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The World
Stocks slipped but closed out November with hefty gains, capping a furious month-long rally fueled by bets that scientists are closer than ever to finalizing vaccines to fight the pandemic. The Dow Jones rose 12%, marking its best month since January 1987. The S&P 500 soared 11% for its best showing since April, while the Nasdaq climbed 12%. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar is set for its worst month since July as the global outlook brightens; the Euro hit $1.20 for first time since September. (Wall Street Journal, Financial Times)
Fed chair Jerome Powell called the economic recovery “extraordinarily uncertain.” Meanwhile, the nation’s weekly unemployment statistics have been plagued by backlogs, fraud and inconsistent data reporting state by state, making them a seriously flawed measurement that has likely overstated the number of individuals claiming unemployment, according to the GAO. Meanwhile, the UK has drawn up a secret dossier detailing the impact of coronavirus on the economy, with a dozen sectors rated “red” and facing significant job cuts and revenue losses, including: aerospace, the automotive industry, retail, hospitality and tourism, arts and heritage, maritime, including ferries and cruises, and sport. (CNN, Washington Post, The Times)
Scott Atlas, President Trump’s pandemic adviser, resigned. New York Gov. Cuomo fears a “nightmare of overwhelmed hospitals,” and CA Gov. Newsom warns of “drastic action” as California’s ICU beds could be full before Christmas. Meanwhile, Moderna has asked U.S. and EU regulators to authorize its vaccine, as dozens of supermarkets and pharmacies, including Albertsons, CVS, and Kroger, are set to become an integral part of administering vaccines. Meanwhile, the University of Florida denied 144 professors the ability to teach remotely this Spring. New polling: 68% of U.S. adults would support stay-at-home orders, while 26% oppose. The partisan divide is wide, with 81% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans saying they would support stay-at-home orders. 68% of adults support statewide face mask mandates that carry penalties like fines or jail time, while 28% . Thanks to Mitch McConnell, senators are learning the hard way: No free lunch. (Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, The Alligator, Morning Consult, Politico)
Following a successful trial with United Airlines, four more major airlines — JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic — plan to roll out a digital health pass for international travel, called CommonPass, in December for passengers flying out from NY, Boston, London and Hong Kong. The technology allows travelers to document their Covid-19 status electronically and present it when boarding an airplane or crossing a border. (HealthcareDive)
A U.S. aircraft carrier group led by USS Nimitz was repositioned in the Gulf, after the dispatch last week of B52 Stratofortress bombers to Qatar, as Iran buried nuclear chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Meanwhile, an Egyptian newspaper reports Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu is preparing for an official visit to Egypt — and Saudi Arabia approved Israeli use of airspace hours before maiden flight to UAE. China put into effect a new export control law that to block shipments to foreign companies for national security reasons, while Chinese scientists built what they claim is a revolutionary plane engine for Mach 16 flight. An aircraft powered by the engine could reach anywhere in the world within two hours, they said. Separately, Australia-China tensions ratchet up over a doctored photo posted on Twitter showing an Australian soldier killing an Afghan child. (The Times, Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Nikkei Asian Review, South China Morning Post, Axios)
Half or more people across all 10 NATO countries surveyed have a positive view of the organization, ranging from a high of 79% in Denmark to 50% in France. Among Americans, 57% have a favorable view of NATO, with only 25% expressing an unfavorable opinion. (Pew Research Center)
Ford is prodding automakers to embrace more stringent automotive clean air standards set by California. The plea comes a week after General Motors Co. dropped its support for Trump’s efforts to strip California of its authority on auto emissions. (Bloomberg)
One of biology's biggest mysteries is “largely solved” by AI: An artificial-intelligence (AI) network developed by Google offshoot DeepMind has made enormous progress in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The breakthrough is likely to transform biology, say scientists, and should aid in drug design. AlphaFold came out on top, by far, in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. AlphaFold’s predictions are comparable in quality to structures determined experimentally by X-ray crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” says evolutionary biologist Andrei Lupas. (BBC News, Nature, DeepMind)
A skeptical Supreme Court reacted with frustration and some confusion to President Trump’s plan to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the calculations used to allocate seats in the House. After over 90 minutes of debate, several justices seemed skeptical of the legality of Trump’s plan. Meanwhile, the Court also indicated serious reservations about the ambiguity and scope of the nation’s only major cybercrime law, hinting it may narrow the law’s applicability to avoid criminalizing such acts as checking social media at work. (New York Times, SCOTUSBlog, Politico)
Economy
JPMorgan traders are set for up to a 20% bonus jump, even as payouts are set to decline across the company, after the business generated a record $23.5 billion of revenue in the first nine months of the year. Payouts will vary widely among desks depending on performance, and bonuses could still change as the process is in an early stage. (Bloomberg)
S&P 500 to swallow Tesla in one gulp: Tesla shares jumped 4% in extended trade on Monday after S&P Dow Jones Indices said it would add one of Wall Street’s most valuable companies to the S&P 500 index all at once on Dec. 21. (Reuters)
As studies continue to show women disproportionately leaving the workplace in 2020 — with more than 860,000 women dropping out of the labor force in September — EY Parthenon Partners and ReBoot Accel launched a Women in Transactions professional development network in July, focusing on unconscious bias, growth mindset, virtual M&A execution, defining transaction success. (ReBoot Accel, CNBC, National Women’s Law Center)
Morning Consult polling in September and November reveals a 27% increase in the share of Americans citing discomfort shopping in stores as the reason for increased reliance on Cyber Monday. 50% of shoppers plan to do most of their holiday shopping online, with pandemic-related safety concerns as the top-cited reason. 23% plan to stay offline and instead shop predominantly in stores. (Morning Consult)
A quarter of workers have “much more” annual leave left than this time last year, averaging 17 days still to take at a time when there are only 27 working days left in the year. (YouGov UK)
The next clean tech boom is coming. Here’s why it will be different: Last decade’s clean-tech gold rush ended in disaster, wiping out billions in investments and scaring venture capitalists away for years. But a new investment boom is building again, this time around a broader set of climate-related technologies. Funding has soared more than 3,750% since 2013. And it’s being further buoyed up by President-elect Joe Biden’s pledge to push through climate-friendly policies, and growing numbers of states, nations, and corporations committing to achieve net zero emissions — likely to spark even further private investment in cleantech and renewable energy. (MIT Technology Review, Crunchbase)
Technology
Zoom Video Communications obliterated 3Q20 earnings estimates — and then shares fell in extended trading. Investors seemed disappointed that the rate of revenue growth, which has accelerated this year, could moderate. Meanwhile, Salesforce’s deal to buy Slack is expected to be announced today after market close. (CNBC, Deadline, CNBC-2)
Amazon detailed the cause of AWS outage that hobbled thousands of online sites and services: A “relatively small addition of capacity” to the Amazon Kinesis real-time data processing service triggered it. The addition “caused all of the servers in the fleet to exceed the maximum number of threads allowed by an operating system configuration,” creating a cascade of resulting problems that took down thousands of sites and services. (GeekWire, AWS)
Telecoms providers must stop installing Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G mobile network from September. The government announcement came ahead of a law being unveiled, which bans the Chinese firm from the network. (BBC News)
New Gartner numbers indicate some recovery underway for the smartphone market as vendors roll out new 5G handsets. Q3 smartphone figures showed that smartphone unit sales were 366 million units, a decline of 5.7% globally compared to the same period last year — a drop, but still a clear improvement on 1H20, when sales slumped by 20% in each quarter. While sales on Thursday and Black Friday were at the lower end of predicted estimates, they still set records over previous years. On top of that, last IDC predicts that sales will grow 2.4% in Q4 compared to 2019’s Q4. (TechCrunch, IDC)
TikTok stars and YouTube gamers are the new climate warriors: Millennials and Gen Z are shaping climate policy like no other generation before. (Bloomberg Green)
Smart Links
First blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer's goes public. (Axios)
Unilever to test 4-day working week in New Zealand. (Financial Times)
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to exit commission after Biden takes office. (Variety)
Microsoft patents tech to score meetings using body language, facial expressions, other data. (GeekWire)
U.K. mortgage approvals hit 10-year record. (Mansion Global)
Median home price sets new record in California. (New York Times)
Foreign buyers spent $800M on Austin-area homes in one year. (Austin American-Statesman)
Learn More (Today, 5 pm ET): The 2020 Gleitsman International Activist Award featuring the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand. The conversation will be moderated by Amb. Wendy R. Sherman. (Harvard Kennedy School)