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TOGETHER WITH
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Good morning. Hope
you feel well-rested today, because tomorrow you’ll make the best trade
since swapping your carrots for a Snack Pack pudding in fourth grade:
one hour of sleep for one hour of daylight.
Morning people, you may be better than us, but you are about to take the L for the next few weeks.
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NASDAQ
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13,319.86
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- 0.59%
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S&P
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3,943.34
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+ 0.10%
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DOW
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32,778.64
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+ 0.90%
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GOLD
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1,725.80
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+ 0.19%
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10-YR
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1.629%
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+ 9.10 bps
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OIL
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65.56
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- 0.70%
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*As of market close.
Here's what these numbers mean.
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Markets: How’s this for a familiar headline—banks and industrial stocks rose, bond yields rose, but tech stocks stumbled. The Dow notched another record.
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Politics: NY Governor Andrew Cuomo again refused to resign
as a growing crowd of Democrats, including senators Chuck Schumer and
Kirsten Gillibrand, called on him to do so following allegations of
sexual harassment and a Covid nursing home scandal.
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Francis Scialabba
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Bumping up
our weekly vaccine tracker to “top story” status today because, well,
there’s a ton of vaccine news going on and there is nothing more
important to the global economy.
Let’s start with the numbers.
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US: The country hit a milestone of 100 million vaccine doses administered
yesterday, and 13.5% of all US adults are fully vaccinated (meaning two
doses of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech, or one of J&J). The seven-day
average of doses administered per day is 2.23 million, a 9% bump over the week before.
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International: More than 345 million doses have been administered across 121 countries, a 27% jump from last week.
Now to the headlines...
The debate over unused doses
A cross-border kerfuffle is brewing over millions of unused doses
of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. Those doses, which are currently sitting in
cold storage in the US, aren’t being used because the US has yet to
authorize the vaccine. More than 70 countries have authorized this vaccine, so they’ve been asking the US to please kindly hand over the doses that are sitting around.
- Yesterday, AstraZeneca itself entered the chat, asking the Biden administration to consider sending the doses to the EU.
- The White House, which is facing increased pressure to send these doses abroad, said that’s not on the table.
How we got here: The
US ordered 300 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine last year, but
regulators are still waiting on data from a clinical trial to begin the
authorization process.
Meanwhile, more age limits are coming down
An increasing number of states are expanding eligibility
to people in the “no, I don’t quite remember Woodstock” range. Texas is
opening up doses to anyone 50 or older starting next week, and Georgia,
Minnesota, and Ohio will also begin loosening age requirements.
Michigan
said all adults will be eligible on April 5, almost a month ahead of
President Biden’s mandate. Yesterday, he pledged that all US adults
would be able to sign up to get a vaccine by May 1.
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, found common cause with the Federal Trade Commission and fans of Sneaky Pete by getting peeved at Amazon. In a USA Today op-ed
published yesterday, Rubio railed against the company and backed the
workers currently pushing to unionize at a warehouse in Bessemer,
Alabama.
- The move made him one of very few Republicans to support organized labor.
The backstory: Rubio’s Amazon irritation began earlier this month, when the company removed from Kindle and Audible a book titled When Harry Became Sally
on the basis that it framed transgender identity as a mental illness. A
group of senators, including Rubio, wrote to Amazon to protest the
decision.
So...no,
Rubio didn’t decide to buck his party's position on labor organizing
after downing some IPAs with Bernie Sanders. Rubio maintained in the
op-ed that “adversarial relations between labor and management are
wrong.” He clarified that he supported the Bessemer workers because
Amazon’s leadership “has decided to wage culture war against
working-class values.”
Looking ahead...the Amazon workers’ votes on whether to unionize are due by the 29th.
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Giphy
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It still isn’t over. ABC’s documentary on the GameStop saga debuts on Hulu
next week, but it might want to start planning a sequel as the stock
continues to rise and fall faster than an old air mattress.
The video game store-turned-Reddit-darling gained 92%
this week to close at $265 per share. That’s down from a peak of $483
in late January, but way up from $17 at the beginning of the year.
This week’s
moonward trajectory followed an announcement that Chewy cofounder and
GameStop board member Ryan Cohen will lead the retailer’s transition to
e-commerce.
In November, Cohen sent a letter
to GameStop’s board that gives us some insight into where he’ll focus
his efforts. He wrote that GameStop needs to prune underperforming
stores and markets and catch up to three major changes in the gaming
industry:
- The switch from physical games and consoles to streamed content (like cloud gaming)
- The growth of Candy Crush-ing mobile gamers
- The rising number of gamers buying equipment from mass retailers like Amazon
Looking ahead...Cohen
turned Chewy into the “Amazon for pets,” proving there’s an appetite
for Not Everything Stores. His next task will be to turn GameStop’s
reputation from “ye olde gaming equipment pawn shop” into “Amazon for
gaming.”
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How can you tell when it’s springtime? Hint: it’s got nothin’ to do with flowers, sunshine, or birdies chirping in trees.
It’s got everything to do with everyone rockin’ CARIUMA’s vibrantly-colored kicks.
Come out of
hibernation looking like a tulip in full bloom while sporting a pair of
these crazy-comfortable, sustainably made CARIUMA sneaks. They come in an array of feel-good spring colors—like rose, green, yellow, and classic white.
You can dress em’ up or down. The one constant? Your CARIUMAs are carbon neutral.
There’s never been a better time to wake up and smell fresh sneaks, because last spring, these babies had an 8k-person waitlist.
Brew readers can get 15% off their kicks—but just like the season, this offer is limited.
Get your CARIUMAs before they’re gone.
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Francis Scialabba
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Typically,
the KPI section consists of one stat, one quote, and one read. But
honestly we found way too many interesting stats yesterday, so today
we’re doing a statistics takeover.
Tech stat: Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees working on its augmented and virtual reality devices, according to The Information. That’s almost 20% of its entire workforce, and double the number of Twitter’s total employees.
Wealth stat: US households finished 2020 with a record net worth
of $130.2 trillion, up 10% from the year before. Asset prices across
the board, from stocks to houses, climbed last year despite the
pandemic.
Streaming stat: HBO Max is updating
its subscriber targets to 120 million–150 million by 2025; the previous
forecast had been 75 million to 90 million. Parent AT&T expects
revenue in the HBO division to more than double to $15 billion by the
same year.
Babies stat: More twins are being born now than at any point in history,
according to a study published yesterday. The rate of twin births has
grown by a third since the 1980s, which the researchers attribute to a
rise in fertility treatments.
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Ever order lunch with coworkers and wonder, “Can I expense this?”
Good Fortune
Burger, a local joint in Toronto, is eliminating all your concerns. In a
perfectly executed marketing campaign, it temporarily renamed some menu items as generic office supplies so you can expense them without raising any HR eyebrows.
Here’s what the menu looks like from Uber Eats:
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Just don’t be the person who orders their ergonomic aluminum laptop stand well-done.
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Lordstown Motors,
the GM backed electric vehicle startup, has been accused by the
short-seller Hindenburg of misleading investors. Hindenburg is the same
firm that accused Nikola of being an “intricate fraud.”
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Microsoft and Google are duking it out in public over their relationship with the news media, cybersecurity, and more.
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The buyer
of Beeple’s $69.3 million NFT has been identified, kinda. It’s a crypto
investor who goes by Metakovan, but no one knows Metakovan’s real
identity.
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Ant Group CEO Simon Hu resigned as the Chinese fintech giant faces increased scrutiny from the Chinese government.
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Richard Branson is reportedly on the hunt to find a SPAC to take another of his space companies, Virgin Orbit, public.
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Intergalactic breakfast: Mocked-up images of the first space hotel, the Voyager Station.
GPOAT: Round #1 is in the books! Head on over to our results page to find out the winners. Then, take a breather this weekend because voting for Round #2 starts Monday.
Weekend Conversation Starters:
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Francis Scialabba
Today's
puzzle, created by Kate Repka, will be a favorite for anyone who's
rooted for Tony Soprano, Madeline Mackenzie, or Omar Little.
Difficulty: 6.2
Favorite clue: “Much-maligned manager-speakers” (6 letters)
Play the crossword here
+ Think you have what it takes to make your own crossword? Spoiler: You do. Check out our tutorial, and then be sure to submit. If we select your crossword, we'll also send you the iconic Brewneck sweatshirt.
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