Category: Protected – Watson’s Weekly

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• US Q2 GDP growth was slower than expectations (Friday), which probably takes a bit of the pressure off the Fed to increase interest rates to calm inflation. In Europe, business confidence in Germany is weakening (Tuesday) according to the latest Ifo survey but then again its latest rate of inflation is at its highest level since 2008 (Friday). France managed to get a watered-down version of its “health pass” legislation approved (Tuesday) after a lot of push-back and protest to the original version. Meanwhile, the UK is growing at its fastest pace for 80 years (Monday) according to the EY ITEM club. The British financial regulator, the FCA, relaxed rules on SPACs, making this an easier path to listing (Wednesday), but the British are becoming less amenable to China as ministers called for limiting China’s involvement in our nuclear power generation industry (Monday), which kind of follows on from Boris Johnson recently ordering a review of the purchase of Newport Wafer Fab (Thursday) by Nexperia, which is owned by Wingtech, a Chinese company.
• Bitcoin jumped after a job ad from Amazon (Tuesday) said that the company was looking for some to “develop Amazon’s digital currency, blockchain strategy and product roadmap”. This was interpreted as meaning that Amazon is on the cusp of accepting Bitcoin, hence it’s jump in value! If Amazon does ever accept it, though, it will be a huge moment and will probably catapult the cryptocurrency into the stratosphere 🚀🌚! It was also interesting to see that the Chinese authorities are forcing Ant Group’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat to take part in the development of a digital Yuan (Monday). Given the companies’ policies thus far of essentially making their entities walled gardens, this is quite a shocking development as it is a bit like forcing turkeys to vote for Christmas! Also, you would have thought that once they pass the Alipay/WeChat test, China’s digital currency will be ready to roll. Its crackdown over the years on Bitcoin in particular is potentially clearing the way – and I think that if China rolls out a cryptocurrency, other countries will soon follow as they won’t want to be left behind.

• China’s tech crackdown continued as China’s Ministry of Information Technology said that it will make errant tech companies change their behaviours regarding user rights and data utilisation within six months – or they will face the consequences (Tuesday). This is why the share prices of companies like Tencent and Meituan, who are expected to be in the firing line, absolutely tanked. Interestingly, one of China’s most recent targets, Didi, is considering taking itself private (Friday) as a way to appease the authorities as well as shareholders. However, even more shocking than this, Chinese authorities turned around and essentially killed their $100bn edu-tech industry at a stroke (Tuesday) as they decreed that any company teaching the national curriculum would no longer be allowed to make profits, raise capital or list on overseas stock exchanges – nor will they be allowed to accept foreign investment! It looks like this is all part of a general campaign by President Xi Jinping to bring corporate China (and its education system) under control. This is a very dramatic development for overseas investors who have already put money into the sector – and it doesn’t bode well for investment in China generally as everyone will now be second-guessing who is going to be next to come under fire.
• Meanwhile, Apple, Google and Microsoft reported fat profits (Wednesday), as did Facebook (Thursday), although the latter warned that it might be in for a rough ride from regulators over the coming months. On the hardware side of things, Intel set out its aims to be the biggest chip company in the world (Tuesday) while Samsung reported quarterly profits up by 73% as chip sales were stellar (Thursday), more than compensating for the rather more sedate performance of its smartphone business.
• Elsewhere, Robinhood had a pretty rubbish market debut this week (Thursday) as it fell below its IPO price that was itself at the bottom end of the stated range. The co-founders don’t care though, as they made an absolute mint 😂!

• Supply chain disruption is continuing. Freight costs are sky-rocketing (Thursday), UK builders reckon that current shortages of materials – such as bricks, cement and timber – will continue for the next six to nine months (Monday). In the US, school cafeterias are facing shortages of food for kids’ lunches ahead of them going back-to-school (Monday) and airlines are facing fuel shortages (Wednesday) due to not enough lorry drivers to transport fuel and existing fuel stocks being prioritised for planes involved in fighting current wildfires.

• It seems like the UK residential property market is turning a corner. Zoopla said that house prices rose strongly in June – to the extent that they are now about 30% above what they were pre-2008 crisis (Tuesday)! However, Nationwide figures point to a notable slowdown in momentum in July (Thursday), which suggests a repeat of what happened leading up to the original stamp duty holiday deadline (before it was pushed back). House prices suffered their biggest fall in a year – so things could be getting quieter over the summer months…
• Banks seemed to have a good week this week! Deutsche has such a good quarter that it abandoned cost-cutting plans (Thursday), Santander benefited from people buying houses and cars (Thursday), Barclays had a rebound (Thursday) and even Metro seems to be turning things around (Thursday)! Lloyds Bank upped its full-year forecasts (Friday) and US financial group Raymond James’ announced intentions to purchase Charles Stanley (Friday), the 229-year-old City stalwart, for £279m in the latest deal in the rapidly-consolidating wealth management sector.

• Luxury goods are flying off the shelves according to LVMH (Tuesday) and Gucci owner Kering (Wednesday), while at the other end of the scale, B&M is worried about tightening margins (Tuesday) as input prices continue to rise. Their margins are already pretty skinny so the scope for absorbing higher costs are very limited.
• In supermarkets, Tesco is offering golden hellos to lorry drivers (Wednesday) in order to attract them (!) and Morrisons gets more flak from whinging investors (Wednesday) who are pushing for a higher price from Fortress/someone else.

• Battery recycling start-up Redwood Materials has just raised a ton of cash (Thursday) to transform the US supply chain for EVs giving the company an implied value of $3.7bn! Given that less than 5% of EV batteries get recycled at the moment, there is going to be a huge need for this. Speaking of batteries/charging, it’s interesting to see that Dutch electric vehicle charging group Allego has just agreed to do a SPAC merger with Apollo Global Management’s Spartan Acquisition Corp III (Thursday).
• VW announced a disappointing performance in China (Friday) and vowed to try harder in the world’s biggest car market. Asia now accounts for about 50% of total profits, so it needs to sort itself out pronto. It seems that younger Chinese prefer to buy domestic, but older (and probably more affluent) Chinese still like a bit of foreign luxury, which helped Benley’s sales there (Friday).

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was most definitely Japan’s brain wave-reading cat ears are back, with a brand-new twist! (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel). A great invention that we never knew we needed!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• GLOBAL MARKETS had a wobble at the start of the week (Tuesday) on fears of the impact of the delta variant, but then they bounced back on optimism about the US economy (Wednesday).
• IN OIL – OPEC managed to hammer out an agreement to increase oil production (Monday), deciding to raise production by 400,000 barrels of oil per day. This was good (for OPEC) because it keeps everyone together, meaning that the price won’t start getting all volatile when rebel members just go out and produce whatever they want.
• VACCINE/HEALTH PASSPORTS FEATURED THIS WEEK – as vaccine passports became law for the first time in England (Tuesday). BoJo said that from the end of September anyone going to a nightclub would have to prove that they’d been double-dosed. It’s likely that this will spread to pretty much anything with a crowd (e.g. concert venues, theatres, sporting events etc.). Over on the Continent, the French government is introducing “health passes” (Tuesday) that will be needed to enter bars, restaurants, shopping centres and long distance trains. Failure to check health passes will result in €45,000 fines and a year in prison 😱. Governments don’t need to make it illegal to make people get vaccinated – but they can make you life much more miserable if you don’t.

• The week started off with the tragic floods in Germany (Monday) and Chancellor Merkel said that “We have to up the pace in the fight against climate change”. The German government pledged €200m in flood aid (Thursday), which is in addition to the €250m promised by regional governments. Given the fact that the government hasn’t covered itself in glory in the handling of one of Germany’s biggest natural disasters for the last 100 years, it’s surprising that the opposition parties have not made much ground.
• It was perhaps rather poignant to see a report by British insurer Aon saying that insurance payments were going to be at a ten year high this year (Thursday) due to claims resulting from the sheer number of natural disasters so far this year. How ironic, then, that billionaires were playing spaceman (Monday) in rockets that belch out 200-300tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per flight versus long-haul flights that emit 1-3tons! Branson and Bezos seem to be keen on damaging the planet. OK, so Musk is also partaking in this galactic 🍆-swinging contest, but at least he’s offsetting his jaunts with EVs and businesses like Tesla Energy!
• There was a really interesting article on the urgent need for the UK to narrow the gap between power generation and power retention in battery technology (Monday) in order to smooth out the provision of electricity – but it seems that the Americans may already have a solution in the form of a four-year-old startup called Form Energy (Friday) which makes cheap batteries that can discharge power for days using iron! Given that wind farms in the UK are regularly paid to switch off on particularly windy days because the grid can’t cope with the sudden surge (!), you can see just how much a necessity it is to be able to hang on to the electricity that we do generate.
• It was interesting to see that Mercedes has bought British electric motor start-up Yasa (Friday) for an undisclosed sum, in its ongoing effort to boost its technological expertise. Yasa’s axial flux motors are smaller and more efficient than other designs and it will now supply its motors across a range of new electric models in Mercedes’ AMG range.

• Consumer confidence is returning to pre-Covid levels (Monday) according to a Deloitte study and a PwC report said that consumer sentiment is at its highest levels since 2008 (Monday)! And if that wasn’t enough positivity for you, a survey from GfK showed that households are feeling increasingly confident about their own finances and the wider economy (Friday)! This may be due in part to house prices rising to new highs in June, according to Rightmove (Monday), something backed up by HMRC data which showed that June was the busiest month on record (Thursday) for residential sales.
• On the other hand, we’re not spending money on Netflix as it reported one of its weakest ever quarters for new subscriber numbers (Wednesday). I think that Netflix – unlike, say, Disney+ – has been around for quite some time and it’s entirely possible that lockdown was a double-edged sword in that more people wanted it, but they also had more time to consume the contents. This means that people may now be jaded with its current offering which means that it might be a good idea for Netflix to buy a studio (Thursday) to get a sudden injection of good quality new content. On the other hand, HBO Max announced that the number of new subscribers on its platform increased (Friday).
• It wouldn’t be a Watson’s Daily without some chat about inflation 😂 and so, in order not to disappoint you, I thought I’d mention the fact that Unilever said that it is facing the biggest cost rises in a decade, and they’re squeezing operating margins (Friday). At the moment, it’s absorbing these costs, but it sounds like price rises are going to be passed onto the customer very soon! More upward pressure on inflation, no??

• Kantar data showed for the first time ever that online grocery sales actually fell (Wednesday)! Talking about online grocery retailers, Ocado had to deal with two big fires at one of its warehouses (Monday), which wasn’t a good look given that it is trying to sell its tech expertise to other retailers around the world. I’d say this is a blip for now but Ocado will want to get that sorted in order to calm existing customers and stop making potential customers nervous. In other grocer-related news, Morrisons is testing out a cashierless format – not using Amazon tech – (Monday) and the Fortress offer for Morrisons got a shot in the arm from Apollo (Wednesday). In the meantime, Brexit red tape is becoming more serious in Northern Ireland (Thursday).
• In other retailer news, Next was confident enough to raise its forecasts (Thursday) and Wickes saw strong like-for-like sales growth over Q2 (Thursday) as it continued to benefit from the wave of DIY popularity powered by a red-hot property market.

• In IPO NEWS, Robinhood announced that it was going for a valuation of up to $35bn in its upcoming flotation (Tuesday) as it tries to take advantage of the retail investor hype it has created. Talking about companies trying to surf a wave of popularity, PureGym, the UK budget gym chain, is now seeing demand rising above pre-Covid levels and is considering a potential IPO (Wednesday). British private equity firm Bridgepoint had a strong market debut (Thursday), which no doubt goes some way to restoring the London Stock Exchange’s mojo that has taken a bit of a battering in the last few months.
• Meanwhile, in M&A, Tencent said that it was buying British games developer Sumo (Tuesday) and Zoom announced a $14.7billion deal to buy Five9 (Monday), a company that provides cloud-based customer service software.
• In TECH, Google and Jio have teamed up to make a smartphone for the masses in India (Wednesday). It’s called the JioPhoneNext, and it is thought that it will be priced at under $50. The Indian market clearly has potential but even a smartphone for under $50 is likely to be too pricey for mass-adoption.
• In SEMICONDUCTOR NEWS, Intel said that the current global semiconductor shortage could potentially run into 2023 (Friday) but that supply shortages should start to ease later on this year, something that was echoed by TSMC recently.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was most definitely Japan’s brain wave-reading cat ears are back, with a brand-new twist! (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel). A great invention that we never knew we needed!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In CHINA, exports shot up by 32.2% in June vs the previous year (Wednesday), way above expectations of 23% – a good sign, as China is seen as being the world’s factory. China’s GDP growth rate slowed down (Thursday) but was in line with expectations given that Q1’s growth rate of 18% was clearly unsustainable!
• Meanwhile, inflation chat continues to stay high on the agenda given that US inflation rose at the fastest rate since August 2008 (Wednesday), up by 5.4% vs consensus of 4.9%. Pressure continues to mount on Fed Chair Jerome Powell, but it’s also getting more intense on Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey as his deputy touted a year-end inflation level 33% higher than the official target (Thursday) – and that was shortly followed by one of the members of MPC saying that UK monetary policy needs to be tightened (Friday).

• The Great Tech Clampdown of China continues as Chinese authorities want to impose checks on overseas listings (Monday) as the Cyberspace Administration of China announced that Chinese companies that have over one million users will have to pass a security review before listing! This is going to mean that the vast majority of tech companies with overseas listing ambitions are going to face a huge bottleneck! Newly-listed ride-hailer Didi has already felt CAC’s wrath and is currently under investigation, a situation that rivals including Caocao, T3 Chuxing and Meituan are all trying to exploit (Wednesday)
• As if that wasn’t hard enough, the Chinese government’s new guidelines say that key industries like telecoms are going to have to spend at least 10% of their IT budgets on cyber security over the next two years (Thursday), so domestic players like Venustech and Nsfocus Technologies could potentially close the valuation gap on their American equivalents Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. Cyber security is a hot area elsewhere – the UK’s Darktrace has seen its share price double since it listed in April (Friday) and London-listed Avast is seeing takeover interest from Norton (Friday) at a level that many think is likely to attract competing bids.
• Google was fined €500m by the French regulator (Wednesday) for violating an order to agree licensing deals with publishers. It now has two months to come up with a solution or face a fine of up to €900,000 a day.

• Household savings were up during lockdown (Monday) but they weren’t evenly spread as the richest 20% of households were four times more likely to have saved more under lockdown than the poorest 20% (but that really should be no surprise because it is waaaaay easier to make money if you’ve got money, no?). The middle classes were among the biggest winners because they were most exposed to rising property prices.
• In jobs, the latest ONS figures showed that Britain had nigh on one million job vacancies last month (Friday), powered by the shortage of delivery drivers, hospitality staff, agricultural workers, care workers etc. – which has led to higher pay rates in these areas (Monday). The shortage of workers in areas like hospitality is being made worse by increasing numbers of people being pinged by the NHS app (Friday) but recruiter Hays is pretty optimistic about the jobs market generally (Friday) although it warned of wage inflation. Confusion and frustration resulted from BoJo’s newly announced guidelines (Wednesday) but you can understand why neither side wants to take responsibility (if the government provides clear guidelines it will get sued if people get Covid, but if they leave it to businesses they will get sued instead). Magic Circle law firm Slaughter & May is providing a number of working options for its staff (Wednesday), but I think they are ultimately doomed to failure IMO because working conditions are often more of a reflection of what their clients expect rather than what they do themselves.
• SO HOW ARE WE SPENDING ALL THIS MONEY?? Barclaycard figures say that we spent 38% more at pubs during the Euros footy tournament (Tuesday) and because more bars, cafés and restaurants have been opening up Pepsi increased its full-year forecasts (Wednesday). The uptick in leisure travel is emboldening some – as Ryanair announced it was going to be hiring 2,000 new pilots over the next 3 years (Tuesday) and Center Parcs announced it was going to be developing a new UK site (Tuesday), presumably to take advantage of the uptick in staycations.
• As for retailers themselves, the latest BRC figures show that UK retail sales rose at the fastest rate in Q2 since at least 1995 (Tuesday) due to lockdown lifting, England at the Euros and general joy! Another sign that retail is recovering is that landlord British Land said that it is collecting more rent from more of its retail tenants (Wednesday). In terms of individual retailers, Kingfisher – the owner of B&Q and Screwfix – upped its guidance for the full year (Thursday) as the DIY wave continues, Topshop is to return to physical stores in the US (Tuesday) thanks to a deal between “new” owner Asos and Nordstrom but then Superdrug announced just how bad the previous year has been (Tuesday) and the John Lewis Partnership announced 1,000 job losses (Thursday) as part of its cost-cutting plan.
• In real estate, estate agent Knight Frank said that house sales were down 60% below average last month (Monday) as the end of the stamp duty holiday looms but then Bank of England figures said that house prices were still going up (Thursday). I think we’ll soon reach a point where sales will dry up as the stamp duty holiday ends and activity slows down overall as everyone waits to see what the effect the end of furlough will have. I think that if the expected sudden spike in unemployment doesn’t happen (of if it’s not as bad as everyone is expecting) the housing market could get a second wind. On the commercial property side of things, Blackstone appears to be shifting the weighting of its portfolio (Monday, Friday) and there’s particularly strong demand for drive-throughs in the UK (Monday), which I think is a bit puzzling because I just don’t think they make much sense in the UK. They take up too much room and if you get that “McDonald’s Feeling”, you either go there or get it delivered – why would you get in the car and get it? I think that standalone doesn’t make sense – but if it’s attached to something else (for instance what EG group will be doing with Leon restaurants), it may do OK. But that’s just my opinion!

• It was reporting week for US banks this week – and Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan (Wednesday), Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo (Thursday) and Morgan Stanley (Friday) pretty much all saw trading levels slow down but advisory fees on M&A and IPOs go up strongly. Investment manager Vanguard made its first ever acquisition (Wednesday) in order to broaden its product expertise. Elsewhere, it was really interesting to see that Apple is teaming up with Goldman Sachs to provide a “Buy Now, Pay Later” service (Thursday), which should get Klarna worried.
• In the UK, insurance company Admiral said that it expected higher profits as claims were really low under lockdown (Tuesday), Revolut got a fat valuation in its latest funding round (Friday), and the Bank of England announced that it is now going to allow shareholder payouts (Wednesday) because it feels that the UK’s biggest lenders are resilient enough to economic risks to resume such actions. This follows similar moves in the US and Europe.

• There was some particularly good news this week for automakers because TSMC said that we’ve now passed the worst of the semiconductor shortage (Friday) and that supplies will be rising. It was also interesting to see that Intel is thinking about making an approach to specialist chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries (Friday) in a bid to broaden its chipmaking expertise and production capacity.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was a toss-up between the controversial Domino’s apologises after creating a pizza that ‘insults both Italy and England’ (The Mirror, Rosaleen Fenton) and the hilarious Teacher left in stitches after asking kids to share one thing she should know about them (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). See you next week!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In MACROECONOMIC NEWS, the latest OECD figures showed inflation across the world’s leading nations rose at the fastest pace since 2008 (Tuesday). The global minimum corporation tax deal is still not finalised as it still has to pass the Senate vote (Thursday) and G20 ministers are meeting in Venice in order to put pressure on the low-tax countries who have yet to sign the agreement. Interestingly, some low-tax jurisdictions like the Bahamas and Switzerland have already signed the deal, so you would have thought that the others will fall in line. IN EUROPE, the ECB has decided to move the goalposts and upgrade its previous inflation target (Friday). This target has been in place since 2003 (!) – from “close to, but below, 2 per cent” to 2%. It added that it would be willing for inflation to rise above 2% in the short term. I guess if you can’t stick within your own rules, you just chance them 😂. IN THE UK, BoJo announced the lifting of restrictions (Tuesday) and there was talk of listing rules changing for the London Stock Exchange (Tuesday) to address the weakening trend of IPOs in recent years. Dual share structures and a lower free float requirement were mentioned but I didn’t see anything about SPAC-friendly guidance, which is something that has been mooted.
• IN COMMODITIES, OPEC didn’t reach an agreement on oil production (Tuesday) but the threat of increased production from US shale producers when oil prices get to decent levels has been neutralised (Friday) due to them still operating under contracts signed last year which ties them to a price of $55 per barrel rather than the current $75 level. Meanwhile, coffee prices are likely to rise in coffee shops (Thursday) due to acute supply issues. Coffee producers are still on contracts signed at lower prices, but when they come off them, prices to end users are likely to rise.
• In CRYPTOCURRENCY NEWS, Bitcoin exchange Binance had its network suspended (Thursday) and it is promising to work with regulators on compliance and putting in new structures to protect customers. Meanwhile, a study by Oxford Risk (a behavioural financial risk specialist) showed that most buyers of Bitcoin don’t understand it (Thursday), which I guess isn’t that surprising, but it does put a figure on it!

• IN EUROPE, house prices rose at their fastest rate since 2007 (Friday), according to the latest data from Eurostat, while IN THE UK, Halifax figures showed that house prices fell last month for the first time this year (Thursday) as we head towards the end of the stamp duty holiday. Having said that, estate agent Knight Frank says that London prices are rising (Monday) and they saw 42% more new prospective buyers registering in June than the five-year average, with the number of offers 86% higher than that average. A mortgage war is looming (Thursday) as banks scramble to compete for falling customer numbers, with HSBC and TSB offering super-low mortgage rates. Lloyds Bank has launched a rental business called “Citra Living” (Wednesday) and John Lewis has announced that it will be building homes (Monday) as part of efforts to diversify its operations.
• IN RETAIL NEWS, the latest figures from the BRC show that total UK footfall was down by 27.6% in June versus 2019 (Friday), implying that shoppers browsed less in fewer stores despite the lifting of some restrictions. It was all go in supermarkets this week! Morrisons got another bid – this time from a consortium led by private equity firm Fortress (Monday) and Sainsbury’s has announced more price cuts (Monday) as it decided to get aggressive on price in order to keep the pressure on the likes of arch-rivals Aldi and Lidl but also raised its profits guidance (Wednesday) after sales soared over lockdown. It is also interesting to note that some US supermarkets are stockpiling (Wednesday) as they are buying up supplies of sugar and frozen meat in anticipation of further food price rises. Elsewhere, WH Smith bought half of Dixons’ airport outlets (Friday) as it broadens its airport exposure and boosts its gadgets format, InMotion.

• Big Tech threatened to leave Hong Kong (Tuesday) over proposed data laws that could leave them liable for “the malicious sharing of individuals’ information online”.
• Microsoft took a blow as the Pentagon decided to abandon the JEDI project (Wednesday), a win for Amazon who complained that Microsoft got preferential treatment under Trump as the former president had a personal dislike for Jeff Bezos. The new project will now go to multiple vendors to avoid this kind of accusation.
• Didi is having a nightmare. Although it listed to great fanfare last week, Chinese regulators are saying that it violated the laws on the collection and use of customer data (Monday), which sent its share price down by 20% (Tuesday) and it is thought that this sudden crackdown could lead to the evaporation of any other Chinese companies’ aspirations to list outside of China (Thursday). Talking of Chinese tech companies, though, it was interesting to see that ByteDance is selling TikTok’s AI to other companies outside China (Monday). I thought that the authorities banned this – so we’ll see whether they start to get involved!
• Apple won a privacy case in China (Tuesday) to prevent companies using a work-around of its new privacy policy. On the flipside, advertisers are moving over to Android (Tuesday) as a result of this privacy policy making its advertising offering less appealing.
• The UK’s biggest chip plant, Newport Wafer Fab was about to be sold to a company controlled by Chinese company Wingtech (Tuesday) but the uproar was such that BoJo ordered an immediate review (Thursday). You may recall that, last year, BoJo put in place rules to stop the takeover of key British interests to foreign firms. Given the currency global chip shortage, this was always bound to be controversial.

• Stellantis said that it would be spending €30bn on EV development (Friday), including the opening of five battery factories in Europe and the US by the end of this decade and a new line-up of EVs that will be able to drive for up to 500 miles on one charge. It also announced its commitment to Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant (Wednesday) to make electric cars and vans.
• Elsewhere, Toyota did well from stockpiling chips (Wednesday), although it concedes that this advantage won’t persist forever, JLR halved sales expectations (Wednesday) due to supply chain issues and Rimac is also due to take control of Bugatti (Tuesday).

• IN TRAVEL NEWS, corporate business is showing signs of returning (Monday) and the US is experiencing an uptick in bookings across the board (Thursday) while a consortium of investors puts in a bid for Sydney Airport (Tuesday) and it was decided that the double-jabbed in England would be able to enjoy quarantine-free travel (Thursday).
• IN IPO NEWS, Wise had a successful London market debut (Thursday), which could set a precedent for more IPOs via direct listing.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was Exact timings you need to follow to cook the perfect English breakfast (The Mirror, OliviaRose Fox) as this is something that could save a lot of stress!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• I guess the biggest story from this week was the agreement signed by 130 countries for a global minimum corporation tax of 15% (Friday). It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out as there are lots of exemptions (Thursday) that have been carved out and there is still resistance to it (Friday).
• Japan saw business sentiment in manufacturing hitting a two-year high (Thursday) although the services sector is still a bit disappointing. There’s a bit of turmoil in Europe as Sweden’s PM Stefan Lofven resigned (Tuesday). He’s trying to build a new coalition rather than call a new election because an election will take four months to organise and execute. I think this just goes to show how much of a nightmare coalition governments are because everyone’s got wildly different agendas. IMO, some of this agenda-following probably saw a bit of truce in the depths of the pandemic because everyone was working together against a common cause but now that places like Sweden are pulling out of it I think that the normal backstabbing/agenda-pushing will return. Do countries like Sweden need an election just when they need to get their economy back on track? I think not…
• Meanwhile, in the UK, the British Chambers of Commerce said in its latest survey that the proportion of UK manufacturers looking to raise prices over the coming months was at its highest level since 1989 (Thursday) and that businesses were at their most concerned about inflation than they had been for the last ten years! The outgoing chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, warned against complacency about inflation (Thursday) and, on a smaller scale, advertising company M&C Saatchi increased its profit forecasts for the full year after a better-than-expected performance (Thursday). This is worth mentioning because much as the fortunes of Danish company Maersk are seen as being a bellwether for global trade, advertising is seen to be a leading economic indicator because advertising spend is one of the first company costs to get cut in a downturn and the first to come back in an upturn.
• OPEC conducted virtual meetings this week to discuss production increases (Friday), but the participating countries could not agree. Talks are set to continue next week, but oil prices went slightly stronger in the meantime. It sounds to me like the production increases were going to be less than the market was expecting but, as I say, it’s all up in the air at the moment.

• In the US, house prices are rising at their fastest rate for 30 years (Wednesday) while US car sales are going crazy (Wednesday) as consumers are having to pay over the odds. Also, as unemployment falls, some employees are grumbling about going back into the office (Thursday). Apple wants its staff to go in on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and argues that its creativity is largely thanks to in-person collaborations while some staff are pushing back, arguing that their quality of life will be affected. Labour markets are so tight in some sectors that signing-on bonuses are becoming the norm (Friday)!
• In the UK, the tapering of stamp duty started (Tuesday) and although consumers saved a lot over lockdown, according to the latest figures from the ONS (Thursday), their confidence has risen to the extent that they are increasingly comfortable with taking out personal loans (Wednesday). As far as UK jobs are concerned, unemployment continues to fall (Wednesday) but the furlough scheme is now starting to wind down and older workers look more likely to suffer the most from increased unemployment (Thursday) according to the Resolution Foundation. Employee shortages continue to hit specific sectors, with the lack of lorry drivers being a particular cause of concern (Tuesday). The shortage in the hospitality industry is getting even more acute (Wednesday) because the staff that are working there are increasingly getting pinged by the NHS App, which is leading to restaurants having to close in some instances – not ideal when they are trying to get back on their feet! The working from home debate continues in investment banks as UBS appears to be taking a more pragmatic approach (Tuesday) versus peers such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

• UK car dealership Lookers is enjoying a sales bounce-back after a tricky year (Friday) but rival Pendragon (who owns Stratstone and Evans Halshaw) warns that the supply of cars is likely to be restricted in the second half of this year (Thursday) thanks to ongoing supply chain bottlenecks. For instance, the global chip shortage is hitting car production in China and Japan (Thursday). Meanwhile, Nissan said it would be building a massive EV hub in Sunderland (Friday). Tesla is having a tough time in China as it has suffered a number of PR problems following a stellar year last year (Tuesday). Should it look to rely less on this market as domestic rivals look increasingly attractive to Chinese buyers?

• US banks are starting to pay dividends again (Wednesday) and it seems likely that Europe (Friday) and the UK could go the same way soon enough as central banks deem economic circumstances to have calmed sufficiently that their capital buffers will be able to withstand further shocks.
• Private equity firms have done the most deals in the first half of the year for 40 years (Friday), which is probably one of the reasons why UK-based Bridgepoint is making plans for a London Stock Exchange Flotation (Wednesday)!
• Elsewhere, Nordic payment groups in Norway (Vipps), Denmark (MobilePay) and Finland (Pivo) plan to merge (Thursday) in order to give themselves more scale to take on the likes of Apple, Google, Alibaba and PayPal and trading app Robinhood gets a fine (Thursday) as losses mount (Friday) ahead of a proposed IPO.

• Facebook became a trillion-dollar company this week (Tuesday) as it won an antitrust lawsuit against the Federal Trade Commission
• Chinese ride-hailer Didi had its stock market debut in New York this week (Thursday), but two days later China’s cybersecurity regulators launched an investigation to “safeguard national data security and protect national security”, which hit the share price quite badly.
• Gap decided to close all of its stores in the UK and Ireland (Thursday) and just go online. It’s had problems for quite some time, so this is not a complete surprise.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was McDonald’s fans are making Percy Pig McFlurries and they’re gamechangers (The Mirror, Emma Rosemurgey). It may not be the weather for it at the moment, but it’s there for if you need it 👍

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• Inflationary pressures continue to build in the US, Europe and UK (Thursday) as the latest IHS Markit PMI figures show near-record increases in business activity. On a more granular level, a Lloyds Bank survey showed that businesses in all 14 sectors of the economy are raising prices at the sharpest rate for 22 years (Monday) and that 11 out of 15 sectors posted faster output growth month-on-month in May versus 9 in the previous month; the CBI’s quarterly manufacturing survey showed that British industrial output grew at record rate in June (Wednesday) and the latest ONS data shows that UK economy’s rebound is proving to be better than expected (Wednesday) while business confidence hits new highs (Thursday) according to a survey by the Institute of Directors. The Bank of England kept interest rates unchanged (Friday) whilst also increasing their year-end inflation target. President Biden outlined a new $1bn infrastructure plan (Friday), but there’s not that much detail in it and it’s still got a way to go yet before it gets full approval, so don’t too excited just yet!
• In CRYPTOCURRENCY NEWS, China continued its crackdown on Bitcoin (Monday), sending its price down (Wednesday). It also turns out that Monero is emerging as the criminals’ cryptocurrency of choice (Wednesday) as it is even harder to trace than Bitcoin!
• In ENVIRONMENT NEWS, there was an interesting article reminding us that there is still a decent chunk of global electricity being generated by coal (Thursday), but on the positive side, Lego has come up with a new eco-friendly brick (Thursday), which will undoubtedly help its environment credentials! It’s also interesting to see that Volvo is going to be teaming up with Northvolt to make a gigafactory (Tuesday) and Cornish Lithium’s valuation has doubled (Tuesday), following a fundraising. Go Cornwall!

• House prices in the US and Europe hit record levels (Wednesday) and although they grew in the UK, they lost some momentum (Monday).
• Joules saw its sales hit record levels (Thursday) in its latest set of results thanks to the success of its online business. Meanwhile, John Lewis is trying its hand at furniture rental (Thursday) in another attempt to diversify its business. Will it actually work or is this just the sign of a non-retailer boss clutching at straws??
• In JOBS NEWS, US jobless claims are falling (Friday), UK employers are experiencing shortages and want help with the shortfall (Monday, Friday) and the grumblings about working-from-home are getting louder (Tuesday). Deutsche wants juniors back in the office (Monday), JP Morgan wants more of its staff to get jabs (Friday) and qualified lawyers are seeing a rise in demand from US law firms (Monday) who are offering some very nice salaries to tempt them. It’s also interesting/concerning to see that employers in Greece are finding it hard to fill roles (Tuesday), especially in the tourism sector which accounts for about 20% of the country’s GDP. It’s particularly concerning given that Greece has the highest unemployment rate in the EU at a whopping 16.5%, but lockdown uncertainty is prompting people to stay out of this key sector.

• Lockdown has seen the emergence of all sorts of trends, some of which are likely to continue as we move towards emerging from the pandemic. More millionaires were created under lockdown (Wednesday), mainly due to strengthening stock markets and residential property prices while Microsoft wants to boost the momentum of Teams (Friday) by giving it a more prominent position in its next iteration of Windows. Burgeoning e-commerce and an increased willingness to hold inventory continues to power warehousing (Tuesday) and although DIY became a Big Thing under lockdown, timber prices have come off their peaks (Monday) and DIY store share prices have taken a beating (Tuesday) as some investors have decided to take profits/believe that momentum is fading in the sector.
• Casinos had a terrible time of it under lockdown, but they could well stage a comeback as new mega-casino Resorts World opened in Las Vegas (Wednesday). I am sure that the prospect of the first big new casino for over ten years will bring a lot of renewed interest in the Strip and that there will be a lot of pent-up demand for all casinos to enjoy.

• US banks look poised to re-start share buy-backs and dividend payments (Friday) because they passed the Fed’s stress tests, showing that they’ve got quite a lot of excess cash sloshing around (which they’ve been itching to do something with rather than leave it lying there doing nothing).
• Elsewhere, Vanguard wants to expand in giving out financial advice (Friday) and reckons it can lower prices, Visa announced the acquisition of Swedish fintech Tink for €1.8bn (Friday) to improve its open banking capabilities and Wise (formerly known as Transferwise) is pushing for an IPO via a direct listing (Friday). China’s Ant Group got closer to moving off the naughty step by making moves to share data (Thursday) with some Chinese-owned state enterprises to build a credit-scoring company.

• In M&A NEWS this week, Morrisons rejected an unsolicited takeover offer (Monday) and major shareholder Legal & General said that it was too low to be taken seriously (Tuesday), meaning that private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice have now got until July 17th to make another offer under current takeover rules. Elsewhere, Tractor firm CNH Industrial offered $2.1bn to buy agriculture technology company Raven Industries (Tuesday) to narrow the gap with market leader John Deere while Axiata and Telenor announced a merger of their Malaysian mobile groups in a $12bn deal (Tuesday) to create a major player in the digital services space.
• In IPO NEWS, Victorian Plumbing had a good market debut on AIM this week (Wednesday) and a number of companies are planning imminent flotations as well. Soho House (Tuesday) and Krispy Kreme (Wednesday) are planning on New York listings, although some are saying that Krispy Kreme is looking at a very full valuation (Thursday) while Chinese ride-hailer Didi has announced a valuation for its forthcoming IPO (Friday), the proceeds of which will be used to develop technology, grow outside China and launch new products.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

I know it’s bad, but this story made me laugh so much this week: Woman convinced groomer gave her wrong cat after returning home with “drowned rat” (The Mirror, Rosaleen Fenton). Hilarious 😂!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, the Bureau of Labor stats showed producer prices rising at their fastest rate since 2010 (Wednesday) as demand continues to outstrip supply. This is yet another data point that is piling the pressure onto the Fed – and after its two-day meeting this week, America’s central bank said that it would raise rates earlier than had previously been indicated (Thursday). World markets got spooked as a result (Friday), which isn’t surprising when you realise that the US economy accounts for almost 25% of the world’s GDP!
• Israel got a new PM this week in the form of Naftali Bennett (Monday) after 12 years of Benjamin Netanyahu. Israelis have had four elections since April 2019 and this government isn’t necessarily going to stick around either given that Bennett is presiding over an eight-party coalition! Stability in the Middle East is likely to be more unpredictable than usual given the change.
• In the UK, lockdown got extended to July 19th (Tuesday) due to the prevalence of new variants and businesses were not happy (Wednesday) given that they’d planned for a June 21st “Freedom Day”. However, the government gave cause for tenants to be relieved and landlords to be frustrated when they announced the extension of the ban on commercial tenant evictions (Thursday) to March 2022. UK inflation overshot the Bank of England’s 2% target (Thursday) for the first time in two years as fuel and clothing costs continued to rise. In trade, the UK signed a deal with Australia (Wednesday) meaning that we will get loads of their meat and they will get more of us working over there! On the other hand, HMRC data showed that British food and drink exports to EU fell sharply in Q1 as Brexit kicked in (Friday).
• It was another eventful week for Bitcoin! Bitcoin strengthened to the $40,000 level (Tuesday) as Elon Musk said Tesla would accept it as payment once more if Bitcoin miners could prove they were being more eco-friendly. There were two other interesting negatives that were brought to light by newspaper articles this week – namely that having a ton of Bitcoin on your balance sheet makes your company’s valuation go haywire (Tuesday), given its volatility – and that new research shows that as more people buy into cryptocurrencies fewer of them actually understand the risks they are taking (Friday). It is interesting to note that, according to the Bank for International Settlements, almost 90% of the world’s central banks are already involved in their own cryptocurrency projects (Tuesday), so existing cryptocurrencies could not only suffer from being pummelled by the regulator, the regulator could also be their biggest competition!
• The oil price is staying at relatively elevated levels (Tuesday) as investors bet that demand and supply will remain tight as oil majors put more money into renewable projects, restricting supply, while demand continues to be strong.

• The latest stats show that more Americans are quitting their jobs than at any point in the last 20 years (Monday). It would seem that confidence is rising among workers that they can find other jobs but I also wonder whether this has got anything to do with people doing “interim” jobs under lockdown migrating back to what they were doing before.
• There seem to be a variety of approaches to coming back to “office” work (Wednesday), with some companies being keener than others to get bums on seats – and this is particularly true with banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Opinions seem to vary between what bosses want and what employees want, according to ONS data (Tuesday), as 40% of companies expect over 75% of their workforce to be in the office and only 14% expect over 50% to work remotely whereas WFH is generally seen as an attractive option by many employees. In terms of more “physical” work, the UK meat industry is facing a shortage of staff (Friday), which could affect the supply of meat in our shops further down the line if the situation doesn’t change!

• Americans are keeping their cars for longer (Tuesday), according to IHS Markit figures. I wonder whether this is at least partly due to whether current owners are willing to hang on a bit longer to their existing vehicle before buying an electric one.
• Speaking of electric vehicles, GM is committing 30% more money to EVs (Thursday) than it said it would back in October and Polestar is considering a stock market flotation (Thursday). In terms of charging, the UK government is in talks with six companies (Ford, LG, Samsung, Nissan, InoBat and Britishvolt) about building battery gigafactories (Thursday). Given how big these places are (the clue’s in the name – “giga-” 😂), they’d presumably have to be in the middle of nowhere which would present financial and logistical challenges re power for the factory itself and you wonder just how good for the environment these places would actually be in the end! Still, it’d be great for jobs and keeping the UK automotive industry alive.

• IN M&A NEWS, Sony Music bought into podcasts by buying Somethin’ Else (Thursday), the UK’s biggest independent producer of audio programmes, in an effort to boost its podcast capability. Addison Lee hoovered up ComCab (Thursday), London’s biggest taxi firm, in a move to strengthen its ability to compete against the likes of Uber etc. and JP Morgan Chase bought UK roboadvisor Nutmeg (Friday) as part of its plans to expand into UK retail banking and wealth management.
• IN MONEY-RAISING NEWS, UK start-ups raised record amounts of money in Q1 (Wednesday), especially in life sciences and tech as investors look to park some of their money into growth assets. Meatless Farm launched a crowdfunding campaign (Monday) to raise £5m via Crowdcube as it needs to increase production and distribution to mix it with the likes of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods etc. Lockdown winner OnlyFans is exploring a share sale to new investors (Friday) and wants to use some of the proceeds to go more mainstream and smarten up its reputation.

• In LEISURE/TRAVEL NEWS, it looks like the dispute between Airbus and Boeing that’s been dragging on for 17 years is at an end (Wednesday), Europeans are booking up their holidays (Tuesday) as vaccine rollouts leads to more freedom but Emirates outlines what a nightmare year it has had (Wednesday). Meanwhile, in the UK, CVC bought a majority stake in UK holiday park operator Away Resorts for £250m (Tuesday) as investors snap up “staycation” assets. For instance, Butlin’s owner Bourne Leisure was bought earlier this year and there are other assets available.
• Then we saw the news that the UK and Norway completed the construction of the world’s longest subsea cable (Wednesday). It will trade power between the UK and Norway with a view to starting operations properly in October as part of plans to cut emissions and boost offshore wind power.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories this week involved the absolutely bizarre world record in Kanna Hashimoto wins Guinness World Record for getting tissues really fast (SoraNews24, Master Blaster) and the potentially useful Elon Musk’s favourite question to ask during job interviews which leaves people stumped (The Mirror, Rosaleen Fenton) if you think you will be having an interview with him any time soon 👍.

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In MACRO NEWS, there’s good news for the global economy (Wednesday) as the latest half-yearly World Bank report predicts that it will grow at a rate of 5.6% – the fastest recovery in 80 years!
• The G7 global minimum tax rate was agreed over the weekend (Monday), which will allow the US to keep its own corporate tax rate high (Biden’s actually hoping to hike it up from 21% to 28%) whilst making it less attractive to leave the US (in theory 😂). Low-tax countries like the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda were particularly unimpressed (Tuesday) as they feel they could lose out although Ireland’s opposition party sounds like it is warming to the idea (Thursday). Meanwhile, the Republicans are threatening to torpedo the plan when it goes to the vote in a finely-balanced Congress (Thursday) but it seems like the market doesn’t seem to think this is going to go ahead anyway (Friday), given the rather muted reaction to the news.
• Talking of Biden, he reversed Trump’s TikTok ban (Thursday), which had pretty much failed anyway. However, he seems to have broadened the remit of the US Commerce Department to investigate foreign transactions more broadly if they pose an “unacceptable risk” to national security. Separately, the US is thinking about lifting travel restrictions (Wednesday) for arrivals from the UK, EU, Mexico and Canada, which will please airlines no end I am sure.
• The latest official US inflation figure of 5% showed the sharpest rise for 13 years (Friday), imports to China grew at their steepest rate for a decade (Tuesday) due to ongoing raw material demand and the UK’s business confidence is the highest it’s been since June 2014 (Monday), according to a BDO survey.
• In COMMODITIES NEWS, options traders are betting on a $100 per barrel oil price (Tuesday) and diamond prices continue to rise (Tuesday), according to De Beers.
• It was a very eventful week for cryptocurrencies this week! Bitcoin started off weaker and some technical analysts reckoned it could go down to $20k (Wednesday). On the plus side, El Salvador declared Bitcoin to be legal tender (Thursday) and US Pension provider ForUsAll announced a venture with Coinbase that would let workers invest up to 5% of their pensions in cryptocurrencies – something that is extremely rare at the moment. On the other hand, Chinese Police did a massive raid mid-week involving 1,100 arrests in 23 regions and cities in a crackdown on money-laundering and Bitcoin mining – not a great look for the reputation for cryptocurrencies. It is interesting to note that ransoms for recent hacking attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the world’s largest meat processor were all paid in Bitcoin! Funnily enough, global regulators are now calling on a major tightening of rules on crypto (Friday). It remains to be seen as to whether anything will actually come of this.

• After a bit of a pause, and a hiccup on the London Stock Exchange where London-based broker Marex postponed its IPO (Thursday) due to “challenging IPO market conditions”, it seems that the Americans are readying themselves for another wave of flotations (Friday). Both Didi and Robinhood are expected to float soon and many bankers reckon the current pipeline is so good that 2021 will be the best year ever for IPOs.
• On the other hand, SPAC-backed EV IPOs have been disappointing (Thursday), with Lordstown looking like failing only months after its own flotation. However, Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman is trying to make SPACs better (Wednesday) and more beneficial to investors outside the SPAC itself. I wonder whether London is watching and taking notes on what to do and what not to do as it reviews its own SPAC rules.
• There was some interesting M&A this week as a consortium of private equity firms bought US medical supply group Medline for $34bn (Monday) in a deal which could herald a surge in leveraged buy-outs (Tuesday).

• UK retail sales continue to pick up pace (Tuesday), according to the latest British Retail Consortium figures which show that retail sales got a 10% boost last month versus May 2019 and burgeoning demand has led to recruitment growing at its fastest pace for 20 years, according to ManpowerGroup. UK shop workers are asked to adapt their jobs (Monday) and help online colleagues when things are slow, but Ted Baker has a shocker (Monday) – which isn’t surprising considering that it is highly exposed to occasion and office wear although Gap has said it won’t renew the leases of 19 of its UK stores (Thursday) and Gap’s stuff is decidedly casual! In Europe, Zara’s parent Inditex has put in a storming performance (Thursday).
• The hospitality sector is having real difficulties as it tries to attract staff who’ve left the industry (Wednesday) and competition for restaurant employees in the US is so fierce that some incredible incentives are being offered (Tuesday) to garner their interest!

• The UK is thinking about ending tariffs on EVs (Thursday) in order to make them more attractive to prospective purchasers and Tesla’s Model 3 is the best-selling 100% electric vehicle in the UK (Monday) while it’s facing stiff competition in China from the cheap-and-cheerful model from Wuling (Wednesday).
• Germany continues to suffer from chip shortages (Tuesday), which Flex reckons could last until the middle of 2022 (Monday). Johnson Matthey is making progress in EV battery technology (Monday) but Belgian recycling company Umicore cautions on the downsides of cheaper batteries (Wednesday) as a UK charging network is sold to a Hitachi venture (Wednesday). Meanwhile, Swedish electric car battery maker Northvolt has just raised another $2.75bn from existing shareholders to expand its first gigafactory (Thursday).

• In TECH, Apple has made FaceTime available on Android (Tuesday), France has fined Google €220m for antitrust abuse in advertising (Tuesday) and Amazon is getting closer to rolling out Amazon Sidewalk (Tuesday), a mini network that can be accessed by other Amazon devices and side-steps mobile phone companies.
• Meme stocks got more attention again from retail investors as Clover Health shone (Wednesday) and then lost momentum (Thursday) once more.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories this week involved pizza, as per Pizza fans have just figured out the perfect way to get more slices in a takeaway (The Mirror, James Rodger) and Pizza chef shares hack for stealing a slice from customers without them noticing (The Mirror, Emma Rosemurgey), although I think that Balenciaga stiletto Crocs now exist – and shoppers ‘can’t tell if it’s a joke’ (The Mirror, Paige Holland) was also worthy of mention!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In MACRO NEWS, G7 finance ministers started negotiations regarding a minimum corporate tax rate (Thursday) that will make it much harder for global companies to avoid tax by shifting their profits to low-tax countries. On Saturday 5th, news emerged that the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Canada had managed to reach a compromise of a global minimum tax of “at least” 15% that is likely to pave the way for a wider global accord at the G20 meeting in Venice in July. The UK managed to squeeze more out of the Americans after holding out for specific targeting of Big Tech. The Americans want France, the UK and Italy to cut their own respective Digital Services Taxes immediately, but they won’t do so until any global agreement has been finalised. It will be interesting to see how countries like Ireland, Cyprus and Liechtenstein react to this given they are all on 12.5% currently.
• Inflationary pressures continue to build on governments and central banks given current economic momentum as the coronavirus rollout continues. Manufacturing activity is increasing (Wednesday), Eurozone inflation has exceeded its target (Wednesday), Germany’s inflation rate is now at its highest level since 2018 at 2.5% (Tuesday) – and heading towards 4% according to the latest Bundesbank estimates – while Sweden becomes the last Nordic country to lift restrictions (Tuesday) and Brazil’s GDP has returned to pre-Covid levels (Wednesday). The OECD has given the UK a massive upgrade on its year-end GDP forecast (Tuesday) to 7.2% from the 5.1% it stated only as recently as March, which would mean the UK outpacing the US! However, oil prices are also rising (Wednesday) despite OPEC agreeing to increase production as planned and food prices are at their highest level for 10 years (Friday)! It sounds to me like the official rhetoric is changing from “current inflation is a blip and will calm down” to “we can take some higher inflation pain if it means that employment goes higher”.

• IPOs seem to be losing steam at the moment. Dealogic says that average price rises on the first day of flotation in January/February were 40%, falling to “just” 20% in March/April (Tuesday), excluding SPAC-backed IPOs. Talking of which, the SPAC boom is also losing momentum as fees from SPAC-backed IPOs accounted for only 4.5% of overall investment banking fees in March/April versus a much chunkier 22.5% in January/February (Wednesday). It’s possible for the SPACs to pick up the pace again as there are still 422 of them with $134.4bn to invest, but I think things are quiet at the moment because US regulatory authorities are looking at the possibility of tightening the rules. Meanwhile, Krispy Kreme is looking at flotation (Wednesday) after a five-year stock market absence.
• In M&A, Ferrero bought Burton’s Biscuits (Wednesday) and Etsy bought Depop (Thursday), which looks like a good strategic move for Etsy as it will broaden its demographic.

• Consumers have been very busy! The secondhand car market is going bananas (Thursday), which is something that’s also happening in the UK at the moment. They are also buying property – Nationwide’s latest figures show that UK house prices are now rising at their fastest rate since 2014 (Wednesday) and the costs of moving are increasing (Wednesday), with conveyancing fees more than doubling due to massive demand. Wickes’ strong performance is also symptomatic of a booming house market (Wednesday). When you consider that, for most people, the biggest expenditures in their lives are their house and their car(s), I think such trends will undoubtedly pile on the pressure for governments/central banks to raise interest rates.

• It was interesting to see good results from M&C Saatchi and ITV (Wednesday) as advertising is generally seen to be a leading economic indicator (it’s often the first expenditure to get cut in the event of a downturn and one of the first to get reinstated in the event of an upturn). A meaningful pick-up shows growing confidence among their clients.
• Domino’s is embarking on a major hiring drive in the UK (Wednesday) as workers who took up positions with them under lockdown return to their previous jobs. I think that this is also a really interesting sign regarding the return of business confidence. Interestingly, Wetherspoon’s is keen to hire and is pushing for a special hospitality working visa (Wednesday) because many in the sector are finding it difficult to find the right staff, to the extent that some restaurants are having to close lunchtime service (Thursday).
• There are growing rumblings about the return of business travel in the US (Wednesday) from some airlines and the return of trade shows in the US (Friday) will no doubt help this. I don’t think we’ll see such a quick recovery in Europe as vaccination rollout is further behind and more patchy, but what’s going on in America could be a sign of what could happen.

• Tesla announced plans to spend $1bn a year on rare minerals from Australia for its battery packs (Thursday). This seems to be another part of an overall strategy to safeguard the supply of raw materials and comes shortly after recent news that Tesla is looking at ways of securing future supplies of semiconductors.
• Trading in AMC Entertainment and other meme stocks went crazy again as retail investors got behind them again! AMC’s share price jumped by 95% in trading in the middle of the week (Thursday) as retail investors went mad for the company’s promise of free popcorn to investors – and then they tanked the following day (Friday) after the company filed with regulators a plan to sell over 11million shares whilst also warning investors against buying the stock! I’d say trading this sort of stuff is OK if you are in the right chat groups that catch this sort of thing early, but it is highly highly risky as it does not relate to fundamentals. You can’t blame the company from capitalising on this unforeseen gift!
• Jack Ma’s Ant Group finally received its consumer finance licence from China’s regulators (Friday) after the group made big concessions to keep the party going following a period of around six months of being put on the naughty step by the government for getting too feisty. The new unit will be called Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance and will be able to issue consumer loans, borrow from banks and issue bonds.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was the one about the rather unique online course in The Japan Ninja Council opens crowdfunding campaign for Nindo, the Online Ninja Academy (Monday). That’d be a good one to put on the CV 😂!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In COMMODITIES, prices were hit after China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) pulled in leaders of some of the world’s top metals producers over the weekend and said they’d come down very hard on excessive commodity speculation and the spreading of fake news (Monday). Pressure has been building for the last few weeks. There was an interesting development in oil as a court in The Hague ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut emissions by 45% by 2030 (Thursday). Although there was a lot of fist pumping and virtuous gloating afterwards, the fact is that it ain’t over yet because Shell is appealing the judgment. It will only be “ground-breaking” if the judgment actually sticks!!!
• In VACCINES, pharmaceuticals companies are continuing their fight against Joe Biden’s proposed coronavirus vaccine patent waiver (Thursday). This proposal is not a done deal as the World Trade Organization’s 164 members have to agree on it and the next meeting is scheduled for November.
• In IPO news, SPACs are going a bit lukewarm these days (Monday). Companies are watching the share prices of many SPAC-backed companies that have IPO’d absolutely tank – and they don’t like it. This will no doubt be music to the ears of private equity firms and the like as it means that they’ll face less competition from other investors. Still, I think that sentiment on SPACs is always going to be flaky – both on the upside and downside! For instance, a lot of them have been doing badly recently, but if a few of them start doing well positive sentiment could well return.
• On the subject of global corporation tax, lots of countries have already signed up to Biden’s “deal” (Monday), but the UK decided to hold out for more concessions from Biden regarding Big Tech (Tuesday). By the end of the week, it was looking increasingly likely that the US would compromise (Friday) in order to get this done.

• Amazon had an eventful week! It bought MGM for $8.45bn (Thursday), which will be a great boost to its content. It also announced plans to screen live recorded theatre productions from the National Theatre (Wednesday) – but then, on the downside, it got taken to court amid accusations of displaying anti-competitive behaviour (Wednesday) by forcing sellers not to sell lower on any other website.
• The embattled Huawei announced the release of its new proprietary operating system, Harmony OS (Wednesday). It had to accelerate the development of this system following very strict sanctions imposed on it by the US and other suppliers. I would imagine it’ll be pretty buggy for the moment but if it gets, say, other Chinese handset makers to sign up to it I would have thought it could be a threat in the coming years to the established players.
• A decision on the Epic Games vs Apple lawsuit (Wednesday) will be under consideration for the next few weeks, but the outcome seems finely balanced despite Apple probably having the upper hand in the earlier stages. I would have thought that, at the very least, the overall commission rate will come down to the 15% commission rate currently being charged to smaller players.

• HSBC said it had no plans to form a cryptocurrency trading desk (Tuesday) as the CEO questioned its suitability as a payments vehicle.
• After a period of weakness, Bitcoin bounced overnight (Tuesday) because Elon Musk said he’d talked to Bitcoin miners about making their energy consumption “greener”.
• Iran banned Bitcoin mining (Thursday) for four months because it has been suffering increasingly from blackouts. President Rouhani said that energy consumption has increased by 20% over the last year. It didn’t say how much Bitcoin contributed to it, but that’s what he’s blaming!

• Consumers are spending on pubs and restaurants (Tuesday) to the extent that the hospitality industry is now facing a labour shortage (Monday). Cinemas also did well (Tuesday) on the first weekend of opening up and we are still spending on homes (Wednesday) as Zoopla says that we are now in the hottest housing market since August 2007! We’re also spending more on gyms, which is something that is benefiting ClassPass (Monday), which saw a 600% week-on-week rise in the number of new members and the Gym Group also saw growing memberships (Thursday). Pets at Home is also doing well from people buying pets under lockdown (Friday).
• Meanwhile, among retailers, Tesco is trialling rapid delivery (Thursday) where you can get your shopping within an hour and Marks & Spencer announced it was shutting more stores and focusing on food (Thursday).

• There’s some interesting car-related news this week! UK car production is on the rise thanks to electric and hybrid vehicles (Thursday) and second hand car prices are rising (Monday) due to the chip shortage affecting the sale of new cars and ongoing demand from people who don’t want to commute by public transport any more (or at least for the near future). Talking of chip shortages, Tesla is looking to pay in advance for chips and/or make its own (Friday) in order to avoid any future supply disruptions. Nissan is pondering a new gigafactory in the UK (Thursday), which could be great news for jobs and the continuation of car production overall in the UK. There’s also good news for EV owners and would-be EV owners as Ofgem, Britain’s energy market regulator, announced that it will triple the number of “ultra rapid” EV charging points at motorway service stations and on key trunk roads over the next two years (Tuesday) as part of an effort to boost EV take-up.
• In property, the UK housing market continues to boom (Monday), according to Knight Frank but building materials prices are going up (Monday) due to rising demand as well as supply bottlenecks. It’s also really interesting to see that some town centres are changing (Monday) as retail space gives way to retirement residences.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was Woman shares genius hack to keep cat off her laptop after discovering it online (The Mirror, John Bett). Clever!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In China, the National Bureau of Statistics published data showing that manufacturing growth is slowing down (Tuesday). Retail sales figures were also underwhelming, which is not great because consumer spending is an important economic driver. This is all a tad concerning given that China was the first to go into lockdown and the first to start recovering, so it is seen by many as a leading indicator that precedes similar moves elsewhere.
• In Japan, economic output fell in Q1 (Tuesday) as the coronavirus state of emergency hit consumer spending. Up until relatively recently, Japan has been seen to be handling the pandemic pretty well, so this is indeed a blow in the lead-up to the increasingly unpopular (among locals) Olympics.
• The debate about inflation and the potential need to increase interest rates to calm it down raged on this week as the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers described the Fed’s loose monetary policy as “complacent” (Wednesday). The official stance of the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB is that the inflation we’re seeing now is a blip, not a trend and will calm down without needing to resort to increasing interest rates. The thing is that US jobless claims figures fell to lower levels than expected late on this week and there’s anecdotal evidence of shortages of staff in certain areas like hospitality (Wednesday), which would indicate an economy that is gaining momentum! Some flash indicators show that the European economy is bouncing back from a double-dip recession (Wednesday) as people are taking more trips to the shops and generally spending more and the latest data from the CIPD shows that recruitment is rising across the board in the UK (Monday). That was then topped off by the UK’s official inflation figure doubling from the previous month (Thursday). Although BoE governor Andrew Bailey says he’s monitoring the situation (Wednesday), the pressure for him to increase interest rates earlier than expected is clearly building!
• The coronavirus situation in India is, sadly, not getting any better. The Serum Institute of India has extended the ban on vaccine exports until the end of the year (Wednesday), but then on the other hand, things have improved so much in Denmark that pretty much all restrictions were lifted (Wednesday). There’s good news on the vaccine front with GlaxoSmithKline making progress with the vaccine they are working on with Sanofi (Tuesday). If all goes well, it could get approval at the end of this year 👍.
• Bitcoin had a very eventful week this week! It got clobbered after the weekend due to an Elon Musk tweet being interpreted as him going lukewarm on the cryptocurrency (Monday) to the extent that he had to send out a tweet saying that Tesla would not be selling any more of the stash of Bitcoin it bought earlier this year (Wednesday). This was made even worse by the People’s Bank of China reiterating that it did not recognise crypto tokens as a valid method of payment (Wednesday) and then Biden made things even worse by announcing that any transfers of Bitcoin worth over $10,000 would have to be declared to the IRS (Friday). It also turns out that investment manager Ruffer sold out of the Bitcoin it bought last year in April (Friday). I think that the biggest risk to Bitcoin is going to be from regulators and governments. I also think that there are so many cryptocurrencies out there these days that if there is a proper crackdown a lot of them will absolutely tank (or even disappear). If Bitcoin gets it bad, they will get it much worse IMO.

• There were some interesting developments for the travel industry again this week. The EU is considering accepting vaccinated travellers (Thursday) but air travel is already booming in America (Thursday)! Ryanair had a mixed week as it announced massive losses for last year (Tuesday) but then won a court case arguing that state help given to national airlines is tantamount to suppression of competition (Thursday).
• Eurostar got rescued by shareholders and banks this week (Wednesday) as the British resisted pressure from the French to cough up some money for the cause. The British government sold their stake in Eurostar in 2015, so I guess they just didn’t want anything to do with it. Staying on the subject of trains, a major overhaul of the UK railways was announced this week (Thursday) and Trainline shares were sold off (Friday) because investors think that the new structure will take a lot of their business, but FWIW, I think that the government’s track record of making and running complex apps isn’t exactly stellar and Trainline could make up a lot of ground in the intervening years.

• In the UK, although sales to buy-to-let landlords have fallen over recent years (Monday) UK house prices continued to grow at their fastest pace since August 2007 (Thursday)! The Bank of England’s deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, is warning that house prices could continue to stay high even after the stamp duty holiday ends (Friday) due to the continued demand for home-working but then you could argue that it may be saved from having to increase interest rates to take some heat out of the market by indirectly restricting lending. For instance, it seems that an increasing number of home buyers are having their mortgage applications rejected (Friday) due to lending limits that were imposed back in 2014. These limits are currently under review, but I guess if they were left unchanged in an environment of rising house prices this could just choke off the current frenzy.
• In commercial property, WeWork announced a massive Q1 loss for 2021 (Friday) and said that it had lost 25% of its members last year. It’s still eyeing an IPO-via-SPAC, though! I personally think that this is not the time to do an IPO for WeWork, which makes me wonder whether the early investors are trying to push this in order to get their money out.

• AT&T is creating a streaming giant (Monday) with Discovery. This is a big deal and it’ll be interesting to see what the plans are for it.
• Amazon is thinking of buying MGM (Wednesday), in another deal related to improving/consolidating content! This is likely to be very expensive for Amazon, but it’s got deep enough pockets and I think that the deal makes strategic sense.
• There was also a very interesting bit of M&A in Asia as two of Indonesia’s biggest tech start-ups, Gojek and Tokopedia, announced that they were teaming up (Tuesday) amid increasingly fierce competition in south-east Asia. The combo will mean that they will be closer in size to key regional competitors such as Grab and Sea and plays into the Asian trend of “super-apps”.

• Clubhouse has lost momentum (Monday), but it may well get it back as it has gone from being iOS-only to now being on Android! About time! Has it missed the boat and offended Android users in the meantime?!?
• American retailers Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target and TJX were among those to report strong momentum (Thursday) as consumers continue to spend! Is this really a blip??

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories of the week included the optical illusions in Mum’s optical illusion of daughter sinking into concrete is ‘melting people’s brains’ (The Mirror, John Bett) and Incredible optical illusion appears to show man leaping up into the sky (The Mirror, John Bett) as well as the crazily good A dad turned his whole house into a climbing frame for an epic ‘floor is lava’ game (The Mirror, John Bett)! John Bett from The Mirror – I salute you! A clean sweep of brilliant “alternative” stories this week!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, Americans are facing higher prices (Monday) according to research and markets were spooked by official figures showing that US inflation came in above market expectations (Thursday), prompting more speculation that inflation could get out of control without interest rate rises. Another major event in America that made the headlines this week was the hacking of the major US pipeline by a group of hackers called DarkSide (Tuesday). The pipeline, operated by Colonial Pipeline, supplies around half of the entire East Coast’s fuel, so petrol stations were running dry (Wednesday) as people were panic-buying petrol (Thursday) sending it up to $3 a gallon, its highest level for seven years! It turns out that the company paid the hackers (Friday) and supply is coming back online. This really shows how vulnerable America can be and could embolden other hackers. I would have thought that, on the other hand, it will be good news for companies who supply cybersecurity software and services.
• In China, the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index (PPI) increased at its fastest pace since October 2017 (Wednesday). Producers are currently swallowing higher commodity prices, but surely it’s just a matter of time before they pass them on to the end user. It was also interesting to see that the latest census figures show that China’s population growth has slowed down to levels not seen since 1953 (Tuesday). This is not going to be a situation that can be solved overnight, but it does store up serious problems for the future.
• In Europe, the European Commission has revised its GDP forecasts and thinks that the bloc is going to bounce back more quickly than expected (Thursday).
• In the UK, a BDO survey is the latest evidence of positivity for the economy as it showed that service sector confidence is at its highest level for 14 months (Monday) while the latest ONS data showed that the UK economy didn’t do too badly in the second lockdown (Thursday). It also showed that the creation of businesses were at their highest level for 10 years (Thursday), especially in retail, wholesale and logistics.
• In commodities, the iron ore price reached record highs (Tuesday) due to strong demand from China and the BDI, which tracks freight rates, was at its highest level for over 10 years. This is important because the BDI is used by many as a barometer for the state of world trade. It was also interesting to see that the International Energy Agency said that renewables grew at their fastest rate since 1999 (Tuesday), with wind power capacity almost doubling and solar power increasing by over 50%.
• In cryptocurrency news, there was a lot of drama this week! Elon Musk suspended the acceptance of Bitcoin as payment for Tesla’s cars (Thursday), which shocked many who assumed he was a big fan. It was all about him being concerned about the negative effect of Bitcoin mining on the environment – but I think that this is very suspect given that this is not a new phenomenon. Alternative “greener” cryptocurrencies include Ether (Thursday) or Chia (Friday). Billionaire investor Peter Thiel decided to inject $10bn into a new Bitcoin exchange to be called Bullish (Wednesday), as a competitor to Coinbase and a brand new cryptocurrency called Internet Computer token launched this week (Thursday) and is already worth $45bn! It is now the world’s 8th biggest cryptocurrency. Then an MD at Goldman Sachs quit his job (Wednesday) because he’d done so well from his Dogecoin investment – but don’t take this as a cue to try the same thing! It sounds good but MDs at Goldman are paid loads and the spare cash that he can afford to fritter away is more than most people could earn in a decade or more (or even in a lifetime)! Everyone is just looking for the next Bitcoin…

• Nio continues to push battery-swapping (Monday) as the way forward for EVs and is going to roll the tech out in Norway as part of its European expansion plans. Interestingly, Renault is mulling the possibility of swappable batteries (Wednesday), having originally aired the concept about a decade ago. There was a piece of research published by BloombergNEF which said that the cost of producing EVs and “traditional” cars will reach parity by 2027 (Monday), but clearly we won’t know that for sure for a while.

• In the US, consumers are spending on hotels and secondhand cars (Tuesday) while concerned British parents are looking to put their kids into private schools (Tuesday) given that many have had their education badly affected by the pandemic, that school fees have stayed relatively static and because some have been able to save/do well over the period.
• As far as UK retail is concerned, online sales are weakening (Thursday) according to the latest data from IMRG Capgemini as people flock back to the high street, Hotel Chocolat has done well enough to pay down furlough (Tuesday), Greggs is getting back on track (Tuesday) and Pret has made an interesting move to do an in-store trial at Tesco (Tuesday) which should help with broadening its customer and geographic exposure if it goes well. A new discount store is going to open (Monday) and plans a serious expansion. Meanwhile, Dixons, PC World and Carphone brands will disappear (Friday) to be rebranded Currys by this October. Dixons Carphone will also change its name to Currys plc on the London Stock Exchange.

• In China, Meituan caused a lot of controversy (Tuesday) after its chief exec posted a poem on social media that investors interpreted as something criticising President Xi Jinping, causing its share price to crater. It is under scrutiny currently for anti-competitive behaviour. The Chinese government also threatened the Swedish government (Wednesday) over its stance on Huawei, saying that Ericsson would suffer as a result and Alibaba announced its first quarterly loss (Friday) since flotation in 2014 as their recent big fine weighed on them.
• In Japan, SoftBank posted record profits as its various investments paid off (Thursday), although they made most of their money in one of their major funds from just three companies! Talking of SoftBank, Britain’s The Hut Group announced a joint venture deal with the company (Tuesday) on a yet-to-be-formed tech division.

• Ebay decided to take on banks and PayPal (Thursday) offering business loans via a new division called “Capital for eBay Business Sellers”.
• Delivery Hero announced that it would return to Germany to do business (Thursday). What is it about Germany?? Uber Eats recently announced that it would return there in a move clearly designed to chip away at Just Eat Takeaway’s dominance.
• British biotech company Allergy Therapeutics announced human trials of its peanut allergy vaccine (Monday), which is a real breakthrough. Even if all went well, though, it won’t hit the shelves for a few years because of all the tests it has to get through.
• Virgin Active won a case in the High Court (Thursday) that gave it the right not to have to pay back rental arrears to landlords. This decision could open the floodgates to a lot of similar actions IMO and seems like it could be the “new” CVA…

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories of the week included the uplifting yet painful-sounding Paralysed man makes miracle recovery – so he can kick his friend in the balls (The Mirror, John Bett) and the fabulous Artist creates unique skatepark that looks like a frying pan full of bacon and eggs (The Mirror, John Bett). Amazing!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen spooked markets (Wednesday) by implying that interest rates might have to increase, but then “walked it back” later on in the day as markets plunged on these remarks. Given she’s got tons of experience and was the previous chair of the Fed, I really doubt that this was a slip of the tongue! I am inclined to believe that this was an attempt to take the heat out of the market momentarily but you can’t do this kind of thing too often without impacting credibility and causing doubt. Given that Excitement and pent-up demand from some of the recovering economies is pushing food prices up (Friday), I just think that inflation is going to hit us earlier than expected – even moreso if you add in the fact that petrol prices are continuing to rise (Thursday) due to stronger oil prices.
• Things are hotting up in the UK as well as the Bank of England raised its estimate for UK GDP growth for 2021 (Friday) to 7.25% (the fastest GDP growth rate since WW2!) from the previous estimate of 5%, due to successful vaccine rollout and easing of restrictions and this feelgood boosted investor confidence as the FTSE100 saw its biggest one-day rise for two months (Thursday) as the recovery continues.
• In oil, Saudi Aramco saw good earnings (Wednesday) – something that other oil majors have been experiencing due to increasing momentum in global trade. I guess the next thing would be to see whether OPEC and other oil producing countries are going to open the taps and agree to higher oil production quotas. Given that everyone could do with more money at the moment you would have thought that they’d agree to production increases sooner rather than later.
• Cryptocurrencies had a very interesting week this week as Ethereum broke the $3,000 barrier (Tuesday), meaning that it has advanced by over 325% so far this year versus Bitcoin’s rather more “pedestrian” 95% 😂. Actually, right now, Ethereum has broken the $3,500 barrier! Mind you, both of these rises look positively puny when you compare them with Dogecoin’s 14,000% rise (Thursday) since the start of this year! It seems that everyone is hoping that “The Dogemaster” himself, Elon Musk, will push the cryptocurrency with one of his tweets. If he doesn’t, latecomers to the Dogecoin party will be nursing very big hangovers very soon!

• Asia’s really suffering (Thursday) versus the UK and US (and to a lesser extent, the EU) as new waves of the virus are hitting countries like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and even Japan (I say that because Japan has really not been hit as hard as many countries in the region). Indian businesses have been calling for more lockdowns (Tuesday) in addition to the existing lockdowns in places like New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. On the other hand, Germany is calling for the lifting of lockdown restrictions (Tuesday) – for those who are vaccinated – and the rate of vaccine rollout appears to be gathering pace. Just for reference (according to last week’s figures), 8% of Germany’s population is now fully vaccinated versus 55.8% of Israel’s, 23% of the UK’s and 32% of the US’s. The US is even trying to get vaccine doubters to get the jab by offering them things like beer (Thursday)!
• Regarding the actual jabs themselves, Pfizer boasted that it would rake in $26bn from its Covid vaccine this year alone (Wednesday) but then President Biden said he would support a temporary lifting of patents on coronavirus vaccines (Thursday) to help boost vaccine supplies in developing countries. Funnily enough, the pharma companies are not pleased about that (Thursday) and argue that it’s not just a case of giving, say, generic makers a recipe and off they go – they also argue that if there is an exception made for the coronavirus, what’s next? Cancer treatments? I think they are just going to have to shut up and take it because if they don’t, they will be portrayed in the media as money-grabbing mass murderers. The longer they drag their feet on this, the more people will die. And I don’t think they want that…

• Some chipmakers commented on the latest situation with regard to the current shortage of chips. Ford had to suspend production for this very reason (Tuesday) and German chipmaker Infineon thinks that there’s a global shortfall of 2.5m cars estimated due to the current chip drought (Wednesday). Fortunately, it also says that it thinks that the supply shortage will improve this summer (Wednesday) but rival ST Microelectronics says that the whole production process has to change in order to ensure that the current situation of widespread chip shortages does not repeat itself. Basically, it says that everyone is going to have to hold more inventory in future because the current way of doing things does not go well when there is a sudden shock.
• In EVs, Tesla is going to be losing out by hundreds of millions of dollars (Thursday) as Stellantis says that it will no longer need to pay Tesla emissions credits because its EV line-up will put it under the emissions limits imposed by Brussels. When you also take into consideration that Tesla’s recent strong Q1 results included such payments and a useful boost from selling off 10% of its bitcoin holding, the money they get from selling cars doesn’t look all that great! I would imagine that other car manufacturers will go the same way as they increasingly electrify their fleets. Tesla will have that to deal with, as well as an increasing variety of models from other producers like GM (Thursday).
• In larger EVs, Uber is going to team up with British electric van and bus start-up Arrival to make electric taxis (Tuesday), which sounds like a good idea strategically. It is interesting to note, however, that all is not rosy on the electric van front as it turns out that big fleet buyers are reluctant to buy more electric vans (Wednesday) because they just don’t have the range.

• Chancellor Sunak is confident that the consumer is going to return with a vengeance (Wednesday) and it seems that not a week goes by these days without some kind of comment that the housing market continues to heat up (Wednesday) There is an uneven recovery in the jobs market, though (Tuesday) and companies are readying themselves for an increase in employment litigation (Tuesday) when furlough comes to an end. Companies are now making plans for employees to return to work (Wednesday), which seems to tally with what office developer Workspace Group is finding as it says that inquiries, viewings and new lettings all increased in Q1 (Friday). Rival Derwent London has also said that it has seen an increase in lettings.
• So what will everyone be doing when lockdown lifts? Well Match reckons that there will be a “summer of love” and more dating will be going on (Wednesday) and, given lockdown lifting means that more businesses will be able to open, there will be more things to do on a date! You’ll be able to go to watch the Bond film at Odeon cinemas (Wednesday), drink inside a pub from June 21st (Wednesday) and perhaps if all goes well and you end up at yours you could get food delivered from an increasing number of takeaway delivery companies (Thursday) and if that goes well, you might end up buying synthetic diamonds (Wednesday)! Phew 😅!
• In terms of the retailers themselves, Next, Zalando (Friday) and Boohoo (Thursday) all saw solid sales – and even the embattled Superdry looked like it was turning a corner (Friday) – while Sainsbury’s got a new boss to head up its non-groceries (Friday). This could be interesting because Paul Nickolds has a very strong reputation and, I think, has some decent assets to play with in Sainsbury’s to get it on the right track.

• Peloton announced a recall of its treadmills (Thursday) following the tragic fatality of a 6-year old. I think this will be hugely damaging to the company and will be extremely expensive. It is also likely to give rivals a boost.
• US private equity group Apollo Global Management bought Verizon’s media assets including Yahoo for $5bn (Tuesday) as it reckoned it could do a better job of improving the performance of its digital media and advertising technology assets. Verizon will retain a 10% stake in the new entity.
• Trainline announced a big loss after a nightmare year (Friday), but I think that it could potentially have a decent turnaround as more commuters return to work and increase their use of apps to buy tickets. It could also be that they benefit from people preferring to travel around Europe via train rather than by plane. We’ll have to wait and see, though!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

There were quite a few candidates this week for my favourite “alternative” story – but I think I’m going to have to go with Scottish five-year-old lays into Amazon Alexa as bot fails to understand accent (The Mirror, John Bett and Magdalene Dalziel) as her reaction is just priceless!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• Mini is the latest manufacturer to suspend production because of the shortage of chips (Thursday) and it joins the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, Ford, Nissan and Honda. Although Intel talked recently about major investment in new production facilities, it won’t be an overnight solution. Chip shortages are just going to continue for some time yet.
• The UK replaced France as Europe’s #2 EV market (Monday) as battery EVs represented 7.5% of UK sales in Q1 this year – almost double the market share of Q1 last year.
• The International Energy Agency reckons there will be 145m EVs on the road by 2030 (Thursday) that will negate the need for over 2m barrels of diesel and petrol by 2030 and save something in the region of 120m tonnes of carbon dioxide. I would be willing to put my mortgage on the fact that these stats will be wrong, but it does put a figure on what we already know – that there will be a lot of EVs whooshing around over the coming years and this just puts a figure on it!
• Tesla posted record Q1 revenues (Tuesday) and did particularly well in China but a closer look under the hood (Wednesday) reveals that the results were boosted by taking some profit in Bitcoin and emissions credits while headwinds of more competition in China and elsewhere remain.
• Lotus announced it would be going electric (Wednesday) and has just had a massive investment to boost its sales. It will be unveiling its final internal combustion engined sports car, called the Emira, on July 6th – and after that it’ll be all electric!
• In other car-related news, Lyft sold its autonomous driving unit to Toyota (Tuesday) for just over half a billion dollars – not that long after rival Uber sold its own autonomous driving business last year. Talking of Uber, the company will be doing a UK recruitment drive (Thursday) in anticipation of strong demand when lockdown lifts and people want to avoid crowded transport.

• Education publishing company Pearson saw Q1 sales rise due to the success of online learning (Tuesday)
• Pet mania under lockdown has boosted the fortunes of companies such as Pets at Home and Chewy (Tuesday). Kantar says that over 50% of new pet owners are under 34, so this could underpin a longer term brighter future for these companies.
• Creator platform OnlyFans has seen transactions have risen sevenfold (Tuesday) to £1.7bn due to the number of users ballooning from 20m pre-pandemic to over 120m under lockdown.
• Spotify is expecting a slowdown in new subscribers (Monday) but it said that it was raising subscription prices (Tuesday)
• Gousto said it would be recruiting another thousand employees (Monday), but I have to say that I think that it will face pressures more akin to the takeaway delivery companies and will lose ground, especially in the initial stages of lockdown lifting as people choose to go out rather than stay in.

• In the US, summer rental prices are rising (Monday), casual dining venues are raising pay (Monday) and even offering signing bonuses! For instance, Chipotle Mexican grill is offering to pay college tuition fees to those who work 15+ hours a week after four months! I suspect that something like this may happen in the UK given that there are already reports of a shortage of restaurant and bar staff – and the venues haven’t even fully opened yet!
• In the UK, spending is already hitting the UK high street as Barclaycard reported spending rising above pre-Covid levels (Monday). A recent report from Deloitte is the latest in a slew of reports to show rising consumer confidence (Monday). Train season ticket prices are also under review (Monday) in an effort to tempt commuters back and Parkdean is benefitting from the current staycation trend (Thursday).

• The British Retail Consortium said that over 5,000 shops closed under lockdown (Friday) and 1 in 7 sites are still vacant over one year on from shutting down. The implication is that many shops will not reopen. Waitrose is deepening its relationship with Deliveroo (Wednesday) and will be increasing the offer of delivery from 40 shops currently to 150 by the end of summer. Sainsbury’s announced a loss (Thursday) due to Argos shutdown and Covid-related costs and it says that it’ll increase revenues by cutting prices (!). Dixons said it was going to shut down all of its airport outlets, but WH Smith raised money and is going to open an additional 100 outlets (Thursday), mainly in the US. I think that the investment in the US makes sense given the amount of domestic travel undertaken there and the likelihood that bookings will increase as the vaccine rollout continues.
• In online retail, Kantar figures show that online grocery shopping is losing momentum (Wednesday) but there isn’t a slowdown for Amazon, which had stellar results (Friday) as its businesses fired on all cylinders.

• US Big Tech had an outstanding week what with Microsoft and Google absolutely raking it in (Wednesday), Apple’s earnings helping it head in the direction of a $3tn valuation (Thursday) and Facebook’s supremacy in advertising powering its revenues (Thursday). Changes to Apple’s iOS could put the mockers on Facebook’s ad capability and the two are having a bit of a tussle about this currently. In China, Meituan is getting the Alibaba treatment from regulators (Tuesday)
• HSBC (Tuesday), Deutsche Bank (Thursday) and Lloyds Bank (Thursday) were the latest banks to announce strong performances this week while British investment bank Peel Hunt announced a joint venture with Santander (Monday) that is designed to help them get a seat at the top table in bigger IPOs and fund raisings.

• Law firm Mishcon de Reya is set for an IPO (Thursday), which makes me wonder whether other law firms – and other professional services firms, for that matter – will start to consider an IPO as a “quick” way of raising a lot of money that they could use to invest in the future.
• The world’s biggest container shipping group, Maersk, said that its profits were likely to double for the year (Wednesday) due to higher prices caused by the logjam caused by the recent Suez Canal blockage. Maersk is often seen as a barometer of global trade as it transports about 20% of all global seaborne freight.
• BT is now in talks with rivals to sell its Sport division (Thursday) as it looks to concentrate on rolling out broadband (and presumably to stop having to throw money every few years at renewing TV rights!).

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

I thought I’d leave you this week with New virtual reality attraction allows thrill-seekers to bungee jump off Tokyo Tower (SoraNews24, Ingrid Tsai). Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• Given that it was Earth Day on Thursday and that Joe Biden was holding a two-day climate summit at the end of this week, there was a lot of environment-related comment this week. The US and China pledged joint action on climate change (Monday) to take concrete actions this decade to cut emissions in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement. Brazil, South Korea and Russia were among the countries making solemn commitments to improve things but we’ll just have to wait a few years to see whether this is just a load of hot air 😁. Although I’ve seen this kind of thing a few times before, I think there may be more chance of it happening this time around because of the momentum that’s been building up over the last few years. We’ve had oil price nightmares, Sir David Attenborough on single-use plastics, Greta Thunberg going on strike, numerous natural disasters, the likes of BP and Shell committing to renewable energy and now a coalition of major global investors putting pressure on banks to stop funding carbon-intensive projects (Monday). I think that recent momentum capped off with hitting polluters where it hurts – in the pocket! – may tip things in favour of the planet, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
• Things are continuing to go in the right direction for the UK economy. According to a survey of economists carried out by the Treasury, the UK is set for its best GDP growth since 1988 (Thursday) as vaccine rollout, business reopenings and other restrictions lift. Interestingly, although consumer spending is up (Thursday) the latest ONS figures show that inflation still has a way to go before it hits the Bank of England’s 2% target – the level at which central banks tend to get twitchy and start thinking about putting interest rates up.
• There were some interesting cryptocurrency developments this week. Bitcoin had its biggest one-day drop for two months on Sunday (Monday) with various fluffy explanations being offered but Scottish investment company Baillie Gifford seems to be getting behind cryptocurrencies (Wednesday) as it invested $100m into the UK’s biggest cryptocurrency group Blockchain.com, thus edging it another step closer to the mainstream. Even the government is getting in on the crypto-fun as Rishi Sunak launched a taskforce to explore the possibility of a Bank of England digital currency (Tuesday).

• Hope are high that the $5.4tn people are thought to have saved globally during the course of the pandemic will power economies to growth (Monday). UK consumers might be feeling more optimistic as the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9% (Wednesday) despite Covid restrictions, although it has to be said that the youth unemployment rate is at a five-year high. I wonder whether this is due to a higher proportion of younger people being employed in industries such as retail and leisure as well as potentially being more likely to be cut by companies who keep on more experienced revenue generators at the expense of possibly less revenue-generative youngsters.
• So what is everyone spending/going to be spending their money on? Anna Wintour reckons you’ll be spending your money on luxury goods (Wednesday), which is actually borne out by a strong performance from Gucci-owner Kering (Wednesday) and then from Hermès (Friday), following on from last week’s strong showing from LVMH. We’re also spending money on cars (Thursday), houses (Thursday), going to the gym (Thursday), Toys (Friday) and bookshops (Thursday) while some companies are making preparations for lifting restrictions, like Pizza Express (Thursday) and Wetherspoons (Thursday). Things are actually getting so frenzied at the moment that UK pubs and restaurants are facing staff shortages (Monday).

• In ICE car news, Hyundai reported a cracking set of profits in Q1 (Friday) but Jaguar Land Rover and Renault announced halts in production due to chip shortages (Friday). The prospect for a resolution to this situation is still pretty distant according to Intel (Friday).
• In EV news, it was a tricky week for Tesla as Chinese carmakers are trying to close the gap (Tuesday) and then the state media got involved with slagging them off for apparently poor customer service (Thursday). This involved a Chinese Model 3 owner complaining that “the brakes didn’t work” (pretty much the worst thing you can say about a car, no?), Tesla then asking the customer to give permission to get this verified and then the owner not allowing them to do so. Tesla then gets the blame for being arrogant etc. and the state media makes a big song and dance about it. Now I think that Tesla can be pretty slippery, but I think that the timing of all this is very fishy! China is a key market for Tesla but I think it needs to broaden its appeal in other countries as I would imagine that it is not going to get as much support as its domestic rivals over the long term. Mind you, the EV revolution could hit some real problems as Rystad Energy says that there could be “a serious lithium supply deficit” by 2027 (Monday) and Bosch said that more attention needs to be paid to alternative technologies (Friday). In the meantime, lithium miners Orocobre and Galaxy Resources announced plans to merge in a $3.1bn deal (Tuesday) to create one of the world’s biggest lithium producers, which they argue will enable them to more than double their annual production of lithium carbonate.

• Other stories worth mentioning this week included Nvidia getting investigated by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority for its proposed $40bn acquisition of Britain’s Arm Holdings (Tuesday), Apple reinstating Parler (Tuesday) and boosting its ad business (Friday), and Netflix having a shocker in terms of very disappointing new subscriber numbers (Wednesday) while rival HBO actually did pretty well in comparison (Friday). Tobacco companies had a wobble over fears that Biden’s administration would force a reduction of nicotine in cigarettes (Wednesday), Uber Eats decided to move into Germany (Thursday) and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez tried and failed to launch a new European Super League (Monday).

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was the astoundingly bizarre Ultra-realistic cat backpack causes a fur-enzy online (SoraNews24, Oona McGee). Who on earth would want to buy such a thing?!?

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, a Wall Street Journal survey of economists showed that there is a belief that GDP will grow at its fastest rate (+6.4%) since 1983 (Monday) due to federal stimulus and a successful vaccine rollout. There was more good news at the end of the week as retail sales shot up by 9.8% in March and jobless claims came down (Friday). All of this feelgood helped US stock markets hit record highs (Friday).
• China’s GDP shot up by 18.3% in Q1 versus the previous year (Friday). Although this is undoubtedly an impressive growth rate, it fell short of analyst expectations.
• In the UK, the latest stats from the ONS show that we have returned to economic growth (Wednesday) as retailers saw rising sales and manufacturing saw an uptick on rising car production. A survey by YouGov and the CEBR showed that consumer confidence was at its highest level since 2018 and business confidence is also up.
• In cryptocurrency news, Bitcoin breached the $63,000 level (Wednesday) and America’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, had a dramatic debut on the NYSE (Thursday).
• In vaccine news, there seemed to be mostly negative developments this week. Someone from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said that they were considering the mixing of jabs to improve efficacy (Monday) but then they quickly backtracked (Tuesday), saying that they have been “misunderstood” and the media reiterated its strong support for domestic-made vaccines. India gave emergency approval for Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine (Wednesday) – adding that it would give emergency approval for vaccines already approved in the US, UK, Europe and Japan without putting them through “bridging trials” – as the number of cases continues to grow. There was bad news when we heard that the Johnson & Johnson jab’s rollout in Europe would be suspended (Wednesday) due to blood-clotting issues. This would have been really useful for accelerating Europe’s vaccine distribution, so will definitely be a blow. The Europeans got more bad news as it turns out that Pfizer is increasing its prices for supplying vaccines to the EU by a whopping 60% (Tuesday), but there was some good news towards the end of the week as Germany’s CureVac said that it has high hopes of getting its vaccine approved in May or June (Friday).

• China’s crackdown on Big Tech companies continues. Alibaba had an expensive start to the week as it was slapped with a $2.8bn fine (Monday), which sounds a lot (it is), but it only represents about 4% of Alibaba’s revenues. I think this is a good outcome for Alibaba as at least it remains intact and it seems that investors seemed to take heart as its share price shot up after the fine was announced (Tuesday). Ant Group, on the other hand, is facing increasing pressure from regulators (Tuesday) to cut ties between its payment platform and its lending business. The regulators also announced that they were giving some Big Tech companies one month to sort out their anti-competitive behaviours (Wednesday) otherwise they would get the Alibaba treatment. The companies look set to comply.

• April 12th marked the reopening of non-essential shops (Monday) and there were high hopes that consumers would spend at least some of the £180bn they’ve saved under lockdown (which roughly equates to 10% of the UK’s GDP!). Footfall was decent (Tuesday), although not completely stellar, and Roadchef announced it was going to be taking on 1,000 new staff at its service stations (Monday) to cater to all the staycationers travelling around the UK. It seems that we are spending money on drive-ins (Monday), laptops (Tuesday), takeaways via Just Eat (Wednesday) and Deliveroo (Friday) and are being targeted by the railways to get back commuting via the offer of new flexible tickets (Friday). Airlines are betting that people are going to travel again as both American Airlines and EasyJet upped their summer flight schedules (Thursday).
• Meanwhile, at the retailers themselves, LVMH had superb Q1 results (Thursday) as sales of champagne, fashion and leather goods were all incredibly strong, particularly in America and Asia as Europe suffered more from store closures. In supermarkets, there was speculation that Sainsbury’s might be taken private (Wednesday), Asda axed in-store baking (Thursday) and Tesco counted the cost of last year (Thursday) while AO World said it would be deepening its involvement with Tesco (Friday).

• This week was an eventful one for banks! HSBC moved virtually all of its top management to Hong Kong (Thursday) while Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan (Thursday) and Bank of America (Friday) posted excellent results. Fund manager BlackRock saw record fund inflows (Friday) and momentum has been so good in IPOs and M&A that British investment bank Peel Hunt is said to be considering an IPO (Friday). Fears about an exodus of City jobs post-Brexit appear to have been overdone (Thursday) as job vacancies shot up by 70% in Q1 this year, according to research by recruitment agent Morgan McKinley.

• The IPO and M&A gravy train continues unabated as the London Stock Exchange had its best Q1 for IPOs since 2007 (Monday) as PensionBee and Darktrace prepared for their IPOs (Tuesday) although BrewDog is thinking hard about listing in London (Monday) given Deliveroo’s recent disastrous debut. Meanwhile, southeast Asian superapp Grab announced the biggest SPAC deal ever (Wednesday) as the SPAC frenzy continues! Coinbase debuted but I already mentioned that above!
• In M&A, Microsoft bought Siri-creator Nuance (Tuesday) in a deal worth around $16bn that will double its presence in healthcare and Veolia finally bought its target Suez (Tuesday), signalling the end of what has been one of France’s hardest-fought takeover bids between the world’s two biggest waste and water groups

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was the one that highlighted one man’s attempt at a cunning plan in Man gets morphsuit to be invisible during video calls – but it doesn’t work as he hoped (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). I think it gets funnier the more you watch it! A video for our times 😂

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, Biden is trying to push through a massive $2.3tn infrastructure plan (Monday) to fund long term infrastructure, education and childcare projects. It will all come with strings attached and will also be financed by tax increases on individuals and businesses.
• In Europe, Macron extended the French lockdown (Thursday) as infection rates increased while, in the meantime, Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen continues to consolidate her position (Wednesday) as she is currently neck-and-neck with Macron in the opinion polls. There is only one year until the next presidential election and although things aren’t looking good for Macron at the moment, you would have thought that, by the time the election rolls around, vaccine distribution will be better and the economy will be on the up. Le Pen ran Macron close in the initial stages of the election last time but was roundly defeated in the end – so she probably needs to get as far ahead of Macron as she can before things start turning around for him to give herself the best chance of winning. And while we are on Europe, Merkel and Macron approached President Putin to ask him to use the Russian vaccine (Wednesday) on the very day that Merkel announced a suspension of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for the under-60s. Rather embarrassingly for Macron, his foreign minister had criticised Russia for using the Sputnik V vaccine as a “propaganda tool”. That must have been an awkward Zoom call 😂
• UK economic data continues to surprise on the upside (Monday), and indicators would suggest that we are heading towards a recovery (Wednesday) and firms say that they are planning to hire (Tuesday).
• In markets-related news, the Suez Canal blockage caused consternation (Tuesday) but was unblocked (Wednesday) but although it is thought that the backlog of ships will take a few days to clear, repercussions are likely to be felt as ships will all be in the wrong places as a result of the disruption so it’ll take a while to reset. Also, Archegos Capital Management, which had big exposures to ViacomCBS and a number of Chinese tech stocks, saw massive drops in its shareholdings (Monday) and a number of banks were affected as a result. The repercussions will continue to play out…Also, the S&P500 broke the 4,000 mark for the first time ever at the end of the week, powered by tech stocks, expectations of massive economic stimulus and a successful vaccine rollout.

• Bankers raked in record fees in Q1 (Wednesday) from deal-making, listings and capital raisings. Asian tech companies are raising huge sums of money (Monday) and there was news at the end of the week that the owner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Endeavour Group, is looking into listing on the New York Stock Exchange sometime this year! It announced the prospect of Elon Musk joining its executive team (where will he get the time to do this??), which will, no doubt, be the cause of a great deal of excitement!
• On the other hand, Deliveroo started the week by getting shunned by yet more investors (Monday), they then lowered the IPO launch price (Tuesday) and still had a disastrous market debut (Thursday)! I think that the real reason for this is because Deliveroo wanted to raise as much money as possible while the figures are still looking good and thought they’d take some short term flak for long term gain. I’ve always maintained that Deliveroo probably didn’t want to postpone this launch because I think that there was a risk that it would be delayed a long time before they could get such a high valuation again and they wanted the money right now! Interestingly, it seems that they were approached about listing in New York via a SPAC, but it turned down the opportunity…FWIW, I think that takeaway demand will drop off as lockdown eases, but one idea that they could pursue to keep punters interested is to have online-only items as per Applebee’s in the US (Monday). It’ll be interesting to see whether that idea comes over here!
• SPACs continue to raise huge amounts of money as the volume of deals done in Q1 was the most since 1980 (Thursday). The UK’s financial regulator, the FCA, said that it would change UK IPO rules to accommodate SPACs (Thursday) in order to get a piece of the action but London continues to lose out to New York (Tuesday) as companies like Cazoo think that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic. Interestingly, the company planning the UK’s first battery “gigafactory”, Britishvolt, is looking at flotation options – including via a SPAC – but it must be said that not all such flotations go well. Companies listing via SPACs and trying to surf the EV wave such as Canoo, Romeo Power, Lordstown Motors and XL Fleet have all had to reign in projections since flotation.
• In M&A news, Spotify bought Locker Room (Wednesday) and intends to rebrand it into something that has sports, music and pop culture content. This sounds great from a strategic point of view and is a logical move given that they are trying to make up for lost time in podcasts by buying in content (remember Joe Rogan’s $100m podcast??) because they don’t have the luxury of letting it grow organically.

• It’s all going on for the UK consumer at the moment! Britons continue to pay down record levels of debt (Tuesday), but the house price growth rate is slowing down (Thursday), with London likely to get hit the most (Tuesday) – but Londoners will get another wallet-wallop as they’re likely to have to pay more tax (Tuesday) in order to save their transport services. The over-65s are returning to the shops (Wednesday) and paths to restart travel are under discussion (Thursday), with Boris Johnson expected to announce more details on Monday.

• Tesla deliveries reached a record number of deliveries in Q1, more than doubling the number delivered in Q1 of 2020. Foxconn is making inroads into making EV platforms (Wednesday) and Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi announced its own plans to make EVs (Wednesday). The trend for tech companies to get into car making continues!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week were the hilarious Little girl’s ‘genius’ note for mum trying to find out her birthday presents (The Mirror, Paige Holland), an important guide in Best sausages around the world – and top places where you can find them (The Mirror, Nigel Thompson) and a rather bizarre concoction that you might like to try this weekend in Woman makes hot cross bun burger but people can’t tell if it’s ‘genius or scary’ (The Mirror, Paige Holland). It’s a clean sweep for The Mirror this week – so let’s hope that some of the other sources can come up with the goods!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, the latest stats from the Department of Labor showed that the number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits fell to its lowest level since the start of the pandemic (Friday). It looks like the combination of a vaccine rollout and stimulus payments are working their magic and economists are raising their GDP estimates as a result.
• China’s recovery is continuing (Monday) according to the latest data from economists at French bank Société Générale (aka SocGen) who believe that China has benefited the most from Western economies being sidelined by the pandemic in terms of trade.
• In the UK, things seem to be looking up. UK inflation fell unexpectedly (Thursday), service sector activity overtook manufacturing for the first time in a year (Thursday) and then Abu Dhabi agreed a multibillion-pound investment into British health, tech, infrastructure and clean energy industries (Wednesday).
• The Suez Canal got blocked this week by a massive tanker and some say it could take weeks to dislodge (Friday). However, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything too sinister about it, so I would see this as a short term blip where freight rates will climb, delivery times will be longer and oil prices might rise.

• Chinese car manufacturer Geely announced a new luxury electric car brand, Zeekr (Wednesday) which will make its first deliveries in Q3. This could certainly increase competition for Tesla, which is currently trying to smooth relations with China as military personnel and employees of some state-owned enterprises were banned from driving Tesla cars due to security fears (Wednesday). Tesla needs China as it represents about 20% of its global revenues.
• In other EV news, Audi said that margins of EV and ICE vehicles would reach parity within the next two years (Tuesday), Arrival floated on the New York Stock Exchange (Friday), Ford ditched the Mondeo to focus on EVs (Friday) and research from the SMMT showed that the UK needs to install WAY more chargers (Friday) if we are to hit government deadlines for EV sales.
• The chip shortage continues (Monday)! It was made much worse for car manufacturers as a fire at Renesas wiped out a load of production (Monday), the majority of which was destined for automotive manufacturers – making an already bad situation worse. GM was the latest car manufacturer to cut production because of a shortage of chips (Thursday). On the plus side, Intel has earmarked $20bn to increase production (Wednesday) but that’s not going to be anything like an overnight fix.

• Consumer confidence appears to be returning as Zoopla reported rising demand for residential property (Tuesday) and unemployment fell unexpectedly in the latest quarter (Wednesday), which really goes to show you just how important furlough has been in avoiding an even worse situation.
• So what are the expectations then? Well the government advising us not to go on overseas holidays hit share prices of affected areas hard (Tuesday) although opinion seems to be split on this. On the one hand you have Ryanair increasing its flight schedule (Thursday) but then Tui is reining in its offering (Friday). On the plus side, cinemas are opening up. The world’s #1 cinema chain, AMC Entertainment, announced openings (Monday), as did world #2 Cineworld (Wednesday). They sound like they are playing things down, but surely they will have a bumper year what with moviegoers looking forward to a year of postponed back-to-back blockbusters and the prospect of seeing something on the big screen!
• There are hopes that some lockdown pursuits will persist. Adidas is moving into walking, hiking and skiing and ditching other areas (Wednesday) as it bets that people will continue a new-found love of the outdoors. Kingfisher has benefited from a strong performance from B&Q (Tuesday) and Travis Perkins has seen its DIY chain Wickes do so well that it’s thinking of splitting it off and giving it a separate listing (Thursday).
• When lockdown lifts, working from home will become more prevalent – especially for employees of Nationwide (Thursday), but when we get there conditions may not necessarily be great, as per the “leaked” report and subsequent response at Goldman Sachs (Wednesday).

• In IPOs, Trustpilot had a decent market debut on the London Stock Exchange (Wednesday), but despite all the hype some big investors say that they won’t participate in Deliveroo’s IPO next week (Friday) ostensibly because they don’t like the dual-share structure and because they don’t agree with the way that Deliveroo treats its employees/contractors. We’ll see soon enough whether there’s any tweaking to be done…
• Other than that, in M&A news, Canadian Pacific Railway put in a takeover bid for Kansas City Southern worth $29bn (Tuesday), effectively as a bet on the trade pact between Canada, US and Mexico. Investment funds Ardian and GIP made a €11.9bn offer to buy the majorty of French water company Suez (Tuesday), which could torpedo a hostile takeover bid from rival Veolia. Microsoft was considering the purchase of messaging platform Discord for at least $10bn as it tries to broaden its offering (Friday). Private equity firm Blackstone made a $6.2bn bid for Australia’s biggest gaming and entertainment operator Crown Resorts (Tuesday), which makes some strategic sense given that it bought the Bellagio in Las Vegas from MGM Resorts in October 2019. Staying on the subject of gambling, US gaming company Bally’s offered $2bn to buy London-listed Gamesys (Thursday) as the theme of US and UK companies coming together to make the most of the potential growth opportunity of increased levels sports betting in the US continues. At the “smaller” end of the scale, Mondelez bought Grenade (Tuesday), which makes the UK’s #1 protein bar Carb Killa. The deal was rumoured to be worth about £200m – not bad for a company started by a husband-and-wife team in 2010!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was These beautiful pieces of sushi aren’t actually sushi (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel). How amazing is this?!?

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, the Fed said that it will keep interest rates close to zero until at least 2024 (Thursday), which is an extension of what the base case was previously – 2022.
• In China, manufacturing output was very strong for Q1 (Tuesday). You could say that this will look particularly impressive given that China was in lockdown in Q1 last year and that this year the annual mass-migration of workers and shutdown of factories over the lunar new year didn’t happen because of the imposition of very strict travelling restrictions.
• In Germany, the government’s economic advisers said that growth is stalling (Thursday) as the slow vaccine rollout is holding the economy back
• In the UK, confidence is rising in both the manufacturing and services sector (Monday) and consumers are also feeling more optimistic as well (Friday). The Bank of England seemed to echo this confidence as it raised its forecasts for the UK and left interest rates unchanged at 0.1% (Friday).
• Meanwhile, Brussels continued to needle the UK as the EU launched legal action against the UK at the European Court of Justice (Tuesday) that may result in trade sanctions regarding actions over Northern Ireland. They have also threatened to stop vaccine exports (Thursday) and will be discussing this further.
• Bitcoin surged through $60,000 (Monday) but, as usual, no-one really knows why 😁

• Regarding consumer spending, US economists think that Biden’s massive $1.9tn stimulus will lead to the biggest spending spree since WW2 (Wednesday). In the UK, there was some research published by Scottish Friendly and CEBR which reckons that we’ll spend 26% of the £192bn that people have saved over lockdown on things like holidays, travel and eating out (Wednesday). It seems that we’re all gearing up for a summer of barbecues and partying as Asda said that sales of barbecue and garden furniture have increased by over 400% (Tuesday). UK consumers also seem to feeling more affluent as UK property prices are rising, according to Rightmove (Monday) and customer inquiries have increased significantly.
• In retail, the picture is mixed what with news that 5% of all shops closed last year in the UK (Monday) – the biggest drop for 10 years. Thorntons the chocolatier announced that it wasn’t going to reopen its shops (Tuesday), in stark contrast to the relative success of Hotel Chocolat. SSP, the owner of brands such as Upper Crust and Caffè Ritazza, asked shareholders for more cash (Thursday) but at the same time are looking out for opportunities as other tenants abandon railway stations and airports. Greggs announced big losses from last year (Wednesday) but added that they are opening 100 new shops and Ocado announced strong sales for the recent quarter (Friday) but said that the growth rate would slow down as lockdown lifts.

• Carmakers are continuing efforts to drive down the costs of making EVs (Tuesday) and there was another sign this week that EVs are edging closer to the mainstream as their prices are now being included in Office for National Statistics data that is used to come up with inflation figures.
• BMW said that at least 50% of vehicles they sell will be electric by 2030 (Thursday) but their Mini brand is to be 100% electric by 2030.
• VW announced its commitment to battery-making (Tuesday) as it unveiled plans for six new battery factories in Europe by 2030. It reckons that 70% of European sales and over 50% of sales in the US and China will be EVs by 2030.
• Panasonic announced reduced reliance on Tesla (Monday). Tesla is putting more resource into making its own batteries and is already working with the likes of South Korea’s LG Chem and China’s CATL.
• The UK’s biggest chain of independent petrol stations, called Motor Fuel Group (it runs petrol stations under BP, Shell, Murco, Texaxo and Jet brands), announced that it was going to spend over £400m on chargers to add 100 miles in under 10 minutes (Monday). As things stand, we need ten times the number of chargers to cope with government EV targets (Thursday), but EV sales may take a hit in the near term as the government surprised everyone by cutting EV subsidies (Friday). Generally speaking, this usually kills EV sales stone dead, so it’ll be interesting to see what the real demand is for EVs given that they were a rare bright spot in an otherwise dire 2020.

• Stripe achieved a stellar valuation this week (Monday) giving it an implied valuation of a whopping $95bn! That’s bigger than either Facebook or Uber were before they did an IPO. Not bad, eh?
• Disney+ is narrowing the gap with Netflix (Monday), according to some recent analysis. I personally think that people will start to cancel subscriptions as lockdown lifts and maybe they will rotate subscriptions to cut costs. I would argue that the one service that won’t be cut is Amazon Prime because you get much more with that.
• eToro is planning on a Nasdaq listing via a SPAC (Wednesday) that could give it a valuation of $10bn. They boasted about 1.2m sign-ups in January, but I think that many of these “traders” will be flaky and leave. A great idea from eToro to surf the wave, but I think it’s fraught with danger for potential investors.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

This week, I have another favourite “alternative” story that stood head and shoulders above the rest: Airline employee goes extra mile to reunite toddler with Buzz Lightyear toy (The Mirror, Paige Holland). What a heart-warming story!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In the US, after jumping through all the hoops, Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus bill is now law (Friday) and so the race will be on to save the economy. The main objective here will be to do enough to stimulate the economy, but not so much that inflation runs rampant – which would necessitate a hike in interest rates, which the Fed won’t want to do at the moment (it has committed to keep them unchanged until next year). Whatever happens here will send ripples around the world.
• Europe continued with their campaign to blame everyone but themselves for poor vaccine distribution as they started the week by accusing the UK of banning exports of vaccines and vaccine ingredients (Wednesday) which they then backtracked on (Thursday), saying that they had only wanted to highlight that Europe exports a lot and the UK doesn’t when it comes to vaccines. Unfortunately, a Danish lady died after getting the vaccine and that led to some countries suspending the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine or at least suspending certain batches. Talking about vaccines, Russia is in talks to manufacture its Sputnik V vaccine in Italy (Thursday), which should help the situation somewhat, although that’s not going to be an overnight solution.
• In the UK, there was some good news in the form of a BDO survey on business confidence for the services sector which reached a twelve-month high (Monday). Given that the services sector makes up about 80% of UK GDP, this is an important development – and one that is needed, considering that a study at Aston University showed that Britain had one of the biggest falls in exports for a major economy in 2020 (Monday). Hopefully, confidence will translate sooner rather than later into actual economic activity!

• In M&A, Apollo merged with Athene creating a major financial conglomerate in a $29bn deal (Tuesday), the Agnelli family bought 24% of Christian Louboutin (Tuesday) and GE sold its aircraft leasing business to AerCap (Thursday) in a deal worth $30bn, but given the size and the power the combined entity would have in the space I would have thought that this is not a done deal and loads of disposals will have to be made in order to allow this deal to go through.
• In IPOs, Roblox had a great debut (Thursday) as did South Korean e-tailer Coupang (Friday)
• In SPACs, it seems that hedge funds have done well by shorting SPACs such as Churchill Capital IV and CIIG Merger Group (Monday) and made about $360m in profits so far this year from such trades. It turns out that Singaporean ride-hailer Grab is considering an IPO via the SPAC route (Friday). The frenzy continues!

• China car sales increased significantly versus the previous year (Tuesday) in contrast to the rather weaker sales in the UK, as evidenced by Direct Line (Tuesday). It’s not really surprising considering dealerships have been mothballed for most of the last twelve months!
• In electric vehicle news, Aston Martin committed to making EVs in the UK from 2025 (Monday), but I have to say I’m sceptical about how this will go down with Aston fans (and potential fans) given that part of the pleasure must be in the noise the car makes when you’re driving it! Meanwhile, US car dealerships are making changes to sell EVs (Monday) and are getting understandably nervous about the whole thing given how much it costs to convert and the fact that EVs currently only make up about 2% of overall car sales in the US. I have to say I think EVs will be fighting an uphill battle in pickup-truck gas-guzzling-loving America.

• In news on office property, it was interesting to see that planning permission was given for loads more office space in the Square Mile (Tuesday) despite the ongoing trend of remote working. IWG signed up its biggest ever client (Tuesday) to give NTT staff access to IWG offices globally and Deutsche said it would allow its bankers to work between one and three days from home (Wednesday), but I maintain that, over time, people will tire of hot-desking and working at home and end up working the majority of time in the office (although that is a massive generalisation – it will obviously depend on your company and your job) with the odd day working from home. I do wonder, though, whether over time this may help more women to stay engaged in the workforce for longer because employers could be more flexible than they have been in the past about remote working. It is just a personal opinion, but I think many women face a difficult choice when they start families because childcare in this country is so expensive that they are often feel that they have to stop working because the costs are so great that you are effectively working net-net for nothing and not being able to see your kids into the bargain. It is a very tough choice. Once they fall out, it can be very difficult to get back on track in your pre-child career.
• It was an eventful week for Marks & Spencer as it announced that it would demolish its Marble Arch flagship (Wednesday), build a ten-storey replacement but only have retail on three floors leaving the rest for offices. This sounds a lot like what John Lewis is doing with its flagship store down the road and I wonder whether this will become a trend in big department stores across the country. If so, this could be bad news for the likes of IWG etc. because there will be even more office space available than there is at the moment! M&S also announced the availability of more different brands (Thursday) which seems to me to be another step in the right direction for its ailing clothing business. Could this be symptomatic of the turnaround that everyone is hoping for??

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

Without a shadow of a doubt THIS was my favourite story of the week hands-down: COVID-19: Teachers perform Take That’s Back For Good in parody video as they await students’ return to school (Sky News). What a great bunch of teachers!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the budget this week (Thursday) and it was pretty much a spend now, tax later budget. One of the many aims of this budget was to encourage investment, with a new “super-deduction” tax break trumpeted as being key to this.
• President Biden is getting closer to pushing through his $1.9tn economic stimulus plan (Friday). It got the OK from the House of Representatives last week and went to the vote in the Senate this week. Kamala Harris had to get involved to move things forward, so the proposal is still alive *** NEWS JUST IN – The Senate just approved the bailout plan so it will now head back to the House of Representatives where it is expected to be endorsed  ***
• Oil prices rose this week (Thursday) as oil producers decided to stick with current production quotas. Given that the general feeling is that demand will rise as lockdowns lift around the world, it’s natural for prices to rise as well if supplies stay the same

• In the US, President Biden pledged to have enough jobs to vaccinate all adults by the end of May (Wednesday), which was probably made even more possible by the fact that Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot jab got FDA approval (Monday). In an unusual move, rival Merck is going to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine (Wednesday) because it has the capacity (it is the world’s biggest vaccine maker, but unfortunately its own coronavirus candidate proved to be disappointing) and the expertise. I thought it was interesting to note that CVS and Walgreens are benefiting from being a part of the vaccination drive (Wednesday) as they are basically harvesting contact details of those being summoned to get their vaccines and then tracking subsequent purchases. I think this sounds morally questionable considering that the government is footing the bill for other expenses and they are using the virus as an opportune marketing exercise on people who have to go into their outlets. On the other hand, I guess you’ve got to admire the retailers’ entrepreneurial spirit! If they continue to be allowed to do this, I would have thought this would be a decent positive for their respective businesses.
• In Europe, vaccine distribution continues to be poor and EU members are, one by one, taking matters into their own hands. Slovakia is already using the Russian vaccine (Tuesday), the Czech Republic is thinking about using it (Monday) and the Hungarians are getting the Chinese vaccine (Tuesday). Then Austria, Denmark and Israel have gone off to form their own side-deal (Tuesday) to produce Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and share vaccine stockpiles! Very cosy, don’t you think?? Germany (Monday) and France (Tuesday) have made massive U-turns and approved AstraZeneca’s vaccine for use in the over-65s , but it’s too late for the swathes of people who cancelled/didn’t turn up to vaccine appointments when they heard they were getting the AstraZeneca vaccine! Germany’s rollout continues to be pretty useless (Wednesday), which is surprising considering that it was seen as having one of the best responses to the pandemic not so long ago. It just goes to show how quickly you can go from hero to zero. Things really are getting pretty desperate as Italy blocked exports of AstraZeneca’s jab to Australia (Friday) and EC president von der Leyen is now trying to get Biden to send them supplies of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to make up for the production shortage. Clearly Biden will just give the EU American leftovers, but still it shows how desperate Europe is getting.
• In the UK – over 20m doses of vaccines have been distributed so far (Monday) and the Office for Budget Responsibility said that if rollout speeds up, all adults could get their first jab by June (Thursday), one month earlier than had originally been projected.

• According to Refinitiv data, SPACs did $109bn-worth of transactions globally LAST MONTH (Tuesday) in 50 deals. So far this year, they’ve accounted for over 20% of dealmaking activity.
• Trustpilot announced plans for a £1bn float on the London Stock Exchange (Tuesday), making it the first European company to do so this year.
• Deliveroo announced that it would also be doing an IPO on the London Stock Exchange (Friday) and is seeking out a $10bn valuation. I would argue that the timing is great for the company (it’s continuing to do well under lockdown), but I wonder whether it’s going to be any good for investors given the possibility that it will have difficulty in replicating the stellar growth rates it saw last year.

• In EV news, Volvo committed to electrify its line-up by 2030 (Wednesday), GM is thinking about building a second battery factory in the US (Friday) and Tesla revealed that it has become an adviser on a nickel project (Friday) as part of a deal to secure nickel supplies. Nio complained of continued chip shortages (Wednesday) and car parts manufacturer Valeo said it thought that the shortage would last until at least the summer (Monday)
• In RETAIL news, Sainsbury’s announced cuts at HQ and a shutdown of its online fulfilment centre in East London (Thursday) in order to save on costs and concentrate spend on improving its food ranges, the latest figures from Kantar showed that Aldi and Lidl showed that both supermarkets lost market share for the first time in over ten years (Wednesday) and, this week, Morrisons dropped out of the FTSE100 (Thursday). In its latest bid to change, John Lewis announced that there would be “mini-John Lewises” in branches of Waitrose (Monday), Amazon opened its first cashierless shop in the UK (Thursday) and, over in the States, Disney announced the closure of 60 stores (Thursday).
• In UK CONSUMER NEWS, the latest Bank of England figures showed that household savings continue to increase (Tuesday), the Entertainment Retailers Association says we are spending record amounts on fun and games (Wednesday) and Nationwide says house prices are rising (Wednesday). Given the latter, banks aren’t wanting to be left behind so the UK’s five biggest banks have agreed to support a new government scheme that will help first-time buyers onto the property ladder by offering 95% mortgages (Thursday).
• In SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS, Twitter announced it would clamp down on users who spread false news about the coronavirus and vaccines (Tuesday) in an attempt to contain the spread of harmful content and Google said that it would be curtailing the tracking of web users from 2022 (Thursday), making it more difficult for advertisers to pinpoint their audiences.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

I thought I’d leave you this week with two food stories – the weird “recipe” in Man turns flour into ‘shredded chicken’ and confused viewers have no words (The Mirror, Paige Holland) – and something for dessert in ‘I played cupcake roulette with Deliveroo and my face says it all’ (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). Nice 👍

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• The House of Representatives passed a comprehensive $1.9tn stimulus package on Friday in the first of a series of hurdles to get full clearance and enshrine it all in law. The House is controlled by Democrats, but the stimulus needs to get approval by the Senate as well (where the Democrats only have a wafer-thin majority) and the clock is running down as the Democrats have given themselves a mid-March deadline to get everything through. This will be the second-biggest stimulus package ever (last year’s Care Act was $2.2tn). Measures include a gradual increase of the federal minimum wage over five years, $1,400 direct payments, an extension of unemployment insurance and $350bn for state and local governments.
• News from Brazil freaked out investors after President Bolsonaro sacked the chief exec of Petrobras (Wednesday) who many thought was doing a decent job at the scandal-ridden state-controlled oil company. The sacking occurred as the two disagreed over subsidising petrol and diesel prices (truckers have been complaining about high prices) as Bolsonaro wants to introduce them. This is a questionable vote-winning tactic that costs a great deal of money to implement. Petrobras’ chief exec was replaced by a puppet military general with zero experience, presumably so that Bolsonaro can push him around. Funnily enough, there are elections next year…
• Boris Johnson outlined a roadmap to freedom at the beginning of the week (Tuesday) and although there are expectations of a great recovery when everyone is released from their domestic prisons (Thursday), there are various things that could hold the economy back (Wednesday)
• In Bitcoin news, the cryptocurrency headed towards $60,000 over the weekend, but then came back (Tuesday) and ended the week nearer $45,000. As usual, no-one really knows why 🤷‍♀️
• Those pesky WallStreetBets/Reddit traders are at it again as trading in GameStop shares was suspended (Thursday) because the price more than doubled mainly in the last hour and then it continued again the next day (Friday). I think that trading in this stock is extremely dangerous as it just isn’t based on any fundamentals. It seems to me that you just have to be in the right chat room at the right time and listen to the right people. I really hope that regulators crack down on this because a lot of people are going to get burned.

• There was a lot of M&A activity this week, what with US regional bank M&T Bank buying People’s United Financial in a $7.6bn deal (Tuesday), Goodyear buying rival Cooper Tire for $2.8bn (Tuesday), LVMH buying a 50% of Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac champagne company (Tuesday), Allied Universal Security Services buying G4S (Tuesday), not to mention Estée Lauder buying a majority stake in Deciem (Wednesday) and British insurer Aviva selling its French business for €3.2bn (Wednesday). 
• IPOs took up headlines as well this week with Swedish alt-milk brand Oatly aiming for a US stock market listing (Wednesday) that could give it an implied valuation of $10bn. Then there were companies that declared that they were going down the SPAC listing route. Joby Aviation has plans to list via a SPAC (Thursday) as does Lucid Motors (Wednesday), but I have to say that I think they are companies that could ONLY be listed via a SPAC because they just don’t seem to have enough substance at the moment.

• Electric bus start-up Arrival announced it would start road-testing in the UK in Autumn (Monday), which sounds great but I do wonder who is going to buy these buses given that most transport companies have been decimated by the pandemic! It will be listing via a SPAC in New York.
• After last week’s earnest declarations by car manufacturers about going 100% electric, there was an interesting article about there being a need to sort out their supplies of raw materials like graphite, lithium and cobalt (Monday). After all, if you don’t have the ingredients, you can’t bake a cake!
• Hyundai announced a massive recall of 82,000 vehicles (Thursday) because of the danger of spontaneously combusting batteries! Not great for them and it might give potential buyers another reason to avoid electric for now.

• It was a bad week for Uber. First of all, the UK’s Supreme Court decided it should classify its drivers as workers and not contractors (Monday), then the EU decided to launch their own review (Thursday) and then, to make things even worse, the rival that essentially drove Uber out of China, Didi Chuxing, announced plans to expand in Europe (Thursday), making an already competitive market even more competitive!
• In banks news, HSBC announced plans to move key execs to Hong Kong (Monday) and to cut office space in London (Wednesday). Lloyds also announced it was going to cut office space by 20% (Thursday)
• There was a bit of a kerfuffle in social media as Microsoft backed paying news publishers for content (Tuesday) and Facebook decided to pay publishers in Australia after all (Tuesday) after pulling content for a few days. Some are suggesting that Facebook’s about-turn will embolden others (Wednesday). Also, India decided to impose new rules to make social media platforms more accountable (Friday), pretty much saying that it will intervene in anything it doesn’t like. Elsewhere in social media, Snap targets ad growth (Thursday)
• In retail, ministers are talking about how to implement an online tax (Wednesday), which isn’t as black-and-white as you’d think and John Lewis is keeping more stores closed when lockdown lifts (Monday)

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

I thought I’d leave you this week with the amusing prank in Woman shares dad’s furious meltdown as she sneakily messes with his Alexa volume (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). Will you be giving this a try??

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• In macroeconomic developments, Mario Draghi became Italy’s new Prime Minister (Monday) and laid out broad plans on how to turn the country’s fortunes around using a mixture of the EU’s recovery fund and structural reform. Japan posted better-than-expected quarterly GDP growth (Tuesday), the second consecutive quarter of growth, but commentators seem to be more downbeat on the prospects for the full year especially as the country is unlikely to get an Olympic boost given the covid-shaped cloud hanging over the event.
• In markets, Japan’s Nikkei 225 breached the 30,000 mark for the first time since 1990 (Tuesday) as Japan announced that it was rolling out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Bitcoin broke the $50,000 mark (Wednesday) and Elliptic, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency compliance company, said that it has seen a huge surge in requests from large banks about cryptocurrency (Thursday) – a further sign that the cryptocurrency is reaching the mainstream. There was another historic moment for the cryptocurrency as the world’s first Bitcoin ETF started trading in Toronto this week (Friday).
• In commodities, the Saudis said that they would up production from current levels from April (Thursday) after committing to cut production earlier this year. Raw material prices have had a huge rise from their 2020 lows (Wednesday), boosting confidence of the likes of BHP and Glencore, as iron ore prices have surged by over 85% and copper prices by over 80% since March lows. All eyes will be on the sustainability of China’s momentum as it accounts for at least 50% of global demand. Prices for crops have risen as well (Monday). Corn prices are at their highest level for seven years (up by 43%) while soybean prices shot up by over 50% and wheat by 15%. This is due to a combination of countries stocking up in case pandemic flare-ups cause supply problems again and countries restricting exports as they make sure their own country’s supplies are replenished first.

• JLR committed to becoming a 100% electric brand by 2025 (Tuesday), Ford said it would commit to 2030 (Thursday) but Daimler decided against putting a date on it (Friday), saying that it would continue to invest in EVs using money generated from its internal combustion engine-powered cars. Presumably they all want a piece of the EV action as Tesla saw sales of its cars rise by 90% last year in the UK (Friday). In other car-related news, VW appears to be considering a partial float of Porsche (Friday), which would presumably a useful chunk of change to throw at EV development.

• In the US, retail sales saw their biggest monthly increase in January than for the last seven months (Thursday) due to a combination of ongoing economic stimulus measures and an easing of business restrictions.
• In the UK, inflation was up (Thursday) on higher prices in food and furniture – which I think coincides with ONS figures showing strong property sales in December (Thursday). Increased activity in the property market prompts people to buy furniture and consumer electronics – and there’s arguably the additional boost from people stuck at home more wanting to improve their environment. Halifax said that demand for detached properties was also strong (Monday), which again is unsurprising as more people look to move from city centres to bigger properties in the ‘burbs where they can spread out a bit more.

• In the world of investments, private equity groups are now accelerating their pursuit of British companies (Monday), according to data provider Dealogic, presumably because Brexit is sort of done and valuations of UK companies aren’t as bloated as they are over the Pond. Interestingly, it looks like there’s going to be a wave of European SPACs coming as LVMH founder Bernard Arnault and ex-UniCredit chief exec Jean Pierre Mustier are getting together to form a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (Tuesday).
• In IPO and M&A news, Kanabo (Israeli medicinal cannabis company) and Cornish Metals (Canada-based miner) had successful market debuts (Wednesday) but the Competition and Markets Authority is now scrutinising the deal for Norway’s Adevinta (which owns Shpock among many other brands) to buy eBay’s UK classifieds business (Wednesday) to form the world’s biggest online classified ads group, potentially putting the whole thing in jeopardy.
• In vaccine news, there was some speculation as to whether the UK would be avoiding vaccine passports and moving towards rapid testing (Tuesday) as well as employers potentially making employees take jabs (Wednesday).
• In tech news, there was a big hoo-ha about Google and Facebook paying news providers to show content on their respective platforms. In the end, Google did a deal with News Corp (Thursday) but Facebook stuck to its guns – but then again, let’s be honest, when was the last time you looked for news on Facebook?? News is way more important to Google than it is to Facebook. Twitter is having problems in India (Wednesday) as the government attempts to seek out their help to quell dissenters, but Twitter isn’t playing ball at the moment. Other than that, Robinhood and others involved in the recent WallStreetBets frenzy faced Congress (Thursday). It’s over a few days and, at the moment, just looks like a load of senators trying to get airtime. It’s all noise at the moment, so it’ll be interesting to see whether anything actually comes out of it any time soon.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories this week both came from Wednesday’s edition of Watson’s Daily. So this week I’m going to leave you with TikTok balance challenge goes viral as ‘women can do it but men can’t’ (The Mirror, Luke Matthews) as something to have a go at in between video calls😂 and the weird and wonderful combinations in Dad’s incredible crisp sandwiches sparked by Wotsits butty turn him into viral sensation (The Mirror, Kristy Dawson). Nice 👍!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• The Fed reiterated its commitment to low interest rates (Thursday) as chief Jerome Powell keeps everything unchanged, including the 2% inflation target.
• China may actually get a coronavirus boost this month (Friday) as the traditional mass migration of workers to their respective home towns and villages is likely to be way lower than normal due to travel restrictions. This means that factories will stay open and exports won’t have their normal dip at this time of year. China continues to win at the moment!
• In Europe, Mario Draghi is getting close to putting together an Italian government (Tuesday) as he brings opposite sides of the coalition together while EC boss Ursula von der Leyen eats humble pie (Thursday) and admits shortcomings in her centralised vaccination distribution strategy
• The oil price returned to pre-Covid levels as it breached $60 a barrel (Tuesday). Oil bulls will say that prices should rise due to a combination of vaccine rollout, co-ordinated economic stimulus packages and potential supply shortages from having cut projects and capacity last year. Oil bears will say that China demand is already at normal levels and that hopes of European and US recovery are too optimistic.
• In specific oil company news, Total was the latest major to announce a big loss (Wednesday), but it was actually less than everyone had been expecting. BP paid £900m for rights to build wind farms in the Irish sea (Tuesday) and Shell announced that it would be carbon-neutral by 2050

• Match Group bought South Korean media company Hyperconnect for €1.73bn (Wednesday) – its biggest ever acquisition. It signals a departure from its core dating-focused business. While we are on the subject of dating, Bumble had a successful IPO (Friday), proving continued investor interest in IPOs and tech stocks.
• Electronic Arts bought Glu Mobile for $2.4bn (Tuesday) as part of its aim to become “a market leader in lifestyle and sports”
• The UK had its fastest start to M&A deals since the 2008 financial crisis (Monday) and I think momentum will continue to pick up as more businesses get distressed the longer lockdown goes on and investors continue to accumulate cash
• Kraft Heinz sold Planters peanuts sale to Hormel Foods for $3.35bn (Friday) as part of its plans to cut debt levels

• Bitcoin got endorsement from Tesla at the beginning of the week (Tuesday) as the EV manufacturer revealed that it had spent $1.5bn on the cryptocurrency. Then it turned out that both Uber and Mastercard have plans to accept Bitcoin payment (Friday), sending it even further north!
• Trading-advice-hub-of-the-moment Reddit raised $250m in its latest funding round (Tuesday) and said that it would spend the money on video, advertising and consumer products
• Cannabis attracted the attention of amateur traders this week (Thursday) after targeting the likes of GameStop, AMC Entertainment and silver in the last couple of weeks. Tilray’s share price shot up by over 50% in trading on Wednesday!

• Our high streets are going to be increasingly “gappy” once lockdown lifts as Debenhams on Oxford Street is due to close down next week (Wednesday). This probably explains why landlords are going to be losing out on £140m in rent (Tuesday) as Boohoo bought the remnants of Arcadia (Tuesday) – but not the shops. The trend of online apparel retailers buying brands but not the outlets continues…meanwhile, Frasers Group sold its 25% stake in French Connection (Tuesday) at a loss compared to its purchase price.
• In restaurants, coronavirus restrictions have hit hard. The new owner of Prezzo is closing more restaurants (Thursday) but drinks companies including Carlsberg (Monday), Heineken (Thursday) and Coca-Cola (Thursday) have also suffered as a result of people not being able to go out. On the other hand, Fulham Shore is ploughing ahead with expansion of its pizza chain Franco Manca (Tuesday) as landlords fall over themselves to offer them rent-free prime sites.
• In groceries, Sainsbury’s is putting pressure on Aldi (Thursday) by price-matching 250 products and we saw official figures confirming what we already know – that online grocery shopping has been increasing (Wednesday) under lockdown

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

I’m just going to leave you this week with my favourite Japanese yodeller, Takeo Ishci in one of his more recent works, Chicken Pig Attack. Watch out for the dodgy lyrics – but hey, you just can’t fault the yodelling 👍. Gotta love YouTube for things like this! Have a great weekend!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• The week started off with widespread condemnation of Europe trying to enforce a border between Great Britain and the island of Ireland to stop vaccine exports (Monday) and then failing. True to form when someone senior (Ursula von der Leyen) mucks up, someone else was blamed for it – and it was vice-president Valdis Dombrovsksis (and former PM of Latvia) who became the fall-guy although he said that the whole thing was reviewed and approved by everyone.
• Eurostat figures indicated a double-dip contraction (Wednesday) as GDP fell in Q4, but not by as much as the market was expecting.
• Mario Draghi (former ECB president) was asked by the current Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, to help form a government (Thursday) as previous PM Giuseppe Conte tried and failed to do so. The coalition, such as it is, is made up of parties with diametrically opposite opinions and agendas so this will be a tall order even for a man of Draghi’s standing and reputation.
• The UK is looking to do an overhaul of state aid (Wednesday), tearing up the European rulebook in the process – but I would imagine it can’t stray too far from it otherwise there could be repercussions
• The Bank of England is expecting a recovery in the second half of this year (Friday) due to a vaccine-fuelled boost, especially if the vaccine rollout continues apace

• The EU continues to take a lot of criticism for vaccine distribution problems (Monday) and so many countries in Europe are getting impatient and just going ahead with buying their own vaccines (Wednesday) from China and Russia. From many people’s point of view, Europe has not turned up in their hour of need whereas China and Russia have. Vlad must be loving this.
• Vlad will especially love the fact that the Russian Sputnik V vaccine showed a 91.6% efficacy rate in a peer review (Wednesday), showing that his gamble to release early is now going to pay off. He now needs to persuade the 54% of Russians that are sceptical about the vaccine to go ahead and take it!
• It was interesting to note that the Germans, French and Swiss – one by one – announced that they were not going to recommend the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine (Thursday) due to there not being enough data on the efficacy of the vaccine for the over-65s. Maybe this is just as well given the supply shortages.
• Johnson & Johnson sought to get its one-shot vaccine approved (Friday) from regulators. This would be great as it just gets one more vaccine into the global armoury. It would be particularly useful as it only needs to be taken once and can be refrigerated at a realistic temperature.

• Some of the richer UK lockdowners have been buying supercars (Monday) as they’ve not been able to spend their money freely, but at the more “normal” end of the scale, Bank of England figures say that households repaid the most credit card debt since records began in 1993 (Tuesday). Others have been spending on property. Mortgage approvals have increased (Tuesday) BUT the latest Nationwide figures say that property prices are falling (Wednesday), which would suggest to me that perhaps we’ve peaked. Potential buyers may now decide to sit things out and wait to get their £15,000 in savings from falling prices rather than rely on Sunak’s Stamp Duty holiday. People seem to be taking an increased interest in their personal finances, according to Hargreaves Lansdown (Tuesday) – and what’s particularly notable here is that, in the first half of the financial year, the average age of people opening accounts was 37 years old! The average age was 54 in 2012!
• Gambling was a pastime that shot up in popularity over lockdown as bored lockdowners aimed to “earn” some money. The Gambling Commission is now cracking down on online gambling  (Wednesday) and will be bringing in restrictions to some games that are seen to be particularly addictive. If this crackdown has the same effect on online gambling as maximum stakes on FOBTs did on high street betting shops, this could prove to be disastrous for the industry. Betting companies will be doubly keen to put even more of their efforts into the massive stateside growth potential brought about by the relatively recent legalisation of sports betting.
• The Treasury has instructed the UK financial regulator, the FCA, to regulate Klarna (Wednesday), the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) specialist. I think it’s high time this happened as Klarna is effectively providing credit to the demographic that has been worst hit by unemployment during the pandemic – young people. Thus far it has been allowed to grow unfettered, but given what’s going on in the worldwide economy at the moment, things could potentially come crashing down if too many young people are not able to make the payments.

• Daimler said it was splitting itself into two companies – one focusing on cars and the other on trucks (Thursday). This got a positive reaction from investors on the announcement. I would say that, generally speaking, investors like it when companies decide to focus on fewer areas because it makes the story simpler. If, for instance, you are investing in the theme of trucking evolution over the next 10 years, you might baulk at having to invest in Daimler as it is now because you might not like the car side of the business. However, you would be interested in buying the new truck-focused business.
• Chip shortages continue to plague the car makers as GM had to cut production as a result (Thursday) – as well as Ford (Friday). These are just the latest makers to suffer and there’s no visibility as to when this is going to end
• Tesla announced that it would be doing a recall in the US of 135,000 cars (Wednesday), which is a lot considering that last year the company shipped just under 500,000 vehicles globally. I would have thought that this is going to be expensive as the recall involves the touchscreen – not some spring or something. Tricky.
• Tech companies benefited from increased ad spending. Google announced record revenues for Q4 (Wednesday) while Snap and Pinterest also benefited (Friday) from higher ad spending. I would have thought that Google’s sheer ongoing power will provide ammo for lawmakers and politicians alike when they eventually get around to deciding what to do about Big Tech.
• Other interesting stories this week included the return of a reformed/reforming Ant Group (Thursday) that could get another crack at launching an IPO if it behaves itself, Asos buying Topshop from the stricken Arcadia (Tuesday) as the online retailer bought the brands and not the shops and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos stepping back from being the CEO (Wednesday) putting a trusted lieutenant into the hot seat.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was the old sketch that just makes me laugh every time and always gives me a lift!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• AstraZeneca got into hot water over vaccines because they were not able to provide enough of them to the EU (Monday). Rumblings have been intensifying over the last few weeks about the EU’s slow handling of the vaccines, then the Germans pushed for vaccine exports to stop and the Italians have threatened to sue drugmakers. It now appears that US biotech company Moderna is going to be cutting deliveries to France and Italy. Someone, somewhere made catastrophic errors here and people are going to die as a result while everyone plays the blame game. Getting vaccinated is going to be key to kick-starting economies and everyone is going to be racing to get this done. The UK seems to have been playing catch-up so far in most respects, but has actually been doing relatively well in comparison to other countries with regard to rolling out the vaccine – which must irk the Europeans even more. The drama continues…
• It’s good to hear that pharma companies are already working on booster jabs that combat new variants. Moderna’s launching a new version of the vaccine that better attacks the South African variant (Tuesday) although makers vary in their estimations of the length of time it takes to make vaccines that combat the variants (Wednesday). Variants are just a fact of life when viruses are concerned so I guess we just need to get used to it!
• In other vaccine-related developments, Panasonic has been inundated with requests (Monday) from European and US logistics companies to trial a super-cold freezer box (called “Vixell”) that it has developed specifically for transporting coronavirus vaccines. Samples will be distributed at the end of March and it will begin selling or leasing them soon afterwards. Sales will surely be huge – certainly for the short term at least! Also, the subject of verifying that you have taken the vaccines came up this week. Airlines are working on vaccine passports such as the “Common Pass”, “Verifly” and IATA’s own “Travel Pass” (Wednesday). They will need robust systems in place to get people up in the air as quickly as possible but, given the whole “no jab, no job” thing brought up by Pimlico Plumbers recently, the airline industry won’t be the only one to want to use some kind of verification system. I think that, unless the government steps in to legislate and clarify the law on this, lawyers will benefit from a blizzard of unfair dismissal and discrimination claims.

• Shares in GameStop, AMC Entertainment, Blackberry and others went through the roof (Thursday) as amateur investors acted as one by communicating on Reddit, buying stocks that were shorted by hedge funds. Things got so crazy that the White House said it was monitoring the situation (Thursday) and then the trading platforms they used freaked out and began to restrict trading (Friday). Retail investors complained about not being free to trade, unlike their professional cousins, and that it was one rule for the billionaires and another for the plebs. If the regulators don’t intervene here, I think that there will be huge scope for criminals with decent networks to game the system. I think that this is just more evidence of the sheer power of social media and will no doubt be brought up when lawmakers around the world consider what to do about Big Tech, their power over data and their power over shaping narratives
• There was some interesting news on Ant Group as Jack Ma suddenly popped up after an uncharacteristic absence (Thursday) making decisions that came as a surprise to everyone – that Ant Group would comply with the more restrictive conditions imposed on it and restructure accordingly. In return, it seems that the Central Bank will be prepared to let it carry out the IPO that it hoped to carry out at the end of last year (but we don’t know when this will happen). The key here is that things could have been much worse! OK, so it’s not going to have the stellar growth it experienced before, but at least it will fight to live another day…

• In DEAL news, Shell bought electric vehicle charging provider Ubitricity (Tuesday), the biggest on-street car charging company in Europe. This is good for Shell, who can use this acquisition to burnish its “green” credentials and great for Ubitricity who gets a sugar-daddy that can finance faster and broader expansion. Also, a joint venture was announced between Beyond Meat and PepsiCo (Wednesday) under the banner of “Planet Partnership”. It’s great for Beyond Meat because they will get access to Pepsi’s global network (and this company needs scale to keep driving prices down and benefiting from economies of scale) and it’s useful for Pepsi, which wants to broaden its product range to “healthier” options. This is a common thing for other beverage companies – it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Coca-Cola bought Costa Coffee, for example (although whether coffee can be judged to be healthy is another conversation!).
• The trend for troubled retail brands being bought but not their shops seems to be continuing. Boohoo bought Debenhams (Tuesday) and Asos looks like being the front-runner to buy Topshop (Monday) from the stricken Arcadia Group. At this rate, by the time lockdown lifts, there won’t be much of our high streets to go back to. Whoever is left should surely do a roaring trade! FWIW, I really think that this is not necessarily the death of the high street – but it might be the death of big chains that have homogenised our high street for the last few decades. I expect there to be a lot of pain at first but then I would think that we will see lots of independents popping up due to business start-up grants/loans and much more understanding landlords gracing our town/city centres. We let’s hope so anyway!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week highlighted some amazing paper skills: Do NOT eat this delicious looking bento and other Japanese food…because they’re not food! (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel). Amazing!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• President Biden reversed Trump’s anti-WHO stance (Friday) and committed to join international efforts to make Covid-19 vaccines available worldwide by signing up to its Covax programme
• Things are getting sticky in the EU regarding vaccine rollout. The grumbling is getting louder as EU members are considering legal action against Pfizer/BioNTech to make them ship more vaccines (Thursday) and Hungary decided to go rogue and approve Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine (Friday). If others decide to go down the same road and source vaccines directly themselves, EU disintegration really could be a possibility – and with Angela Merkel leaving office this year, this could really escalate as others line up to take her place both within Germany and outside. Populists in Europe will be loving the potential discord and they could potentially use the kerfuffle to get back on the offensive again. They will no doubt point to the relative success of the UK’s vaccine rollout (Tuesday) – although, as we all know, this situation could change!
• All the while, poor countries are going to suffer, as one study predicted that some countries could take up to three years to get vaccinated (Thursday). I think it’s in these countries that the Chinese and Russian vaccines are going to do best – and if they prove to be effective the companies that make them could find themselves new overseas markets.
• Now that we actually have vaccines, though, the next thing is going to be how to transport them all. Companies who make fridges that can cope with the cold temperatures needed for the vaccines will benefit (Friday). China’s Haier and Japan’s Panasonic make such fridges, but I am sure that others will also benefit! I think that this is going to be a major trend for this year…

• In petrol-powered vehicle news, the Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot Citroen merger went live as the new entity “Stellantis” (Monday) becoming the world’s third biggest car maker by sales, according to 2019 figures. The chief exec warned that the Ellesmere Port factory in the UK could be at risk at some stage (Wednesday) because of Brexit uncertainties and the commitment by the UK government to stop selling petrol-powered cars in 2030, although let’s face it – car sales have been pretty ropey for a while now so I think he’s just setting the stage to blame someone else (the government) if he has to sack loads of people. Nissan said the complete opposite (Friday) as they saw that Brexit might present opportunities as their cars would look pretty attractive compared to more expensive imports. Time will tell who is right! Meanwhile, Audi was the latest manufacturer to bemoan the shortage of microchips (Monday). The chip industry doesn’t cope well with big swings in demand and companies like TSMC are likely to benefit (Friday). Intel saw a strong end to last year because of increased demand (Friday).
• In EV news, Tesla started deliveries of its new Shanghai-made Model Y (Tuesday). A survey by Deloitte showed that UK buyers remain reticent about buying EVs because they are still a bit too expensive (Tuesday) and a number of companies are getting stuck into upgrading our charging network (Tuesday). Having said that, other companies are developing batteries that can charge faster, hold their charge longer and deteriorate more slowly (Wednesday). I personally think that if we can get the batteries right with longer range and faster charging times the need for an expensive and hard-to-roll-out charging network will actually diminish over time. We need the charging network at the moment, though, in order to convince more people to buy EVs in the first place!
• Interestingly, VW just missed their European emissions targets leading to a whopping €100m in fines (Friday)! Ouch 😱! Presumably, this wasn’t helped by the later-than-planned launch of their ID3 all-electric car. I would have thought that this means Tesla will do a roaring business next year from VW for emissions credits (Tesla makes a huge amount of money from this)!

• In Financials news: the US banks’ reporting season showed us that banks with more exposure to trading and advisory revenues ruled (Wednesday) while those with more exposure to consumer lending were held back. Elsewhere, BlackRock and Vanguard continue to dominate the world of ETFs (Tuesday), but although they probably wield more power between them than the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Google on tech, it doesn’t seem to attract much attention. Then we also saw Elliott Management leave Hong Kong (Wednesday), making it one of the first major financial institutions to pull out since all the pro-democracy tensions led to China imposing new stringent national security laws on the territory. It’ll be interesting to see whether this trickle will become a flood.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week was One of Japan’s best ramen chains now has a VR game that lets you cook their noodles (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel) which makes me crave ramen!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• The Capitol fallout continues as Trump is impeached (Thursday) while party sponsors continue to abandon – even New York City cuts him off (Thursday)! The next stage is that the Senate will have to vote to convict him (it will need a two-thirds majority to do so), but that’s unlikely to happen before Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday 20th. I think that if the inauguration passes off without Trump supporters doing anything stupid, Trump will probably be OK (the Senate is thought to be 50-50 at the moment), but if it all goes wrong there is much more likelihood of him getting convicted – and if that happens, he probably won’t be able to run for office in 2024. In the meantime, Biden wants to get a $1.9tn coronavirus bailout/stimulus package out there (Friday) that should see him through the first year of office.
• Big Tech continues to cut Trump off (Twitter and Facebook effectively “de-platform” him) but it also pretty much kills his supporters’ communication platform of choice as Amazon, Apple and Google all but kill off Parler (Tuesday). The sheer power that Big Tech wields in terms of whether someone gets to have a voice or not is plain for all to see and will no doubt push the whole free speech/anticompetitive behaviour thing up the Biden agenda in terms of urgency
• Bitcoin took a lot of flak this week – but gave it back in style despite getting slagged off by the FCA (Tuesday), the ECB (Thursday) and being put under scrutiny by the US Treasury Department (Tuesday). Investors ignored it anyway as Bitcoin broke through $40,000 again (Friday)

• Ford closed down factories in Brazil (Tuesday) as part of the ongoing pruning process of its loss-making international operations while Honda decided to close down its Swindon plant (Thursday) due to a lack of semiconductors. Modern cars require more of these chips – something that could be very good news for chipmaker TSMC (Friday) this year as demand is high but supply is limited
• In electric vehicles, Tesla is riding high in China (Thursday) with a 20% market share of EV sales, but you’d think it has to be careful not to do too well otherwise it might attract unwanted attention from the Chinese authorities! There could be a potential banana skin, though, as the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asked it to recall 158,000 vehicles due to a fault in the all-important touchscreen (Thursday). This would be a big deal for Tesla given that it delivered almost 500,000 vehicles GLOBALLY last year, of which about 205,600 of those stayed in the US. Apparently, Tesla does not have to recall the vehicles but it does have to come up with a reason why. Interestingly, the UK’s safety regulator, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, has looked at the same issue but not recommended the recall. However, news of what’s going on in the US is causing concern and some charities, such as Brake, are urging a review…
• German carmakers BMW, Daimler and VW tripled sales of EVs last year (Wednesday), outpacing Tesla for the first time. However, when you are doling out up to €9,000 in subsidies per vehicle (a measure introduced last year to boost car sales) this is hardly surprising! The real test of how popular EVs are is what sales are like when there are no incentives!
• GM announced a new electric truck business (Wednesday) called BrightDrop which will specialise in delivery vehicles – something that I think is a good idea given that it is a growing area and one that requires fleets of vehicles, which will be good for sales.

• EU vaccine distribution is coming in for a lot of criticism (Wednesday) and although I think there is a lot of niggling going on now, I think things could escalate quickly and get nasty.  Criticisms are that much more acute given that the UK and US is already rolling out the vaccines. If the EU doesn’t get a handle on this quickly, there’s a risk that individual countries could splinter, get their own supplies and really drive a rift between the richer northern European countries (because they can just go and buy more vaccines) and the poorer southern ones (who can’t). Talking of vaccine distribution, Russia is having problems getting to the regions (Friday), but there’s also the other problem of scepticism of its citizens as to whether its vaccine, Sputnik V, really works and we also heard that the Chinese vaccine is has a lower efficacy rate than had been previously thought (Wednesday), which is a real shame as, TBH, I just hope that ALL vaccines work wherever they are from!
• There were two “feelgood” stories I wanted to tell you about as well this week – the one about the Sussex company that has found a way to make vaccines in pill form (Thursday) – HOW FANTASTIC IS THAT??? – and then the (probably more realistic) one about Johnson & Johnson nearing the final tests for its one-shot vaccine (Friday), which would obviously be WAAAAAAY easier to distribute (although I’m not sure what temperature it has to be kept at) because you don’t have to worry about the logistics of getting people back in for a second shot
• There were some other issues that came up that are worth considering for the future that came up this week, though. The CEO of Pimlico Plumbers said that he would be bringing in a “no jab, no job” policy (Thursday) meaning that new starters will have to have the jab as a condition of work – something that I think could become common practice as time goes on. Also, health and tech groups are working on a vaccination passport (Friday), which is another thing that needs to be brought in quickly because individuals are surely going to be asked to prove that they’ve been vaccinated in order to do all sorts of things like go to the office, step onto a plane, go into crowded venues etc.

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” stories this week involved the dangerous noodles in ‘I tried instant noodles that were so spicy I almost went deaf for a few days’ (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin) and the unbelievably cute dog in Dog with huge eyelashes melts hearts as people compare her to a Disney character (The Mirror, Luke Matthews) 😍😍😍

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• Trump reluctantly came to terms with the fact he’s leaving office. He “tried” to get Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the handover of power (Wednesday), which didn’t happen, then incited supporters to riot to the extent that they managed to breach the Capitol (Thursday) which infuriated so many that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for Trump’s removal (Friday) by invoking the 25th Amendment just two weeks before his term is due to end. He was banned, rather belatedly, from both Facebook and Instagram “indefinitely”, which is kind of hilarious because the damage was already done. What was rather less hilarious, though, was the fact that five people died in this needless escapade
• Lockdowns got much more restrictive this week with Boris Johnson addressing the nation on Monday night and closing schools for Lockdown 3.0 (Tuesday) while Germany’s existing lockdown got tighter (Wednesday) due to rising case numbers
• In markets news, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) initially decided not to delist China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom (Tuesday) as per their intention at the end of last year, but then they did a U-turn on their U-turn after US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gave them a call (Thursday). In the meantime, Chinese markets reached their highest levels since the 2008 crash (Wednesday)
• There was good news in oil this week as Opec and non-Opec countries came to an agreement (Wednesday) with Saudi Arabia agreeing to cut its own production but allow Russia and Kazakhstan to increase their respective production. This will take uncertainty out of the market for the meantime…
• Then Bitcoin went bananas, smashing through $40,000 (Friday). I think that this is due to increasing numbers of mainstream institutions getting involved. The more “legit” players get involved, the more this could snowball. I think many institutions will at least be thinking about getting involved in Bitcoin as its sheer momentum has to be taken seriously and we have already seen one, Ruffer, get involved in a meaningful way. If growing institutional interest takes hold, I do wonder whether this will take out some of the volatility that scares off some investors (because they are arguably more likely to hold onto it for longer than your average retail punter). IMO, one danger is that the wheels could fall off in a drastic fashion if central bankers and politicians get together to shut out Bitcoin. Although they can’t “go to the source” and negotiate, I think that they could potentially restrict its usage (e.g. they could prohibit banks from using it, for example) and pass laws that make it more user un-friendly. Just think – they got together to shut out Libra, so maybe they could do the same to Bitcoin! However, I don’t see that happening just yet because politicians have coronavirus to worry about. Then again, the longer they leave Bitcoin to run riot, the more problematic a shut-out could become…

• Fiat Chrysler and Groupe PSA (Peugeot Citroen) shareholders have approved of the biggest automotive merger so far this century (Tuesday) and the enlarged group will be called Stellantis. It will start trading around the 18th and 19th of this month. As with most mergers in the automotive industry these days, they want to join forces to eek out cost savings, work together on reducing emissions and pool R&D spend
• It’s probably just as well that the two companies are getting together considering that US car sales are at their lowest for 10 years and UK car sales are their lowest level since 1992 (Wednesday)!
• In terms of electric vehicles (EVs), General Motors CEO Mary Barra outlined how it would overtake Tesla (Thursday) via a slew a new models to be released this year. No doubt she wants to drown out the idiocy of her company’s now-abandoned tie-up with Nikola with something positive. It sounds like she is not so much polishing a t*rd – she is just rolling it in glitter 😂
• It was very interesting to see that Foxconn, well-known for putting together iPhones, announced a  a tie-up with Chinese EV maker Byton (Wednesday), which is aiming to bring its first EV to market within a year. It’s good to see that it is diversifying and maybe this could be a decent earner in years to come

• UK residential property continues to go from strength to strength with mortgage approvals at a 13 year high (Tuesday), according to the latest Bank of England figures. Presumably this is more a result of everyone trying to beat the end-of-March stamp duty deadline rather than “natural” demand

But then in office property,

• Law firms are among those thinking about cutting their office space needs dramatically (Tuesday) and I suspect that those who are currently wearing too much space are looking at how to sublet. This is all bad news for companies such as WeWork, who is currently trying to cut costs (Thursday) in order to survive because I would argue that companies who sublet their excess office space will be more inclined to let out the space at lower prices (they would just rather someone use the space rather than just leave it empty), thus lowering rents for all landlords in the surrounding area

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week is the ‘Revolutionary’ wrap hack loved by foodies will upgrade your lunch game in minutes (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). I am definitely going to try this!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• Brexit negotiations are ongoing as the deadlines continue to get extended but in the meantime, ports will be facing IT problems as they don’t know what systems to input re tariffs (Monday) so it’s looking increasingly unlikely that they will be able to meet the end of the year deadline for testing and implementation
• Still, hopes of some kind of deal buoyed the pound this week as it broke through the $1.36 level (Friday) and Bitcoin had a ridiculously good week (Friday) as it edged further towards the mainstream with news that Ruffer buying over half a billion pounds-worth for its clients (Thursday)

• Tiers changed in the UK this week, but Germany went one further and went into lockdown (Monday), potentially putting it at risk of falling into a double-dip recession (Tuesday)
• There was good news as Moderna’s Covid vaccine got FDA emergency approval (Friday), meaning that it will be the second vaccine to have received approval in America – and, as such, it will be delivering about 20m doses to the US government by the end of the year. The company expects to have 100m-125m doses available during the first quarter of next year, of which 85m-100m will be allocated to the US
• It seems to me that there are a number of hurdles with regard to Covid vaccines. The first one is getting vaccines in the first place (we’re starting to see this sort of thing come through), the second one is how to distribute them (how to allocate limited doses, especially at the beginning) and then the third one is how to combat scepticism (people are wary of taking a vaccine that has developed over months rather than years). Both Americans and Russians seem to be rather sceptical (Monday), so I am sure that there will be ongoing campaigns in every country that will encourage people to get vaccinated

• Electronic Arts decided to break up the Codemasters/Take-Two Interactive deal (that was for cash-and-shares) and put in a higher all-cash bid (Monday). This will go some way to addressing shareholder complaints that management were too hasty to take the first deal. It’s not clear yet whether Take-Two will come back with a counterbid
• Reddit bought Dubsmash (Tuesday), but I’m not entirely sure what the rationale is there given that there is arguably not much overlap in terms of audience
• JD Sports bought Shoe Palace for $680m (Wednesday) as part of its US expansion. Good luck with selling sneakers to Americans in a hugely competitive market both online and offline
• Canadian cannabis companies Tilray and Aphria announced a $2.8bn merger (Thursday), which will create the world’s biggest weed company in an all-share deal

Then in IPOs,

• Last week’s stellar performers DoorDash and Airbnb share prices weakened (Tuesday) although they are still comfortably above their respective flotation prices. Given their huge rises, you can hardly blame any holders from crystallising the value! Or is the weakness a sign of the top of the market?!?
• Roblox seemed to think so as it pulled its IPO (Monday)
• …but a company that probably wished it had pulled its IPO was e-tailer Wish, who saw its share price fall on its stock market debut (Thursday). Stock markets can take one or two duff IPOs before people start to get concerned, but if this becomes a trend investor sentiment can evaporate very quickly indeed!
• American doggie food and treat subscription seller BarkBox still plans on doing an IPO via a blank-cheque company (Thursday) but, given what I said above, it’ll be interesting to see whether SPAC-led IPOs lose their lustre…

In the UK,

• Residential property prices are said to be trending upwards into next year (Monday), being partly driven by the return of landlords to the property market (Monday) and NatWest bringing back 90% mortgages (Tuesday). Having said that, sellers cut prices last month (Tuesday) but Purplebricks has definitely been recovering from the doldrums (Wednesday) of lockdown
• Retail property continues to have a nightmare as the west end London REIT Shaftsbury saw the value of its property take a massive hit (Wednesday) when it did a revaluation. I’d say that things are not going to get better any time soon given current lockdown trends, unfortunately…
• In contrast, things are going very well for Segro, which bought a 74.9% stake in Sofibus Patrimoine (Wednesday), taking its holding in the French urban warehousing company to 94.4% – with the added bonus that it comes with a property that has 17 hectares of development land suitable for more warehouse developments! Nice! This company is doing well on both sides of the Channel!

• It seems that the regulators are trying to tighten the noose on Big Tech in the UK (Tuesday) and Europe (Wednesday). The UK wants the industry to tighten up on illegal content while the EU released the draft of its Digital Services Act. It is also threatening to break up companies that are fined three times within five years under its new rules. Whether it can/will actually do so is debatable, though!
• Google was slapped with a lawsuit on ad-price rigging (Thursday) and behaving monopolistically on internet search (Friday)
• Facebook sided with Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple (Thursday) accusing the latter of monopolistic behaviour regarding its AppStore. I would have thought this would give Epic Games’ case a decent boost!
• The Massachusetts securities regulator is launching a legal action against Robinhood (Thursday), the online trading app, saying that it has insufficient controls in place to protect inexperienced investors. This is interesting given that the volatility of US markets during lockdown has been partly put down to the success of this app attracting market newbies. I think it is high time that businesses like this are regulated properly because trading on markets is not a game and it is not easy!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published on January 5th.

My favourite “alternative” story this week was the very cute Christmas tree snap is ‘driving people mad’ as they try to find ‘camouflaged’ kitten (The Mirror, Courtney Pochin). This is actually quite tricky!

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• China continues to do well (Tuesday) as exports rose at their fastest rate this year, driven by demand for things like PPE and electronics. China is certainly on a roll!
• Japan’s PM Suga announced a big economic stimulus (Wednesday) of $294bn, which roughly equates to about 6% of Japan’s GDP. It will be spent on coronavirus-related measures and green tech
• Angela Merkel went on a bit of a European mission this week to knock some European heads together (Tuesday) regarding the EU budget and coronavirus stimulus package. It seemed to work, though, as the budget got approved (Friday), with Hungary and Poland falling into line after a bit of hand-holding
• Meanwhile, BoJo and Ursula von der Leyen are deep in Brexit negotiations that are supposed to be concluded this Sunday. BoJo is trying to manage expectations by saying that we need to brace ourselves for no-deal (Friday) but who really knows?!? In the meantime, ports like Felixstowe are backed up (Wednesday) and delays are mounting, which is starting to cause all sorts of problems. FWIW, I really think that if no-deal is avoided, the UK is going to be in for a serious upswing as this cloud has been hanging over us ever since the referendum

• DoorDash had a stellar IPO this week (Thursday), as did Airbnb (Friday). Their share prices shot up by 87% and 110% respectively on the first day of trading as investors went mad for tech IPOs!
• Small/mid-size British investment bank Numis announced record annual revenues (Wednesday) as M&A fees kicked into overdrive. Talking of which, G4S agreed to a takeover approach from American rival Allied Universal (Wednesday) having successfully fended off approaches from Canadian rival GardaWorld. GardaWorld may yet come back with a counter offer…
• Over in Europe, Moncler bought Stone Island in cash-and-shares deal valuing the latter at €1.15bn (Tuesday). Moncler will buy 70% of the company that owns Stone Island and the remaining 30% from Singaporean state-backed investor Temasek. Not really sure what it’s going to achieve, but there you go 😁