The booming almond
industry in California
is inspiring a new
organized crime, said
Oliver Milman in
TheGuardian.com:
beehive heists. There
were 1,048 reported
hive thefts in California
in 2017, compared
with just 101 in 2015.
Authorities know where
the stolen bees tend to
wind up—in California’s
fertile Central Valley,
where farmland filled
with “lettuce, grapes,
lemons, apricots, and
more requires pollina-
tion from far more bees
than naturally live in
the area.” Almonds are
the “main driver of the
honeybee demand,”
with 1.17 million acres
of land requiring pol-
lination “at a standard
rate of two beehives
an acre.” With demand
rising and bee popula-
tions dropping, the
price of a hive for pol-
lination has grown to
$200 and up. Reported
thefts dropped recently
after the arrest of two
men who’d been hid-
ing 2,500 hives in what
authorities called “a
chop shop for bees.”Stung by crime
BUSINESS
The stock market finally felt the full
force of the new coronavirus this
week, said Fred Imbert in CNBC
.com. After shrugging off warning
signs for weeks as Covid-19 shut
down travel and broke international
supply chains, investors slammed
the panic button after reports of
viral outbreaks in Italy, South
Korea, and Iran. That triggered
“a two-day loss of 6.3 percent” for the S&P 500,
“the largest for the benchmark since 2015,” while
“the Dow posted back-to-back losses of at least
800 points for the first time ever.” A handful of
stocks were up: Clorox, Camp bell’s Soup, and
Zoom video conferencing, for instance—signs that
investors anticipate more consumers stocking up
on necessities and working from home.“Wall Street’s medical opinions
always need to be read with cau-
tion,” said Ruchir Sharma in The
New York Times. Investors were
“unusually blasé” about Covid-
19, partly because of optimism
in the bull run, partly because
previous epidemics going back to
SARS in 2003 produced a sharp
one-quarter slowdown “followed
by a sharp recovery.” That still may happen here.
But beyond China, the economic impact seems
likely to “vary from nation to nation, depending
on how much stimulus a country can afford.”
U.S. investors trust the Federal Reserve “to keep
growth alive,” but countries “with less where-
withal and inclination to spend” are more at risk,
threatening the global economy.Markets: A global chill from Covid-19
Disney: Bob Iger leaves top job
Disney’s CEO stunned the entertainment business this week with a
sudden exit, said Ryan Faughnder in the Los Angeles Times. Bob Iger,
“one of the entertainment industry’s great corporate success stories,”
announced he was handing the reins of Disney’s sprawling empire to
Bob Chapek, head of the company’s parks and consumer products
business. Iger said he wanted to create “the smoothest possible transi-
tion,” as successorship issues have plagued Disney in the past. Iger will
become executive chairman, a role that he said would “free him up to
focus on creative aspects of the business.”
Te c h : U.S. backs Oracle after Trump fundraiser
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to side with Oracle
in a dispute with Google, said Margaret Harding McGill in Axios.com,
on the same day last week that Oracle founder Larry Ellison hosted a
fundraiser for President Trump. The news of the fundraiser, for which
tickets “ran as much as $250,000,” prompted several hundred “typi-
cally reserved Oracle employees to publicly call out Ellison.” The case,
over whether Google had to pay Oracle billions of dollars in software
license fees, has wound its way through the courts for a decade. Other
major software companies, including Microsoft, have sided with Google;
the Obama administration had backed Oracle in the dispute.
Taxes: Intuit to buy upstart Credit Karma
The tax-prep giant Intuit agreed to buy Credit Karma this week for
$7.1 bil lion, said Cara Lom bardo and Dana Cim il luca in The Wall Street
Jour nal, strengthening its “foothold in the burgeoning realm of online
personal finance.” Thirteen-year-old Credit Kar ma offers users “free
access to their credit scores and borrowing history,” funded by advertis-
ing from financial services companies. Adding Credit Kar ma’s 100 mil-
lion customers expands Intuit’s “trove of financial data” and gives Intuit
insurance against competition from Credit Kar ma’s free tax-prep service.
Employment: Tougher rule for franchise workers
“The National Labor Relations Board announced a new regulation
this week making it harder to challenge companies” over labor-law
violations by their franchisees, said Noam Scheiber in The New York
Times. The new rule says a parent company shares liabilities for
infractions committed by contractors or franchisees only “if it has
substantial, direct, and immediate control over the other companies’
employees”—for instance, through pay and scheduling. That reverts to
a doctrine established in 2015, which was easier on parent companies.32
The news at a glance
Newscom (2)A health crisis hits Wall Street.QThe average weekly wage
for a tech worker in Seattle
in 2019 was $5,367, or almost
five times the national aver-
age. That’s 56 percent more
than the average for finance
workers in New York City,
$3,437 a week.
Bloomberg.com
QSome $763 billion was
invested in startups in the
past decade, but there are
signs of a pullback. Though
2,215 startups raised money
in the U.S. in the last quarter
of 2019, that’s the lowest
number since 2016.
The New York Times
QThe six stars
of Friends
will receive at
least $2.5 mil-
lion apiece to
appear on a
one-episode
reunion show
on HBO Max,
which paid
$425 million
for the streaming rights to the
hit sitcom for five years.
Variety.com
QSun Communities, which
owns 422 trailer parks with
141,000 spots in the U.S. and
Canada, has seen its stock
price rise 4,141 percent since
March 2009—eight times the
return of the S&P 500. The
average price of a single-
wide trailer home is $53,000,
and few residents can afford
to move one; Sun’s parks are
96.4 percent occupied.
The Wall Street Journal
QMore than 2.8 million
Amer i cans over 60 are con-
tending with student debt,
four times as many as in- Among those older bor-
rowers, 73 percent are paying
off student loans they either
took out or co-signed to help
children and grandchildren
through college. The average
debt: $23,500.
The New York Times
QThe private equity firm
Blackstone is now the world’s
biggest landlord, with a real
estate portfolio valued at
$325 billion. Its latest invest-
ment is a $6 billion deal for
student dorms in the U.K.
Fortune
The bottom line