing as a “patriots-only” election for the city’s legislature, as authorities worry about low turnout in the poll. The Big Four auditing firm has offered staff an extra day off if they exercise their “privilege to vote” in the elections on Sunday for the Legislative Council. (Financial Times)
China is calling for more global talent to bolster technological innovation and national power, amid growing concern from foreign investors that Beijing’s “dual-circulation” strategy might turn it further inward and hamper international collaboration. China will “exhaust all means” to recruit intelligent and innovative professionals from around the world, President Xi Jinping said in a speech in September. The transcript, published on Thursday on Qiushi, a state journal covering the Chinese Communist Party’s governing philosophy, laid out a specific timetable for China to become a world power in science and technology within two decades. (South China Morning Post)
The Senate voted 75-18 to confirm Nicholas Burns as U.S. ambassador to China. (Axios)
Economy
China has revised down the size of its economy and growth rate for 2020 with Beijing increasingly worried about mounting headwinds and a further slowdown in economic activities. Authorities revised down China’s 2020 gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate to 2.2% YoY, down from 2.3% previously. Beijing did not publish a GDP growth target for 2020 for the first time in decades, as it struggled with the impact of the coronavirus. (South China Morning Post)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a 50% rise in the country’s minimum wage in an effort to protect the Turkish people from soaring inflation just hours after the country’s central bank cut interest rates for the fourth consecutive month. Erdogan, whose ruling party has suffered an erosion of support in the polls amid a sharp slide in the lira and rising living costs, hailed the increase as a “historic” pay boost for the country’s workers, about 40 per cent of whom earn the minimum wage. (Financial Times)
Electric vehicle maker Rivian confirmed it plans to build a $5 billion assembly plant and battery factory in Georgia, which Gov. Brian Kemp called “the largest single economic development project ever in this state’s history.” Rivian outlined plans to employ 7,500 workers at its factory, a jobs tally state officials have said could grow to 10,000. The plant will be built on a sprawling swath of farmland and pine forest about an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. Georgia beat out Texas and several other states for the vehicle factory. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Oracle is in talks to buy electronic-medical-records company Cerner, a deal that could be worth around $30 billion and push the enterprise-software giant further into healthcare. Should a deal come together, it would rank as the biggest ever for Oracle, which has a market value of more than $280 billion. Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner designs software that hospitals and doctors use to store and analyze medical records and other healthcare data. (Wall Street Journal)
U.S. healthcare spending in 2020 spiked much higher than it has in almost the past two decades as a result of federal spending, mostly on aid, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase was nearly 10%, reaching $4.1 trillion. (Healthcare Dive)
Japanese startups raised a record $3B+ in 1H21, up from $2.37B in 1H20, as China's crackdown leads SoftBank and others to invest in the country. (Bloomberg)
Technology
Apple is hiring engineers for a new office in Southern California to develop wireless chips that could eventually replace components supplied by Broadcom and Skyworks Solutions. It’s part of a broader strategy of expanding satellite offices, letting the tech giant target engineering hotbeds and attract employees who might not want to work at its home base in Silicon Valley. The approach also has helped Apple further its goal of making more of its own components. (Bloomberg)
Popular video-sharing app TikTok said it would adjust its recommendation algorithm to avoid showing users too much of the same content, as social-media platforms globally come under scrutiny for their potential harm to younger users. TikTok said it is testing ways to avoid pushing too much content from a certain topic, such as extreme dieting, sadness or breakups, to individual users to protect their mental well-being. (Wall Street Journal)
Top Washington Post officials are discussing how to respond to a major problem the news outlet is facing: a sharp decline in online readership. Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said she was struck by a presentation showing that in one stretch of 2019, nearly all of the 50 most popular articles on the Post’s home page were related to politics, whereas in the same period of 2021, just three of the top 10 were related to politics. One document provided a stark snapshot: The site had about 66 million monthly unique visitors in October, down 28% from last year. The Post’s digital subscriber growth, meanwhile, has begun to stagnate. The outlet had 2.7 million digital subscribers as of October, according to the internal document, down from roughly three million in January. Some of the people familiar with Post’s operations said the publisher is expected to end up roughly flat in digital subscriptions for the year. (Wall Street Journal)
Alphabet's smart city project is winding down and Google will take over its products. Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced the news in a letter, in which he noted he is stepping down for health-related reasons. (Engadget)
Scams were once again the largest form of cryptocurrency-based crime by transaction volume, with over $7.7 billion worth of cryptocurrency taken from victims worldwide. That represents a rise of 81% compared to 2020, a year in which scamming activity dropped significantly compared to 2019, in large part due to the absence of any large-scale Ponzi schemes. That changed in 2021 with Finiko, a Ponzi scheme primarily targeting Russian speakers throughout Eastern Europe, netting more than $1.1 billion from victims. Another change that contributed to 2021’s increase in scam revenue: the emergence of rug pulls, a relatively new scam type particularly common in the DeFi ecosystem, in which the developers of a cryptocurrency project — typically a new token — abandon it unexpectedly, taking users’ funds with them. (Chainalysis)
Smart Links
Former McDonald’s CEO returns $105 million to settle lawsuit. (Wall Street Journal)
Goldman Sachs sets 2030 carbon emissions reduction targets. (Reuters)
Harvard extends test-optional admissions policy for four years. (New York Times)
What are pro rata rights and has the growth of VC changed them? (Crunchbase)
Spotify is launching podcast user ratings, playing catch-up to Apple. (Variety)