Financial Daily Dose 5.10.2021 | Top Story: Ransomware Attack Prompts Closure of Key U.S. Pipeline

A cyberattack over the weekend forced the shutdown of one of America’s largest pipelines for refined gas and jet fuel. Operator Colonial Pipeline revealed late Friday that it had “shut down its 5,500 miles of pipeline, which it says carries 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel supplies, in an effort to contain the breach” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and HuffPost and Mashable

Some in the energy sector are growing concerned about supply shortages while the pipeline remains closed in the aftermath of the attack - NYTimes and Bloomberg

After a pretty dramatic build-up, the Jobs Report numbers disappointed on Friday, delivering just over 260k new jobs despite expectations of nearly 1 million - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Marketplace

Predictably, there’s much to sort out in those figures. Like how they likely support the Fed’s “take-it-slow” approach – NYTimes

And whether the $300/week unemployment supplement under President Biden is somehow incentivizing the jobless to stay out of the labor force—a supposition that has prompted several Republican governors “to end the benefit for unemployed people in their states” - NYTimes and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

Activist investor Edward Bramson and his Sherborne Investors crew have sold their stake in Barclays PLC, “giving up on a yearslong activist campaign to restructure the British bank with a major Wall Street presence.” Bramson had hoped to push Barclays CEO Jes Staley to focus more on its UK retail presence rather than investment banking, but Staley beat back the challenge - WSJ

While its $10 billion contract with Microsoft to provide cloud-computing services to the Pentagon is stalled due to litigation with Amazon, the DOD is considering other paths forward out of a concern that the delays are harming service members who need the technology - WSJ

ByteDance chief and “AI coding genius” Zhang Yiming, whose “magic touch with app creation” and those AI skills have made TikTok a sensation and turned ByteDance “into the world’s most valuable private company” has decided that challenging Alibaba’s e-commerce dominance is his next mission. And ByteDance has recently hired “thousands of staff” to make it happen - Bloomberg

The Journal’s doing some deep thinking about what happens when the era of easy money—where stock valuations have gone wild, home prices are skyrocketing, risky companies can borrow at will, and cryptos are all the rage—finally comes to an end. Looking at you, Federal Reserve . . . - WSJ

File under “must be nice”: Jeffy’s got another $5 billion cash-in-hand after two massive stock sales this week - MarketWatch

DoorDash and Uber Eats—pandemic mainstays—are capitalizing on their newfound mainstay status by passing along fees associated with new driver benefits to consumers in the form of a “regulatory response fee,” while some restaurants are hoping to incentive pick-ups over deliveries by charging more for the latter - WSJ

We’re getting closer to international travel again, but since we’re not quite there yet, how about a photographic visit to Stromboli—the “Lighthouse of the Mediterranean”—where the volcano that tops the island at the tip of Italy’s boot is “always active” - NYTimes

Stay safe,
MDR