GameStop shares plummet after lackluster earnings report

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced Tuesday that it is now possible to buy Tesla vehicles in the US with Bitcoin. ’You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,’ tweeted Musk. People outside the US will be able to buy a Tesla with Bitcoin ’later this year,’ Musk added. Musk added that the Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency.

Stock trading app company Robinhood has filed the paperwork with the SEC a plan to go public later this year. Robinhood did not disclose the size of its initial public offering, or where it plans to trade its stock. Robinhood was founded in 2013 by Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, who were roommates at Stanford. Robinhood had been valued most recently at about $12B in a 2020 financing round.

Discord Inc. is set to be acquired by Microsoft according to reports for a sum of over $10 billion USD. Rumors regarding the acquisition of the gaming-focused group-chatting platform rose this week after it was reported that various companies had been approached by the VoIP app in a bid for a buyer. Also, it has been reported that Discord is more likely to go public rather than selling itself.

On March 23, during the House Financial Services Committee, Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary claimed, ’With the passage of the Rescue Plan, I am confident that people will reach the other side of this pandemic with the foundations of their lives intact.’ Along with Yellen, Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, emphasized the need to ’do more’ so as to promote complete economic recovery.

The second largest movie theater chain in the US, Regal Cinemas is set to reopen some of its theaters from the 2nd of April. The same was announced on Tuesday by the parent company, Cineworld Group. Attendance for the theaters will only be limited to 25% or 50% for the 500 locations which are reopening. For nearly half a year, the company has had its 7,211 screens shut in the United States.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said Monday that he sees Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies more as a replacement to gold than the dollar. ’Crypto assets are highly volatile—see Bitcoin—and therefore not very useful as a store of value, and they’re not backed by anything,’ Powell said. He added that the Fed is researching the potential for a central bank digital currency.

Democrats are seeking to prevent members of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, from using the company’s bankruptcy to get legal releases freeing them from lawsuits over the opioid painkiller. The proposal comes after the Sacklers offered to pay $4.28B over the next decade in exchange for legal releases that would resolve lawsuits accusing Purdue of helping fuel the opioid epidemic.

The US National Labor Relations Board said it found credible a claim that Amazon threatened and retaliated against its warehouse workers in Queens, New York who protested against the company’s handling of the Covid situation, Motherboard reported. The case was settled before it went to trial. The report said an NLRB probe found that the warehouse managers may have violated US labor law four times.

Ikea’s French subsidiary has gone on trial accused of running an elaborate system to spy on staff and job applicants. The trial comes after two investigative publications uncovered the surveillance scheme in 2012. Since the revelations, the company has sacked four executives. Ikea France faces a fine of up to €3.75M. 15 people are on trial including the former CEO Vanoverbeke and his predecessor.

On Monday, The Federal Reserve reported that it had earned $88.6 billion in 2020, and it paid the federal government $86.9 billion, which stands to be the largest sum to be paid by the Fed in four years. The Fed’s earnings increased by $33.1 billion last year which reflected a fall in interest rates.

The Turkish currency plummeted against the US dollar on Monday after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the central bank governor over the weekend. The lira was down nearly 10% against the dollar from Friday’s close. Erdogan fired Naci Agbal for having hiked interest rates. He replaced Agbal with Sahap Kavcioglu, the 4th governor to lead the bank in two years. Agbal hiked rates by 200 bps.

Publisher Hasbro announced this week that the board game ’Monopoly’ will soon be receiving a socially conscious makeover. The company said the classic versions of the cards included prompts referencing beauty contests and holiday funds, and were ’long overdue for a refresh.’ All 16 of Monopoly’s ’community chest’ will be changed to focus on topics that emphasize ’community.’

A new study from the Pew Research Center concluded that the middle class shrank worldwide, while some 131 million people fell into the category of poverty as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to pre-pandemic data, 54 million individuals ceased to belong to the middle class. The largest increase in poverty levels were noticed in South Asia, particularly India, and sub-Saharan Africa.

After running several ads showing its processors are better than Apple’s M1, Intel has launched website showcasing how owning a PC with its processor is better than Apple’s M1 MacBooks. The website is a part of Intel’s ’Go PC’ campaign. The website highlights PC’s virtues, like touchscreen capabilities, multiscreen support, range of games, etc, and mocks Macs limited device support and few games.

The number of Americans seeking jobless aid rose last week to 770,000 from 725,000 the week before, Labor Department data showed. This is despite the US economy is showing signs of recovery. Experts said the high number of jobless claims indicate that layoffs are still high as the pandemic is still squeezing employers. Jobless claims never exceeded 700,000 in any one week before Covid hit the US.

Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee, Amazon warehouse worker Jennifer Bates said workers are able to take two 30-minute breaks during their 10-hour shifts. Also, the size of warehouses leaves little scope to take rest. She said, ’Just walking the long way to the bathroom and back eats up precious break time.’ She said Amazon tracks workers’ each move and they can be fired for being slow.

A new report from Bloomberg reveals that up to two-thirds of entry-level tech jobs go to foreign guest workers from low-ranked colleges. According to the report, the United States in 2018 between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupations that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering.

The Metropolitan Opera musicians accepted a deal that will provide them with paychecks for the first time since April 2020, when most of the opera’s musicians and staff were furloughed. The opera offered members of its orchestra temporary payments of up to $1,543 a week in exchange for simply to start negotiations. The chorus union agreed to the deal over a month ago, but the orchestra agreed now.

Chinese authorities have asked Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group to divest its media assets, WSJ reported. The report said Beijing is worried about the influence of the e-commerce behemoth on public opinion in the country where information is tightly controlled. Among the media companies that Alibaba has assets are social media platform Weibo and Hong Kong-based English news outlet South China Morning Post.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US government will use all its powers to address climate change. Speaking at a meeting of Christian and Jewish religious leaders, and Jubilee USA Network – a non-profit, Yellen stressed that the poor suffer the most from climate change. She also said the Covid-19 crisis had sped up global economic inequality, and poor nations would need continued support.

Rates were kept anchored near zero by the Federal Reserve, and it also maintained the current pace of asset purchases. Expectations for GDP growth and inflation were also upgraded by officials, and estimates for the unemployment rate were also cut. An increasing number of members have predicted rate hikes in coming years, but not enough to change the forecast for none through at least 2023.

This year’s tax deadline is set to be delayed from its usual time of 15th April to somewhere during the mid of May. This will provide taxpayers with more time to pay their outstanding balances. No final deadline has yet been provided for the same. Questions regarding the same were not answered by the IRS and Treasury. Returns received by the IRS have fallen drastically behind last year’s numbers.

Ford informed its global employees who haven’t returned to workplace for the Covid-19 pandemic that the company expects them to do so from this summer in a flexible work plan. The work plan for the carmaker’s roughly 86,000 global employees will be a mixture of working from home and working from office. However, most of the employees aren’t expected to return to workplace before July.