Financial Daily Dose 2.25.2021 | Top Story: McKinsey Ousts Managing Partner on Heels of Opioid Settlement

In the wake of McKinsey’s $600 million settlement with states over sales advice it had given drugmakers on opioids, partners at the consulting powerhouse have voted out the firm’s top executive, Kevin Sneader. Sneader had been on the job since 2018, and his tenure has been a rocky one for the company from the start - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg

WeWork’s former CEO Adam Neumann appears “set to reap an extra $50 million windfall and other benefits as part of an agreement that would settle a bitter dispute he and other early investors in the shared-office space provider have waged with SoftBank.” In exchange for the extra cash, Neumann will leave WeWork’s board for at least a year - WSJ and Bloomberg

Meme stocks are back. For now - Bloomberg and WSJ and Mashable

More musings from Fed Chair Powell courtesy of his second day on the Hill, this time with the House Financial Services Committee. Among the notables was Powell’s take that “improved child care support policies from the government might help pull more women into the labor market”—a position he supported with reference to “our peers, our competitors, advanced economy democracies” who are doing much better at supporting child care  - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg

Not on the agenda for Powell but awfully relevant in Fed news yesterday was the revelation from the central bank that “an unspecified error disrupted all of its financial-services systems in an extraordinary event that took down key payment systems used by banks, businesses and government agencies for several hours.” Treasury department officials suggested early evidence did not suggest the outage was the result of a cyberattack - WSJ and Bloomberg

Damning (and timely) analysis from the WSJ shows that Texas’ deregulated electricity market, which “left millions in the dark last week,” has led to residential customers paying “$28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities” - WSJ

This week’s news that the USPS chose Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense to make the next-generation electric postal truck was bad news for fans of vehicle aesthetics and a disaster for electric delivery van-maker Workhorse Group, which had been competing with Oshkosh for the $482 million contract - NYTimes and MarketWatch

After teasing its revamped streaming service during the Super Bowl, CBSViacom offered more details on Wednesday about its plans for the newly dubbed Paramount+, including a “Frasier” reboot - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and TechCrunch

Which means it’s the right time to lament the ubiquity of the pluses - NYTimes

Fry’s Electronics, the West-coast “big-box retailer that nurtured a generation of do-it-yourself tech fans and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,” is going the way of Circuit City and Radio Shack - NYTimes

Homemade spice blends? I’ll consider that the next step up in lockdown cooking. (But go light on the sumac in the za’atar. Trust me) - NYTimes

Stay safe,
MDR