Have a great Super Bowl Sunday. Here are the top business stories for the week ahead. – Charlotte Cowles
How are you? (January 31 – February 6)
Bezos bows out
Twenty-seven years after Amazon’s founding, Jeff Bezos hands over his job as CEO to one of his protégés, Andy Jassy, who heads the company’s lucrative cloud computing division. Bezos becomes Amazon’s executive chairman and participates in high-level decisions, but it’s still the end of an era for the country’s largest e-commerce retailer. He leaves on a pretty high note: Amazon’s last quarterly sales were over $ 100 billion for the first time, and the company’s value ($ 1.7 trillion) has made Mr. Bezos one of the world’s richest people. But challenges lie ahead as the company faces increasing scrutiny from lawmakers and antitrust regulators over whether it has used its influence illegally.
The beginning of the end
Well, here’s something not surprising: GameStop’s stock – the company that sparked an online buying frenzy that rocked the markets – fell back to Earth and fell to a fraction of the value they had a few days earlier. The same army of private investors that fueled GameStop’s boom-and-bust cycle had also won shares of underdogs like AMC Entertainment and BlackBerry, whose prices also plunged last week. Named for their flash-in-the-pan popularity on social media, the rapid devaluation of so-called meme stocks made investors wonder who was to blame for their losses. However, as the market stabilized, it had its biggest recovery in months.
Protect investors
Will the GameStop saga change the way stock trading is regulated? Perhaps. The recently confirmed Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, held a meeting with top regulators on Thursday to discuss the increasing prevalence of retail investing – that is, stock trading is being made easy (and free) on apps like Robinhood and E-Trade. The advantage of those platforms is that they make investing more accessible to ordinary (read: not Wall Street) people. But if the past few weeks have taught us anything, the whims of these individual stock traders can also lead to volatility hurting investors of all levels.
What’s next? (February 7-13)
Stimulus and route
The Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress are getting ahead with their overwhelming $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, and will discuss the final details this week. To avoid potential blockages, Senate Democrats have passed a budget framework that allows the aid package to be approved by simple majority and without Republican backing. President Biden said he still hoped to compromise with the Republicans, who rejected the bill’s scope and price tag. But he’s unwilling to waste time looking for their vote, or giving in to cornerstone amenities like aid to schools or $ 1,400 direct payments to qualified Americans. And given the bleak January job report, he says there’s no time to lose.
The business of elections
Voice technology company Smartmatic has filed a $ 2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, three of its anchors, and lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell. The company accuses the defendants of harming its business and reputation by spreading false theories about its services as part of their discredited claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In its complaint, Smartmatic alleges that Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, representing former President Donald J. Trump, “made a story about Smartmatic” and that “Fox has joined the conspiracy to defame and belittle Smartmatic and its election technology and software.”
A strange year for advertising
The cost of Super Bowl ads remained on par with last year – about $ 5.6 million for a 30-second spot. It’s the first time the rate hasn’t increased significantly in more than a decade, and it took much longer than usual for CBS to sell all the slots. After all, it’s a strange time for marketing and advertisers face a dilemma: Are they alluding to the pandemic and reminding viewers of a nightmare they hoped to escape for a few precious hours? Or do you ignore it and run the risk of coming across as tone deaf? The ads will be dominated by companies popular with pandemics, such as the delivery service app DoorDash, Mexican takeaway chain Chipotle, and recently beleaguered investment platform Robinhood.