Category: Business

Categories
Business

Consultants Debate How To Put together For the Subsequent Pandemic

Experts Debate How To Prepare For the Next Pandemic

The Food and Drug Administration will hold a hearing this week to determine whether to grant emergency authorization to a coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. The vaccine, which the companies claim is 95 percent effective, is one of two that could be ready for injections in the United States before the end of this year. The other, by Moderna, will be considered by the regulator for emergency approval next week. In early trials, the vaccine appeared to prevent the development of Covid-19 in around 94 percent of recipients.

The news is a welcome development in the otherwise grim saga of the fight against the coronavirus. The United States averages around 200,000 new cases each day, and more than 2,000 deaths.

An effective and widely available vaccine has long been promoted as the lifeline that will curb infections, save lives and pull a battered economy back from the brink. Yet the impending arrival of one or more vaccines raises questions about equity, education and how battered American institutions should prepare for the next pandemic, while repairing the damage wrought by this one.

As part of the DealBook D.C. Policy Project, The New York Times gathered a virtual panel of experts in early December to discuss the policy environment in a post-Covid world — or, at least, a post-Covid vaccine world.

The participants:

  • Ruth Faden, professor of bioethics at Johns Hopkins University

  • James E.K. Hildreth, professor of internal medicine, president and chief executive of Meharry Medical College

  • Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

  • Thomas M. Moriarty, chief policy and external affairs officer and general counsel at CVS Health

  • Gregory A. Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases and director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic

  • Monica Schoch-Spana, medical anthropologist and senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

  • Moderated by Carl Zimmer, The Times’s “Matter” columnist

An effective vaccine will be a huge breakthrough for society and the economy. But will it as effective in practice as in studies?

Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic, who is also editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, explained the extent to which early results of the various vaccine trials have defied even optimistic expectations. He described it as “as nothing short of dizzying,” and added:

“We were all prepared to see something like 50 to 70 percent efficacy, something like that. And to be in excess of 90 percent, 95 percent, puts it on par with the best vaccines that have ever been developed — and with apparent acceptable short-term safety. I think this is really going to have a profound effect on the field of vaccinology. I hate to overuse the word ‘paradigm-breaking,’ but it is, in many ways, to see something come to fruition within eight months like this.”

But Mr. Poland also warned of “surprises” when measuring the impact of the first generation vaccines:

“The efficacy measures we have were at times of relatively low transmission of disease compared to now. It was with masks on with people distanced, none of which will be true in time. So we may see some differences.”

Who should be first in line for the vaccinations? What’s fair when allocating a limited number of shots?

Even if vaccine injections are approved for use before the end of the year, the vast majority of people in the United States won’t notice any appreciable difference in their lives for at least three months, said Marc Lipsitch. Cases will continue to rise as winter temperatures force more people indoors, and there won’t yet be enough doses to cover the population.

That raises some thorny questions.

Earlier this month, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to vaccinate health care workers and nursing home residents first. It proposed placing essential workers like bus drivers and grocery workers in the next tier of recipients.

Mr. Lipsitch is among those who supports the alternative recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to dole out the vaccine based on people’s health conditions rather than their working ones:

“The only certain way, given what we know about the vaccine now, to get society back to being able to function is to have this be a less-severe disease. And the way you do that is to make the people in whom it’s severe no longer vulnerable.”

But Mr. Lipsitch also acknowledged that the vaccine might never fully rid the world of Covid-19. “I can’t conceive of its disappearing,” he said. “Viral infections this widespread don’t disappear on their own that I’m aware of, unless they’re out-competed by some new strain.”

He suggested, however, that Covid-19 might become less severe in the long term. “If everybody essentially in the world who’s not a newborn has either had the virus or had the vaccine,” he said, “there would be some immunity to severity, and some immunity to transmission, and so if I had to make a guess I would say it would become a seasonal disease like the flu.”

Your neighborhood pharmacy will soon become a major player in vaccine distribution.

Getting a Covid-19 vaccine to millions of people in every corner of the country is, of course, a huge logistical undertaking. Rather than relying on public health networks, the Trump administration has placed the nation’s two largest for-profit pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, at the center of the nation’s vaccination effort.

That also puts those chains at the forefront of an effort to educate the public about a new vaccine, and to convince the many skeptics that the rapidly developed shot is safe. Thomas Moriarty of CVS Health shared a little of what that task looks like, noting that about three-quarters of all Americans live within three miles of a CVS, “and we have the ability to extend beyond that through vaccination clinics.”

The Road to a Coronavirus Vaccine

Words to Know About Vaccines

Confused by the all technical terms used to describe how vaccines work and are investigated? Let us help:

    • Adverse event: A health problem that crops up in volunteers in a clinical trial of a vaccine or a drug. An adverse event isn’t always caused by the treatment tested in the trial.
    • Antibody: A protein produced by the immune system that can attach to a pathogen such as the coronavirus and stop it from infecting cells.
    • Approval, licensure and emergency use authorization: Drugs, vaccines and medical devices cannot be sold in the United States without gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, also known as licensure. After a company submits the results of  clinical trials to the F.D.A. for consideration, the agency decides whether the product is safe and effective, a process that generally takes many months. If the country is facing an emergency — like a pandemic — a company may apply instead for an emergency use authorization, which can be granted considerably faster.
    • Background rate: How often a health problem, known as an adverse event, arises in the general population. To determine if a vaccine or a drug is safe, researchers compare the rate of adverse events in a trial to the background rate.
    • Efficacy: The benefit that a vaccine provides compared to a placebo, as measured in a clinical trial. To test a coronavirus vaccine, for instance, researchers compare how many people in the vaccinated and placebo groups get Covid-19. Effectiveness, by contrast, is the benefit that a vaccine or a drug provides out in the real world. A vaccine’s effectiveness may turn out to be lower or higher than its efficacy.
    • Phase 1, 2, and 3 trials: Clinical trials typically take place in three stages. Phase 1 trials usually involve a few dozen people and are designed to observe whether a vaccine or drug is safe. Phase 2 trials, involving hundreds of people, allow researchers to try out different doses and gather more measurements about the vaccine’s effects on the immune system. Phase 3 trials, involving thousands or tens of thousands of volunteers, determine the safety and efficacy of the vaccine or drug by waiting to see how many people are protected from the disease it’s designed to fight.
    • Placebo: A substance that has no therapeutic effect, often used in a clinical trial. To see if a vaccine can prevent Covid-19, for example, researchers may inject the vaccine into half of their volunteers, while the other half get a placebo of salt water. They can then compare how many people in each group get infected.
    • Post-market surveillance: The monitoring that takes place after a vaccine or drug has been approved and is regularly prescribed by doctors. This surveillance typically confirms that the treatment is safe. On rare occasions, it detects side effects in certain groups of people that were missed during clinical trials.
    • Preclinical research: Studies that take place before the start of a clinical trial, typically involving experiments where a treatment is tested on cells or in animals.
    • Viral vector vaccines: A type of vaccine that uses a harmless virus to chauffeur immune-system-stimulating ingredients into the human body. Viral vectors are used in several experimental Covid-19 vaccines, including those developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Both of these companies are using a common cold virus called an adenovirus as their vector. The adenovirus carries coronavirus genes.
    • Trial protocol: A series of procedures to be carried out during a clinical trial.

One of Mr. Moriarity’s biggest concerns is whether people will be willing to take the vaccine. His team surveys up to 7,000 people two to three times a week about what he called the “hesitancy rate,” he explained:

“What we have seen in the data since getting past the election, and with the efficacy results of these vaccines becoming public, is that the hesitancy rate is starting to drop. There’s still going to be a core element of hesitancy — no question about it — but getting past the politics and seeing the results of the science is helping alleviate some of that hesitancy.”

The country needs to re-establish trust in institutions, because pandemics are here to stay.

Much of the conversation about the coronavirus pandemic has focused, understandably, on “getting back to normal.” Yet the inescapable truth is that, in many ways, there is no going back to the world as it was before the coronavirus. In a global economy in which pathogens can spread more quickly than ever before, the question is not if there will be another global pandemic, but when.

Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist who studies the ways communities respond to disaster, talked about what needed to be done to repair institutions that struggled during this crisis to clearly and effectively communicate with the public:

“This is about trust, and trust building, and processes of reconciliation. And that takes time. And during that time, we can improve our messaging and involve trusted messengers. But what we’re talking about is re-establishing trust in institutions. We have to build processes for that, and strengthen the ones that are already there.”

She said that efforts to persuade the public to accept the vaccine will have to include different messages targeted at different communities:

“There will be certain messages that resonate really well in Baltimore City among local Black communities that may not resonate well with rural frontier Hispanics in southeastern Idaho. So we have to have those very hyperlocal perspectives.”

When it comes to public health education, the messenger is at least as important as the message.

Black, Latino and Asian communities have disproportionately borne the brunt of coronavirus cases in the United States. And yet, thanks to a legacy of racism in the American medical system, many in those communities are particularly wary of receiving the vaccine. Black adults, in particular, have expressed higher rates of vaccine hesitancy than others in the United States, a wariness fueled by the historical example of forced injections, forced sterilizations, unethical experimentation and other acts administered in the name of public health.

Opposition to the vaccine within these communities is of particular concern to James Hildreth, an immunologist who spent decades on H.I.V. and AIDS research as a professor at Johns Hopkins before taking over in 2015 as president of Meharry Medical College, a historically Black medical school in Nashville. He discussed his experience with what works in public health education — and what does not. “We discovered that the messages were fine, but if the messenger is not trusted you’re wasting your time,” he said:

“So we identified trusted messengers in those communities. We empowered them with the information they needed. They needed to believe it first — and accept it first — and they were the ones that delivered the messages that turned out to be quite effective. So that’s the model we’ve adopted to try to engage and reach minority communities with the vaccine.”

We have to take care of the virus. Then we have to take care of everything else.

The vaccine is not the end of the pandemic recovery period, but the beginning. Once the virus is under control, the nation faces disarray: millions of people unemployed, communities shattered by the loss of businesses, a generation with a disrupted education and deepened systemic inequalities.

“The pandemic did more than just make us physically sick,” said Ruth Faden, a bioethicist. But she explained how this pain could become a catalyst for a better society:

“I think it’s possible to envision a way in which for some of these horrible gaps in access, and the consequences that are lifelong for people’s prospects for a decent life, there will be an effort to fix them, perhaps with some urgency. I have to hope that something like that will happen as a consequence of what we’ve all gone through — and if not, it will be profoundly depressing.”

Categories
Business

Uber sells its flying taxi enterprise to Joby Aviation

Uber sells its flying taxi business to Joby Aviation

Joby Lufttaxi eVTOL demonstrator. After more than six years of secret development, Joby Aviation is lifting the lid on its innovative eVTOL air taxi program.

Source: Joby Aviation

The air taxi business is at least a few years away from launch, but there is already consolidation among startups. Joby Aviation, California, which develops all-electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, is acquiring Uber Elevate, Uber’s aviation division.

The move will allow Joby to use Uber’s app to offer air taxi rides when the company’s plane finally enters service, which could be as early as 2023. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Uber has agreed to invest $ 75 million in Joby Aviation. Earlier this year, Uber invested $ 50 million in Joby as part of the Series C funding round.

“We were proud to partner with Uber Elevate last year and we are even more proud to have you on the Joby team today,” said JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, in a press release announcing the deal has been.

For Uber, the deal comes a day after the autonomous driving division known as the Advanced Technologies Group was sold to Aurora, a self-driving autostart company.

“Aurora will know exactly what to build, what routes there are, what skills the driver needs to learn to cater to the largest segment of the market and essentially the easiest way to build this technology,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box”.

By separating from Advanced Technologies Group and Uber Elevate, the hail giant can save hundreds of millions of dollars that would have been required to develop autonomous hail and urban air taxi services over the next several years.

For Joby Aviation, the integration of Uber Elevate could help the company achieve its goal of offering short trips in urban areas with vertical takeoff and landing planes. Joby’s aircraft, operated in conjunction with Uber’s Ride-Hail app, could provide customers with a seamless way to use ride-hail services and air taxis in a single trip.

“These tools and new team members will be invaluable to us as we accelerate our commercial launch plans,” Bevirt said in a company release.

Of course, Joby Aviation is still a long way from the start. The company has built and is testing an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers and a pilot up to 150 miles at a top speed of 200 mph. Joby conducts test flights on a regular basis, but the aircraft has yet to be certified by the FAA. Regardless, Joby hasn’t set prices for an air taxi ride, which will be an indication of whether air taxis are really taking off with the crowds.

– CNBC’s Meghan Reeder contributed to this article.

Categories
Business

Pfizer’s Vaccine Gives Sturdy Safety After First Dose

Pfizer’s Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose

WASHINGTON – The coronavirus vaccine, manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech, offers strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose. This emerges from documents released Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration ahead of a meeting of their vaccine advisory group.

The result is one of several significant new results in the newsletters, which includes more than 100 pages of data analysis from the Agency and Pfizer. Last month Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had a 95 percent effectiveness rate after two doses three weeks apart. The new analyzes show that protection starts much earlier.

In addition, the vaccine worked well regardless of the race, weight, or age of a volunteer. While no serious adverse events from the vaccine were identified in the study, many participants experienced pain, fever, and other side effects.

“This is what an A + certificate looks like for a vaccine,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

On Thursday, the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Panel will discuss these materials prior to a vote on whether to recommend approval of the vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech.

Pfizer and BioNTech started a large-scale clinical trial in July that recruited 44,000 people in the US, Brazil and Argentina. Half of the volunteers received the vaccine and half the placebo.

New coronavirus cases in the vaccinated group of volunteers quickly subsided about 10 days after the first dose, according to a graphic in the educational materials. The number of cases increased steadily in the placebo group.

The vaccine’s swift action could benefit not only the people who receive it, but also the strained hospitals in the country, limiting the flow of new patients to intensive care units.

Despite the early protection provided by the first dose, it is unclear how long this protection would last on its own, which underscores the importance of the second dose. Previous studies have shown that the second dose of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine gives the immune system a significant long-term boost that is seen with many other vaccines.

The effectiveness of the vaccine after the first dose, according to Dr. William C. Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, at about 52 percent. After the second dose, this value increases to about 95 percent. “Two doses of the vaccine offer maximum protection,” he said.

Many experts have raised concerns that the coronavirus vaccines might protect some people better than others. However, the results in the educational materials indicate no such problem. The vaccine has a high rate of effectiveness in both men and women, and similar rates in whites, blacks, and Latinos. It also worked well on obese people who are at higher risk of developing Covid-19.

Some vaccines for other diseases produce a weak immune response in older adults. However, Pfizer and BioNTech found that people over 65 received about as much protection from the coronavirus vaccine as younger people.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic, on the vaccine’s robust response in the overweight and elderly.

Even if the vaccine is approved by the FDA, the study will continue. In the briefing documents, the companies said they would encourage people to stay in the study for as long as possible without knowing whether they received the vaccine or the placebo, so the researchers can continue to gather information on whether the vaccine is safe and effective.

The road to a coronavirus vaccine

Interesting facts about vaccines

Confused by all of the technical terms used to describe how vaccines work and study? Let us help:

    • Adverse event: A health problem that occurs in volunteers in a clinical trial with a vaccine or drug. An adverse event is not always caused by the treatment tested in the study.
    • Antibody: A protein produced by the immune system that can attach to a pathogen such as the coronavirus and prevent it from infecting cells.
    • Approval, Licensing, and Approval for Emergency Use: Medicines, vaccines and medical devices cannot be sold in the US for no profit approval by the Food and Drug Administration, also known as Licensing. After a company submits the results of clinical studies to the FDA for review, the agency decides whether the product is safe and effective. This process usually takes many months. If the country faces an emergency – like a pandemic – a company can file an application instead Emergency approvalthat can be granted much faster.
    • Background rate: How often does the general population experience a health problem called an Adverse Event? To determine whether a vaccine or drug is safe, researchers compare the rate of adverse events in one study to the background rate.
    • Effectiveness: The benefit of a vaccine compared to a placebo, measured in a clinical trial. For example, to test a coronavirus vaccine, the researchers compare how many people in the vaccinated group and the placebo group are receiving Covid-19. In contrast, effectiveness is the benefit that a vaccine or drug offers in the real world. A vaccine’s effectiveness can be found to be less or more effective than its effectiveness.
    • Phases 1, 2 and 3 studies: Clinical trials typically take place in three phases. Phase 1 studies typically involve a few dozen people to determine whether a vaccine or drug is safe. In Phase 2 trials that involve hundreds of people, researchers can try different doses and take more measurements of the vaccine’s effects on the immune system. Phase 3 trials, involving thousands or tens of thousands of volunteers, determine the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine or medicine by waiting to see how many people are protected from the disease it is intended to be used against.
    • Placebo: A substance with no therapeutic effect that is widely used in clinical trials. For example, to see if a vaccine can prevent Covid-19, researchers can inject the vaccine into half of their volunteers while the other half are given a placebo with salt water. You can then compare how many people are infected in each group.
    • Post-market surveillance: The surveillance that occurs after a vaccine or drug has been approved and regularly prescribed by doctors. This monitoring usually confirms that the treatment is safe. Rarely, side effects are noted in certain groups of people that were overlooked during clinical trials.
    • Preclinical Research: Studies that take place prior to the start of a clinical trial typically include experiments that test a treatment on cells or animals.
    • Viral vector vaccines: A type of vaccine that uses a harmless virus to deliver immune-stimulating ingredients into the human body. Viral vectors are used in several experimental Covid-19 vaccines, including those developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Both companies use a cold virus called adenovirus as a vector. The adenovirus carries coronavirus genes.
    • Test protocol: A series of procedures that must be performed during a clinical trial.

The educational materials also provide a deeper look into the safety of the vaccine. In any large clinical trial, some people who receive vaccines have health conditions unrelated to the vaccine itself. Comparing their symptom rates with those of the placebo group, as well as background rates in a population, may indicate symptoms that a vaccine may actually cause.

The FDA concluded that there were no “significant imbalances” between the two groups in serious health complications known as adverse events. The agency found that four people in the vaccinated group had a form of facial paralysis called Bell’s palsy, with no cases in the placebo group. The difference between the two groups was not significant and the rate in the vaccinated group was not significantly higher than in the general population.

The new Pfizer analysis found that many volunteers who received the vaccine felt sick in the hours after the second dose, suggesting that many people may need to request a day off or be willing to rest until symptoms appear ease up. Among the 16 to 55 year olds, more than half developed fatigue and more than half also reported headaches. Slightly more than a third experienced chills and 37 percent had muscle pain. About half of those over 55 felt tired, a third had a headache, and about a quarter felt chills, while 29 percent had muscle pain.

“Taking a day off after the second dose is a good thing to anticipate,” said Dr. Iwasaki.

On Monday, Kristen Choi, a psychiatric nurse and health care researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, released a firsthand report on the symptoms she experienced as a participant in the Pfizer BioNTech study, including chills, nausea and headaches and fever.

“Doctors need to be prepared to discuss with patients why they should trust the vaccine and that its adverse effects could be very similar to Covid-19,” wrote Dr. Choi in JAMA Internal Medicine. She advised doctors to tell patients that these uncomfortable symptoms “are a sign that the vaccine is working despite the unfortunate similarities with the symptoms of the disease”.

Categories
Business

Warner Bros. CEO defends 2021 movie launch mannequin, in talks with expertise

Warner Bros. CEO defends 2021 film release model, in talks with talent

Last week, AT & T’s Warner Bros. announced that all films set to release in 2021 will be released on HBO Max as soon as they hit theaters. Ann Sarnoff, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment, defended the decision on Tuesday.

“We have been trying to find the best way forward for the last eight months since we were first suspended,” Sarnoff told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on Squawk Alley. “We have a lot of movies that are ready and they’re on the shelves, so we thought this was the most creative and win-win situation to get them not only in theaters but also on HBO Max for 31 days at the same time . “

Like many film studios, Warner Bros. has been forced to postpone blockbuster features due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now they are looking for a way to get theatrical releases but also improve the HBO Max streaming service.

However, the company’s decision was not well received by many filmmakers or cinema chains. Warner Bros. has not consulted with the actors, agents, or directors of the 17 films that make up the 2021 film, and has not entered into distribution agreements with cinemas that have traditionally opposed simultaneous theatrical and streaming releases.

Indeed, some media reports suggest that filmmakers and cinema owners were only informed of the announcement less than two hours before it was released.

In addition, the New York Times reported that “Wonder Woman 1984” star Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins were each rewarded with a check for $ 10 million when Warner Bros. decided to send that film to HBO Max if it came to Christmas is coming to theaters. This was seen as minor to other talents who had worked with the company.

“It’s a unilateral decision that the studio made,” Christopher Nolan, a notable filmmaker and contributor to Warner Bros., told the Associated Press on Monday. “You didn’t even tell anyone involved. You have these great filmmakers who have worked passionately and diligently for years on projects that are supposed to be feature films with fantastic movie stars. And everyone has now been told it is a loss leader for a boy Streaming service. “

Nolan is known to pressure Warner Bros. to release his movie “Tenet” on the big screen instead of offering it for purchase as a premium video upon request. As of August, Tenet has had domestic sales of $ 57.6 million and $ 302.1 million from international markets.

“We work through the system with our talent and their agents,” said Sarnoff. “I think the more they see how well they’re getting paid, the more we find that people understand the economy. And that’s unprecedented. So it’s always a bit difficult to work something new through for the first time.”

Sarnoff did not disclose details of financial dealings with parties, but said filmmakers and talent “have access to some additional economic aspects of HBO Max.”

“We are in the process of having a lot of conversations with the talent, agents and exhibitors to see how this can work and be good for everyone,” she said.

Currently, that same-day movie release strategy in theaters and on HBO Max only appears to apply for 2021. Sarnoff called it a “workaround” but said the company needs to see how 2022 plays out before making any decisions about future sales models.

Jason Kilar, CEO of WarnerMedia, made similar comments in an interview with CNBC last week.

“Everyone should take a breather,” said Kilar. “Let’s play for the next six, eight, ten months. And then let’s check in again.”

AT&T CEO John Stankey said earlier Tuesday that the streaming service had added subscribers even before the new content hit the service. HBO Max has approximately 12.6 million subscribers, up from 8.6 million activated accounts at the end of the third quarter.

Categories
Business

Reside Market Updates: Shares Decline Amid Covid Restrictions and Rising Instances

Goods are piling up at some British ports, as trucks and rail have failed to keep up with companies trying to stockpile ahead of Brexit.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Businesses in Britain and the European Union are bracing for the economic disruption of Brexit, which threatens to clog ports and disrupt trade across the English Channel on Dec. 31 if leaders do not reach a compromise to settle their future trading relationship.

But the economic breakup could have a relatively limited impact on trade with the United States, trade experts said.

Because the United States does not have a free-trade agreement with the European Union, Britain’s departure from the bloc will do little to alter its trading relationship with the United States. Following Brexit, the terms of trade between the United States and Britain will continue to be governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization, as they were before.

The direct effect on the two trade partners “should be minimal given there’s no change in tariffs,” said Christopher Rogers, a global trade and logistics analyst at Panjiva.

Still, he said, significant customs disruptions between Europe and Britain could have knock-on effects for supply chains, if, for example, it takes British businesses that are exporting to the United States longer to source components from abroad. Goods are piling up at some British ports, as trucks and rail have failed to keep up with companies trying to stockpile ahead of Brexit.

Britain’s trading terms with the United States may not get much worse, but they also appear unlikely to get better.

The two countries have been carrying out negotiations for a free-trade deal since May. But with the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., the prospects for that agreement, which many Britons saw as a source of post-Brexit strength, have been greatly diminished.

The congressional authority that gives trade deals an easier path to approval by Congress, called trade promotion authority, is set to expire this summer, and Mr. Biden has promised not to enter into any major new trade agreements until the United States has made major investments at home.

Boeing 737 Max aircraft in a lot at Boeing Field in Seattle. The plane was grounded worldwide almost two years ago.Credit…Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

Gol Airlines, a Brazilian carrier, said it planned to start flights aboard the Boeing 737 Max on Wednesday, making it the first airline to fly passengers on the plane since it was grounded worldwide almost two years ago.

The first flights will be on domestic routes to and from Gol’s hub in São Paulo, with the company expecting all seven of the Max planes in its fleet to be updated and cleared to fly by the end of the month. A Gol spokeswoman declined to provide further details.

“Our first priority is always the safety of our customers,” Celso Ferrer, vice president of operations and a commercial pilot at Gol, said in a statement. “Over the past 20 months, we have watched the most comprehensive safety review in the history of commercial aviation unfold.”

The Max was banned worldwide in March 2019 after a total of 346 people were killed in two crashes aboard the plane. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration last month became the first regulator to allow the plane to fly again, after required modifications are made. The agency was recently joined by regulators in Brazil, while the European aviation authority has suggested that it plans to lift its ban within weeks. Relatives of those killed in the crashes criticized the decision to allow the plane to fly again, arguing that it remains unsafe.

The lifting of the ban allows Boeing to restart sales and deliveries in earnest after its passenger airline business was pummeled by the grounding and the pandemic. The plane maker on Tuesday reported a net decline of 61 orders last month. Boeing’s backlog of orders, most of them for the Max, stood at 4,240, down more than a thousand from the start of the year after accounting for fulfilled orders.

Still, airlines are still interested in acquiring the plane. Last week, the company announced it had agreed to sell 75 Max jets to Ryanair, the low-cost European airline. Like RyanAir, Gol is among the biggest customers for the Max. The airline’s fleet is composed of 127 Boeing planes and it has an order for 95 Max jets scheduled for delivery over a decade starting in 2022.

Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s co-founder, in 2018. It’s usually not regular people, employees or even pre-I.P.O. investors who get a windfall from initial public offerings.Credit…Eric Risberg/Associated Press

A dirty secret of initial public offerings is that even the coolest ones may make only a handful of people rich — and it may not be regular people, employees or even fancy pre-I.P.O. investors who get a windfall.

DoorDash and Airbnb are expected to have spectacular first sales on public stock exchanges this week and start trading at far higher levels than anticipated even a few weeks ago.

But buying stock in relatively young and unproven companies — which usually describes technology companies selling their stock to the public for the first time — is often a coin-toss bet. Even the professional investors who buy stock in hot companies before they go public don’t always get rich, unless they throw their money around early and get lucky. Companies you might have heard of like Uber, Lyft, Snapchat and Slack were at best meh I.P.O. investments.

Look at Airbnb. Among the investors who got a special chance to buy Airbnb stock nearly four years ago, each $10,000 of stock they bought will be worth about $11,500 if Airbnb starts selling its shares to the public for $60 each. Nice!

But if your aunt had invested $10,000 nearly four years ago in a simple fund that mirrored the ups and downs of the S&P 500 stock index, she would now have $15,600. Even nicer.

The pandemic hurt business for Uber and Lyft, but their stocks were losers before then. Uber’s stock price has bounced back and is now up 30 percent since the spring, and still anyone who bought Uber shares in its 2019 I.P.O. — and even the professional investors who bought its stock in the four years before that — would have made far more money buying an index fund. Uber employees who were hired before the I.P.O. and were paid partly in stock also would have been better off getting paid in an index fund.

People who bought Snapchat’s stock in its 2017 initial public offering had to wait more than three years to not lose money on their bet. Slack just sold itself at a share price not much higher than its first public stock sale last year.

These are cherry-picked examples. There are companies whose stock prices have soared since their I.P.O.s and made people rich — Zoom Video is a prominent example in technology. And the people who have already bet on the restaurant delivery app DoorDash stand to make a big profit when the company goes public this week.

Will Airbnb be a winning I.P.O.? It depends. It definitely will be for the venture capital firm Sequoia, which bet on Airbnb early. And it’s certainly faring better than people expected when travel froze early this year. But no one can confidently predict whether its share price will shoot to the moon like Zoom’s has since its 2019 I.P.O. or will plunge as Lyft’s did after it went public.

That’s the lesson. Cool companies don’t always make good investments. The people screaming on Robinhood about their splurge on a hot I.P.O. may not know what they’re talking about.

By: Ella Koeze·Source: Refinitiv

  • Stocks were unsteady on Tuesday, as the spread of coronavirus cases and restrictions on people’s movement and businesses outweighed optimism about the rollout of a vaccine.

  • The S&P 500 was flat by midday after recovering from an earlier dip. The Stoxx Europe 600 and Britain’s FTSE 100 also recouped small losses and were slightly higher.

  • In the United States, rising numbers of virus cases has led California to impose new stay-at-home orders in large swathes of the state. In New York, the number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus is rising and could lead to another ban on indoor dining.

  • In Europe, countries are struggling to emerge from a second wave of the pandemic. The infection rate in France is threatening plans to ease restrictions before the holidays, and in Greece, the lockdown was extended until early January.

  • But on a brighter note, Britain on Tuesday started a mass vaccination campaign, delivering the first shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. “There is finally some clear light at the end of a very dark tunnel,” James Pomeroy, an economist at HSBC, wrote in a note to clients. “And that cheer should be seen in some of the economic data in the coming year too.”

  • Tesla said on Tuesday it would sell as much as $5 billion in shares, its third return to markets in 10 months, and use the money for more investments including factory construction. Tesla’s shares were down nearly 3 percent. This year, the electric carmaker’s shares have risen about 670 percent, and later this month, the company will join the S&P 500.

Google’s offices in London. Britain’s top antitrust regulator recommended a new tech watchdog.Credit…Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Governments around the world have been grappling with ways to crimp the power of the biggest tech companies. In the United States, the Justice Department recently filed an antitrust case against Google. The European Union has issued antitrust violations and enacted stiffer data-protection laws. The Australian government is pushing new rules to make Google and Facebook pay for certain content.

But many question whether the tactics are adequate, particularly if a lengthy enforcement and legal process slows down action against the fast-moving and deep-pocketed companies.

On Tuesday, Britain’s top antitrust regulator recommended a new approach. The Competition and Markets Authority released recommendations for creating a new regulator called the Digital Markets Unit that will focus on the biggest technology platforms. The regulator would be able to fine companies up to 10 percent of global revenue.

The idea of creating a tech industry regulator has gained momentum among academics and policymakers around the world. The aim is to treat giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft more like the biggest companies in banking and health care — with dedicated regulators that have the expertise in the subject matter to serve as a watchdog and act quickly to address wrongdoing, akin to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration.

Britain is perhaps the furthest along. The new regulator would be responsible for enforcing a legally binding code of conduct intended to prevent the biggest companies from using their dominance to exploit consumers and business, or to box out emerging competitors. Officials said only companies of a certain size would fall under the rules, which would be tailored to specific types of businesses. Google and Facebook may face certain restrictions related to digital advertising, while Amazon would have others related to e-commerce.

To improve competition, the regulator could force companies to share certain data with rivals, and it would review acquisitions.

The proposals build on recommendations made by a British panel of experts last year and are part of a process by the government to enact regulations for the digital economy by next year. Britain is preparing to leave the European Union, which next week will release its own draft laws to increase oversight of the tech industry across the 27-nation bloc.

British authorities have raised specific concerns about the digital advertising market dominated by Google and Facebook. In July, the Competition and Markets Authority published a 437-page investigation that concluded the two companies have such scale and unmatched access to user data that “potential rivals can no longer compete on equal terms.”

Goldman Sachs has reached a deal to buy out the minority partner in its Chinese securities joint venture, which could make it the first global bank to assume full ownership of its securities business in mainland China since the Communist Party took control of foreign-owned enterprises in the country in the 1950s.

In a memo to employees on Tuesday, the Wall Street bank said it had reached a definitive agreement to buy a 49 percent stake in Goldman Sachs Gao Hua still held by its local partner, Beijing Gao Hua Securities. Goldman Sachs did not disclose a price for the transaction.

The deal follows a pledge by Chinese leaders in 2017, amid worsening trade relations with the United States, to relax or remove limits on foreign bank ownership. The move was part of an unsuccessful effort by China to enlist Wall Street in heading off President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Chinese goods.

Goldman Sachs could be the first to take full control of its China securities business, depending on regulatory approval and how quickly the deal is completed.

JP Morgan Chase already has full ownership of its futures business in China, but still has a joint venture for other activities on the mainland. Other investment banks, like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Nomura, are in various stages of raising their stakes in their Chinese securities operations.

Commercial banks, by contrast, have avoided raising their stakes in commercial banking operations in mainland China above 25 percent. Doing so would subject those operations to further global banking regulations.

Goldman Sachs had announced on March 27 that it had obtained regulatory approval to raise its stake in Goldman Sachs Gao Hua from 33 percent to 51 percent. Tuesday’s memo was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

With movie theaters largely shut across the United States, traditional movie companies like Warner Bros. are being forced to evolve.Credit…Aaron P/Bauer-Griffin, via Getty

Last week, when Jason Kilar, WarnerMedia’s chief executive, announced that 17 more Warner Bros. movies would each roll out on HBO Max and in theaters simultaneously. To prevent the news of the 17-movie shift from leaking (and to make the move speedily rather than get mired in the expected blowback), WarnerMedia kept the major agencies and talent management companies in the dark until roughly 90 minutes before issuing a news release, report Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling.

The surprise move left agencies on a war footing. Representatives for major Warner Bros. Talk of a Warner Bros. boycott began circulating inside the Directors Guild of America. A partner at one talent agency spent part of the weekend meeting with litigators. Some people started to angrily refer to the studio as Former Bros.

The 97-year-old studio, the ancestral home of Humphrey Bogart (“Casablanca”) and Bette Davis (“Now, Voyager”), suddenly finds itself at the uncomfortable center of a Hollywood that is changing at light speed. Even before the pandemic, streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video were upending how movies get seen and their creators are compensated. Now, with theaters struggling because of the coronavirus and the public largely stuck at home, even traditional film companies are being forced to evolve.

It’s not that all actors and directors are against streaming. Plenty of big names are making movies for Netflix. But last week’s move by Warner Bros. raised fundamental financial questions. If old-line studios are no longer trying to maximize the box office for each film but instead shifting to a hybrid model where success is judged partly by ticket sales and partly by the number of streaming subscriptions sold, what does that mean for talent pay packages?

How studios compensate A-list actors, directors, writers and producers is complicated, with contracts negotiated film by film and person by person. But it boils down to two checks. One is guaranteed (a large upfront fee) and one is a gamble: a portion of ticket sales after the studio has recouped its costs.

If a film flops, the second payday never comes. If a film is a hit, as is often the case with superheroes and other fantasy stories, the “back end” pay can add up to wheelbarrows full of cash.

A garage at the Aurora office in Palo Alto, Calif.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York Times

Uber, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a self-driving car project that executives once believed was a key to becoming profitable, is handing the autonomous vehicle effort over to a Silicon Valley start-up, the companies said on Monday.

Uber will also invest $400 million in the start-up, called Aurora, so it is essentially paying the company to take over the autonomous car operation, which had become a financial and legal headache. Uber is likely to license whatever technology Aurora manages to create.

The deal amounts to a fire-sale end to a high-profile but star-crossed effort to replace Uber’s human drivers with machines that could drive on their own. It is also indicative of the challenges facing other autonomous vehicle projects, which have received billions in investments from Silicon Valley and automakers but have not produced the fleets of robotic vehicles some thought would be on the streets by now.

Aurora’s chief executive, Chris Urmson, said Aurora’s first product will not be a robot taxi that could help with Uber’s ride-hailing business. Instead, it will likely be a self-driving truck, which Mr. Urmson believes has a better chance of success in the near term because long-haul truck driving on highways is more predictable and does not involve passengers.

In a statement, the Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said he was looking forward to bringing Aurora technology to market “in the years ahead.” Uber declined to comment further on the agreement.

  • Rashida Jones, a senior vice president for news at MSNBC and NBC News, will become the first Black woman to take charge of a major television news network. Her promotion, announced by Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, is another big shake-up in the network’s management ranks. She will succeed Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president whose left-leaning shows yielded big ratings in the Trump years and minted media brands like “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Morning Joe,” will depart on Feb. 1 after a 12-year tenure, the network said on Monday.

  • The Japanese advertising giant Dentsu Group plans to cut roughly 6,000 jobs as it grapples with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. In a securities filing in Tokyo on Monday, Dentsu laid out details of its restructuring strategy, which will cost 88 billion yen (about $850 million) to carry out over two years and includes trimming its 48,000-person international work force by 12.5 percent. The timeline will vary by location, the company said.

Patrick Gaspard, a former aide to President Barack Obama, U.S. ambassador to South Africa and executive director of the Democratic National Committee, has emerged as the leading candidate to be nominated as labor secretary under President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Mr. Gaspard announced last week that he would step down as the head of the Open Society Foundations, founded by the liberal megadonor George Soros, at the end of the year, fueling speculation in Washington that he was poised to join the incoming administration. He has a background in labor organizing, including a senior leadership position for the Service Employees International Union, which he held before joining the Obama administration.

His potential nomination would give Mr. Biden, who calls himself a “union guy,” a labor secretary with union roots. He would also add to the list of Black cabinet appointees, a key goal of Mr. Biden’s transition team as it seeks to fulfill Mr. Biden’s campaign promise of diversity in the top leadership of his administration.

Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haitian parents, Mr. Gaspard immigrated to the United States in early childhood, grew up in New York and attended Columbia University before leaving to work on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. He worked for years in New York City politics and on Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic presidential bid, and he was an aide to former Mayor David Dinkins. After Mr. Dinkins died last month, Mr. Gaspard wrote on Twitter, “He taught me that you don’t need to be loud to be strong.”

Mr. Gaspard worked for years as an organizer and rose through the Service Employees International Union to become its national political director before joining Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In the Obama White House, Mr. Gaspard served as director of political affairs, before helming the Democratic National Committee and being confirmed as Mr. Obama’s ambassador to South Africa.

Allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and Mr. Biden’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination this year, had pushed hard for Mr. Sanders to be selected as labor secretary. But Mr. Biden’s short list for the job does not appear to include Mr. Sanders.

Categories
Business

Ford F-150 ‘Tremor’ pickup introduced with new off-road provides

Ford F-150 'Tremor' pickup announced with new off-road adds

2021 Ford F-150 tremor

ford

Ford Motor is expanding its highly profitable truck range with a new “Tremor” off-road model for the F-150 pickup.

The 2021 F-150 Tremor announced on Tuesday offers several new features in a revised version of the pickup, which is arriving at dealerships across the country, and improvements to the off-road equipment. According to Ford, the tremor model will go on sale next summer.

2021 Ford F-150 Tremor interior

The new edition of the F-150 is Ford’s latest attempt to grow its loyal truck customers and increase profits by taking advantage of increasingly popular off-road models. It complements the current Tremor models that are offered for its larger Super Duty pickups as well as for the Ranger mid-range pickups.

Ford’s F-Series trucks are a cash cow for the company, according to a study commissioned by Ford from the Boston Consulting Group. They generate much of the automaker’s bottom line and have annual sales of around $ 42 billion. Ford’s automotive sales were $ 143.6 billion in 2019.

2021 Ford F-150 tremor

ford

The F-150 Tremor has special badge and design elements, as well as additional off-road capabilities, including improved suspension and shock absorbers and a “bash plate” to protect the vehicle’s chassis. It also adds 33-inch off-road tires mounted on matte 18-inch wheels, 1-inch width and all-wheel drive as standard. The vehicle is powered by Ford’s 3.5 liter V6 engine and 10-speed automatic transmission.

Ford hasn’t released pricing for the F-150 Tremor, but it could be somewhere between a similarly-featured model with its current off-road package of around $ 45,000 and Ford’s 2020 F-150 Raptor Performance Truck which sells at $ 53,455 Dollar starts.

Categories
Business

As His Time period Ends, Trump Faces Extra Questions on Funds to His Resort

As His Term Ends, Trump Faces More Questions on Payments to His Hotel

Ms. Trump wrote to Mickael C. Damelincourt, the hotel’s general manager, asking him to call Mr. Gates to negotiate a better offer for the opening committee. “It should be a fair market price,” Ms. Trump said in a follow-up email that soon resulted in a new offer of $ 175,000 a day.

Even so, Ms. Wolkoff expressed concerns.

“In my opinion the maximum rental fee should be $ 85,000 per day,” she replied to Mr. Gates and Ms. Trump in an email in which she also stated that other properties such as Union Station had offered their rooms for inauguration in free .

This series of emails filed on court documents as part of the lawsuit is at the center of the case that Democrat Racine is pursuing.

The opening committee paid $ 220,000 for rooms in the hotel, including $ 75,259 for renting what is known as the Trump Townhouse, marketed as an ultra-luxury suite.

There were no events that took advantage of it on two days the opening committee paid the hotel $ 175,000 to rent the ballroom, the lawsuit said. And on a third day that the ballroom was actually used for lunch – again, $ 175,000 – another nonprofit group had paid just $ 5,000 to rent the same President’s ballroom for a housewarming event that morning.

The committee also paid the hotel for the cost of a “friends and family” event for Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. that their father was not supposed to attend. The inauguration staff were so uncomfortable that they tried to cancel the meeting, court documents showed. But Mr. Damelincourt disagreed.

“Rick… just heard that the Friday night reception was canceled. Is it accurate “Mr. Damelincourt wrote,“ Hard for us if it’s like it’s a lot of sales. ”The event was then postponed and took place the night Mr. Trump was sworn in.

Categories
Business

Italy coronavirus outbreak: What’s taking place there now

Italy coronavirus outbreak: What's happening there now

Healthcare workers transfer a COVID-19 patient to a biocontainment stretcher in the Covid emergency room of the San Filippo Neri Hospital during lockdown measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on October 29, 2020 in Rome, Italy.

Antonio Masiello | Getty Images

Italy became Europe’s first coronavirus hotspot earlier this year after cases occurred in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto in February.

It imposed the first lockdown outside of China after the virus spread across the country and across the continent.

In the summer, as elsewhere, there was a lull in infections in Italy before a second wave of coronavirus infections set in.

Now the daily number of infections remains high and a record number of daily deaths were reported last week. Here is a snapshot of the current developments in Italy.

What is the virus situation like?

Italy currently has the second highest number of coronavirus infections in Europe after France with 1,728,878 confirmed cases. This is based on data from Johns Hopkins University. Over 60,000 people have died of the disease in the country.

13,720 new Covid cases and 528 more deaths were recorded on Monday, with the numbers likely to be lower due to the delay over the weekend. It comes after 18,887 new cases on Sunday and 21,052 on Saturday. On Friday, 24,099 new infections were counted, as data from the Ministry of Health show – a number that points more to the current virus trend in Italy.

993 deaths were recorded last Thursday, surpassing an earlier record of 919 daily deaths during the first wave of the virus.

Italy’s health department, the Higher Health Institute, said Monday that nearly 40% of Italy’s 60,000 deaths have occurred in the hardest-hit region, Lombardy.

What about the vacation?

Last week the Italian government passed another package of tough restrictions, which are seen as a crucial way to avoid further hikes in certain cases.

This includes the ban on travel between Italian regions between December 21 and January 6, which means families across Italy cannot get together for Christmas unless they travel before the rules come into force.

Measures put online by the Italian Ministry of Health include a ban on leaving your hometown on Christmas Day, St. Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day, December 26) and New Year’s Day.

The government has maintained the current curfew. People are not allowed out of their homes between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. (and until 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day), except for work or health reasons. That rules out a midnight mass for millions of Catholics in Italy.

Italian tourists traveling abroad from December 21 to January 6 will have to undergo quarantine upon their return, the ministry said. Foreign tourists who come to Italy during the same period must also be quarantined.

Red zones

As in other countries, Italy has applied a tiered system to differentiate parts of the country according to their risk profile, with different rules applying in these areas.

The areas with the highest risk are classified as “red zones” and are subject to the strictest restrictions. This is followed by “orange zones” with medium to high risk and increased restrictions, and yellow zones of medium risk with baseline restrictions.

Currently, the yellow area includes the regions: Emilia Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Liguria, Marche, Molise, Trento, Apulia, Sardinia, Sicily, Umbria and Veneto.

The orange areas include: Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Lombardy, Piedmont, Bolzano, Tuscany and Aosta Valley.

The only red zone at the moment is the central region of Abruzzo. In a red area, only stores selling essential goods can remain open and restaurants and bars can only offer take-away service.

Red zone residents are not allowed to move around their own area (whether by public or private transport) unless there is a vital reason to do so. Anyone who has to leave the house for work, study, health or emergency reasons must fill out a form. In a red zone, visiting or meeting relatives or friends with whom you do not live together in an open or closed place is prohibited.

Bans and continued restrictions clearly affect some Italians more than others; A story about an Italian went viral after an argument with his wife who took a walk to cool off and ran 450 km after an argument with his wife. Italians called the man, who was fined 400 euros by the police for violating the curfew, “Forrest Gump” after the character who walks thousands of kilometers across America.

Categories
Business

Pope Francis and Companies Discovered Group Selling ‘Inclusive Capitalism’

Pope Francis and Businesses Found Group Promoting 'Inclusive Capitalism'

It may seem unusual: big corporations and Pope Francis, a Pope who has repeatedly and devastatingly criticized capitalism. But they announced a new partnership today, the latest sign of the growing influence of environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices in the economy.

Meet the Inclusive Capitalism Council with the Vatican, a group of corporations, investors, and other groups with a market cap of $ 2.1 trillion and 200 million employees. The group, with Francis’ blessing, announced commitments to environmental and sustainable business goals that fit into the ESG movement.

The council’s 27 leaders are known as guardians of inclusive capitalism. These include Ajay Banga from Mastercard, Marc Benioff from Salesforce and Brian Moynihan from Bank of America. You will meet every year with Francis and Cardinal Peter Turkson, who heads the Vatican Department that deals with many social issues.

  • “An economic system that is fair, trustworthy and able to meet the most profound challenges facing humanity and our planet is urgently needed,” Francis said in a statement.

The group is the brainchild of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the businesswoman who campaigned for the promotion of so-called inclusive capitalism after the financial crisis of 2008. Among them is Inclusive Capital Partners, an ESG-focused activist hedge fund co-founded with Jeff Ubben.

There are reasons to be both hopeful and skeptical about the initiative. The companies’ commitments are meaningful, but some are not new: for example, BP reiterates its commitment announced in February to achieve net carbon-free emissions by 2050. And while the council made the pledges public, there isn’t much to hold the companies accountable (other than the risk of disappointing the Pope).

But it is remarkable to open a new front in the ESG movement. The Pope, whose time in the Church focused on caring for the poor, has long criticized capitalism for its sins and excesses. (Five years ago he called it “the devil’s crap.”) In an encyclical – the most definitive doctrine a Pope can teach – he published in October, Francis rebuked market capitalism for failing humanity during the pandemic .

UK starts Covid-19 vaccinations. A 90-year-old woman became the first patient in the western world to receive a fully tested and approved vaccine as the country distributes images from Pfizer and BioNTech. The US ordered 100 million cans, but it turns out the Trump administration turned down an offer from Pfizer in July.

Boris Johnson travels to Brussels and faces a dead end with Brexit. The UK Prime Minister said he would negotiate personally with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to reach a trade deal between the UK and the EU. There are still some areas of disagreement and the current trading conditions will expire on December 31st.

Nielsen is revising the way ratings are measured. The company announced that it would add digital television and streaming to its widespread television audience metrics, which could transform the way around $ 100 billion worth of ads are sold and valued. Speaking of which, Japanese advertising giant Dentsu is planning to cut 6,000 jobs as the pandemic is upsetting the industry.

Goldman Sachs will take full control of its securities joint venture in China. It has agreed to buy its local partner’s 49 percent stake. Beijing said it would allow such moves earlier this year, and other Western financial firms are preparing to follow suit.

“Davos” will be in Singapore. The World Economic Forum will hold its 2021 annual meeting, traditionally held in January in the Swiss Alps, in May in Singapore, citing Covid-19 concerns. The focus of the gathering will be – what else? – Recovery from the pandemic.

Years ago, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick described the company’s Advanced Technologies Group as “existential” for the company. Now Uber is paying a start-up to take over the division.

The department becomes part of Aurora, A Pittsburgh-based company focused on long distance autonomous transportation. Aurora had previously agreed to deliver self-driving technology to Volkswagen and Hyundai, although both are now working with other partners. As part of the deal, Uber will invest $ 400 million for a 26 percent stake in Aurora and take a seat on Aurora’s board of directors.

It’s about losses and headaches. Looking at autonomous driving as a possible means of reducing human driver costs, Mr Kalanick built the business by acquiring Otto, a trucking start-up founded by a former Google engineer. But Uber ran into a thicket of problems:

  • Google’s self-driving car partner Waymo accused Otto founder Anthony Levandowski of stealing trade secrets. Uber and Waymo eventually settled their legal battle, and Mr Levandowski admitted to stealing.

  • An Uber self-driving car hit and killed a woman in Arizona in 2018, creating legal and regulatory chaos for the company.

  • Uber’s investors have long called for ties to the project to be severed in hopes of containing heavy losses. (In 2018, Uber accepted a $ 500 million investment from Toyota to keep the unit alive.) Those demands grew louder as the pandemic hit the company’s finances.

The deal raises questions about the future of Silicon Valley’s self-driving obsession. Investors have poured billions into the technology but have yet to produce an armada of self-driving vehicles.

– Christopher Nolan, the film director, isn’t happy with WarnerMedia’s plan to simultaneously release films in theaters and stream them on HBO Max at the same time, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Etsy is known as a place where artisans and small businesses sell goods like handcrafted face masks. But there’s something else too, write Matt Phillips and Gillian Friedman of The Times: The best performer in the S&P 500 this year. This is a remarkable turnaround for a company that struggled shortly after going public in 2015 and was forced to abide by Wall Street rules.

Engine No. 1, a new ESG-focused investment firm founded by former activist investors, has adopted an ambitious goal for its first campaign: Exxon Mobil. It believes that by combining the traditional activist-investor book – which advocates actions that increase shareholder returns – with long-term social and environmental concerns, success can be achieved when social activists, environmentalists and others fall short .

Exxon’s shares are down around 40 percent this year. The pandemic hit oil prices as the industry grappled with the long-term move to cleaner energy sources. This leaves the company more vulnerable to activists looking to change their strategy.

  • Under its current CEO, Darren Woods, Exxon has continued to expand its exploration and production activities, responding to erroneous assumptions about the price and availability of oil made in a letter to Engine’s directors. (European competitors have shifted to renewables much more aggressively.) Exxon’s announcement last month that it would cut spending didn’t go far enough, Engine said, offering “little reason to hope that this change will mark a new era” . An Exxon spokesperson told DealBook that the company was reviewing Engine’s letter.

The fund is pushing for changes to Exxon’s board of directors, a common tactic used by activist investors (although unusual at the start of a campaign). It has been proposed to add four leaders, including clean energy specialists, who will be vital to the future of the company.

  • Engine needs powerful allies. Exxon is valued at $ 172 billion and the fund only has a $ 40 million stake. It is said to have the backing of CalSTRS, the country’s second largest pension fund, which has an additional $ 300 million.

It’s a great test for a new breed of activist. Funds like Engine, which were launched this month, aim to give ESG investing a sharper edge through “active ownership,” as founder Chris James put it. “In the long run, shareholders and stakeholders have the same interests, and companies that invest in their stakeholders are better and stronger companies,” he said when announcing the creation of Engine. Other new funds like Inclusive Capital Partners (mentioned above) are taking a similar, as yet untested, approach. The transformation of Exxon would be very substantial evidence.

deals

  • Online lender SoFi has reportedly held talks to go public through the merger with a SPAC. (Reuters)

  • Bob Dylan agreed to sell the rights to his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group for potentially more than $ 300 million. This is a single songwriter’s biggest deal. (NYT)

  • A new investment firm is planning a fund to bet against privately held startups. (WSJ)

Politics and politics

  • President-elect Joe Biden plans to appoint General Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. He would be the first black man in the role. (NYT)

  • The District of Columbia Attorney General is investigating whether President Trump’s family has improperly benefited from his Washington hotel. (NYT)

  • A Senate battle over Mr. Trump’s appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC under the control of the commission is on. (Bloomberg)

technology

  • A second federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s move to ban TikTok downloading in the US (WSJ).

  • Palantir’s shares rose after the data mining company won a three-year contract from the Food and Drug Administration to help get drug approvals. (Bloomberg)

  • European tech companies will raise $ 41 billion this year despite the pandemic, a record. (Atomico)

The best of the rest

  • Paul Sarbanes, the former Maryland Senator who co-authored the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a major accounting revision after scandals like Enron, died Sunday. He was 87. (NYT)

  • MSNBC named Rashida Jones the next president, making her the highest-ranking black woman on American television news. (NYT)

  • Chuck Yeager, the first test pilot to break the sound barrier and immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, died yesterday. He was 97. (NYT)

We appreciate your feedback! Please email your thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

Categories
Business

U.S. ought to be a Covid catastrophe mindset for 2 months

U.S. should be a Covid disaster mindset for two months

The intensive care unit and the pulmonologist Dr. Vin Gupta told CNBC that for the next two months in the US, everyone should be in a “disaster mindset” as Covid-19 cases explode across the country.

“Doctors in the reserves, US Air Force reserves, we haven’t used all of our skills, we should use those resources – military, National Guard, as you call them, emergency ID cards for anyone properly trained in critical care,” Professor at the institute for University of Washington health metrics and assessment said Monday evening. “We need all hands on deck here.”

According to the Covid Tracking Project, there were 102,148 people in hospitals across the country with coronavirus as of Monday. New Mexico hospitals have reached the point where they may need to start rationing care. The state is likely to be the first to fill all beds in the intensive care unit during the pandemic. Now they are overloaded. Per Covid, the fourth highest in the nation, there are more than 43 people per 100,000 in the hospital, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Gupta told The News with Shepard Smith that care rationing was actually spreading to other regions across the country. “This is a fact of life, and one of the reasons we believe that by the end of February about 500,000 Americans will lose their lives because we take care of the care and people can’t get the care they need.” the magnitude they need considering how out of control this pandemic is. “

The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation modeling projects project 538,893 deaths from Covid-19 by April 1.

To save life, governors are using hospitalization and ICU capacity as key metrics to set new restrictions.

On Monday, Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that parts of the state would close when hospitals are 90% full. He also said indoor dining in New York City may close soon.

At least 33 million people in California are regionally locked after ICU capacity fell below 15% in some regions. California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said the appointment would take at least three weeks.

Gupta, an NBC medical worker, described what he called “common sense” of encouraging people not to travel by bus or plane, minimizing gatherings and stopping eating indoors. “Unfortunately, I think these are the parameters that we have to adhere to,” he said. “Do I think they are draconian? I think they are common sense and I think if we can stick with these things we will be able to mitigate the transmission until vaccines are used in the near future.”

Pleading with Americans to wear three-layer masks everywhere in public, Gupta added that there was “compelling data” for people 55 and older that suggest wearing the extra layer of face shield with a three-layer blue mask be safer.