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The World
Senior Democrats are abandoning a backup plan to increase the minimum wage through a corporate tax penalty, after encountering numerous practical and political challenges in drafting their proposal over the weekend. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said they would instead seek to add tax penalties on large corporations that fail to pay $15 an hour. But now senior Democrats — including Wyden and Sanders — are walking away from that backup effort. (Washington Post)
One day after federal regulators authorized Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, senior Biden administration officials warned Sunday that the supply of the new vaccine would be highly uneven for the next month. In an effort to lower expectations that the authorization of a third Covid vaccine will mean a steady new stream of doses, the officials said that the company will deliver 3.9 million shots this week but none the week after. (New York Times)
Iran rejected a European invitation to attend direct talks with the US over a return to the nuclear deal that Donald Trump abandoned in 2018, but says it will continue “consultations” through other channels. The decision is a blow to the Biden administration, which had said it would attend talks with Tehran under EU auspices in a bid to revive the multi-party accord. That pact placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. (Financial Times)
Israel reportedly bombed Iranian targets near Damascus in Syria late Sunday night leading to speculation that the airstrikes were in response to what is believed to be an Iranian attack on an Israeli-owned ship in the Gulf of Oman last Thursday. The Syrian army said that Israeli-fired rockets struck parts of southern Damascus in escalating attacks that regional intelligence sources say target Iran-linked assets. (Jerusalem Post)
Protesters marched in Myanmar today in defiance of a crackdown by security forces that killed at least 18 people a day earlier, as calls grew for a more united international response after the worst violence since a coup one month ago. (Reuters)
Co-working companies tap into customers facing work-from-home fatigue. The industry was devastated at the beginning of the pandemic but now sees an opportunity for growth. WeWork says it is refocusing on workplaces during the pandemic. Rather than depending on small businesses and individual memberships, more than half of WeWork’s customer base is now large companies leasing blocks of workspace for their employees. In November, Deloitte leased 35,000 square feet at a WeWork in Manchester, England. (Washington Post)
Economy
Warren Buffett warned that debt investors faced a “bleak future” days after a sell-off pummelled government bonds and sent reverberations through global stock markets. The 90-year-old chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway told shareholders in his closely followed annual letter that it was best to eschew the fixed-income market, in which the company is itself a large player. “Fixed-income investors worldwide — whether pension funds, insurance companies or retirees — face a bleak future,” he wrote. (Financial Times)
A £400 billion pension giant has put boards on notice that they will face investor revolts if they try to pay bonuses after taking taxpayer support, setting the scene for a fractious annual meeting season. Fidelity International has written to FTSE 350 companies saying it wants to see “a restrained approach to executive pay this year” and warning that it will vote against bonuses for bosses whose companies have used schemes such as furlough without repaying the money. (The Times)
2021 is proving to be a wild year for really big venture investments, breaking records for funding totals and round counts. Rather than the pandemic-inspired decline many predicted, we are instead seeing an industry scaling ever-higher peaks. In particular, so-called supergiant funding rounds of $100 million or more are taking off. Less than two months into the new year, investors already put at least $46 billion globally into such deals. That puts this year on track to come in well above 2020’s already historically lofty levels. (Crunchbase)
The head of Goldman Sachs’ consumer finance division and one of its top executives are both leaving to join a fintech start-up backed by Walmart and Ribbit Capital. The hires represent a big step in the second big effort by the world’s largest retailer to enter financial services, after it abandoned its plan to start a bank over a decade ago, under pressure from regulators. (Financial Times)
Australian home prices raced at the fastest clip in almost two decades in February and job advertisements skyrocketed, as the economy rapidly emerged from its once-in-a-generation recession. (Reuters)
Technology
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has told G20 finance ministers that Washington will drop a contentious part of its proposal for reform of global digital taxation rules that had been the main stumbling block to an agreement. The move could unlock long-stalled multilateral negotiations at the OECD, which struggled to make progress after the Trump administration first insisted on the “safe harbour” measure in late 2019. The provision would have allowed technology companies to abide by any agreement on a voluntary basis and was strongly opposed by several European countries. (Financial Times)
Researchers at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University have confirmed what millions of remote workers already knew: “Zoom fatigue” causes greater stress than meeting in real life because of the “non-verbal overload” of endless video calls. A study by Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communication and founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, found that the underlying causes of Zoom fatigue include “excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze” and “increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself”. “Zoom users are seeing reflections of themselves at a frequency and duration that hasn’t been seen before in the history of media — and likely the history of people,” Bailenson wrote. (Financial Times)
Clubhouse is recording your conversations; that’s not even its worst privacy problem. The popular new social media platform is scooping up more data than you might think: 1. Clubhouse is recording your audio. 2. You can't delete information other people share about you. 3. You can't just delete your account. 4. They can share your personal information without notifying you. 5. Clubhouse is tracking you. (Inc.)
Smart Links
China’s number of super rich grew fastest in the world in 2020. (South China Morning Post)
Brex valuation could reach $8 billion in new funding round. (The Information)
Indonesia startup bags $50m for lending to rural women. (Nikkei Asian Review)
Chicago’s new 6 mph speeding ticket rules start today, and they’re looking lucrative for the city. (Chicago Tribune)
People blame a vehicle's automated system more than its driver when accidents happen. (Society for Risk Analysis)
Scientists on verge of finishing an end-to-end human genome map — 20 years after the first draft. (Nature)
Study: Sleep is vital to associating emotion with memory. (University of Michigan)