The future of dining could include surge pricing. "Online reservation systems will soon allow diners to finish their meal and leave without whipping out a credit card," by paying in advance based on dynamic pricing, Bloomberg reports.
Details: Nick Kokonas, co-owner of culinary reservation system Tock, said that rather than create culinary gimmicks with artificially inflated prices to make ends meet, restaurants should introduce “surge pricing” like that offered by Uber and Lyft. Meals would rise and fall in price based on the demand in the reservation system.
In two cases involving his China trade war this week, President Trump suggested the U.S. should ignore historic separations of power and precedent if it yielded good results, Bloomberg's Shawn Donnan writes.
Trump said the Federal Reserve should keep rates low to help the economy weather the trade war.
Trump suggested he'd help free a Huawei executive that the U.S. is currently trying to extradite from Canada.
Why it matters: "U.S. officials have struggled for decades to convince suspicious foreign counterparts about the separation of powers ... They didn’t persuade all of the people all of the time — but the framing was central to America’s ability to lead by example," Donnan notes.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 497 points lower on Friday, or 2.02%, while the S&P 500 fell 1.9% and Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 2.3%. All three are now in correction territory.
Downward drivers: Johnson & Johnson, the biggest decliner in both the Dow and S&P 500, had its worst day in over 15 years after a Reuters report said the company knew its baby powder "was sometimes tainted with carcinogenic asbestos." Disappointing economic data in China also fueled the sell-off.
Author James Mann, whose views once stirred controversy about a decade ago when he suggested prosperity might not bring the PRC closer to Western liberal ideals in his book "The China Fantasy," now appears vindicated by the evolution of the relationship between the two superpowers.
What's new: I interviewed Mann this week about the current state of U.S.-China relations, to compare with his older premise (which was one of three possible scenarios) that Western elites misrepresented the benefits of engagement with China. Back then, Mann posed the question...
"What if, twenty-five or thirty years from now, a wealthier, more powerful China continues to be run by a one-party regime that still represses organized political dissent much as it does today? ... What if, in other words, China becomes fully integrated into the world’s economy, yet it remains also entirely undemocratic?"
The parent companies of T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank respectively, have agreed to "consider curbing" their use of equipment from China's Huawei Technologies in order to receive national security clearance for their planned merger, Reuters reports.
Why it matters: U.S. officials believe Huawei is tied too closely to the Chinese government, and that incorporating its technology into U.S. networks could enable cyber espionage. The company also became a flashpoint in U.S.-China trade tensions following the recent arrest and requested extradition of Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that parent companies Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank are considering dropping Huawei, not T-Mobile and Sprint.
The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that hasn't been shy about criticizing President Trump, is officially closing on December 17, Politico's Jason Schartz reports, who obtained a copy of the press release.
Why it matters: The 23-year-old magazine once reflected the opinions and concerns of conservatives on key subject matters including religious liberty, regulation and tax cuts. But the publication has struggled over the past five years, and saw double-digit declines in its subscriber base in all but one year since 2013, according to the press release.
Pharmaceutical company AbbVie, the maker of rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, said yesterday it has authorized another $5 billion in stock buybacks. AbbVie has now repurchased $15 billion of its own stock since the Republican tax overhaul was signed into law earlier this year.
The big picture: Drug companies are reporting massive profits, due in part to the tax law, and a lot of that money is being used on tools like stock buybacks that benefit Wall Street and executives. Patients, however, continue to voice frustration about their drug costs.
Actress Eliza Dushku received a $9.5 million confidential settlement from CBS after she says she was written off the show "Bull" in retaliation for confronting the show's star, Michael Weatherly, about inappropriate comments he made on set, the New York Times reports.
The big picture: The settlement was uncovered after the CBS Corporation board hired lawyers to go over sexual misconduct allegations made against now-ousted president and CEO Les Moonves. The lawyers' report says, per the Times, that CBS' "misguided" handling of Dushku's complaints was "emblematic of larger problems at CBS."
Just as signs emerged that China was softening on trade this week, Beijing seemed to ramp up its retaliation over the arrest of a top Chinese tech executive in Canada.
Between the lines: This confusing week in U.S.-China relations has seen signs of a major climbdown from China, over trade, in parallel with a major escalation. "The Chinese really are trying to keep Huawei and trade separate," says Axios contributor Bill Bishop.
