SoftBank Hit With $20+ Billion Quarterly Loss as Tech Investments Falter

A largely brutal 2022 for tech stocks has led to a massive $23.4 billion quarterly loss for Masa Son’s SoftBank conglomerate, its largest ever, “driven by poor performance of its flagship tech investments and a weak yen” - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch and TechCrunch

Newsletter-focused news upstart Axios has agreed to sell itself to Cox Enterprises in a deal worth more than half a billion dollars. Under the terms of the agreement, Axios’ founders “have financial incentives to stay at the company,” and each will “continue to make day-to-day newsroom and business decisions.” Cox CEO and chair Alex Taylor will “join the Axios board” - NYTimes and WSJ

About that jobs slowdown . . . . Friday delivered a surprisingly robust jobs report, with U.S. employers adding 528,000 workers to their rolls last month, a hiring spree that supports the White House’s pushback on the US-in-recession arguments but also complicates the Fed’s job in trying to tamp down inflation - NYTimes and WSJ

As for stocks, Monday was a mixed bag, as Wednesday’s inflation report looms large - WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

We’ll have to wait to see if the numbers bear it out, but at least for the moment, consumer sentiment suggests that there’s “a growing belief that the rapid surges in food and housing . . . would ebb in the future” - CNBC

An investment advisory firm—Loomis Sayles Trust Co—is heading up a proposed class action against Citigroup over the $70 million loss caused when the bank “allegedly botched large trade orders involving shares of Shopify Inc. and Colgate-Palmolive Co.” – Law360

Facing intense pressure over its role in “exposing young users to potentially harmful content,” Snapchat parent Snap announced this week that it will introduce “new tools” that “would let parents see whom their teenagers were friends with on the app and whom they had communicated with in the pervious seven days.” Importantly, parents can only access these tools by becoming Snapchat account-holders themselves, and they still “will not be able to see their children’s conversations on the app” - NYTimes and TechCrunch

Carlyle Group CEO Kewsong Lee is stepping down immediate and will leave the PE firm altogether at the end of the year amidst challenges in expansion plans and lagging shares. The departure “marks a rare instance in which a handpicked successor to a private-equity firm’s founds has been shown the door” - WSJ and Bloomberg

The US Treasury Department has barred Americans from “using the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, saying the service has helped criminals launder more than $7 billion of virtual currencies.” Treasury officials determined that the platform was a “threat to U.S. national security” and that it had “repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors” - NYTimes and Law360

Amazon snapped up Roomba parent company iRobot late last week for $1.7 billion. The acquisition adds to the Amazon’s stable of smart home devices  - Marketplace and NYTimes

Gen Z’s ironic take on the LLBean Tote? We’ll be enjoying all of this trend’s 15 minutes, thank you - NYTimes

Stay safe,
MDR

The Robins Kaplan Financial Daily Dose features top stories and latest news headlines in financial markets, banking, securities and technology topics.