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The World
Pelosi delays infrastructure vote as Democratic rift persists: House Democrats delayed a vote on an approximately $1 trillion proposal to improve the nation’s infrastructure, a dramatic reversal after hours of negotiations that marked a major setback for President Biden’s economic agenda. The decision came after House Speaker Pelosi and other Democratic leaders strained late into the night to try to repair the schisms among their own moderate and liberal ranks, whose distrust of each other turned the public-works bill into a political bargaining chip in a fight over the full array of new spending Biden seeks. (Bloomberg, Washington Post)
Democrats are desperately trying to make lemonade out of the bag of lemons Joe Manchin handed them. Senate Democrats spun away Manchin’s utter rejection of their $3.5 trillion spending dreams and embrace of a $1.5 trillion plan as a positive development, saying that it offered them a path forward for negotiation on a potential deal. When that deal will come to fruition, however, is anyone’s guess. (Politico)
Shutdown averted: Congress approved a measure to fund the government into early December, and President Biden signed the bill hours later, staving off a shutdown that was set to occur after midnight. (Washington Post)
North Korea fired a newly developed anti-aircraft missile, the latest in its recent series of weapons tests amid deadlocked denuclearisation talks with the U.S. It was North Korea's second known weapons test this week after launching a previously unseen hypersonic missile on Tuesday. It has also fired ballistic missiles, and a cruise missile with potential nuclear capabilities, in recent weeks. (Reuters)
China’s population could halve within the next 45 years, a new study warns. Researchers say previous estimates may have severely underestimated the pace of demographic decline. Census data says the birth rate was 1.3 children for each woman last year – well below the level needed to stop the population from falling. (South China Morning Post)
France is trying to persuade the EU to retaliate against Britain over what it sees as Boris Johnson’s use of fishing permits to gain leverage in the migration crisis. Paris is likely to ask for curbs on British fish imports and restrictions on UK students who want to study in the bloc. Annick Girardin, France’s minister for the sea, has suggested that railway links could be dragged into the fishing war too, hinting at blocking Channel tunnel freight and passenger traffic. She said that energy could be another weapon in the hands of France, which exports electricity to the UK. (The Times)
‘Mandates are working’: Employer ultimatums lift vaccination rates, so far. As California’s requirement that all health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus took effect on Thursday, major health systems reported that the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90% or higher. In New York, another mandate that began this week compelled thousands of hospital and nursing home workers to get shots. And at several major corporations, executives reported surges in vaccination rates after adding their own requirements. (New York Times)
Vaccine mandates reach 25% of U.S. companies after Biden’s order, as other 13% of companies plan to put a mandate in place. (Bloomberg)
Record Covid-19 cases reported in Minnesota pre-K-12 schools. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
More than half of states will see nursing demand outstrip supply in the next 5 years, Mercer finds. Other findings include that primary care will increasingly be provided by non-physicians, like physician assistants and nurse practitioners, and demand for mental health providers will rise by more than 10%. (Healthcare Dive)
Senate Republicans and Democrats grilled Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety. Antigone was called to answer questions about Instagram’s impact on the mental health of teens and Facebook’s efforts to build more products targeting children. Multiple senators compared Facebook to the tobacco industry, which for years knowingly hid what it knew about the dangers associated with the products it was selling. “Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product that they know is harmful to the health of young people, pushing it to them early, all so Facebook can make money,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. (CNBC)
A stunning 100% of large-company CEOs polled at a summit of F100 chief executives and political leaders convened by Yale University said that social media platforms posed a threat to pre-teens and teens on critical behaviors like confidence and body image. None of the 50 or so CEOs polled—who represented some of the world’s largest corporations outside of Silicon Valley—said the platforms posed “no threat” or were “neutral/indifferent.” An overwhelming 88% said they disagreed with the statement “I have confidence in the ability and judgement of social media companies in content moderation and policing.” Asked if government should “intervene in the practices of social media giants to mitigate the threats presented to pre-teens and teenagers,” 80% of the CEOs polled said “yes.” (Chief Executive)
Economy
Global M&A activity is shattering all-time records through the first three quarters of 2021. Deal volume topped $4.3 billion, nearly double the year-to-date period for 2020. It's also 34.4% higher than 2007, which was the prior record-holder and one of only two years in which $3 trillion was topped through the end of September. The 2021 data includes $1.52 billion for Q3, which also is an all-timer. Not just for a third quarter, but for any quarter. Q3 also reflected higher average deal sizes, or at least higher disclosed deal sizes, as the number of deals was hundreds below any of the prior four quarters. (Pro Rata)
The S&P 500 notched its worst month since March 2020. The market capped a tumultuous September as inflation fears, slowing growth and rising rates crept up. The S&P 500 finished the month down 4.8%, breaking a seven-month winning streak. The Dow and the Nasdaq Composite fell 4.3% and 5.3%, respectively, suffering their worst months of the year. 10 of the 11 S&P 500 sectors suffered losses in September, led to the downside by a 7.4% monthly drop in materials stocks. Energy is the best performer of the month, gaining more than 9%. (CNBC)
Accounting and consulting firm PwC told Reuters it will allow all its 40,000 U.S. client services employees to work virtually and live anywhere they want in perpetuity, making it one of the biggest employers to embrace permanent remote work. The policy is a departure from the accounting industry's rigid attitudes, known for encouraging people to put in late nights at the office. (Reuters)
Crypto ‘MiamiCoin’ has made the city $7 million so far, a potential game-changer for revenue collection: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has a plan to transform the city into the world’s “cryptocurrency innovation hub,” and one of the outcomes, he claims, could be a metropolis free from taxes. The lofty idea is the byproduct of a cooperation with CityCoins, a nonprofit and opensource protocol that allows people to hold and trade cryptocurrency representing a stake in a municipality. By running software on their personal computers, CityCoins’ users mint new tokens and earn a percentage of the cryptocurrency they create. A computer program automatically allocates 30% of the currency to a select city, while users get the other 70%. Since CityCoins unveiled “MiamiCoin” in August, the protocol has sent about $7.1 million to Miami. (Washington Post)
Central bank digital currencies may not replace crypto, the Bank for International Settlements said. Policymakers worry that growth of cryptocurrencies could lead to central banks losing control. The study is the second report from the BIS on central bank-backed digital currencies, which are in part an effort from national authorities to combat the threat to their role. (Financial Times, BIS)
Zillow Group, an operator of apps for real estate listings, is waking up to the new reality of mergers and acquisitions with Lina Khan in charge of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission: Even after the agency allows a specific deal to close, that doesn’t mean the antitrust review is over. About two weeks ago, Khan revived a review of Zillow’s $500 million acquisition of real estate listings service ShowingTime several months after the FTC appeared to have cleared the deal. The FTC had opened an in-depth review of the deal in April, shortly after it had been announced, and by June, agency lawyers told the companies they had no concerns about it. Zillow and ShowingTime had planned to complete the deal by the end of this month—but Khan is now asking the two companies for more information. (The Information)
Rent data for the past two months show no sign yet of the usual seasonal dip at this time of year, following peaks early in the summer, when many lease renewals come due. A Zillow Group Inc. index based on the mean of listed rents rose 11.5% in August from a year earlier, with some cities in Florida, Georgia and Washington state seeing increases of more than 25%. (Bloomberg)
New York rents jump as Covid-19 pandemic discounts fade. (Wall Street Journal)
Technology
Apple’s fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside. Apple’s remote work struggle is emblematic of a deeper shift taking place inside the company. Since 1976, the tech giant has operated in largely the same way: executives make decisions about how the company will function, and employees either fall in line or leave. What choice do they have? Apple is currently worth $2 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world, as well as one of the most powerful. Over the past few months, however, that culture has started to erode. As workers across the tech industry advocate for more power, Apple’s top-down management seems more out of touch than ever before. Now, a growing number of employees are organizing internally for change and speaking out about working conditions on Twitter: “There’s a shift in the balance of power going on here.” (The Verge)
How IBM lost the cloud: Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated development processes meant IBM Cloud was doomed from the start, and eight years after it attempted to launch its own public cloud the future of its effort is in dire straits. (Protocol)
Cloud contact center software company Five9 and video calling software maker Zoom said they will not go forward with Zoom’s plan to acquire Five9 for $14.7 billion. The news comes one week after media outlets reported that a U.S. government committee was reviewing the deal on national-security grounds. (CNBC)
LinkedIn blocked the profiles of several U.S. journalists from the company's China-based platform this week, citing "prohibited content." The Axios writer was one of the profiles affected. LinkedIn is one of the only large American social media platforms to agree to the Chinese government's demands to censor content, and is tasking its own employees with restricting what users in China can see. (Axios)
As the chip shortage continues to disrupt different sectors, investors have flooded money into the design and processing of chips at a never-before-seen rate. This rush to invest comes at the same time more tech giants have unveiled plans to design their own chips—something that likely is not a coincidence. (Crunchbase)
Weekend Reads
The C.E.O. Other C.E.O.s Turn to for Advice: Rich Lesser, who has run Boston Consulting Group for eight years, is stepping down at a moment of enormous change. (New York Times)
US car shortage hits everyone from dealers to junkyards: The semiconductor shortage that has disrupted the global car manufacturing industry is touching every player in the chain of businesses supplying, building, selling and disposing of cars and trucks in the US, a country with 276m registered vehicles. Even junkyards struggle to replenish inventory. The pinch originates from a slowdown of semiconductor orders by automakers last year, as vehicle demand momentarily sank at the onset of the pandemic. Supplies tightened further when a fire destroyed a Renesas Electronics chipmaking factory in Japan. Over the summer, production in Vietnam and Malaysia was hit by government-imposed restrictions meant to control the Delta coronavirus variant. (Financial Times)
U.S. auto sales forecast to plummet in 3Q21 as chip shortage plagues industry. Industry forecasters predict 2Q21 vehicle sales were down 13-14% from a year earlier. Edmunds expects General Motors and Ford to have the largest third-quarter sales declines of 31.5% and 29.3%, respectively. (CNBC)
Smart Links
Managers, your employees don’t want to be Facebook ‘friends.’ (Harvard Business School)
U.S. firms' diversity and inclusion efforts lag behind most of the world. (Axios)
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey to retire from the Amazon-owned grocer in 2022. (CNBC)
Neiman Marcus told 4.6 million customers their personal information including names and credit card data may have been affected. (The Verge)
China boosts rare-earth quota 20% to shield supply chain from U.S. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Microsoft climate head says planting trees won’t be enough to remove CO2 from the air. (CNBC, Nature)
Arctic sea ice hits 2021 minimum. (Nature)
Why Fanatics’ nascent trading card business has a $10 billion valuation. (CNBC)
Apple reveals most popular podcast subscriptions and free channels. (Variety)