It might sound nuts
that Disney is charg-
ing $75 for visitors
to wander around its
California theme park
even though the rides
are still closed, said
Mary McNamara in the
Los Angeles Times. But
“I am here to tell you
it’s not.” About a year
after the pandemic
forced the shutdown
of Disney’s California
Adventure, there are
thousands “desperate
for even the faintest
tang of the Disney
experience.” On my
recent visit to the park-
adjacent Downtown
Disney and Buena Vista
Street shopping and
dining areas, “it was a
45-minute wait” just to
enter. All to experience
the aspects of Disney
we used to “complain
about the most: long
lines, overpriced food,
and the siren call of too
much Disney merch.”
But, I’ll admit, after a
“yearlong lifetime of
home- office work,”
even the piped-in
music sounded like
“the singing of a heav-
enly host.”Welcome to Disney.
Enjoy the lines.BUSINESS
Riding the wave of Bitcoin enthu-
siasm, the Silicon Valley crypto-
currency exchange Coinbase is
prepping to go public, said Mark
DeCambre in MarketWatch.com.
Coinbase filed financial documents
with regulators last week ahead of
a planned direct listing later this
month. “A direct listing means it
won’t raise any new money and
is similar to approaches used by
Palantir, Slack, and Spotify in recent years.” The
company “bills itself as a bet on the rapidly grow-
ing crypto-economy,” which has driven the price
of Bitcoin above $50,000 and handed Coinbase
a staggering valuation of over $100 billion at a
recent private share sale. But it’s still a business
based on “an unproven asset class.”“There’s a saying that the best
way to make money in a bubble
is to sell pickaxes to the gold
miners,” said Jared Dillian
in Bloomberg.com. That’s
Coinbase. Only its business is
built around “an investment
cult.” Coinbase has frequent
service outages and “nonexistent
customer service,” as well as
“sky-high transaction costs.” It
also faces a range of unusual risks. One listed in
its prospectus: that Satoshi Nakamoto, the anony-
mous person or persons who created Bitcoin, could
incite “pandemonium” by selling off $50 billion
worth of Bitcoin. Ordinarily, this would scare off
investors, but the usual rules don’t seem to apply,
because Bitcoin has become a religion.Coinbase: An IPO for Bitcoin’s true believers
Economy: Fed worried about bond market
“A wild ride in bond markets over the past week may have raised
alarms” at the Federal Reserve, said Jeanna Smialek in The New York
Times. Fed governor Lael Brainard said this week she was watching
closely for “disorderly conditions” in the bond market as yields on
Treasury notes—“basically the rate the United States government must
pay to borrow money for a decade”—spiked abruptly. Traders have
abruptly turned away from Treasuries, causing markets to seize up in a
way “reminiscent of trading in the early days of the pandemic.”
Energy: Oil lobby dropping opposition to carbon tax
The oil industry’s top lobbying group is willing to support a tax on car-
bon emissions, said Ted Mann and Timothy Puko in The Wall Street
Journal. A draft statement revealed this week that while the American
Petroleum Institute still opposes an emissions reduction mandate, the
group was ready to endorse “ economy-wide carbon pricing as the
primary government climate policy instrument to reduce CO 2 emis-
sions.” API was “one of the fiercest opponents” of legislation to make
companies pay for emissions that was proposed a decade ago. Its rever-
sal is “the strongest signal yet that oil and gas producers are ready to
accept” climate efforts spearheaded by President Biden.
Advertising: Google promises privacy improvements
Google this week pledged to stop selling advertising that tracks specific
users across the web, said Mitchell Clark in TheVerge.com. The search
giant is in the process of “slowly phasing out third-party tracking cook-
ies,” which allow advertisers to follow your activity. Analysts have
questioned whether the third-party cookies will simply be replaced by
equally invasive new tools. Google now says that it “will not build alter-
nate identifiers,” and instead wants advertisers to use its new Privacy
Sandbox, which eliminates personally identifiable data and hides indi-
viduals inside “a large crowd of cohorts with similar interests.”
Collectibles: Nike executive in sneaker resale scandal
A Nike executive resigned this week after it was revealed that her
19-year-old son used her corporate credit card to fund a sneaker resell-
ing business, said Kim Bhasin and Nick Turner in Bloomberg.com.
Ann Hebert, a vice president and general manager, had “disclosed
relevant information about her son’s business to Nike in 2018.” But a
Bloomberg Businessweek article exposed the “uncomfortable relation-
ship between sneaker makers and the network of resellers who thrive off
their brands,” and made public details of the lucrative enterprise.32
The news at a glance
Newsco
m,
AmazonTotems of the crypto marketQThe oldest and largest
power generation and trans-
mission cooperative in Texas,
Brazos Electric, filed for bank-
ruptcy this week after racking
up an estimated $2.1 billion
in charges over seven days
of deep winter freeze last
month. Cooperative mem-
bers paid $774 million for
power for all of 2020.
Bloomberg.com
QThere were 4,814 public
companies listed on major
U.S. exchanges in the fourth
quarter, an increase of 197
from the year before. That re-
verses a steady decline in the
number of listed companies,
which had fallen from 8,500
in 1997 to 4,500 in 2017.
The Wall Street Journal
QAmazon Air, the retailer’s
cargo fleet, now makes an
average
of 140
flights per
day and is
expected to have 85 planes
in service by the end of 2022.
That’s still far fewer than
FedEx (679 planes) and UPS
(572), but Amazon Air has
already almost doubled in
size since last May.
CNBC.com
QTarget’s sales growth of
$15.5 billion last year was
larger than its total sales
growth over the past 11 years
combined. The retailer’s over-
all sales: $93.6 billion in 2020.
CNN.com
QThe 100 richest Americans
would hand over more than
$78 billion in a year under
a wealth tax proposed this
week by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D.-Mass.) and other
lawmakers. Dubbed the Ultra-
Millionaire Tax Act, the bill
would require households
with more than $50 million
to pay a 2 percent annual tax,
with an extra 1 percent surtax
on fortunes over $1 billion.
Bloomberg.com
QWarren Buffett revealed his
company, Berkshire Hatha-
way, bought back $9 billion
of its own stock in the fourth
quarter, bringing its total of
share repurchases in 2020 to
$24.7 billion.
Barron’sThe bottom line