Cryptos Crash As Mixed Jobs Report Pushes Investors to Safety

Markets fell again on Friday after the November jobs report failed to hit predicted marks. Still, the news wasn’t all bad, as the numbers also showed that the country’s unemployment rate dropped and “the overall participation rate, which measures the proportion of Americans who either have jobs or are looking for one, rose to its healthiest level since the start of the pandemic” - NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch

What was all bad? Bitcoin, which slid more than 20% at one point over the weekend before “bouncing back” a bit. Other cryptos fell as well, as investors appeared ready to pull “back from riskier bets after this week’s stock-market selloff” - WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

Twitter’s new boss, Parag Agrawal, is putting an early stamp on the company in part through a reorg of top leadership that will see the company’s head of engineering, Michael Montano, and R&D lead, Dantley Davis, head toward the exits by the end of the year - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg

Your official explainer (complete with charts) of how the pandemic kicked off the current supply-chain crisis that still has the world in its grip - NYTimes

Yet another setback for Uber in the UK, as the country’s high court ruled that the company “should enter into a direct contract with passengers when providing car journeys” so that it “assume[s] more responsibility for each trip booked” on its app - Bloomberg

The internal maneuvering at SoftBank about a disputed $2 billion payday for firm COO Marcelo Claure is spilling into the public eye, as SoftBank founder Masa Son and other company execs worry about “such a gigantic payday” raising “the hackles of investors in Japan, where the conglomerate’s stock trades and where big payouts to executives are generally frowned upon” - NYTimes

More on the increasingly “brazen” and coordinated “flash mob” robbery attempts hitting retailers across the country in recent months “forcing an industry already buffeted by pandemic lockdowns and fights over mask requirements to deal with a new problem” - NYTimes and WSJ

The Journal explores the relationship between Elon Musk and China, where both sides need each other, but almost everything else is up in the air (and definitely complicated) - WSJ

And while we’re mulling that, we’ve got this look at Elon’s obsession with autonomous driving based on cameras alone—even as “many Tesla engineers questioned whether it was safe enough to rely on cameras without the benefit of other sensing devices.” That dispute, by the way, is now squarely before NHiTSA “after at least 12 accidents in which Teslas using Autopilot drove into parked fire trucks, police cars and other emergency vehicles”  - NYTimes

China’s central bank is cutting its reserve requirement ratio by .5 percentage points as of December 15, a move that instantly juices the amount of liquidity in its financial system “in a bid to support the economy and cut financing costs for businesses” - WSJ and MarketWatch

Cook & Co. aren’t talking about it yet, but buzz in the Valley is that Apple’s next big thing could be a head-mounted augmented reality (“AR”) device that “will offer access to a layer of information, objects and data spread across our view of the real world like so much digital pixie dust” - WSJ

Red pill time on a Monday morning: any interest in unraveling the algorithm that gives TikTok access to the inner workings of your very own human nature? - NYTimes

Stay safe, and get boosted,

MDR