“You can’t have a Prime Minister called Dan. People called Dan work in fitness centers and listen to West Coast jazz.”
Marc Ross Daily
December 11, 2018
Curation and commentary from Marc A. Ross
Reporting from Alexandria, Virginia
Marc Ross Daily = Business News at the Intersection of Globalization, Disruption, and Politics
TOP FIVE
✔️ EU rebuffs May’s plea for help
✔️ Humbled Macron tries to buy off angry protesters
✔️ Russia deploys two bombers to Venezuela for exercises
✔️ SoftBank's record IPO reaches $23.5 billion
✔️ Malls are not dying, the bad ones are
ROSS RANT
Memo: Now what? How to communicate during trade negotiations with a jailed Huawei executive
At the end of the 1972 film The Candidate, the main character and winning candidate Bill McKay, played skillfully by Robert Redford, utters the final line: "what do we do now?"
With the arrest of Wanzhou Meng, the CFO of Huawei Technologies (and daughter of the company’s founder), we find ourselves in the same situation.
Tim Culpan, writing for Bloomberg Opinion, described the situation as, "the arrest of Huawei's Meng is the equivalent of the dog catching the car."
So, what do we do now? The car has been caught.
All the talk of a trade truce has been overwhelmed with news reports ranging from who and what is Huawei, to how and what did President Trump know as he sat down to a working dinner in Buenos Aires with President Xi Jinping.
Read the full memo here: http://www.caracal.global/insights/
GEOECONOMICS
Brexit: PM Theresa May delayed a critical parliamentary vote on her Brexit bill, throwing both her government and her plans for the U.K.’s EU exit into disarray.
NYT: Facing defeat, Theresa May seeks delay on Brexit vote in parliament
Juncker rules out renegotiation of May’s Brexit deal: FT reports, European Commission president vows there will be no concession on Irish backstop.
The Times: EU rebuffs May’s plea for help
Bloomberg - Editorial: May should admit that Brexit has failed
A vote must be held. The PM suggested this will happen before January 21.
France: President Emmanuel Macron vowed to boost the minimum wage and cut taxes on some pensioners in an attempt to placate “yellow vest” protesters who have mounted demonstrations against his pro-business agenda.
Humbled Macron tries to buy off angry protesters: The Times reports, a contrite President Macron raised the minimum wage last night and unveiled a series of concessions in a €10 billion spending spree aimed at ending a month of violent protests that battered his administration.
"It is an economic and social state of emergency that I want to declare today," Macron says.
Gideon Rachman: Macron protests show that leading France is an impossible job: The French contradiction of a demand for lower taxes and better public services will stay unresolved.
Lionel Laurent: Emmanuel Macron puts on his yellow vest: France’s president has boosted spending to quell the riots. It might just work in the short term but it’s hard to feel confident about his future reforms.
Trade negotiations: The US and China started the latest round of trade talks with a phone call involving Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He.
Bloomberg: Huawei clash shows deeper US-China battle for global influence
"You are going to see elevated trade tensions for some time to come, potentially years." -BlackRock's Richard Turnill on U.S.-China trade
#Correct
Japan to seek bilateral deals on accepting foreign workers: Nikkei reports, the government aims to eliminate shady brokers through deals with eight countries.
Russia deploys two bombers to Venezuela for exercises.
Mexico to invest $30 billion to boost growth and stem migration in its poor southern states over the next five years.
Tuna fishing: Pacific island nations have vowed to oppose US efforts to increase its catch limit in the world's largest tuna fishery, saying the proposal does nothing to improve sustainable fishing. The United States is expected to try to increase its quota for bigeye tuna at a meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) taking place in Honolulu this week. The meeting brings together 26 nations to determine fishing policy in the Pacific, which accounts for almost 60 percent of the global tuna catch, worth about $6.0 billion annually.
AMERICAN POLITICS
WSJ - Editorial: Thank you, John Kelly: Trump seems to think he can be his own chief of staff.
WP: ‘There was no plan B’: Trump scrambles to find chief of staff after top candidate turns him down
Timothy L. O'Brien: Would you want to be Donald Trump’s chief of staff? The failure to recruit a relatively unknown 36-year-old to be chief of staff reveals a Trump administration still struggling.
"All of which is to say that chaos in the Trump administration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature."
Seriously, who would want to be the Trump's chief of staff?
HBD: John Kerry, US secretary of state (2013-17), 75
ENTERPRISE
Apple in China: A Chinese court ordered Apple to stop selling older iPhone models in the country after finding it infringed on two Qualcomm patents.
Huawei says it has cut ties to Skycom—which is shrouded in mystery in part because of its opaque ownership and its dealings with Iran—in 2009. The US says it didn’t.
Lawyers for Huawei’s Meng fail to secure bail in Canada: FT reports, the finance chief of the Chinese company to fight extradition request from US.
Know this, Huawei mistrust imperils China tech ambitions.
Nikkei: Edgy executives cancel trips in wake of Huawei arrest
Crypto layoffs: Cryptocurrency companies are laying off employees in an effort to survive the nascent market’s biggest selloff to date.
WPP to cut 3,500 jobs in a widespread restructuring.
Motown lodging: The new Shinola Hotel is scheduled to open in downtown Detroit in January 2019.
CBS sells Television City for $750 million to Los Angeles real estate developer.
SoftBank's record IPO reaches $23.5 billion after extra share sale.
Walt Disney Studios is ending the year on a high note, posting more than $7 billion in global box office earnings.
Alexa voice assistant: Alexa will now read your newest emails to you. And, if you want, you can delete an email or reply to it by voice.
Instagram voice messaging: Users can hold down the microphone button to record a short voice message that appears in the chat as an audio waveform that recipients can then listen to at their leisure.
Bloomberg's best B-Schools rankings:
1.Stanford
2. Wharton
3. Harvard
4. Sloan
5. Booth
6. Haas
7. Columbia
8. Kellogg
9. Darden
10. IMD
26. Kenan-Flagler
Full rankings here: https://bloom.bg/2QoDNyB
TRENDS + BUZZ
Digitally native brands are changing the American mall: As mall developers shift their aim to fewer, better stores, buzzy direct-to-consumer brands are increasingly popping up in shopping centers.
Malls are not dying, the bad ones are.
Time is luxury: Peloton’s value proposition is as much about what you can accomplish away from the treadmill. Why take the time to travel to a gym? That time could be better spent elsewhere. This is the mark of a modern luxury brand.
Peloton recently raised money at a $4 billion valuation.
Screen time is changing children's brains: In 2018, children are growing up in a world dominated by iPads, iPhones, computer screens, and TVs — and now, new research suggests that it’s literally affecting their brain structure. According to a new report on 60 Minutes, a landmark research study conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH) found that brain scans of some 4,500 children showed “different patterns” depending on how much screen time they were exposed to per day.
Home prices: As of September, housing prices in the U.S. were 53 percent higher than they were when the market bottomed out in 2012. A house that sold for $200,000 back then would fetch about $300,000 today, which is the third-largest boom since 1913.
Electric car fuel: If all passenger cars in Texas were electrified today, the state would need 110 terawatt-hours more of electricity per year, which is approximately the annual electricity consumption of 11 million homes and also a 30 percent increase over current consumption.
CULTURE
HBD: Nikki Sixx, musician, co-founder, Mötley Crüe, 60
Bohemian Rhapsody now most-streamed 20th-century song.
Voyager 2 just entered interstellar space: More than 40 years after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft is now in interstellar space. A region called the heliosphere surrounds the planets in our solar system.
Aquaman is swimming in it in China, grossing $93.6 million in its opening weekend.
SPORT
Today: Momentum Generation on HBO @ 10:00 pm ET
Review: Momentum Generation, a new HBO surf documentary, brought this critic to tears. More than once: LAT reports, You do not need to be interested in surfing to be excited and moved by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist's excellent, eloquent documentary "Momentum Generation," which premieres Tuesday on HBO. A surf film might not be the first thing you’d expect to bring you repeatedly to tears, but I can say with authority it is possible.
Trailer: Momentum Generation: http://bit.ly/2RKkxZ4
Mina Guli is running 100 marathons in 100 days to highlight a looming global water shortage. The 48-year-old Australian is galloping across the planet, 42 kilometers (26 miles) at a time.
Champions League:
Today: All matches @ 3:00 pm ET
Liverpool vs Napoli
Internazionale vs PSV
Barcelona vs Tottenham Hotspur
Tomorrow: All matches @ 3:00 pm ET
Ajax vs Bayern München
Manchester City vs Hoffenheim
Young Boys vs Juventus
Valencia vs Manchester United
Through to the round of 16: Ajax, Atlético Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern München, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus, Manchester City, Manchester United, Porto, Real Madrid, Roma, Schalke
Can still reach the round of 16: Internazionale Milano, Liverpool, Lyon, Napoli, Paris Saint-Germain, Shakhtar Donetsk, Tottenham Hotspur
