Digital artists are get-
ting a chance to cash
in on a booming art
and collectibles market,
said Erin Griffith in The
New York Times. Digital
media has not held the
same value as physical
art “because it can be
easily copied, shared,
and stolen.” But block-
chain technology allows
for a shared ledger,
or a permanent public
record, of transactions,
and thus a way to
authenticate that a digi-
tal item is an unaltered
“original.” Now people
are paying astronomi-
cal prices for official
copies of a digital
image, video, or tweet.
An early viral animation
of a “flying cat with a
Pop-Tart body leaving a
rainbow trail,” sold for
$580,000. A DJ known
as 3LAU has sold more
than $1.1 million in
“unreleased songs
with exclusive digital
effects.” You can even
snag an authentic
piece of entrepreneur
and Dallas Mavericks
owner Mark Cuban—
an authenticated copy
of one of his tweets just
sold for $952.Digital lightning,
in a pricey bottleBUSINESS
Boeing is again dealing with the after-
math of an aerial disaster, said Andrew
Tangel in The Wall Street Journal.
This week, the Federal Aviation
Admin i stra tion ordered that 128 of
Boeing’s wide-body 777s be removed
from the skies so that their “engines
can undergo immediate inspections”
following an explosion near Denver on
Feb. 20. The engine fire immediately
brought to mind the problems with
Boeing’s 737 Max, which caused two
deadly crashes with 346 deaths. The 737 Max
was allowed to “continue flying with passengers
after the first fatal accident.” By contrast, regula-
tors in the U.S. and Japan moved quickly to stop
flights of 777s with the Pratt & Whitney engines
that failed over Colorado.This was nothing like the Max
crisis, said Brooke Sutherland in
Bloomberg.com. The jet involved
was 26 years old, and “there’s
no evidence to suggest any issues
with the 777 model outside of the
engines.” More recent models of
the 777 shouldn’t be affected. In
fact General Electric, not Pratt &
Whitney, has been making the pro-
pulsion systems for Boeing’s wide-
bodied 777 jets since 1999. “Should
the required repairs prove costly,” retiring the
remaining Pratt-powered 777s in service could
conceivably even benefit Boeing as airlines seek
substitutes. This is Boeing, though, so things are
not simple: The company’s planned replacement,
the 777X, is itself three years behind schedule.Boeing: More trouble for an aerospace giant
PPP: A loan window for the smallest businesses
Criticized for favoring “the most well-established and well-connected”
businesses, the Paycheck Protection Program this week temporarily lim-
ited access to its loans to businesses with 20 employees or fewer, said
Stacy Cowley and Jim Tankersley in The New York Times. Since its
start last spring, the program has extended nearly $700 billion in for-
givable loans to small businesses. But sole proprietorships and indepen-
dent contractors “have had a particularly hard time” getting PPP loans.
In addition to the 14-day freeze for larger businesses, the Small Business
Administration has instituted a more generous loan calculation for one-
person firms, based on gross income rather than annual profit.
Economy: Fed promises to keep buying bonds
Despite “healthy signs of a return to normal,” the Federal Reserve will
keep supporting the economy with major bond purchases, said Brian
Cheung in Finance.Yahoo.com. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note
rose this week, a sign that investors feel confident enough to flee the
“safe haven and relatively risk-free asset” usually seen as positive for the
economy. But in a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Powell
said the central bank’s job is not finished and he remains “committed to
buying at least $120 billion a month in U.S. Treasuries.”
SPACs: Investors skeptical of electric-car startup
Investors finally found a SPAC deal they didn’t love, said Edward
Ludlow and Crystal Tse in Bloomberg.com. Special-purpose acquisi-
tion companies—blank-check firms that sell shares in order to buy a
hot startup to take public—have soared in recent months. However,
shares in one high- profile SPAC, Churchill Capital Corp IV, “fell
as much as 46 percent” after it confirmed a deal to take public the
electric- vehicle startup Lucid Motors. Though Lucid is run by a former
Tesla engineer, it has “shied away from comparisons to Tesla.”
Deals: A last payout for WeWork founder?
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is nearing a $500 million settle-
ment with SoftBank, said Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown in The Wall
Street Journal. The Japanese investing giant originally “agreed to buy
$3 billion of shares from Neumann,” WeWork’s former chief execu-
tive, after the company’s IPO fell apart in 2019. SoftBank then backed
out, saying Neumann hadn’t met certain conditions. But now SoftBank
wants an end to the legal drama and is willing to spend $1.5 billion to
buy the shares of early WeWork investors and employees and “clear the
way for WeWork’s second attempt at a public listing.”36
The news at a glance
AP(^2
)Unexpected dropQThe price tag for the energy
crisis in Texas: $50.6 billion,
the cost of electricity sold
from early Monday, when
the blackouts began, to
Friday morning, according to
Bloomberg estimates. That
compares with $4.2 billion for
the prior week.
Bloomberg.com
QBitcoin “mining” uses more
electricity annually than it
takes to power Argentina,
according to a study from
Cambridge University. The
heavy computer calculations
required for verifying crypto-
currency transactions con-
sume about 121.36 terawatt-
hours (TWh) per year.
BBC.com
QTesla’s shares fell 8.5 per-
cent in the first trading day
after Elon Musk called Bitcoin
overpriced. The electric-car
company recently invested
$1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Even
with this recent decline,
Tesla’s shares are up 1,300
percent since October 2019.
CNN.com
QWalmart announced a pay
bump for 425,000 employees
to at least
$13 an
hour. About
half of
Walmart’s
U.S. work-
ers, or
730,000
employees, now make at
least $15 an hour; however,
the company maintains an
$11 minimum wage.
CNN.com
QInitial jobless claims rose
for the second straight
week, to 861,000, hitting a
four-week high. In addition,
4.49 million people filed for
ongoing benefits.
Bloomberg.com
QIn 2020, consumers filed
more than 280,000 com-
plaints about credit- reporting
issues concerning mistakes
such as incorrect personal
information or miscalcu-
lated debts. That’s more
than double the number of
credit-reporting complaints
from 2019.
The New York TimesThe bottom line