Private equity's retail apocalypse hit another miserable milestone yesterday, with Payless ShoeSource refiling for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The shoe store chain also plans to liquidate all 2,500 of its North American locations, costing around 16,000 people their jobs.
The bottom line: Physical retail is under severe stress, regardless of ownership structure, but private equity is almost always buying into mature industries that are prone to disruption. Engaging in large dividend recaps only makes the margin for error that much smaller, and the likelihood for failure that much larger.
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times' White House correspondent, called President Trump's claim that reporters don't reach out to the White House for comment "a lie" during an appearance on CNN on Wednesday. "We went through a detailed list of what we were planning on reporting. They chose not to engage," she said.
Backdrop: Haberman and a team of other journalists at the Times reported yesterday that Trump called acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker last year to ask whether a Trump-appointed attorney could "unrecuse" himself in order to lead the Southern District of New York's investigation into hush money payments during the 2016 presidential election.
Non-financial S&P 500 companies with the least cash are piling on the biggest loads of debt.
By the numbers: More than half of the S&P 500's total cash is held within just 25 companies — or the top 5% — while the bottom 95% of companies hold 73% of the index's debt, according to the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
The issue driving income inequality in the U.S. has not been a lack of productivity by American workers, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds. Instead it is that the lion's share of gains from increased productivity have gone to a tiny segment of wage earners at the top.
The big picture: After tracking closely in the three decades following World War II, from 1979 to 2017 productivity grew 70.3%, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers grew just 11.1%. That means productivity grew six times faster than typical worker pay.
U.S. ad dollars spent this year on digital channels, including desktop, mobile, search, and social media, will surpass the total spent on non-digital ad channels, like television, out-of-home (billboards), radio, newspapers and magazines, according to a new projection from eMarketer.
Why it matters: 2017 was the first year that digital ad spending passed the television ad spend in the U.S. Now, digital is growing so quickly that it's slated to surpass revenue from all of the old-school mediums that for decades dominated the entertainment landscape.
As Amazon's market power has sunk big box stores left and right, Walmart seemed next in line for a big hit. But the 56-year-old legacy retailer has been surprisingly nimble as it stares down the formidable everything store.
Driving the news: Walmart today easily beat earnings expectations for Q4 of 2018, giving its stock a 5% boost at one stage. The company reported a whopping 43% year-over-year increase in online sales — for the second quarter in a row.
Sarah Isgur, the former leading spokeswoman for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, will join CNN as a political editor for the 2020 presidential campaign despite the fact that she has not previously worked in a newsroom, reports Politico.
Flashback: Isgur, who will not oversee news coverage that relates to the Justice Department, drafted the statement that announced Rod Rosenstein's departure, written in the voice of then-AG Sessions.
One of the world’s largest private equity firms is moving in on the local media landscape, placing billion-dollar bets on some of the biggest local TV franchises in the U.S.
Why it matters: Apollo Global Management's local media spree could one day give the firm significant local TV power. Bloomberg reports that if Apollo's next big deal with Nexstar media pans out, it would reach almost a quarter of U.S. households with its TV stations, based on Bloomberg Intelligence estimates.
Nearly $1 billion has been committed to saving local news in America over the next several years, as the country grapples with the consequences of less local coverage and accountability.
Why it matters: Despite valiant efforts, there's still no real business model for local news to continue to operate the way it has been for decades. Many of these donations, however, are being used to fund the research and development of sustainable business models for local news.
Vice Premier Liu He, China's economy czar, is heading to Washington for talks Thursday and Friday aimed at ending a fight over Beijing's technology ambitions ahead of a deadline for a massive U.S. tariff hike, AP reports.
Why it matters: Without an agreement, a 10% tariff increase imposed in July on $200 billion of Chinese goods is due to rise to 25% on March 2.
The big picture: Emerging market central banks are now the most dovish they have been since 2009, Bank of America Merrill Lynch strategists said. Their findings were based on language in various central bank statements.
Screen time for children ages 0-2 more than doubled from 1997 to 2014, according to a new report from Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics.
The bottom line: The study found that most of the uptick came from screen time spent on television. In total, TV consumption has more than doubled in percentage points of overall consumption of screen time from 1997 to 2014.
