Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, the latest installment in Nintendo’s racing franchise, brings together the fun of a remote control car with the versatility of a video game, bridging the two with a clever use of augmented reality.
The big picture: As we've written before, games that merge digital and physical play have tremendous promise, but that pairing has seen more misses than hits.
Google's $2.1 billion deal for Fitbit might go down as the only merger to qualify as both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.
Driving the news: European Union antitrust regulators have again extended their decision deadline, this time to Jan. 8, 2021. And it could be further complicated by U.S. authorities, who are drawing up a broader antitrust case against Google and/or its parent company Alphabet. The deal was originally announced on Nov. 1, 2019.
Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) will pay $3.6 billion to acquire a control stake in Chinese hypermarket operator Sun Art Retail Group (HK: 6808), increasing its equity position from 21% to 72%.
Why it matters: This comes against the backdrop of China's economy growing by an official 4.6% in Q3, year-over-year, which isn't too far below projections made before the pandemic began.
Why it matters: It highlights the power that the app continues to have over the charts, where one video — and its innumerable clones — can vault a 43-year-old album back to cultural relevancy.
Manufacturing PMIs have surged over the past few months, showing a clear breakout V-shaped recovery that has put the indexes of sentiment at the highest levels since 2018, but the hard numbers continue to lag.
Driving the news: The Fed's index of industrial production, which tracks output at factories, mines and utilities, fell a seasonally adjusted 0.6% last month after consistent increases since May, and output remains 7.1% below where it was in February.
Consumer confidence continues to improve but remains well below the levels seen before the coronavirus pandemic despite the rebound in housing and equity markets, surveys show.
Driving the news: The University of Michigan released its latest consumer sentiment index Friday showing an overall small improvement that was the result of increasing optimism about the future and pessimism about the present.
Several officials at the Fed are beginning to worry about asset bubbles and excessive risk-taking as a result of their extraordinary policy interventions, James Politi writes for the Financial Times, citing interviews with multiple Fed presidents and members of the Board of Governors.
Details: Some are now pushing for "tougher financial regulation" as concerns grow that monetary policy is "encouraging behavior detrimental to economic recovery and creating pressure for additional bailouts."
With the stock market again rising toward record highs, short sellers are moving back into technology shares and broad U.S. indexes with increasing confidence, betting that prices will fall and they will profit.
What's happening: After largely cashing out their bets at the end of the first quarter following the market crash in late March and pulling back in July and August, the renewed rise in stock prices has bears upping their bets again.
Chinese officials said Monday that GDP "expanded by 4.9% in the third quarter from a year earlier, putting China’s economy back toward its pre-coronavirus trajectory," The Wall Street Journal reports from Beijing.
Why it matters: This shows a superpower economy can bounce back quickly after the virus is defeated.
The internet and social platforms have made it easier for political actors to manipulate elections by posing as fake media operations or by manipulating real media companies into reporting and spreading disinformation.
Why it matters: Consumers already struggle to differentiate between straight news, fake news, opinion journalism and political advertising on the internet, and partisans in today's information war are deliberately blurring the lines, with technology's help.
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