Financial Daily Dose 2.26.2021 | Top Story: Rising Long-Term Bond Yields Blamed for Jumpy Markets

Surging bond yields raised fears that government, consumer, and business spending could become more expensive, leading to a “tumultuous day in financial markets” that prompted some to blame the Fed for not expressing sufficient concern about bond rates. [Or, perhaps, an overheated market needed to release some steam and found a good excuse. Your call.]  - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

A Thursday ruling by the Senate parliamentarian appears to nix consideration of a proposed federal minimum wage hike based on her determination that the provision “violated the strict budgetary rules that limit what can be included” in the budget reconciliation process - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

In an ambitious move for a company largely resistant to change, Twitter announced on Thursday it plans “to expand with new options to pay for exclusive content from certain users, and to launch communities for specific interests.” The changes are part of an effort to “attract more users . . . and impress skeptical investors while not weighing down its service with bulky features that come across as afterthoughts” - NYTimes

AT&T will offload part of its TV business to PE-giant TPG in an effort to “shed assets to deal with a burdensome debt load and focus on its mobile telephone and streaming business.” The agreement values AT&T’s TV business (comprised of DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-Verse) at just over $16 billion—a serious haircut on the nearly $50 billion AT&T paid for DirecTV back in 2015 - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and TechCrunch

TIAA, which manages “$1.3 trillion in assets through its retirement accounts and investment funds,” has chosen JPMorgan exec Thasunda Brown Duckett as its next president and chief execs. Duckett currently serves as CEO of Chase Consumer Banking and is regarded as “one of Wall Street’s most-prominent Black executives” - WSJ

TikTok parent ByteDance will pay $92 million to users to “end 21 proposed class actions alleging TikTok doesn’t inform users—many of whom are children and teenagers—that its facial recognition technology collects and stores their biometric identifiers” without the BIPA-mandated written permission. The settlement is the latest in a series of big-ticket privacy results under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act in recent years – Law360 and WSJ

Now-public Airbnb posted a dismal $3.9 billion loss to go with declining revenue in its “first earnings report as a publicly traded company” - NYTimes and WSJ

In a sign that the jobs market may be improving, initial seasonally adjusted unemployment claims fell by 111,000 compared to the week before to 730,000—the lowest level since last November - WSJ and Marketplace

An internal review conducted by Kirkland & Ellis at the direction of EV-maker Nikola Corp. found that “the startup and its founder made several inaccurate statements, marking a break with the company’s previous denials of misleading communications with the public” - Bloomberg

Beyond Meat has announced deals with McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC in what’s universally being seen as “a victory in the company’s effort to take meat alternatives into the American dining mainstream” - WSJ

It’s definitely not the world map you’re used to, that’s for sure, but proponents of the Princeton GVG version (that would be its inventors, J. Richard Gott, Robert Vanderbei, and David Goldberg) suggest that the two-sided, disc-shaped effort that virtually eliminates the distortion problems plaguing nearly all 1 dimensional maps - NYTimes

Stay safe, and have a great weekend,
MDR