默默新聞08

2020年2月6日星期四

DealBook: Should Google Shrink to Save Itself?

February 6, 2020

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Reuters

Google reportedly weighs divesting a big ad business

As antitrust regulators turn up the heat, the company is reportedly considering a sale or spinoff of its third-party ad tech unit, Keach Hagey and Rob Copeland of the WSJ report, citing unnamed sources.

The context:

• The Justice Department has increasingly focused on Google’s third-party ad business, which was “built largely on the company’s 2008 acquisition of the ad-technology firm DoubleClick,” Ms. Hagey and Mr. Copeland write.

• Google’s ad-tech business consists of software used to buy and sell ads across the web.

• Critics say Google unfairly bundles these tools together and uses them to help its own services, like search and YouTube.

Some Google executives have discussed informally “whether the company should consider divesting its third-party ad tech business, according to people familiar with the situation,” Ms. Hagey and Mr. Copeland write. (A Google spokeswoman said there were no plans to divest the unit.)

Proponents of divesting the business note that the ad tech arm “has steadily declined in importance to Google overall since the DoubleClick purchase, while units like search and YouTube have soared.” That’s because web search traffic is stagnant, while mobile internet use is booming.

“For Google, a partial voluntary breakup of its advertising business might be preferable to whatever regulators come up with on their own,” Alex Webb of Bloomberg Opinion writes.

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Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York and Michael J. de la Merced in London.

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Outside a Casper store in New York. Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Investors hit snooze on Casper’s I.P.O.

The mattress seller officially priced its I.P.O. at $12 a share, the low end of a sharply cut price range. It’s a sign that public-market investors remain sour on money-losing start-ups with no clear path to profitability.

The bed-in-a-box company is valued around $476 million. Just last year, it was valued around $1.1 billion in a private fund-raising round.

Investors remain wary of money-burning I.P.O. candidates, having turned up their noses at Uber and WeWork last year. It shows the public markets aren’t willing to subsidize these companies’ growth efforts.

It’s not the only bad news for start-ups this week: The Federal Trade Commission moved to block the sale of Harry’s, the upstart razor brand, to the owner of Schick. If unprofitable start-ups can’t sell themselves to bigger rivals, and they suffer badly when they go public, what can they do?

Elon Musk Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Tesla’s epic rally hits a bump

Market fundamentals didn’t appear to apply to the electric-car maker’s shares this past year. At least they didn’t until yesterday.

Tesla’s stock fell 17 percent, in what Tom Maloney of Bloomberg notes was its worst drop in eight years. Shares closed yesterday at $734.70, which is three times more than where they traded in June.

Elon Musk lost $5.9 billion on paper in just one day, leaving him with an estimated net worth of $39.3 billion. (He could still earn a huge bonus if he keeps Tesla’s market value above $100 billion over six months: The company is currently valued at $132 billion.)

The stock dropped after even hardened Tesla critics conceded defeat. The hedge fund manager Steve Eisman, who famously profited by betting against subprime mortgage lenders before the financial crisis, said he had covered his bet against the company amid its “cultlike” rally.

Today’s a new day, however. Shares in Tesla were up 2 percent in premarket trading.

Coronavirus said to spur Chinese concessions on trade

Beijing said today that it would cut tariffs on $75 billion of U.S. imports. Analysts say the coronavirus outbreak was a major factor in the decision.

China will halve tariffs on some American products starting Feb. 14. The Finance Ministry said in a statement that the move was meant to “alleviate economic and trade frictions and expand economic and trade cooperation” between China and the U.S.

But analysts saw the economic impact of the coronavirus. With Chinese consumers sharply cutting spending, it appeared unlikely that Beijing would be able to hit targets for increasing U.S. imports that were laid out in the recently signed trade agreement with Washington anytime soon.

“I see it as a measure to signal to the U.S. that, ‘We’re not going to be able to ramp up imports straight away, but we’re still on board with the deal,’ ” Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, told the FT.

Global markets rose this morning, and S&P 500 futures pointed toward a positive open when trading begins.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Trump’s latest cudgel in his immigration fight: Global Entry

The Trump administration’s feud with New York State over protecting immigrants has expanded in a way that could affect many New York business travelers.

Residents of New York State are temporarily barred from applying for Global Entry and similar programs that let travelers speed through borders and airport security lines, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jesse McKinley of the NYT report.

The move is tied to the enactment of the Green Light Law, which prohibits agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection from gaining access to New York D.M.V. databases without a court order.

It’s the latest stage of the battle between federal officials and New York State over immigration. The Trump administration has already criticized New York City for policies that protect undocumented immigrants.

“This is obviously political retaliation by the federal government, and we’re going to review our legal options,” a senior adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.

Bernie Madoff in 2009, the year he was sentenced. David Karp/Associated Press

Bernie Madoff says he’s dying and wants to leave prison

As part of a request for early release, the mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history told a court yesterday that he had terminal kidney disease, David Yaffe-Bellany of the NYT reports.

Doctors have determined that Mr. Madoff has just over a year to live, according to medical records attached to his filing. Under federal guidelines, prisoners who receive that kind of diagnosis can be eligible for early release.

He has already served 11 years of his 150-year prison sentence for a variety of crimes, including money laundering, perjury and theft. Victims of his fraud lost an estimated $13 billion.

Federal officials denied a previous request, saying that “his release at this time would minimize the severity of his offense.”

Bernie Ebbers, the former WorldCom C.E.O., was given early release in December from his 25-year prison sentence after his health deteriorated sharply. He died on Sunday.

The speed read

Deals

• Analysts don’t understand why the Intercontinental Exchange would want to buy eBay. (FT)

• Spotify agreed to buy The Ringer, the website founded by Bill Simmons, to add more podcasts to its offerings. (NYT)

• Nestlé plans to invest $200 million in the drug maker Aimmune Therapeutics, whose peanut allergy treatment recently won F.D.A. approval. (Reuters)

• Vanguard became famous for offering index funds. Now it’s getting into private equity. (WSJ)

Politics and policy

• The United States trade deficit shrank last year — because the economy is cooling, not because factories are reopening. (NYT)

• Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are nearly tied in the latest results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses. (NYT)

• Britain plans to ask the public which E.U. rules the country should scrap. (FT)

Tech

• Jeff Weiner will step down as C.E.O. of LinkedIn on June 1 and become the social network’s executive chairman. He’ll be succeeded by Ryan Roslansky, the company’s product chief. (CNBC)

• Facebook’s move to encrypt its messaging platforms has run into opposition from child welfare advocates, who worry that the measure would let predators act with impunity. (NYT)

• Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, sued Verizon for patent infringement. (CNBC)

• The C.I.A. plans to offer more cloud-computing contracts to Amazon rivals. (Bloomberg)

Best of the rest

• Some bondholders are said to have reached a deal with of Puerto Rico’s oversight board, possibly paving the way for the U.S. territory to exit bankruptcy protection. (WSJ)

• Three big investors in Credit Suisse have sided with the Swiss bank’s C.E.O., Tidjane Thiam, in his fight with the firm’s chairman, Urs Rohner. (FT)

• The latest generation of Nike’s super-sneakers will qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. (WSJ)

• Kirk Douglas, the Hollywood star, died yesterday. He was 103. (NYT)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.

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On Politics: Acquitted. What’s Next?

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Continue reading the main story

February 6, 2020

By Giovanni Russonello

Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a daily political analysis of the 2020 elections based on reporting by New York Times journalists.

Where things stand in the race

President Trump was easily acquitted on Wednesday on both articles of impeachment, less than 24 hours after giving a proud, pugnacious State of the Union address that signaled the start of his 2020 campaign. The Democratic presidential candidates are starting to ask voters to do what the Senate would not. Michael Bennet put it this way on Twitter: “The Senate failed to do its job. Now the American people must do theirs.”
In Iowa, we finally have something close to complete results — but now the picture is less clear than ever. With 97 percent of precincts reporting early Thursday, Pete Buttigieg’s lead over Bernie Sanders had been cut to a tenth of a percentage point. Results from satellite caucus sites have yet to come in; satellites are a new phenomenon in Iowa, and their potential impact on the final vote count is unclear.
After what looks like a humbling defeat in Iowa, Joe Biden finds himself facing “jittery donors, an uncertain landscape in upcoming Democratic contests and a sharp challenge” to the argument that he’s the most electable Democrat in November, Katie Glueck, Jonathan Martin and Thomas Kaplan write. Speaking to a crowd in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday, Biden admitted that he “took a gut punch in Iowa” — but he said he was in this fight for the long haul. “I’m going to fight for this nomination” he said. “I’m counting on New Hampshire. We’re going to come back.”
After all that talk of “wine caves” at the last Democratic debate, Buttigieg’s fund-raising habits are a touchy subject. But there’s no way around it: High-dollar events are essential to his campaign, so on Wednesday he left New Hampshire for a swing through New Jersey and New York, holding one fund-raiser in each state. (He has another in New York scheduled for Thursday.) Elizabeth Warren and Sanders have criticized rivals like Buttigieg for taking corporate donations.

One thing that has Democrats worried: the modest turnout at the caucuses on Monday. We still don’t know the full results, but we do know that turnout was only a little better than in 2016 — and not nearly on the level of 2008, when Barack Obama’s candidacy drove a wave of enthusiasm. Some Democratic insiders are expressing concerns that this reflects badly on the power of the party’s brand, particularly in the Midwest, as it looks ahead to the general election.
A last word about Iowa, from Patrick Healy, our politics editor, who left Des Moines on Wednesday for Manchester, N.H.:

It’s hard to overstate how frustrated a lot of Iowans feel about the way the caucuses turned out. Both Democrats and Republicans there take exceptional pride in their electoral process, and many Democratic caucusgoers cherish the memory of setting Barack Obama on the road to the White House in 2008. In the 36 hours after Monday’s caucuses, Iowan after Iowan expressed regret over the state party’s debacle. It’s a little heartbreaking to see a proudly political state so aghast and humbled.

Photo of the day

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Andrew Yang after an event in Keene, N.H., on Wednesday. He is trying to appeal directly to New Hampshire voters who supported Donald J. Trump in 2016 and are now looking for a Democrat to woo them.

Continue reading the main story

Romney crosses the aisle alone

Trump was acquitted on Wednesday after the third and briefest presidential impeachment trial in American history.

Mitt Romney was the only senator to go against the rest of his or her own party. He voted to convict Trump on the first article of impeachment — abuse of power — but not on the second, obstruction of justice.

“The grave question the Constitution tasked senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor,” Romney said. “Yes, he did.”

But ultimately, he was just a speck of red in a sea of blue, not nearly enough to reach the two-thirds threshold needed for a conviction. Trump plans to make a statement on his acquittal at the White House on Thursday at noon.

Continue reading the main story

Trump’s Gallup approval rating rose to 49 percent just before the State of the Union address, his highest on record. He has already gone longer than any previous president without reaching 50 percent approval — but if he gets a bump from the State of the Union, that streak could end. And just at the right moment for him: the start of his re-election year.

Democrats react to the State of the Union

Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday was a direct-delivery mechanism for Republican red meat. He seemed squarely aimed at his own base for most of the speech. And Democrats took notice.

In New Hampshire, Biden said: “Anyone that watched the State of the Union last night knows two things: One, it’s going to be hard to beat Trump. And two, we have to beat Donald Trump.”

Trump portrayed undocumented immigrants as fatally dangerous, promised to fight for the Second Amendment and painted the Democratic agenda as socialist. He also boasted of what he called an end to “the mentality of American decline” and took credit repeatedly for the low unemployment rate; he didn’t mention that the rate fell steadily throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.

Continue reading the main story

Our reporter Astead W. Herndon, writing in from New Hampshire, said none of this was new — but it’s a reminder of Trump’s bare-knuckle approach.

The State of the Union has reinforced for Democrats what they have known for more than a year: that Trump has united the Republican Party and will be a difficult person to run against. This is common knowledge by now, among Democrats and the 2020 candidates themselves. People in the party use new speeches by the president as another opportunity to drive home that message or to fund-raise, but not because they’re surprised.

A TV critic’s take on the president’s ‘reality-fied’ speech

James Poniewozik, The Times’s chief TV critic, watched most of the State of the Union with his mouth half agape. He has written about many Trump speeches over the past few years, but this one — a “stunt-laden spectacle,” James calls it — stood out. In a just-published critic’s notebook, he explains why. Here’s an excerpt:

The speech was jammed with more twists and giveaways than a two-hour “Survivor” finale. President Trump awarded a young girl in the audience a scholarship. He had his wife, Melania, drape a Presidential Medal of Freedom around the paleoconservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh. He arranged a reunion between a deployed soldier and his wife, just like the surprise-military-return videos that TV morning shows love.

In addition to previewing Trump’s re-election campaign, James thinks all the bluster might have served the more immediate purpose of distracting viewers from both the Democratic primary election and his own impeachment trial.

For the president, the address had obvious political goals, coming amid the impeachment trial and at the beginning of an election year. But it also seemed built to make noise and get lasting attention amid a crazy-busy political news week.

What Went Wrong for Joe Biden in Iowa

His placement behind his leading rivals in the caucuses on Monday dealt a damaging blow to his campaign. Some party officials say it was a long time in the works.

By Katie Glueck, Jonathan Martin and Thomas Kaplan