Child care in the U.S. is in crisis, which makes it much harder for the American economy to recover — as providers struggle to stay in business and parents wrestle with work.
Axios Re:Cap digs into the problems and what can be done to solve them, with Vox senior reporter Anna North.
Donald Trump fancies himself a businessman — and has given himself a central role in determining the conduct and even the existence of major companies both domestic and foreign.
Why it matters: America has historically been a great place to operate a company under the rule of law, and not be beholden to political whim. Those days seem to be over — at least for companies in the communications industry.
One paradox of the recent bull-market run is that it has taken place in the face of consistent selling by investors in ETFs and mutual funds.
The big picture: Monthly flows from actively-managed stock-market funds have been negative for years, and while flows into passively-managed funds have been positive, they have generally been smaller.
2 million suspicious activity reports,or SARs, are filed by banks every year. Those reports are sent to the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which has the job of determining whether the reports are evidence of criminal activity, and whether that activity should be investigated and punished.
The catch: FinCEN only has 270 employees, which means that FinCEN is dealing with a ratio of roughly 150 reports per employee per week. So it comes as little surprise to learn that most of the reports go unread, and the activity in them unpunished.
Why it matters: America did nothing that should have been necessary to really get the economy moving again. We didn't get the coronavirus under control, and we gave up on fiscal stimulus after a single short-lived round of it. Nevertheless, we're about to close out by far the strongest quarter of economic growth in American history.
There's a very high probability that you have a prepaid debit card in your wallet. If you do, it's probably perfectly safe.
Yes, but: Some Americans, however, work in a quasi-legal industries like sex work or cannabis, and they can find it difficult to sign up for normal bank accounts or prepaid debit cards.
We're 40 days away from the election, which means we're between 40 and 80 days away from knowing who won the election.
What happens next: The stock markets, which have spent most of 2020 divorced from the real economy, may tank — setting up a chain reaction that could impact everything from high-profile IPOs (e.g., Airbnb) to private market fundraising (denominator effect) to pending mergers (Delaware Chancery Courtnip).
A slew of high-profile journalists have recently announced they are leaving newsrooms to launch their own, independent brands, mostly via email newsletters.
Context: Many of those writers, working with new technology companies like Substack, TinyLetter, Lede, or Ghost, have made the transition amid the pandemic.
The fate of California's aggressive moves to wring carbon emissions out of transportation could depend heavily on the election and the shape of the Supreme Court.
Why it matters: California is the country's largest auto market and transportation is the country's largest source of CO2.
The market looks like it may be throwing another tantrum, investors say. But the cause is different this time around.
What's happening: This selloff is beginning to look like the 2013 taper tantrum, which roiled markets as U.S. government yields rose in response to an expected reduction of the Fed's quantitative easing (QE) program.
Members of the Fed, including chair Jerome Powell, have spent nearly a month talking about the central bank's shift to average inflation targeting in an effort to boost U.S. inflation and it has fallen on deaf ears.
Driving the news: A survey from the Cleveland Fed found that "despite extensive coverage in the news media, Powell’s speech apparently did not reach or register with the vast majority of the population."
Reduced inflation and stimulus expectations are combining with a notable uptick in coronavirus cases in the U.S. and especially in Europe where there is fear a second wave of the virus could again cause businesses to close and dent the global economic recovery.
The intrigue: That would normally provide a boost for bond prices and precious metals, but gold and silver are instead following inflation expectations lower. And government bond yields have fallen nearly as low as they can without the Fed resorting to negative interest rates, says Subadra Rajappa, head of U.S. rates strategy at Société Générale.
Since 2000, U.S. GDP has lost $16 trillion as a result of anti-Black discrimination, a new study from Citi global economist Dana Peterson and global chief economist Catherine Mann finds.
What they're saying: "The analysis in the report that follows shows that if four key racial gaps for Blacks — wages, education, housing, and investment — were closed 20 years ago, $16 trillion could have been added to the U.S. economy," Citi vice chairman Raymond J. McGuire says in the report.
Shares of little-known SPI Energy Co. jumped by as much as 4,000% on Wednesday, rising from around $1 to as high as $46.67.
What happened: SPI announced it was launching a unit to design and develop electric vehicles and charging solutions called EdisonFuture — a nod to electric vehicle companies Nikola and Tesla, which are both named after Nikola Tesla, a rival of Thomas Edison.
