“Productivity gurus”
are bringing their life
hacks to the masses on
social media, said Claire
Hubble in Vice.com.
“With many studying or
working from home for
the first time because
of the pandemic—and
others trying to fill their
time on furlough—
Google Trends data
show that searches
for ‘productivity’ and
‘time management’
hit a five-year high in
2020.” Many of those
searches lead to the
YouTube and Instagram
pages of “productiv-
ity influencers,” offer-
ing free life lessons
and visions of days
“mapped out in Google
calendar squares and
neatly color-coded
notebooks.” “Hustle
culture,” though, is also
eliciting some backlash,
and even some of the
gurus themselves have
some second thoughts.
Ali Abdaal, who has
1.4 million subscribers
to his tips for maximiz-
ing time and energy,
admits his regimented
schedule may have
“thwarted his creative
ability” and slowed
progress on his book.You can finish this
story in 41 secondsBUSINESS
Citigroup lost its effort to undo
a half-billion-dollar mistake, said
Chris Dolmetsch in Bloomberg
.com. U.S. District Judge Jesse
Furman said this week that
10 creditors of Revlon could
keep the staggering sum the bank
“mistakenly transferred in August
while trying to make an interest
payment.” Some hedge funds in
the creditor group had already returned their por-
tion of the money, but others argued that the trans-
fer “didn’t look like a mistake when it arrived,”
and since it settled Revlon’s debt, “it was theirs
to keep”—an argument Furman accepted. “The
downside of working from home, maybe the dog
hit the keyboard,” one fund manager joked to col-
leagues after Citi asked for its money back.Incoming Citi CEO Jane Fraser
has a massive cleanup on her
hands, said John Foley in
BreakingViews.com. Fraser,
who will begin her tenure as
the first woman to lead a major
U.S. bank on March 1, has “to
act as a sort of plumber,” fixing
Citi’s pipes “before they leak
again.” Among the big banks,
only Wells Fargo’s shares have performed worse
over the past decade. What’s especially damaging,
though, has been “the perception that the bank has
yet to get on top of its corrosive habit of careless-
ness.” The mistaken Revlon transfer was a “pain-
ful example of human error” that’s become typical
of the bank. Until Fraser tackles these issues, it will
be hard “to address bigger questions.”Citigroup: Plenty of problems for new CEO to fix
Newspapers: Hedge fund to buy Tribune
Alden Global Capital, “a hedge fund with a history of deep cost- cutting,”
came to an agreement this week to take over Tribune Publishing, owner
of the Chicago Tribune and other major dailies, said Robert Channick
in the Chicago Tribune. Alden owns about 200 publications and already
held a 31.6 percent stake in Tribune. The deal, which values Tribune at
about $630 million, still needs the agreement of Patrick Soon-Shiong,
the owner of the Los Angeles Times and a major Tribune shareholder.
As part of the agreement, The Baltimore Sun will be sold to a nonprofit.
One Tribune shareholder said that he’d hoped for a more civic-minded
buyer for the whole company, but “despite all the talk about saving the
papers and community interest, no one stepped up.”Economy: Stimulus checks lift consumer spending
Retail sales rose 5.3 percent in January, thanks to a boost from the lat-
est round of stimulus checks, said Jeff Cox in CNBC.com. The jump far
exceeded estimates and is likely to encourage proponents of President
Biden’s bigger $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package. The data found
shoppers returned to the marketplace “armed with $600 checks they
used to buy a variety of goods,” including electronics and appliances (up
14.7 percent) and home furnishings (12 percent). Even restaurants saw a
6.9 percent sales increase despite continued restrictions.Delivery: Uber Eats now as big as ride hailing
Uber’s food-delivery business is now almost as big as its ride-hailing
business, said Kate Conger in The New York Times. Uber Eats has
been “a bright spot” for the company, which reported a $6.77 billion
loss in 2020. “Ride hailing declined precipitously during the early days
of the pandemic” and has been slow to pick up. But food delivery
brought in $1.35 billion in the fourth quarter, nearly matching its
$1.47 billion revenue from rides.GameStop: DOJ probes market manipulation
The Justice Department opened an investigation last week into the
rapid run-up in stocks such as GameStop, said Dave Michaels in The
Wall Street Journal. Federal prosecutors working with the U.S. attor-
ney’s office in San Francisco “have subpoenaed information from bro-
kers such as Robinhood,” the popular brokerage app. Investigators are
also seeking information from social media companies such as Reddit,
which became a “hub for the trading frenzy,” to compare investors’
public statements to their trading records.32
The news at a glance
ReutersFraser: Fixing Citi’s many leaksQSpending by consumers
who make less than $60,000
a year jumped by more than
20 percent in the week after
the Treasury Department
began electronically sending
stimulus payments of $600
per adult and $600 per child.
A study of the effects of the
earlier March 2020 stimulus
found that a $1,200 stimulus
check raised spending by
$604 in the following two
weeks—with $94 of that go-
ing to Walmart.
The Wall Street Journal
QU.S. airlines carried 58.7 per-
cent fewer passengers in 2020
compared with 2019, accord-
ing to U.S. data released this
week. The number of people
flying internationally dropped
70.4 percent.
Axios.com
QThe
Disney+
streaming
service
passed
94.9 million
subscribers, up from roughly
74 million last quarter. Disney
now says it expects to have
230 to 260 million subscrib-
ers by 2024, quadrupling its
initial projections.
CNBC.com
QDetective Chinatown 3, the
latest installment in a long-
running buddy-cop series
with tepid reviews, raked in
an estimated $397 million
over three days in China, a
world record for the largest
opening weekend in a single
market. The previous record
holder, Avengers: Endgame,
took in $357 million in its
weekend opening in the
United States and Canada
in 2019.
The New York Times
QThe federal debt is expected
to rise to a record 107 percent
of economic output by 2031.
For 2021, the Congressional
Budget Office projects the
deficit will total $2.3 trillion.
The federal deficit hit
14.9 percent of total national
output for fiscal 2020 and is
projected to be 10.3 percent
for 2021, the highest numbers
since the end of World War II.
The Wall Street JournalThe bottom line