Proponents of the QAnon "conspiracy theory," which the NYT can't seem to stop writing about, are going to love seeing this.

A memo that has reportedly been circulating among policymakers on both sides of the aisle for weeks was finally released to the press on Tuesday when Dealbook editor and CNBC "Squawk Box" host Andrew Ross Sorkin got the scoop: a memo penned by a group of senior-level bureaucrats, including - who else? - Henry Kissinger and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has provided a kind of "blueprint" for the Biden Administration to undo all of President Trump's trade-war tactics and other policies that didn't exactly help promote free trade.

The European Union is doing the same as they did in 2008-09, extend and pretend, dishing out cheap loans to businesses and hoping for a recovery.

What's worrying today is that excessive optimism comes as European governments invest in the recovery by increasing public spending as the central bank keeps rates low and floods capital markets with liquidity.

The problem is that banks have high exposure to small business loans, which is the backbone of the continent's economy. If these businesses fail, another round of economic pain is dead ahead.

WSJ interviews Miguel Ríos, who operates four karaoke bars in Barcelona, said the pandemic and resulting government shutdown of his businesses forced him to borrow nearly $100k and put ten of his employees on a government wage-support program. He said his bars had been shuttered for almost one year as he is on the brink of financial disaster, with piles of insurmountable debt.

COVID-19 will accelerate technological change that will bring the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence to many industries.

In particular, the restaurant industry, and how one Seattle startup is automating pizza kitchens.

The Picnic Pizza System was rolled out at 2019's CES technology conference in Las Vegas. The robotic pizza-maker fully automates the process of making a pizza. It can make hundreds of customized pizzas, each with different toppings, along with different sizes.

For many years, a handful of people have postulated that those who control industry, finance and governments are essentially the same people – a cabal of sorts that have, over generations, solidified their relationships in order to gain greater wealth and power, whilst systematically making things ever more difficult for the free market to exist.

But why should this be? Surely, corporate leaders are more ardently capitalist than anyone else?

Well, on the surface, that might appear to make sense, but once a significant position of power has been achieved, those who have achieved it recognize that, since they’ve already reached the top, the primary concern changes. From then on, the primary concern becomes the assurance that no others are able to climb so high as they have.

Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, becoming the 46th president of the United States. And as Peter Schiff put it in his podcast, he took the helm of a sinking ship.

But the stock markets sure don’t act like the ship is taking on water. All four major stock indices close at new record highs on inauguration day. Peter said this proves that the stock market rally really didn’t have much to do with Donald Trump.

If the stock market gains were really attributable to Donald Trump’s policies, and Joe Biden is already unwinding those policies and reversing as many as he can by executive order, why are all the stock markets making record highs? To me, that shows you that the stock market couldn’t care less about Biden being president, because it didn’t matter that Trump was president. This stock market rally that Donald Trump took credit for was not the result of Donald Trump’s policies.”

The Purchasing Managers' index (PMI) reflects economic trends in the manufacturing and service sectors. A PMI below 50 points indicates a downturn of economic activity. The Eurozone's PMI for December sank to 49.1 amid new lockdown measures imposed to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

A double-dip recession in Europe seems an "increasingly inevitable" prospect, a PMI survey conducted by Markit Economics revealed on Friday.

According to preliminary estimates, the Eurozone's PMI tanked to 47.5 in January, down from 49.1 registered in December.

Thousands of farmers, mainly from India's agricultural states of Punjab and Haryana, have been protesting at Delhi's Singhu, Tikri, and Ghaziabad borders for over two months against three farm laws passed by the Narendra Modi government last September.

North India is currently incurring l410 million per day in losses, "from the value chain and transport disruption because of the farmers' protests," the country’s key industry body Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) told Sputnik.

According to Deepak Sood, the Secretary-General of ASSOCHAM, the non-government trade association and advocacy group, the ongoing farmer protest has “severely affected the inter-connected economies of the region of north-Indian states like Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh".

Jeff Bezos’ firm’s offer to the nascent Biden administration to help deliver experimental vaccines across the US is a clever scheme to avoid potential legal liability – and burnish the e-tailer’s own reputation into the bargain.

The e-commerce behemoth reached out to the Biden administration on the day of the new president’s inauguration. It offered to help distribute Covid-19 vaccines to Americans, essentially offering to step in where former president Donald Trump had promised the military would deliver.

“We are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” the company’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer Dave Clark wrote in a letter to the Biden administration on Wednesday.

President Joe Biden on his first day on the job axed the Keystone XL Pipeline, drawing the ire of union workers, industry stakeholders, and GOP lawmakers whose states will be negatively impacted by the decision.

Mike Sommers, president and CEO of trade group American Petroleum Institute, said Biden’s announcement “is a slap in the face to the thousands of union workers who are already a part of this safe and sustainable project.”

“This misguided move will hamper America’s economic recovery, undermine North American energy security, and strain relations with one of America’s greatest allies,” Sommers said.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke out on Wednesday to brand James Comey as a “notorious liar” who “should be in prison” after the former FBI director claimed that the Republican Party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

Comey Goes After Republican Party

“The Republican party needs to be burned down or changed,” Comey told The Guardian. “Something is shifting, and I’m hoping it’s the fault breaking apart, a break between the Trumpists and those people who want to try and build a responsible conservative party because everybody should know that we need one.”

He went on to attack those who supported Trump.

Volkswagen has been the latest automaker to be hit hard by the semiconductor shortage that is sweeping its way through the auto industry.

The company has reportedly lost "tens of thousands" of vehicles in production in China as a result, according to Bloomberg.

VW’s China head, Stephan Wollenstein, commented Wednesday: “It was hurting us already in December and we lost some 10,000 cars since then simply because we lost 50,000 cars in production in December because of some chips.”

Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory scrutiny over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen's Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals.

"Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern," Yellen responded. "I think many are used—at least in a transactions sense—mainly for illicit financing."

Joe Biden begins his first full day as the 46th president of the United States today with as daunting a list of foreign-policy challenges as almost any of his predecessors. After four years of Donald Trump, the new administration must overcome skepticism about America’s ability to deal with the great tests facing the world, including the rise of China as a 21st-century superpower, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the onslaught of man-made climate change. To this list can be added a new issue: patching up the transatlantic alliance.

Boeing’s stock prices continues to languish in the wake of the B-737 Max crashes in 2018 and 19. In December 2020 the jinxed plane was finally allowed to fly again after a tortuous programme to re-write and improve its control systems and regulatory oversight. The stock didn’t move much. Nor should it have.

I’ve mentioned many times I have massive issues with the US duopoly plane-maker. I am not a fan. Last week it signed a $2.5 billion deferred settlement with the US Department of Justice which some think puts it on the road to recovery. The deal makes me seethe – it’s a massive victory for Boeing’s corporate legal team over corporate social responsibility, natural justice and just about every positive aspect of stakeholder capitalism and ESG investment.

The administration of US President-elect Joe Biden will use every persuasive tool to stop the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and will work to convince European partners not to move forward with it, Secretary of State Nominee Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that held a confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

He said Joe Biden’s strong conviction was that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a "bad idea" and that the administration would use "every persuasive tool" to convince partners, including Germany, to discard the project.

Twitter shares—since President Donald Trump’s permanent ban—slid even more on Monday.

As of Monday at around 11:20 a.m. ET, the San Francisco-based company’s stock was trading at $44.96—dropping about 0.50 percent. Earlier in the day, shares were trading below $44.60.

On Jan. 6, during the Joint Session of Congress, the company’s shares were trading at $53.26. At this point, Twitter is down about 17 percent so far in 2021.

Last week, CNBC analyst Jim Cramer warned that Twitter’s stock could slide even further because of Trump’s ban.

Americans who gave their direct deposit information to the Internal Revenue Service will see their $1,200 stimulus checks in their bank accounts on Wednesday.

But others, who did not give banking information when filing their tax returns, could wait months to see their stimulus dollars.

The move came the day after official new jobless claims hit 16.8 million and amid increasing signs of economic despair around the country, with food banks reporting record demand.

Democrats are already suggesting more checks will be needed to keep people afloat.

The Treasury Department will take the first step Friday in disbursing the millions of dollars in payments by alerting banks to confirm that the money will go into the correct accounts, according to Politico.

President-elect Joe Biden is supposedly planning to cancel the permit for the $9 billion Keystone XL pipeline project as one of his first acts in office, and perhaps even as soon as his first day, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Two lobbyists confirmed that Biden plans to yank the project's permit on Inauguration Day, a development first reported by CBC News. It's the latest development in a decade-long fight over the controversial pipeline and solidifies a campaign promise the Canadian government had hoped was negotiable.

"The only question has always been whether labor can stave off the death sentence," said one oil and gas lobbyist who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press. "And they never had a chance."

Last week’s storming of the Capitol was a turning point in many regards, but what we want to focus on is what it signifies to the global community.

Since the end of WW2, America has represented democracy. Its power and prestige, in terms of its ability to invade other countries in the name of freedom and democracy, hasn’t been challenged much.

There have always been detractors to the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and others, but no Western World leader or emerging nation has ever publicly and formally come out in defiance of the American strategy of policing the world.

We believe that last week’s Capitol Hill incident will greatly damage any future attempts of U.S. diplomacy to pressure countries to embrace “Americanism” since they’ll strike back, saying that America’s democracy is, in itself, broken.

Democrats have the legislative path to push through the $1.9tn American Rescue & Recovery Plan through the back door if they really wanted to; it’s called budget reconciliation. This is the mechanism that allows Democrats to vote on the plan, which will ease their path and relieve them from having to gain the support of at least ten Republicans, in order to reach the 61 total “YES” votes needed.

Biden presented the plan in a way that aims to unite the country, by hoping that Republican Senators agree to it, but $1.9tn is a huge sum!

Republicans can’t just abandon all logic and agree to this proposed stimulus plan, in the name of uniting the country. The markets, seeing through Biden’s weakness, are not happy with the delays that are projected with this plan.

This anticipated friction between the two camps is the cause of the few red days we’ve been seeing this week, especially in the NASDAQ 100 and, obviously, with precious metals.

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to cancel the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on the first day of his administration, a document reported by CBC on Sunday suggests.

The words “Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” were reportedly listed on a briefing note shared by the Biden transition team with U.S. stakeholders as part of a roundup of Biden’s planned day one executive actions. CTV News also reviewed the briefing documents, and a source familiar with Biden’s thinking told Reuters that the President-elect is planning to cancel the pipeline as one of his first acts.