As Sears filed for bankruptcy yesterday, we chronicled how the once-iconic department store has been misunderstanding its shoppers for decades. But early in Sears' long reign, it was a revolutionary force in the U.S., among other things subverting Jim Crow-era practices that blocked black Americans from shopping freely, and charged them usurious prices.
President Trump has told the Associated Press that Saudi Arabia being blamed for the disappearance and assumed killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is "another case of 'guilty until proven innocent.'"
The big picture: The Saudis and Trump administration each have incentives to stop this from becoming a lasting crisis. The U.S.-Saudi relationship survived 9/11 and is unlikely to end over the situation surrounding Khashoggi, but the evidence against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is increasingly hard to ignore.
Univision has written to the heads of the FCC and FTC alleging that Dish has been deceptively marketing Univision programming as part of Dish's pay-TV services to consumers, even though the two parties have failed to reach an agreement to air Univision's content for months, according to a letter obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: It's the latest and most aggressive step by the Hispanic broadcaster to get the telecom giant to agree to a fee, known as a retransmission agreement, that would put Univision's programming back on air for millions of Dish customers.
Investors still think a trade war is the top risk for stocks, but normalized central bank policy is now a close second, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s latest survey of over 200 global fund managers.
Data: BofA Merrill Lynch Global Fund Manager Survey; Note: Surveys of 231 panelists with combined $646B assets under management conducted Aug. 3–9, Sept. 7–13, and Oct. 5–11, 2018; Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios
Facebook and Twitter are declining as news and media referral sources on mobile, according to a report from traffic analytics company Chartbeat, which finds that users are increasingly using search for news as well as migrating to publisher and news aggregation apps.
Why it matters: The increase of social media distribution on smartphones meant that more people generally had access to more news and information than ever before, but a lot of it was unvetted, one-sided or outright false.
UnitedHealth Group posted a $3.2 billion profit in the third quarter, a 28% jump from the same period a year ago, on $56.6 billion of revenue. The lofty numbers — driven by lower corporate taxes, relatively low medical claims in its health insurance arm, and growth in all of its Optum businesses — pushed the health care giant's stock higher on Tuesday.
By the numbers: UnitedHealth is now valued at roughly $260 billion, or more than twice as much as banks are saying Uber is worth. UnitedHealth's market cap is also almost seven times higher than what it was in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
There were a record 7.1 million U.S. job openings in August, the government said on Tuesday, the most since the Department of Labor began tracking the data in 2000.
Details: The number of job openings continues to be higher than people who are seeking employment, Julia Pollak, a labor economics researcher at ZipRecruiter tweeted. The government also said the number of people who quit or were laid off was little changed from the previous month.
Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) agreed to buy Denver-based email marketing company SendGrid (NYSE: SEND) for around $2 billion in stock, which works out to an implied price of $36.92 per share (19% premium to Monday's closing price for SendGrid).
Why it matters: Email continues to not be dead, despite all punditry to the contrary.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was dispatched to Saudi Arabia by President Trump following two weeks of reports tying the kingdom to the alleged assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The latest: Pompeo has now met with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Trump administration's position is that it remains unclear what happened to Khashoggi. The Saudis reportedly plan to claim he was killed in an interrogation gone wrong.
Carl Icahn, the activist investor, disclosed an 8.3% stake in a tracking stock for Dell Technologies' position in VMWare yesterday, and said he will actively oppose Dell's plan to return to the public markets via a $22 billion reverse merger with that tracking stock. Per Icahn's letter:
Why it matters: If this sounds familiar, it's because Icahn tried preventing Dell from going private back in 2013, arguing that Michael Dell and private equity sponsor Silver Lake were undervaluing the company.
The world's largest advertising companies face a growing threat from clients moving more of their media strategy and creative businesses in-house.
Why it matters: The trend is happening amid a trust fallout between agencies and companies over murky ad-buying and contract bidding practices, some leading to federal investigations.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Fox & Friends Tuesday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) "can never be a leader on the world stage," and that regardless of what President Trump does, Graham is going to move to "sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia" over the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Why it matters: The Trump administration, and Jared Kushner in particular, have worked hard to polish the reputation of Saudi Arabia and MBS. Meanwhile, Trump has said that he is not in favor of ending the billions of dollars in weapons deals the U.S. has negotiated with the kingdom as a result of Khashoggi's disappearance, but Congress nonetheless still has the power to introduce sanctions.
Last week, I wrote about the race to own the future of TV, focusing largely on efforts by technology companies to invest in mobile and streaming video, and noting legacy media networks were largely behind.
The bottom line: The consensus among most analysts is that many networks don't at this point have the scale to compete directly with some of the streaming giants, in large part because they spent years as wholesalers with no direct-to-consumer relationships.
Walmart expects earnings to take a hit from its FlipKart acquisition in the coming year, and predicts online sales will slow from its current pace in the next fiscal year, the company said on Tuesday.
The details: Walmart is upping the ante to keep up with Amazon, but its e-commerce business is projected to grow 35% in fiscal year 2020, compared to the 40% it's on pace to grow in the current year, per Reuters. The company also said it plans to open 3,100 grocery pickup locations and over 1,500 grocery delivery stations in the next few years.
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