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The World
The U.S. economy’s 2021 growth surge likely peaked in the spring, but a strong expansion is expected to continue into next year, says economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. But that burst of economic growth is starting to slow, economists say. “We’ve moved into the more moderate phase of expansion,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. “We’re past the peak for growth, but that doesn’t mean something more sinister is going on here and that we’re poised to then drop off sharply.” (Wall Street Journal)
Republican Senators rejected a plan to spend $40bn more on tax enforcement to help pay for a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure package. Sen. Rob Portman, one of 22 members negotiating the deal, said his colleagues had decided not to include a proposal to strengthen the IRS after pushback from his fellow Republicans. (Financial Times)
OPEC+ agreed to boost oil output by 400,000 a day as demand roars back, moving to restore capacity they cut at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. (Wall Street Journal)
Asia's nascent market for buying and selling carbon emissions has been boosted after China, the world's biggest polluter, launched a long-awaited national trading system. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Quad members the U.S., Australia and Japan, along with eight other countries, began joint exercises in Australia and its nearby waters through July as military tensions simmer in the Taiwan Strait and near the Senkaku Islands. China has sent intelligence-gathering ship to nearby waters. (Nikkei Asian Review)
The long-feared possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic could disrupt the Tokyo Olympics is rapidly emerging as a reality, as Games organizers scramble to deal with a rising load of athletes and officials who are testing positive upon arrival in Japan. The stream of positive cases is quickly demonstrating how difficult it will be to stage one of the world’s largest events during a global pandemic. U.S. tennis player Coco Gauff has tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing her to pull out of the Tokyo Olympics. In all, 55 people connected to the Olympics, including officials and contractors working on the Summer Games, have tested positive since July 1, according to data from the organizers. (Wall Street Journal, ESPN)
Three of Britain’s most senior cabinet ministers — including prime minister Boris Johnson — will be self-isolating on England’s so-called “Freedom Day” today, highlighting the surge in Covid-19 cases just as the country throws off its last pandemic restrictions. Meanwhile, Britain could have 200,000 new coronavirus cases a day by mid-August, a leading scientific adviser has warned, while a new poll reveals most voters don’t back unlocking. (Financial Times, The Times)
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said he supports individual counties reinstating mask mandates to combat local surges of the coronavirus among unvaccinated people. (Washington Post)
Vaccine inequity: Inside the cutthroat race to secure doses. No one disputes that the world is unfair. But no one expected a vaccine gap between the global rich and poor that was this bad, this far into the pandemic. Inequity is everywhere: Inoculations go begging in the U.S. while Haiti, a short plane ride away, received its first delivery July 15 after months of promises — 500,000 doses for a population over 11 million. Canada has procured more than 10 doses for every resident; Sierra Leone’s vaccination rate just cracked 1% on June 20. (Associated Press)
The devastating collapse of the condo building in Florida isn’t likely to end coastal living but make it less accessible to the masses. As regulatory measures increase as a result of the collapse, it is likely that developers in south Florida may simply replace the more-affordable condos built before the 1990s and replace them with luxury towers that only the wealthy can afford. (Bloomberg)
41 candidates have met the qualifications to run in the California gubernatorial recall election, less than a third of the number who ran in the state's memorable 2003 contest and well below what some political experts months ago had predicted. Republicans comprise roughly half the field with 21 candidates, ranging from former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer to reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner. The recall field is notably absent of prominent Democratic politicians after Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign successfully deterred other leaders in his party from giving their voters an attractive option. (Politico)
Economy
Costs at the top US banks jumped more than $6.6bn, or 10%, in the most recent quarter compared with the same period of last year as executives paid up for talent and technology to fortify their businesses against increasing competition from nearly every angle. The increase in spending at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citigroup surprised analysts. Many had predicted that banks’ expenses would fall modestly this year as the extra costs associated with doing business during the pandemic faded away. (Financial Times)
Europe grabbed a bigger slice of record venture pie: Venture funding to startups in Europe in 1H21 totaled an unprecedented $59 billion, up from $18.5 billion for 1H20. The continent is also gaining a bigger share of the world’s venture investment, now at 20 percent of the record amount of global VC funding deployed in H1 2021. (Crunchbase)
Funding to Black women minuscule but rising: While Black female startup founders have received just 0.34 percent of the total venture capital spent in the U.S. so far this year — a far cry from being representative — the dollars invested in their companies is on the rise. (Crunchbase)
Women have long been underrepresented in Wikipedia, but a new study found that they are also more likely to be nominated for deletion. Women made up 25% of Wiki pages nominated for deletion despite accounting for less than a quarter of biographies. (NPR)
Facebook's 2021 diversity report is out, and women now make up a smaller share of the company's workforce—36.7%—than they did a year ago. That's the first time that number has dropped since Facebook began publishing a diversity report; the company attributes the decline to increased hiring for technical roles, which still tend to be male-dominated. (Fortune)
Benchmark mortgage rates continued their downward trajectory over the past week, following Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s indications to lawmakers that the central bank wasn’t changing up its strategy anytime soon. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 2.88% for the week ending July 15. Since peaking at 3.18% in April, the rate on the 30-year mortgage has now fallen nearly one-third of 1%. (MarketWatch)
As U.S. home prices surge, buyers set their sights on Europe: With travel opening up to the European Union, second-home markets in countries like Italy, Portugal and Greece have seen an uptick in interest from Americans. (Wall Street Journal)
Stablecoins, digital currencies pegged to national currencies like the U.S. dollar, are increasingly seen as a potential risk not just to crypto markets, but to the capital markets as well. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is scheduled today to hold a meeting of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets to discuss stablecoins, the Treasury Department said Friday. The group includes the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (Wall Street Journal)
Technology
Person you should know: FTC Chair Lina Kahn:
Big Tech is trying to disarm the FTC by going after its biggest weapon: Lina Khan. Amazon and Facebook have filed petitions seeking the FTC chair’s recusal in antitrust cases involving their companies. Khan’s confirmation to the FTC and appointment to lead the agency presents one of the clearest threats of major regulatory action in the tech sector in years. By seeking to recuse Khan, the companies are going after one of the biggest antitrust weapons the FTC has and, whether Khan is recused or not, the decision could muck up the antitrust charges against either company. (CNBC)
Facebook and Amazon want Khan’s recusal at the FTC. What now? Any action against Facebook and Amazon will be tougher if either can prompt the FTC chair to recuse herself, but the companies don't need to succeed to make the agency's work a slog. (Protocol)
Who is Lina Kahn? After graduating from Williams College in 2010, Khan joined the New America Foundation, where she conducted anti-monopoly research. After law school, she worked for a year as the legal director of the newly formed Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on the dangers of monopoly abuse, before joining the staff of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. In October 2020, Khan joined Columbia Law School as an associate professor, a job she's currently on leave from to serve in the FTC. Khan argues the old interpretation misses threats. The dominance of Big Tech can drive competitors from the market, leaving us with few other choices for shopping, socializing online and searching the web. It concentrates economic and political power in the hands of a small group of businesses and their leaders, "empowering the interests of a few to steer collective outcomes," she wrote as a student in an article published in the Yale Law Journal. (CNET, Yale Law Journal)
Zoom gave its employees gigantic pandemic bonuses. Since the company's share prices skyrocketed over the past year, those share handouts are now worth about $171,000 to each employee. (Protocol)
Netflix to court older viewers as flow of young fans slows down: Netflix is set to report the smallest growth in subscribers in a decade next week, as the flow of young fans who have fueled its meteoric rise slows down, leading it to target tech-wary over-55s. The streaming giant expects to have added just 1 million new subscribers when it reports second quarter results on Tuesday, the lowest number of new signups since 2011, when it was splitting its postal DVD and streaming operations. (The Guardian)
Netflix will start emailing parents about the content their kids are consuming (but not police on the amount of screen time). As the family living room becomes a key battleground in the global streaming wars, Netflix’s emails hope to put a bigger emphasis on ways to create shared family time rather than only noting what content kids are interested in these days. (Protocol)
Smart Links
Zoom to buy Five9 for $14.7 billion to shore up video calls. (Bloomberg)
House Republicans outraise Democrats in midterms funding battle. (Financial Times)
China unveils design for first waterless nuclear reactor. (South China Morning Post)
New ways to work anywhere in the world. (Wall Street Journal)
ACA marketplace snags 2M sign ups during pandemic's special enrollment period. (Healthcare Dive)
Artificial life made in lab can grow and divide like natural bacteria. (New Scientist)
Italian museum uses cameras to monitor people looking at artwork, define a work of art's “attraction value” and accordingly change museum layouts. (Bloomberg)