fortune--2020-11-05--2020 elections mark another ‘Year of the Woman’—this time for Republicans

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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Colorado voters approve paid family leave, Angela Merkel urges action against COVID, and GOP women close their gender gap. Have a great Thursday!
– Another ‘Year of the Woman.’ The 2018 midterm election was dubbed the ‘Year of the Woman,’ especially in Congress, with voters electing 102 women to the House and 14 to the Senate. But that title came with an important caveat: it really only applied to Democrats. Of the women elected to Congress, 89 of the representatives were Democrats, as were 11 of the senators.
In 2020, the reverse is true. As results continue to trickle in, it’s clear that this year was another big one for women—but mainly for Republicans.
As of last night, 23 female Republicans had won House seats, setting GOP women up to surpass their previous record of 25. In the Senate, Republicans Joni Ernst (Iowa) and Susan Collins (Maine) held off serious challenges to their seats, and Kelly Loeffler (Ga.) beat out another Republican, Doug Collins, to advance to a January runoff for the seat she was appointed to earlier this year. Cynthia Lummis, meanwhile, is a newcomer; she’ll be the first Republican woman to represent Wyoming in the Senate.
So far, the number of female Republicans who will serve in the next Congress—31—surpasses the previous high of 30, set in 2006. Female Democrats’ tally is at 96, which represents a loss of nine seats.
The Republican wins cut into Democrats’ advantage in electing women to federal office and they make good on the GOP’s 2018 vow to chip away at its own enormous gender gap in Congress. Republicans made progress by seeking to recruit and nominate candidates who are more diverse and have less traditional backgrounds, the same strategy Democrats employed for the 2018 midterms.
For instance, former journalist Maria Elvira Salazar unseated Democrat Donna Shalala in Florida’s 27th District. Yvette Herrell, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, beat incumbent Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico’s 2nd District; she’ll be the first Native American Republican woman in Congress.
Americans will—of course!—filter the 2020 results through a partisan lens, but at the very least, the gains among Republican women mirror a trend we’re seeing across the U.S., from Congress to the C-Suite; that the definition of who’s ready to assume positions of power—a standard that long disadvantaged women—is finally shifting.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Ballot questions, answered. Colorado voters approved a plan to create a paid family leave program for the state. Starting in 2024, workers could receive up to $1,100 a week for paid family or medical leave. The state's voters also rejected a 22-week abortion ban. (Louisiana voters, however, approved a state constitutional amendment specifying that "abortion is not a protected right.")
- News from New Mexico. New Mexico's new House delegation is historic: all three representatives from the state will be women of color. Rep. Deb Haaland won reelection; Republican Yvette Herrell and Democrat Teresa Leger won their races to join Haaland in Congress. That delegation also contributes to a record six Native Americans who will serve in Congress—three men and three women.
- Crypto in Congress. Republican Cynthia Lummis's Senate victory in Wyoming is notable for an unusual reason: Lummis will be the first member of the Senate who owns cryptocurrency. That personal ownership could influence her lawmaking on the issue. Fortune
- Working women. Florida's vote to raise the minimum wage to $15 will have meaningful consequences for the two-thirds of minimum-wage workers who are women. The state is now set to reach a $15 wage by 2026. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Karin Ajmani, former Progyny president and chief strategy officer, joins Cleo's board of directors.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Open by Christmas? As European countries begin new lockdowns, Chancellor Angela Merkel is telling Germany that the country could defeat this wave of the coronavirus within the month of November. "It is up to everyone to make this November a success, a turning point," she says. "If we succeed, then we can have a bearable December with more freedom." Politico
- Pregnancy risk. Pregnancy is now officially a condition that puts someone who contracts the coronavirus at risk of becoming severely ill. U.S. officials added pregnancy to a list of conditions earlier this week based on a new study that compared symptomatic pregnant women with symptomatic non-pregnant women. New York Times
- Hunters and gatherers. Is it true that men were always the hunters and women always the gatherers? A new discovery of a 9,000-year-old female skeleton in Peru, buried with a "big-game hunting kit," challenges that belief. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
A QAnon supporter has been elected to Congress for the first time BuzzFeed
Tara McGowan will get inside your head Marie Claire
A conductor becomes a virtual-concert jet-setter New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"We broke a 120-year record on turnout—the kind of turnout people only dreamed of."
-Political scientist Julia Azari of Marquette University on the record number of people who voted in this year's U.S. election.


fortune--2020-11-05--AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID vaccine on track for year end, CEO Pascal Soriot says

Trump ’ s odds of winning have surged in the past 48 hours , according to this data scientist ’ @ @

AstraZeneca Plc’s coronavirus shot could be ready for large-scale vaccinations as early as this year, Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot said, dismissing reports of delays and production snags.
The U.K. drugmaker is poised to unveil vaccine test results by year-end even after trials were slightly delayed over the summer as infection rates slowed in the northern hemisphere. A recent resurgence has allowed scientists to gather the clinical data they need, according to Soriot. Astra and the University of Oxford are keeping the vaccine in a frozen bulk state to preserve its shelf life while they await final test results.
“At the end of the day, we don’t yet know if the vaccine works,” Soriot said in a Bloomberg Television interview, adding that many questions remain, such as whether it will show results for everyone and for how long. “We would hope that large-scale vaccinations would be possible starting in January next year—possibly even December.”
Soriot’s remarks come a day after Kate Bingham, chair of the U.K. Vaccine Taskforce, said only 4 million doses of the shot would be available by the end of the year, far fewer than the 30 million that were due to be ready by September. AstraZeneca said it’s confident it can begin supplying hundreds of millions of doses on a “rolling basis” once a shot is cleared.
The U.K. drugmaker has been at the forefront of efforts to fight the pandemic, and its experimental shot could be one of the first to be approved globally if successful. Astra and drugmakers Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. are all seeking to deliver crucial test results on a vaccine in the coming weeks, with emergency clearance possible before the end of the year.
Soriot said the world needs several vaccines and that Astra studies conducted in the U.K. and Brazil kept progressing well even as the U.S. one suffered a halt. It’s possible the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will want to wait for the results of the local trial before reviewing the product, he said.
The FDA “may want to wait for the results of the U.S. study or they may review our international program and give us an emergency approval on that basis,” Soriot said. “It will be up to regulators in individual countries to decide.”
Vaccine Timeline
Astra has said it will sell the vaccine at cost during the pandemic at a price tag of between $4 to $5, depending on local manufacturing charges. The company said recently it would add as much as 20% to cover manufacturing costs to avoid any material impact on its finances. Astra is incurring a bill in excess of $1 billion globally for expenses including clinical development, Soriot said.
The Astra-Oxford candidate has produced a robust immune response in older adults and the elderly, those at highest risk of severe illness. Astra and Oxford have enrolled about 23,000 volunteers in vaccine trials globally, with plans to reach 50,000 once the U.S. arm has completed recruitment.
A U.K. government spokesperson said Thursday that “a vaccine will only be deployed once proven to be safe and effective” and that the National Health Service was ready to start the vaccination program.
Pandemic Disruption
Pfizer, which is developing its vaccine with Germany’s BioNTech SE, has said it may release initial late-stage trial data this month. The company is also waiting to hit a safety milestone, two months of data on half of participants, which it expects by the third week of November. Assuming both sets of results are positive, it would apply for emergency use authorization in the U.S. shortly thereafter.
Astra on Thursday reported third-quarter profit that fell short of analysts’ estimates as the pandemic inflated costs and discouraged some doctors’ visits and diagnoses. Other drugmakers such as Switzerland’s Novartis AG and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk A/S also cited similar disruptions.
“Believe it or not, people are having heart attacks and they don’t go to the hospital because they are scared,” Soriot said on a conference call, also citing delays in cancer diagnoses and treatment. Injectable products are more affected by such slowdowns, he said.
Astra shares were little changed in London trading.


fortune--2020-11-05--Are Chinese spies trying to hack this anticensorship startup? Its execs believe so

Sam Williams was going about his business on Oct. 28, when he received a warning he has long anticipated. “We believe we detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password,” an email from Google said about his work Gmail account.
Williams is CEO and cofounder of Arweave, a Berlin-based startup that has a censorship-resistant data storage network. “We’re trying to create a record of history that can never be altered or deleted, and will never be forgotten,” Williams told Fortune of his three-year-old tech project.
Arweave’s network today hosts nearly 350 applications, including blogging sites, social media services, and software code repositories. The venture, while tiny, has gained traction as an antidote to state censorship of online information sources, especially as some governments clamped down amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Arweave is, in other words, exactly the kind of venture that may find itself the surveillance crosshairs of a foreign intelligence agency. “I can’t say that it’s fantastically surprising that we eventually reached the point where authoritarian governments started to target the system,” Williams said.
Arweave’s chief technology officer, Jesper Noehr, received a similar red alert from Google on the same day as Williams. “Attackers may be attempting to compromise” your account, the notification read.
After receiving the alerts, Williams began piecing together a narrative, like a detective, about a recent series of unusual events spanning several months and continents. He said he believes the clues suggest who might be behind the hacking attempts.
While it may be impossible to learn the identity of the attackers with certainty—or whether they were, indeed, directed by an overseas regime, though Google reckons that to be the case—anecdotal evidence has Williams persuaded about the whodunnit.
“We can’t be sure that it’s China, but I’m telling you it looks to me an awful lot like it is,” Williams said.
Setting the Great Firewall aflame
As a mysterious virus tore through China starting at the end of last year, an outpouring of updates, hearsay, government criticism, calls to action, and other information—ranging from false to factual—about the disease known now as COVID-19 erupted across Chinese social media.
Government censors took notice. Almost immediately, services such as YY, a livestreaming site, and WeChat, Tencent’s so-called super-app, started blocking posts containing keywords and links to certain news sources, as Canadian researchers found.
Enter Arweave. Amid the tumult, some people used bots to crawl and copy posts likely to be banned on Chinese social networks, such as Sina’s Weibo, a Twitter-like service. Projects such as “Weibo uncensored” uploaded archives to the Arweave network.
Arweave debuted its “permaweb”—an indelible, tamper-proof version of the World Wide Web—two years ago. The technology is based on distributed computing and blockchains, the computer-engineering innovation behind digital currencies like Bitcoin. The network “spreads the data across tens of thousands of places in the world and then makes it available from those locations, like the web, except censorship-resistant and permanent,” Williams said.
The end result? Censors and authoritarian states “can’t memory-hole”—here, Williams borrows a term from the dystopian novel 1984 to mean “redact history”—”what people say.”
Arweave’s fanbase remains niche. Yet, the network is growing; more than a million pieces of data were added to it last month in total, up 23x from the same period last year. The development of even a small, passionate following could pose trouble to powers that be.
During quarantine, censorship-evaders weren’t the only ones taking notice of Arweave’s tech; venture capitalists paid attention too. Firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and the investment arm of Coinbase, the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, bought up $8.3 million worth of Arweave’s cryptocurrency tokens in March in hopes of their market value rising in time to come, as TechCrunch reported.
Arweave’s digital tokens underpin its business. Cryptocurrency rewards go to volunteers who run the project’s software on their computers, thereby bolstering the network’s capacity for data storage. Like many Bitcoin derivatives, the value of the speculative tokens is volatile. Their total market value today exceeds $91 million. (By way of comparison, the total value of all Bitcoin surpasses $250 billion; the entirety of Ethereum, another digital coin, is worth more than $40 billion.)
Everything was going smoothly until October. Suddenly, the team started to notice connectivity issues into and out of China that slowed data download speeds.
Then the situation got more serious. Williams said he learned that on Oct. 9, Chinese authorities quietly detained a prominent Arweave “miner,” a supporter of the network who lends computing resources in exchange for cryptocurrency. (Williams declined to reveal the person’s name, citing “physical security risks.”)
The Chinese agents apparently interrogated the miner and seized machines. Eventually, they returned the equipment on the condition that the miner abandon Arweave, Williams said.
That’s when the strange messages started to arrive.
Something smells phishy
On Oct. 20, two weeks after the detainment, Williams received an email purporting to be from the chief operating officer of a cryptocurrency exchange in China.
The message cited a “listing service agreement,” the kind of deal a cryptocurrency company may strike to get its token listed on a particular marketplace. “Please check out reviewed agreement,” the prospective business partner urged. “Our legal team made one change on redline and added our company name.”
Below that prompt, the email thread contained a message appearing to originate from Jesper Noehr, Arweave’s chief technology officer. “Could you update our agreement and send to” Williams?, the note asked alongside a document attached via Google Drive.
Something about the note seemed “slightly off,” Williams told Fortune. “The phrasing just wasn’t completely professional. It didn’t necessarily read like perfect English. The sentence structure didn’t feel quite right.”
So, Williams took no action.
But a couple hours later, Williams received another odd request. An email appearing to come from Sebastian Campos Groth, Arweave’s chief operating officer, asked “How does this work for us?” next to an accompanying Google Drive document.
The original message purported to be from one of Arweave’s most prominent investors. It claimed to contain a “partnership mutual NDA form.”
Williams, already feeling suspicious about the earlier note, again didn’t bite. But he wondered about the elaborate campaign.
The lures were highly tailored and targeted, designed to impersonate executives within and outside Arweave. The hackers used SendGrid, an email marketing tool owned by Twilio, to make the emails appear as though they were originating from people’s real email accounts.
A spokesperson for SendGrid told Fortune the company is “aware that bad actors” misuse its platform for phishing, and that it is “invest[ing] heavily in technology and people focused on combating online abuse.” After Fortune shared details of the phishing emails with SendGrid, the team said it “identified the traffic as malicious and immediately shut down the account” of the sender.
“We had theories at that time that this might be a more significant state actor potentially,” Williams said. “But we didn’t have anything that really tipped us over the edge at that point.”
Eight days later, Williams and Noehr received the government-backed hacking notifications from Google.
Falling down the memory hole
It’s unclear whether the alerts received by Arweave’s executives are related to the phishing attacks they detected on Oct. 20, or whether they’re the result of some other, unrelated scheme.
But the timing is highly suggestive. A spokesperson for Google declined to comment on individual cases related to its government-backed hacking alerts. However, guidance from Gmail’s official “help” forum notes that if a person receives such a warning, then Google believes attackers made attempts at account or computer compromise “within approximately the last month.”
Google sends more than 10,000 such alerts every quarter, the company said in another blog post.
An initial analysis of the phishing emails revealed a connection to a computer server in Pakistan, Williams said, while acknowledging, “that doesn’t really tell us anything.” Hackers typically launch attacks from compromised machines across various jurisdictions to obscure their tracks.
In Williams’s mind, all of the recent activity involving China seems more than just a coincidence. From the development of the Weibo uncensored project to the detainment of a miner, signs appear to point to Beijing as the culprit.
The attribution is, of course, based on purely circumstantial evidence. There’s no proof.
Oren Falkowitz, cofounder of Area 1 Security, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in anti-phishing tech, noted that being targeted by nation-state attackers can generate paranoia. Victims and investigators alike should never jump to conclusions, he said.
“Individual cyberattacks are never ‘snowflakes,’ they’re always part of larger campaigns,” said Falkowitz, a former U.S. National Security Agency hacker. “You’re one of 10,000 things that they care about, you just ended up on the list.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., categorically denied any involvement in targeting Arweave. “The Chinese government’s position on cybersecurity is consistent and clear,” a spokesperson at the embassy told Fortune in an email. “We firmly oppose and combat cyber attacks of any kind. China is a staunch defender of cybersecurity.”
China isn’t the only country with a plausible reason to subvert Arweave’s network. The startup’s indelible databases contain records of articles that could upset the Kremlin. Iranian and North Korean hackers are, generally, known cryptocurrency looters who may be seeking to rob Arweave’s coffers. And there is no shortage of cryptocurrency scammers angling for financial gain by similar means.
Whoever is to blame, Williams isn’t surprised about becoming a target. “Frankly, we’ve always been expecting something like this to happen along the way,” he said.
Now Williams wishes to get the word out so people affiliated with the project can be on the lookout for future attacks and protect themselves. “The network is a threat to anyone that wants to censor history—and that’s basically it,” he said.


fortune--2020-11-05--Global investors are relishing the prospect of a Biden White House and Republican Senate

U.S. futures and world shares surged on Thursday as investors awaited the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and embraced the upside of more gridlock in Washington.
European markets opened higher after a day of gains in Asia, while the fate of the U.S. presidency remained undecided as neither President Donald Trump or Democratic challenger Joe Biden had secured the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
Analysts say a Congress likely once again split between a Democratic House and a Republican Senate is expected to keep U.S. tax and other policies relatively stable amid legislative stalemates. And share prices tend to rise regardless of who is in the White House.
Taking reassurance where they can, “markets have been happy to presume that this Democratic White . . . House and Republican Senate is the ‘Goldilocks’ outcome. In other words, a ’Goldilocks Gridlock,‴ Mizuho Bank said in a commentary.
An expectation that Biden has a chance of winning also has raised hopes that U.S. foreign policies might be “more clear,” said Jackson Wong, asset management director of Amber Hill Capital. He added, “investors are cheering for that. That’s why the markets are performing well.”
But while most markets have rallied since Tuesday’s election rising coronavirus counts, job losses and recessions remain a dark backdrop for many countries.
Britain’s FTSE 100 edged up 0.1% to 5,893.80 as England began a four-week lockdown Thursday that will keep closed all shops selling items deemed to be non-essential, such as books and clothes. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also have announced wide-ranging restrictions on economic activity.
The Bank of England increased its monetary stimulus by a bigger than anticipated 150 billion pounds ($195 billion) to help the economy weather the new lockdown measures. But as expected it kept its benchmark interest rate at an ultra-low 0.1%.
In Paris, the CAC 40 gained 1% to 4,969.79, while Germany’s DAX also gained 1% to 12,449.54.
The future for the S&P 500 gained 1.4% and the future for the Dow industrials was up 1%.
Thursday’s rallies followed a strong performance overnight on Wall Street, where the S&P 500 rose 2.2% for its best day in five months. The Nasdaq notched its biggest gain in more than six months as traders doubled down on technology stocks that are seemingly immune to pandemic shocks that bring more and more activity online.
In Asia on Thursday, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng surged 3.3% to 25,695.92 while Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index climbed 1.7% to 24,105.28. South Korea’s Kospi jumped 2.4% to 2,413.79. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 gained 1.3% to 6,139.60. The Shanghai Composite index rose 1.3% to 3,320.13.
Shares also rose in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Indonesia’s stock benchmark rose 3% after the government reported the country fell into recession for the first time in two decades in the past quarter. The economy, Southeast Asia’s largest, shrank at at 3.49% annual rate in July-September, though that was an improvement over the 5.3% contraction in the previous quarter.
Looking ahead, continued Republican control of the U.S. Senate may further stymie an agreement on a fresh infusion of aid for the economy following the expiration of an earlier package of stimulus measures in July. That could add to pressures on the Federal Reserve to do even more on its own to support the economy, which could send the dollar lower against the euro and other currencies.
The Fed is meeting this week and had been due to announce its latest decision on interest rate policy on Thursday. But it may hold off on determining whether and how to expand its economic support until after final election results are confirmed.


fortune--2020-11-05--How A.I. and advanced tech are being used to stop the spread of COVID-19

Kimberly Powell, vice president and general manager of health care at Nvidia, believes her company, in effect, is building time machines.
Using artificial intelligence and supercomputing to drastically shorten the time doctors and researchers spend diagnosing diseases and developing antiviral drug treatments, Nvidia, which got its start as a chipmaker for video games, has played a key role in accelerating efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.
“We’ve really essentially built a time machine for these researchers,” Powell says. “Instead of waiting three months to screen 12 billion potential drug candidates, we did it in 12 hours on the world’s largest supercomputer.”
On this episode of Fortune Brainstorm, a podcast about how technology is changing our lives, Powell speaks with Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe about how Nvidia has been leveraging its technology to help key stakeholders diagnose and treat existing cases of the disease as well as assist in the race to a vaccine.
In particular, the company is working to make its A.I. and computing platforms “domain specific.” Moreover, transitioning away from developing A.I. technology that is broadly applicable but must be adapted by customers for industry-specific use, Nvidia is focused on making its products better suited to assist specific fields, such as radiology, digital pathology, genomic sequencing, and drug discovery, among others.
For example, Nvidia––in partnership with the National Institutes of Health––has developed an A.I.-based alternative to traditional versions of COVID-19 testing.
“Our testing strategy here in the United States hasn’t been extremely straightforward,” Powell says. “But if you go back to technology like medical imaging, it’s a very common practice, it’s readily available, and the results are potentially instantaneous. And so we thought, Could we use the power of medical imaging to really give a second option for testing? And we did just that…We created an A.I. model with the NIH that does lung segmentation and a CT scan, and then it does a classification of whether or not you have COVID.”
Zig Serafin, president of the software company Qualtrics, also joins the podcast to discuss how his company is assisting governments with the logistical nightmares of both distributing a potential coronavirus vaccine and convincing a critical mass of people to take it.
In addition to helping hospitals and governments with tasks like tracking vaccine candidates, scheduling patient appointments, and contact tracing, Qualtrics is working to help gauge sentiment around the vaccine so it can provide officials with information about which people are averse to receiving it, why that is the case, and what can be done to encourage them to get it.
“Really, it comes down to actually understanding people––who they are; what their needs might be given what demographic they might be from; what age they might be; what their living conditions might be,” Serafin says. “And, then, how do you accommodate people in the best possible way? So, it isn’t just about the process. Sentiment is a big part of the way in which you end up taking action, the way you end up building trust and confidence.”
Nvidia and Qualtrics are both using tech to provide support throughout the pandemic in a variety of other ways. To hear more about them, as well as why Powell thinks the pandemic has ultimately caused the health care and pharmaceutical industry to take a long-overdue step forward in regard to their approach to drugmaking, listen to the episode above.


fortune--2020-11-06--The best bottles for wine lovers this year

Biden received more total votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history

Not everyone has time to shop around (not to mention most people have no desire to shop in stores at all right now) and look for the newest items on the market that could appeal to the loved ones and colleagues on their gift-giving lists. (Or for themselves, because let’s be honest, we look at holiday gift guides and deals for ourselves just as much as for others.)
Here is a helpful list of suggestions for the oenophiles in your life.
White wines
Cakebread Cellars: Known for especially for Chardonnay, Cakebread Cellars’ 2018 Napa Valley vintage is the perfect winter varietal for white wine lovers. This wine has a pretty, floral nose with fresh citrus, orange blossom, and white peach. But the real treat is in the mouthfeel; the viscosity coats the palate, and it is weighty on the tongue yet well balanced with acidity. SRP: $40.
The Prisoner: The 2019 Blindfold is a crisp, unique white blend featuring a classic Chardonnay base. This full and balanced wine from the Napa Valley boasts aromas of lychee, citrus, apple pie, and peach, all culminating in a lengthy finish. This is an ideal choice to pair with holiday meals, from classic winter vegetables or seafood hors d’oeuvres. SRP: $32.
Rosé wines
Domaines Ott: The 2019 Chateau Romassan Bandol shimmers with a beautifully clear, pale peach hue and a fresh, fruity nose. The aromas evolve toward notes of apricot and grapefruit. The wine opens up with delicate spicy and citrus notes intertwined with aromas of white stone fruits. The palate is fresh, appetizing, complex, and characterized by its well-defined structure. A refreshing touch of acidity on the finish creates a lovely breadth and lingering flavors. SRP: $52.
La Fête du Rosé: La Fête du Rosé made its debut in summer 2019 and is the first entirely Black-owned rosé wine out of St. Tropez, France. After 15 years in the wine and spirits industries with stints at LVMH and Champagne Armand de Brignac, founder and CEO Donae Burston saw that most rosé brands on the market only catered to a general market consumer. Specifically, he says, there “wasn’t a rosé brand that spoke to ‘us.’ When you thought about rosé, you didn’t think of brown or black people drinking it, or, at the time, see brands promoting people of color or men drinking their wine, despite the immense spending power we bring to the market.” Made of 80% Grenache, 14% Mourvèdre, and 6% Syrah grapes, this pastel, salmon-pink wine has aromas of cherry, dried fruits, and hazelnut. SRP: $25.
Macari Vineyards: This year, the winery on the North Fork of Long Island added a second rosé to its collection, one that is ideal for year-round drinking. Paying homage to the beloved grape of the Champagne region, the Macaris planted Pinot Meunier on their North Fork vineyard back in the 1990s, typically blending it into a rosé or making it a fully fledged red wine. A slightly more robust and full bodied rosé designed for cool-weather drinking, the 100% Pinot Meunier rosé has notes of cherry and pomegranate with a deep pink hue. SRP: $24.
Orange wines
Gia Coppola: The newest label within the Coppola family’s wine production, the “Gia Coppola wine collection” launched earlier this year with two bottles: a skin-contact wine release and a bottled sangria (dubbed “SanGia”). The orange, skin-contact wine is especially fetching for winter festivities for your quarantine bubble. Made with 100% California Riesling grapes that were fermented for 15 days and then aged in steel, the unfiltered result is a hazy, funky wine with tasting notes of fleshy citrus fruits like kumquat, plus quince, clove, and honeydew, that is medium-bodied at 12.5% alcohol, a perfect pairing for a cheese board or fresh seafood. SRP: $20.
Red wines
Sterling Vineyards: Sterling Vineyards boasts more than five decades of winemaking in Northern California’s Napa Valley. The winery has a prominent Southern California connection as well: Sterling has been the official wine provider for the Emmy Awards for the past five years. The Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, in particular, was sent to nominees across every category this fall; more than 3,000 bottles were shipped out. Fans of wine and television can share in this bottle, too. The garnet-hued, full-bodied wine offers aromas and flavors of dark red and black fruits—including black cherry, raspberry, blackberry, and plum—with notes of mocha, oak spice, and cassis, accented with sea salt caramel and vanilla bean. SRP: $45.
La Crema: A representation of La Crema’s four decades along the Pacific coast in Northern California’s Sonoma County, the special edition 2018 40th Anniversary Pinot Noir was made as a tribute to both Burgundian winemaking practices and cool climate appellations. Aged in French oak barrels for 10 months, this 100% Pinot Noir wine offers aromas of rose, cedar, and raspberry with flavors of plum, black cherry, and cocoa. SRP: $100.
Sparkling wines
Louis Roederer: A family-owned Champagne house in production since 1776, Louis Roederer produces a nonvintage cuvée using all three Champagne grape varieties (40% Chardonnay, 20% Pinot Meunier, and 40% Pinot Noir) from more than 40 different plots across the famous French wine region. Aged for three years, the Brut Premier is exemplary of the Champagne house’s style—essentially, rich and powerful. For holiday pairings, this bottle is ideal for scallops with potato pancakes and caviar sauce. SRP: $55.
Frank Family Vineyards: Made up of 73% Pinot Noir and 27% Chardonnay grapes, the sparkling “Rouge” wine experiences greater skin contact resulting in a scarlet ruby hue. The vibrant wine is rich in structure with a creamy mousse that is upheld by fresh acidity, making it a great food wine—even for the hardest pairings such as Thanksgiving turkey. Following the méthode champenoise (traditional method), the California sparkling wine wine rested on its yeast for three years and was riddled before disgorgement on April 26, 2020. SRP: $55.
Bollinger: Bollinger is introducing an addition to its permanent collection for the first time since the launch of its rosé in 2008. The newest Champagne, dubbed “PN,” was developed following a challenge within the winemaking team and is part of an ongoing series. Made from 100% Pinot Noir grapes, each release of PN will highlight a Pinot Noir grape from a different cru (a vineyard or group of vineyards) from the base year to bring its distinctive terroir and taste to light. For the first edition of the series, the PN VZ15, 20% of the blend comes from reserve wines aged in magnums dating back to 2009. (The name and the design of the label are nods to the way Bollinger’s enologists identify wines in the cellar.) It opens with rich aromas of cherry stone, jam-infused fruit, and dried fig before developing toasted, baked notes. On the palate, expect flavors of peach and apricot, enhanced by hazelnut and floral notes. This is a great food pairing wine and is versatile enough to enjoy with everything from a tomato tartlet to a rich risotto. And it will be available in the U.S. this fall in time for the holiday season. SRP: $120.
Bundles
Enriquez Estate Wines: Paving the way in an industry where both women and Mexican-Americans are underrepresented, Cecilia Enriquez is breaking the mold of wine traditions with creative blends and an out-of-the-box approach to winemaking that has won several awards in recent years. Based in Forestville in Sonoma County and braving the ongoing devastating wildfire season, the winery is paying tribute to first responders this autumn with their Thanksgiving Give Back 4-Pack, going on sale Nov. 1; 10% of the proceeds go to the California Community Foundation Wildfire Relief Fund. The set includes a rosé, the 2015 Brisa, the 2013 Pinot Noir, and the 2013 Tempranillo. SRP: $144.
Verjus: Wine director Matt Cirne has put together Le Club Noël, a celebratory bundle of dynamic, funky, and experimental natural wines from off-the-beaten-path wineries—all of them otherwise unavailable for retail purchase. Le Club Noël is a curated trio of three bottles: one white, one red, and one sparkling. The package includes custom gift engraving on one bottle; additional engraving is available for $15 per bottle. Le Club Noël can be picked up in person at Verjus’s storefront in San Francisco and can also be shipped to other U.S. states where permitted. Note that buyers need to act fast: Le Club Noël will be available for order online through Nov. 27. SRP: $95.


fortune--2020-11-06--From ice cream to Zoom screenings: How female filmmakers are getting their work seen in the pandemic

We all need an escape—now more than ever. Luckily, content creators are still developing, producing, and distributing series and films, finding creative ways to get projects out the door during the pandemic.
At a Fortune Most Powerful Women virtual event that took place last week, three prolific, female filmmakers spoke about the challenges and opportunities of working in the current environment. The audience heard from dream hampton, executive producer of the Peabody Award–winning documentary Surviving R. Kelly; Jyoti Sarda, producer of the PBS miniseries And She Could be Next—all about the women of color who are transforming politics; and Sarah Megan Thomas, writer and producer of A Call to Spy, a new film about female heroes from World War II.
So what has it been like to create art in the middle of a pandemic—and even launch a movie while many theaters are still shut down or seeing just a trickle of moviegoers? “It’s been really different from the business side, being an indie, because I made this film for the big screen,” said Thomas, whose movie is now streaming on demand. “It’s a World War II piece that’s beautifully shot.”
Getting the word out about new projects, especially without a big marketing budget, has been particularly challenging given the inability to hold in-person events. “Word of mouth is crucial to an independent—you don’t have television commercials and posters everywhere,” said Thomas.
The filmmaker, who also created and starred in the female-driven Wall Street flick Equity, has found creative ways to market her recently launched movie: “I partnered with an ice cream company in San Francisco called Smitten Ice Cream, led by a female CEO. We have special edition ice creams tied to characters in the movie.” (An example: Vera Atkins, a British intelligence officer and one of the characters in the film, is now a Smitten flavor featuring Earl Grey with milk chocolate chips.)
hampton, meanwhile, has had her hand in several projects even as restrictions have made it difficult to travel to and shoot in different locations. (She spoke to the Fortune audience while on a shoot in Harlem, where she was interviewing an octogenarian about voting rights.) In August, hampton directed and executive produced the Black National Convention. The virtual event was organized by the Movement for Black Lives, with the aim of pushing for slavery reparations and a reimagined criminal justice system, among other reforms.
“It was an incredibly ambitious, three-hour broadcast,” said hampton. “The challenge there was to make it something more than a bunch of Zoom panels, which everyone is fatigued from.”
The filmmaker says she always tries to connect with and employ local crews. But shooting the convention during the pandemic forced her to rely on on-the-ground talent even more. “I was able to connect with small film crews in places like Jackson, Mississippi, or Tennessee or Oakland, California,” said hampton. “Stories came in and were produced entirely by local producers and directors because that’s what we had to do.”
If not for the pandemic, hampton said she would have ultimately come to places like Oakland with her team to shoot. “I got to learn the amazing work of local filmmakers in all of these places,” said the filmmaker. “I’m from Detroit, so I know what it’s like for people to think there’s no one with talent in [your] town. I learned so much.”
As for Sarda, her timely series had finished filming by the time COVID hit and was never intended to be released in theaters. Still, getting the documentary finalized with pandemic-induced restrictions was a challenge. “The edit team had to complete all of our postproduction [work] remotely,” said Sarda. “But at least we didn’t have to shoot during the pandemic.”
Not getting to observe others observing her work has also been limiting. In the past, screenings in front of live audiences would have been a given. Not so today. “I have yet to see our documentary screened in front of a live audience to know the nuances of how they’re reacting to the characters,” said Sarda. “We do a lot of digital screenings and Q&As—like a lot of documentaries do. But it’s not the same thing as being with an audience. I’ve really missed that.”


fortune--2020-11-06--U.S. visas for Chinese students have all but dried up

The U.S. issued 808 visas to Chinese students between April and September this year, compared to 90,410 in the same period in 2019, amid the ongoing fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and unrelenting political tensions between the U.S. and China.
The drop in F-1 student visas for Chinese nationals represents a 99% decline—a decrease larger than the one seen among international students outside of China, according to Nikkei Asia.
Around 370,000 Chinese nationals studied in the U.S. during the 2018–2019 school year; they accounted for more than a third of the entire international student population in the U.S., according to the Institute of International Education. The U.S., in turn, is the No. 1 destination for Chinese students studying abroad—those who study in the U.S. represent more than half of all overseas Chinese students.
But the Trump administration’s increasingly unfriendly immigration policies toward Chinese students and now the COVID-19 pandemic appear to be chipping away at those figures.
Chinese students are enrolling in the U.S. at a much slower rate than in the past. For the 2015–2016 school year, the number of Chinese students enrolled in U.S. schools rose 8.1%; for the 2018–19 school year, it rose 1.7%. Overall, new international student enrollment at U.S. universities has declined for the past three years.
The drop-off poses a significant financial threat to U.S. universities, since most international students pay full tuition compared to their American peers, who often receive financial aid. Chinese students alone paid an estimated $15 billion in tuition payments to U.S. colleges in the 2018-2019 school year.
In recent years, the Trump administration has erected barriers to Chinese nationals studying in the U.S. as part of a wider political dispute with China that has often devolved into tit-for-tat retaliations across trade, technology, and immigration.
In September, the U.S. Department of State revoked 1,000 student visas awarded to Chinese nationals, saying the students and researchers in question had ties to the Chinese military. In 2019, the U.S. restricted visas for Chinese students who researched any technology that could have national security applications, and in 2018 the administration cut the visa length for Chinese graduate students in high-tech fields from five years to one.
The U.S.’s handling of the pandemic is another enormous deterrent for Chinese students. Many international students attending U.S. colleges opted to stay in their home countries for remote fall semesters—either because coronavirus travel restrictions prevented them from traveling to the U.S., or because they were unable to obtain visas.
Some universities adapted to the situation.
At Pennsylvania State University, for instance, most international students are attending classes remotely this semester, and 5,080 of the 11,000 international students hail from China. The university arranged for some of its students in China to attend in-person classes in Shanghai at one of the college’s affiliated study-abroad centers.
“Since we knew that some new students wouldn’t be able to make it to the U.S. because of visa restrictions, we started thinking, ‘What would it look like to offer students a residential experience in their own country?'” a Penn State representative said in a university press release.
In addition to hurting universities, the increased number of Chinese citizens opting to study abroad in countries outside the U.S. could result in a significant hit to the U.S. economy generally. International students contributed almost $41 billion to the U.S. economy in 2019, according to the NAFSA Association of International Educators.


fortune--2020-11-06--Divided government would be good for business

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
The financial markets have decided that divided government—with Democrats winning the White House and Republicans holding the Senate—is a good thing for business. (Read this and this.) I’m inclined to agree. A “blue wave,” with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, would have left a President Biden vulnerable to the anti-business demands of his left wing. A mixed result means if elected, he will have to reckon with Mitch McConnell—which either leads to gridlock, or, more hopefully, to a much-needed effort at reconciliation and more centrist policies.
Infrastructure would be a good place to start. And I’m not just talking roads and bridges. The pandemic has exposed an urgent need for universal broadband, so those in inner cities and rural areas can fully participate in the digital revolution. Investment in green energy would help address the risks of climate change, and has some bipartisan support. A focus on financing public-private training platforms that provide alternative pathways to good jobs for those left behind by the technology revolution should be embraced on both sides of the great divide. Given current low interest rates and ample capital, borrowing to fund such urgent priorities should be a great opportunity for a new President to use whatever limited political capital this fractious election leaves him to make bipartisan progress.
In any event, divided power in Washington likely means the pressure on CEOs to step up on social issues will continue. I talked yesterday with Joshua Bolten, CEO of the Business Roundtable, which last year revised its definition of the purpose of business to give multiple “stakeholders” a standing on a par with shareholders. Bolten says the tumultuous events of the past year have only increased his members’ commitment to that cause.
“All three of the crises—the health crisis, the economic crisis, and the latest chapter in the crisis of racial equity—have prompted the CEOs to revert even more than they had been to the full breadth of their stakeholders. All three of those crises were pan-crises. The pan-crises have made them lean in” to stakeholder capitalism, he said.
And since it is Friday, some feedback—especially to yesterday’s post about the election results. I liked this one, with apologies to Dave Mason:
“Clearly there is NO mandate and the nation is remarkably divided. We the people need to get back to dialogue…There are no good guys, there are no bad guys; there’s only you and me and we just disagree.”
Less conciliatory was this one:
“When you on the Left finally acknowledge your insatiable need to usurp power over all of us maybe then a discussion of ‘sense of community’ can begin.”
—RA
And finally this:
“If you ever learned anything from history class, you would understand we have always been a nation divided. Both major parties are to blame.”
—DA
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Visa antitrust
The Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit over Visa's planned $5.3 billion takeover of fintech player Plaid. The suit alleges that Plaid poses a significant threat to Visa in the online debit market, and its purchase would allow Visa to unlawfully maintain a monopoly in that market, thus harming customers by keeping prices high and stymying innovation. Wall Street Journal
Plane sale
EasyJet, stricken like all airlines are by the pandemic, has sold 11 Airbus jets so it can lease them back. The sale raised $169.5 million, which could help the British budget giant handle what's turning out to be a dismal quarter—thanks to fresh European lockdowns, EasyJet will fly a mere fifth of its planned capacity. Bloomberg
COVID count
The coronavirus pandemic continues to gather steam in the U.S. Yesterday was the second straight day in which the country recorded at least 100,000 new cases (in this case, over 116,000.) The U.S. has now recorded more cases in the last week (650,600) than Germany has during the entire pandemic (619,100.) Financial Times
European economy
The resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic has led Europe's executive body, the European Commission, to scale back its forecast for a post-pandemic recovery. Its fall economic forecast sees a 7.4% contraction in EU GDP this year, which is better than last quarter's forecast, but 2021's projected growth is down from 5.8% to 4.1%. EU economy chief Valdis Dombrovskis: "This forecast comes as a second wave of the pandemic is unleashing yet more uncertainty and dashing our hopes for a quick rebound." Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Bitcoin seizure
The U.S. Justice Department has seized around $1 billion worth of bitcoins from "Individual X," who is apparently a person rather than a mid-'90s industrial band. Identity aside, the timing is interesting: the digital wallet holding the virtual coins belonged to a hacker who stole them from the operator of the taken-out Silk Road underground marketplace in 2012, and the coins were shifted in 2015, after which they stayed still. So why did no one touch them in the last five years? Fortune
Abuse of position
Michael Link, the head of the international team of election observers monitoring the U.S. elections, yesterday accused President Trump of "an unprecedented abuse of his position," due to his calls for a halt to the counting of legitimately cast votes. Trump continued in that vein last night, in a speech that claimed the election was being stolen from him—he emitted so many falsehoods that many U.S. networks cut away from the broadcast. Fortune
Why Belgium?
Belgium has been hammered exceptionally hard by the pandemic, in both the first and second/current waves. Why? As this CNBC piece explains, it's down to politics—conflicts between regional and federal—as well as high population density, and the fact that Belgium reopened very quickly earlier this year. CNBC
Electric Bentley
Bentley, the British luxury carmaker, will only be selling hybrid or fully electric vehicles by 2026, and only electric by 2030. The Volkswagen-owned company also said its manufacturing will go completely carbon neutral in that timescale. CEO Adrian Hallmark: "Within a decade, Bentley will transform from a 100-year-old luxury car company to a new, sustainable, wholly ethical role model for luxury." BBC
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-11-06--Investors hit pause on the markets rally as the nail-biter vote count drags on

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Happy Friday, Bull Sheeters. Take a breather. The markets certainly have. The “relief rally,” the “Biden bounce,” the glee over gridlock—whatever you want to call it—is on pause after stellar markets gains the past few days.
The vote count—of course we’re heading right there—continues to show a tightening race in Georgia (Biden up 917 votes, as I type) and Pennsylvania (Trump up 18,229 votes). The moment Georgia went blue, shortly before 4:30 a.m. Atlanta time, U.S. futures bounced off their lows.
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are mixed in afternoon trading with Japan’s Nikkei up 0.9% .
are mixed in afternoon trading with up . President Xi Jinping has delivered his longterm economic outlook, saying the Chinese economy should double by 2035 . What’s raising eyebrows is that projection would imply a sub-5% annual growth rate , below the country’s 30-year performance.
has delivered his longterm economic outlook, saying the Chinese economy should . What’s raising eyebrows is that projection would imply a , below the country’s 30-year performance. Shares in Alibaba were one of the few tech laggards in the U.S. yesterday, falling 2.7% on Thursday. After the Ant Group IPO debacle, the e-commerce giant reported disappointing sales last quarter.
Europe
The European bourses were lower at the open, with the Europe Stoxx 600 down 0.6% in mid-morning trading.
were lower at the open, with the down in mid-morning trading. The European Commission released on Thursday its latest GDP forecast , and it’s a mixed bag. The 2020 outlook is slightly better than first thought, but the latest round of COVID lockdowns will dent the eurozone economy in 2021.
released on Thursday its latest , and it’s a mixed bag. The is slightly better than first thought, but the latest round of will dent the eurozone economy in 2021. Europe’s banks may have surprised on the up-side this reporting season, but that doesn’t mean jobs are safe. A trio of banks—Banco Santander, Lloyds Banking Group and ING Groep—have announced cuts, bringing global banking layoffs to more than 75,000 this year, Bloomberg calculates.
U.S.
U.S. futures are down this morning, but have rebounded sharply following the Georgia vote-count development. On Thursday, the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq soared again, led by mega-cap tech stocks.
are down this morning, but have rebounded sharply following the Georgia vote-count development. On Thursday, the and soared again, led by mega-cap tech stocks. Shares in Visa closed up 2% even after the U.S. Justice Department announced it would sue to block Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of digital transactions specialist Plaid .
even after the U.S. Justice Department announced it would sue to block Visa’s of digital transactions specialist . Uber has been on a post-election tear since its Prop 22 ballot victory on Tuesday. But shares in the ride-hailing firm are falling, down 2%, in pre-market trading after it reported a big top-line miss last quarter.
Elsewhere
Gold is gaining, with the shiny metal topping $1,940/ounce .
is gaining, with the shiny metal topping . The dollar is flat.
is flat. Crude is down with Brent now trading just above $40/barrel .
is down with now trading just above . Bitcoin jumped another 8.5% in the past 24 hours, now trading above $15,700. Crypto bulls are eyeing a $20,000 price target in its near future.
***
By the numbers
979.34
Let’s start with Big Tech. Since last Friday’s close, the tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 979.34 points. Over the past four days, the Nasdaq has rocketed 7.8% higher, putting it on pace for its best week since the go-go-go days of April. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial, too, are in the middle of a nice bull run, as the chart below shows. (As of yesterday’s close, the Dow is roughly 0.5% away from hitting break-even for 2020). Wall Street is calling it the “relief rally“—that is, relief the “blue wave” scenario looks like a remote possibility. But there is a downside: under divided rule, investors probably won’t get that generous stimulus package they were pining for just a few weeks ago, and that could mean more pain for financials, airlines and value stocks.
7.6%
We break into our election coverage to remind you that we get the non-farm payrolls report today before the opening bell. The consensus estimate is for the unemployment rate to tick down to 7.6%. Here’s a reminder that the labor market recovery in America is a very uneven picture. What should be of little surprise is how many battleground states—Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan, to name three—are still behind the V-shaped curve. In states where the travel and leisure sectors—think Nevada and Hawaii—are vital, the unemployment rate is in the double-digits. It’s also hitting states where energy is a significant part of the local economy: Texas and PA, namely.
***
Postscript
I turned on the TV this morning. The screen went bright white, then black, and then nothing. Silence. “Morto,” my wife observed as I fruitlessly pressed a bunch of buttons and fiddled with cables.
My kids gathered around and cheered. “No more Bloomberg,” they taunted me.
Part of me is relieved.
***
Have a nice weekend, everyone. I’ll see you here on Monday (possibly after getting a new TV).
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
Rich on a niche? COVID has fundamentally changed the way we invest. One example is the rise of thematic funds, "which track trends such as cybersecurity, green energy and health technology," the Wall Street Journal reports. Such niche funds have bagged record inflows of $42 billion through the first nine months of 2020.
"Nirvana for growth stocks". That's how CNBC's Jim Cramer described the markets outlook with Biden in the White House and a split Congress. Gridlock, the thinking goes, is good for business, good for stocks. Fortune's Shawn Tully isn't fully buying that logic. And here's why.
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a discount offer for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
Quiz Time
COVID has socked the top line of American professional sports leagues. The big three—the National Basketball Association, the National Football League and Major League Baseball—have lost a combined $13 billion. Which of these leagues saw the biggest revenue hit in 2020?
A) NBA
B) NFL
C) MLB
The answer is C, MLB. According to Bloomberg, Major League Baseball lost a staggering $7.7 billion in sales this year.


fortune--2020-11-07--Election misinformation is spreading with and without social media’s help

Who won the election ?
Putin and Xi , experts say

In anticipation of trouble during the final stages of the election, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube added new labels that warn users about misinformation. In some cases, they also temporarily tightened rules for what users can post.
But when President Trump made a last-minute speech on Thursday, two cable networks aired the briefing in full, letting him spread unsupported claims of voter fraud and election theft.
“I think ultimately it is a little bit of a double standard here,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning misinformation watchdog Media Matters. “If [Trump] said that online everyone would be criticizing Facebook and Twitter for carrying it live.”
ABC, CBS, and NBC cut away during the speech so that their anchors could explain that the President’s claims were unsubstantiated. But CNN and Fox aired the nearly 17-minute statement uninterrupted. CNN displayed explanations at the bottom of the screen clarifying that Trump’s statements were false. Fox did not.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper quickly rebuked the speech, calling it “shockingly disappointing.” And in a segment following Trump’s address, fellow CNN anchor Anderson Cooper compared Trump to “an obese turtle on his back flailing in the sun realizing his time his over.”
Carusone took issue with CNN’s decision to broadcast the President’s full statement along with Cooper’s “insult” to Trump, saying, “If that’s the best commentary you have after that wraps up, then you shouldn’t have aired it.”
Instead Carusone said that the two channels could have added a short delay like how broadcasters do during live entertainment such as the Super Bowl. If something harmful airs, broadcasters can pull the plug.
Erin Simpson, associate director of tech policy at nonpartisan public policy organization Center for American Progress, said she’s seen American media adjust to handling live misinformation from government officials over the past few years. That became especially apparent when some media stopped broadcasting the White House coronavirus briefings after some members started to veer off topic and spread misinformation.
Overall, Simpson felt most television news handled Trump’s speech well, although she was concerned that Fox didn’t challenge the President’s claims. That is especially concerning if Biden wins the election and Trump, during his final weeks in office, is left to speak unchallenged, she added.
“It will be extremely damaging if they let Trump use their platform to spread hate or delegitimize the election,” Simpson said.
Of course, social media had its own problems controlling misinformation over the past few days. Twitter obscured several of Trump’s tweets with a warning about misinformation that users must click through. It also stopped letting users retweet such posts without including their own commentary to contextualize it.
But Twitter has been slow to react to other tweets that included misinformation, allowing them to amass thousands of likes and retweets before they were labeled. For example, Trump’s son, Eric, on Wednesday tweeted that his father had won Pennsylvania even though the votes there hadn’t yet been fully counted and no major news outlet had declared a winner. The post was retweeted more than 30,000 times before Twitter finally labeled it.
At the same time, Facebook labeled several posts containing misinformation with a relatively generic message that suggests the vote counting was ongoing and providing a link to more authoritative information. Facebook neglected to spell out whether post contained misinformation or misleading claims. The problematic posts were widely surfaced to users until Thursday when the company started limiting their distribution.
Facebook also let Trump ally Stephen Bannon livestream his online show War Room a day after he suggested on his show that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, should be beheaded. Facebook removed that video from its service but let Bannon continue to broadcast, in contrast to Twitter, which kicked Bannon off its service.
Simpson said she’s most concerned about YouTube, which has avoided much of the public backlash against social media but arguably features just as much problematic content. For videos related to the election, YouTube tacks on a label on the bottom that says election results may not be final and sends users to Google for more information. On Wednesday, CNBC reported that the company failed to remove a video from conservative news service One American News Network that claimed Trump had won the election and that also spread unsupported claims of voter fraud.
The bigger issue is that though the election will conclude, political division and misinformation won’t. Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of the advocacy nonprofit Free Press, said that she’s concerned about the amount of misinformation online, especially what comes directly from politicians.
“We’re going to have to keep educating, fighting, investing in journalism and journalists of color,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”


fortune--2020-11-07--Even if Biden wins, European leaders warn rebuilding relationships will take time

When France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian went on air on one of the country’s biggest morning radio shows on Thursday, most listeners expected him to be celebrating a possible new U.S. President, after years of European Union leaders colliding with President Donald Trump.
But Le Drian instead had a more urgent warning for his countrymen: The old relationship with the U.S., he told them, was over, no matter whether Trump or Joe Biden won the election.
“We will not return to the status quo ante, to the good old days of the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Le Drian, a veteran French politician, told Europe1 Radio. “The world has moved on after these four years.”
After days of Europeans watching the election drama play out, Le Drian’s words were a jolt, bringing a sense that Trump’s presidency has left a scar that is unlikely to heal easily.
Clearly, a Biden presidency is a drastic relief for European officials who have struggled to maintain good relations with the U.S. over the past four years—a period that most describe as being an unprecedented low time.
For one thing, Biden already has an extensive network of contacts across Europe, from his eight years in President Barack Obama’s White House.
“Everybody knows him,” François Heisbourg, a defense analyst and advisor to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, told Fortune on Friday night. Heisbourg twice met Biden during his visits to Europe while he was Obama’s vice president. “The good news is that we will be able to have an adult relationship again with people speaking with each other, rather than past each other. Biden is not only an adult person, but a rather rational one.”
The anticipation of Trump’s defeat has built all week across Europe. On Tuesday, the fat-type headline splashed across France’s left-leaning Liberation newspaper read, “End of the nightmare?” When Heisbourg was asked how Europeans regarded Trump’s seemingly imminent defeat, he said: “Good riddance—to put it in the shortest possible words.”
Yet, despite the delight in a likely Biden presidency, Heisbourg and others believe that Europe is unlikely to snap back to the previous close relationship it enjoyed with the U.S. up until 2016.
Like Americans, many Europeans have sat glued to their televisions this week, watching the nonstop election coverage; only Europe’s soaring coronavirus caseload has competed for airtime. And while many have eagerly anticipated Biden’s victory, they have also watched closely, as Trump’s huge support across the U.S. held up.
That has led many to conclude that while Trump looks likely to leave, his ideas could well take hold again.
“You have to assume things can turn around in 2024,” Heisbourg says. “This Republican Party had four million more votes than last time with the most dysfunctional candidate you can imagine.”
European analysts say they are struck by the sight of two contrasting Americas, playing out on their screens: the free democracy they have long admired and a country that appears dangerously split.
“America is not just picking its President,” political commentator Dominique Moisi wrote in the Ouest-France newspaper on Tuesday. “It is choosing what it is: A proud democracy, capable of inspiring the world, or a country that has sunk into violence, with contempt for democratic legitimacy.” That, he wrote, could make the U.S. seem “an XXL-sized banana republic.”
European leaders grappled for years with the President’s policies, which many found erratic and hostile.
The friction reached crisis points on several occasions over Trump’s presidency, including when he withdrew the U.S. from the global Paris Agreement (a decision that took legal effect on Wednesday); when he pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, which Western countries and the U.N. had painstakingly negotiated over years; and when he announced he would pull U.S. funding from the World Health Organization amid the coronavirus pandemic.
For countries on Russia’s border, Trump’s views on Europe have seemed truly perilous. As Biden’s victory began to seem inevitable on Friday evening, Edgars Rinkēvičs, the foreign minister of the small Baltic country of Latvia, tweeted a joint statement with foreign ministers from neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, reminding the next U.S. administration that NATO was crucial to fending off military attacks in Europe, especially in the tiny frontline Baltic states. The U.S., they said, “is and will remain for us the closest ally.”
The statement came after years in which Trump complained that Washington was spending too much on defending European, threatening to pull the U.S. out of NATO, the bedrock of the West’s security for 70 years. “The European Union is a foe,” Trump told CBS News in 2018. “They have really taken advantage of us.”
Such talk has incensed Europe’s leaders, and in 2018, German Chancellor Angela Merkel bluntly warned them that Europe could no longer trust the U.S.—a sentiment echoed on Thursday by French foreign minister Le Drian. “It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us,” Merkel said at the time. “Europe must take its destiny in its own hands. That is the task of the future.”
Now that that future has arrived, Europe’s deep rethinking about the U.S. is clear.
“Europe has emerged from its naivete,” French foreign minister Le Drian said in his interview Thursday. “It is beginning to assert itself as a power.” In the minds of many Europeans, that now appears the safest path.


fortune--2020-11-07--Meet the new highest-ranking female CEO in the Fortune 500

Early on the morning of November 6, CVS Health unveiled the change in leadership that most analysts and investors expected. Karen Lynch, who now heads the Aetna insurance arm, will succeed Larry Merlo on February 1. Lynch’s ascension is especially notable because she’ll become the highest-ranking female CEO in the Fortune 500 (on our 2020 rankings CVS was 5th behind Walmart, Amazon, Exxon Mobil and Apple). CVS is now also considered the world’s biggest healthcare provider. As one analyst noted on the third quarter earnings call that followed shortly after the announcement, in this week of post-election turmoil, it was reassuring to witness a peaceful transfer of power.
Lynch, 57, who joined CVS via its late-2018 acquisition of Aetna, will face a challenge as towering as any in healthcare. So far, CVS’s daring experiment in being first-ever to combine a big insurer, neighborhood retailer, and pharmacy benefit manager has failed to pay off for shareholders.
Lynch started her career as a CPA at Ernst & Young auditing insurance companies and hospitals, moving to Cigna and Magellan Health before joining Aetna in 2012. There, she impressed CEO Mark Bertolini by building the Medicare Advantage business serving seniors, a highly-profitable franchise she’s continued to rapidly expand at CVS. From fewer than one million in 2013, its membership has grown to around 2.5 million. In the past year, Lynch has swelled its ranks at three times the industry average. Medicare Advantage now contributes well over $20 billion in annual revenue, approaching 10% of the CVS total of $242 billion in 2019.
At Aetna thru her first year at CVS, Lynch established a strong track record. In the past five years, she’s lifted the insurer’s revenues from $60 billion to $75 billion and delivered on her promises for sales and earnings twenty quarters in a row. News that Lynch will soon take charge is giving investors new confidence that she can do for CVS as a whole what she’s done at Aetna. The applause from Wall Street lifted the stock price 9% to $66.87 by mid-afternoon on Friday.
Lynch has actually won two competitions for CEO. In 2015, Aetna’s Bertolini anointed her as his successor following a two-person race with an internal candidate. Then and again now at CVS, the board clearly recognized that Lynch harbored a rare combination of data-crunching analytical skills and marketing moxie for winning customers. On the call, Lynch described her task in the broadest of strokes, “a mission to reshape healthcare as we know it by addressing every meaningful moment of health in a person’s life.”
The rationale behind the Aetna deal: creating a one-stop provider offering the full range of routine and chronic care, in part by turning your neighborhood store into a doctor’s office. The strategy comes in two parts, and Lynch will need to deliver on both. First, CVS is re-purposing its combination pharmacies and retail stores by adding on-site neighborhood clinics where folks can get everything from cholesterol to diabetic retinopathy screenings, and recently, COVID-19 tests, with vaccinations for the virus to come. It’s already added those services to 600 of its 10,000 stores, enhanced sites called HealthHUBs, and aims to reach 1,300 by the close of 2021. The goal is demonstrating to insurance plans that the model can save them a lot of money, so that carriers assign preventive care, and management of chronic conditions to the HEALTHubs. The insurers would would reward CVS with a slice of their savings.
Second, Aetna holds rich troves of data on its over 20 million customers. It’s mining those records to remind the people it’s insuring to refill their prescriptions, and come in for tests when they’re overdue. Those are just the services the HealthHUB at the strip mall a few miles from home is providing. Lynch also wants to develop apps that combine all of patients information, from every procedure they’ve ever undergone to all of their prescriptions, in a digital file they can share with the nurse at the HealhHUB, their CVS pharmacist, or a new physician.
Lynch will face stiff competition from two sides. In one camp, Walmart, along with other big retailers, are rolling out their own in-store clinics. In the PBM arena, Amazon is delivering prescription drugs. CVS believes that it’s Rx will win by providing everything you need to stay healthy, from power shakes in the shopping aisles, to the HealthHUB screenings, to the reminders and home visits arranged by Aetna, right in the neighborhood or on your CVS app. If the template works, CVS will be gaining a bigger and bigger share of Americans’ healthcare wallets.
But it’s been a big loser for investors in recent years. After multiplying its share price 12-fold from 1995 to 2015, CVS went astray by paying $12.7 billion for Omnicare, a provider of drugs to nursing homes that’s fared poorly since, then way overpaid on its $70 billion purchase of Aetna. When the deal was announced in December of 2017, the combined companies were worth $128 billion. Today, CVS’s market cap is $87 billion, meaning that the combination has so far destroyed $40 billion in shareholder wealth.
Still, those diminished expectations mean Lynch is starting with a lower bar. What matters from here is getting earnings, and that shrunken market cap growing fast. She clearly has a range of skills ideal for the job. The question: Can she transform the strategy of getting folks to access all of their care right in the neighborhood, and adding high-tech to the high-touch by making their records and reminders digital, into the reigning model.
During an interview with this writer at CVS’s headquarters in sleepy Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Lynch described a pet new product that distills her view of where health care is headed. It’s called “Recovery in a Box.” Lynch told me that the crucial time for patients, the moments when most things go wrong, comes when they’re first discharged from the hospital. She used the case of someone who just underwent surgery, and whose insurer is Aetna. Here’s how the insurance, pharmacy and HealthHUB parts would work together. Under Recovery in a Box, the Aetna care manager would digitally message a care concierge or pharmacist at the patient’s neighborhood HealthHUB to arrange transportation to home from the hospital. The local CVS would also send a big package containing everything the patient needs for the first days of recovery, from a shower chair to knee scooter to health foods, right to their door. “We’re the new front door to your health care,” she told me.
No company’s ever put together all the pieces assembled by CVS, and so far the whole has added up to less than the parts. It’s up to Karen Lynch to prove just the opposite, that doing it all, right near home, is what America wants, and what America will pay for.


fortune--2020-11-06--Apple, Sony both discussed buying podcast network Wondery

Apple and Sony Music Entertainment have each held talks about potentially acquiring Wondery, the producer of “Dirty John” and “Dr. Death,” according to people familiar with the matter, setting the stage for the biggest deal yet in the booming podcasting market.
Wondery is seeking $300 million to $400 million in a possible sale, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are ongoing.
Apple and Sony are two of at least four companies that have discussed a deal with Wondery, according to one of the people. Though Spotify Technology has been the most aggressive buyer of podcasting companies over the last two years, the Swedish audio giant has pulled out of the running, said two people with knowledge of the talks. A deal is expected in coming months, but there’s no guarantee that the discussions won’t fall apart.
Wondery is one of the largest independent podcasting studios and networks, reaching a monthly audience of more than 8 million people, according to Podtrac, an industry measurement firm. A price tag north of $300 million would surpass what Spotify paid for the Ringer and Gimlet Media, as well as what IHeartMedia paid for Stitcher.
It’s possible that the price tag could scare off some would-be bidders, especially since the podcasting industry is still fairly small. But Wondery has a pipeline of podcasts that could be turned into television series and other content. It’s already developing more than a dozen TV shows based on its podcasts, including a program for Apple about the rise and fall of WeWork.
For Apple, adding Wondery would mark the tech giant’s most prominent investment in podcasting in several years. It also would immediately give the company a strong library of original content. Apple has been pushing deeper into original series in recent years with its TV+ video service and is also creating podcasts to augment the video efforts, Bloomberg News has reported.
After first popularizing podcasting 15 years ago with iTunes, Cupertino, California-based Apple has been refining its services. It improved its Podcast app on the iPhone and iPad in recent years, launched a Mac app, added new analytics tools for podcasters, and improved its outreach with creators.
Smaller Deals
Apple also acquired at least two small podcasting companies. In 2017, it bought Pop Up Archive, a startup that built technology to improve searching for podcasts. Earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported that Apple bought Scout FM, a podcasting service that turns shows into radio-like stations.
Sony’’s music arm, the second-largest music company in the world, has invested in a handful of podcasting ventures and funded dozens of original podcasts. Sony has been the most aggressive of the three major music companies in the genre, which became a focus following Spotify’s investment in the industry.
Spotify is the world’s largest paid music-streaming service and the biggest distributor for all the major music companies. For now, podcasts aren’t a massive industry — they generate less than $1 billion a year in ad sales in the U.S., according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
But the market’s growth potential has helped propel Spotify’s shares this year, sending them up 85%.


fortune--2020-11-06--Why Trump made gains among minority men against Biden

Despite courting white nationalists as President, Donald Trump remains popular among a minority of Latinos and Blacks. Strong support from Latinos in Florida helped deliver the Sunshine State to the President. Meanwhile, exit polls suggest that Trump is gaining in popularity among minority men, with 18% of Black men and 36% of Latino men voting for Trump.
What accounts for Trump’s cross-racial appeal? It’s partly because of honor culture. In such a culture individuals—and men especially—are expected to defend their reputation for toughness. They must never back down or let even a small slight slide. Failure to do so is always read as weakness.
Honor culture is not just deeply rooted in the white working-class communities that have embraced Trump, it is common in Black and Latino communities as well. There, too, men must always project strength by respecting what sociologist Elijah Anderson called the “code of the street.” In the vernacular of the street, one must always “step up” when disrespected.
Trump, a child of Queens and a tough Scots-Irish mother, also believes he must always step up, as his endless Twitter feuds suggest. As Trump once put it: “Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice.”
Exit polls show that his supporters especially admire the President’s strength. When asked to identify the quality that mattered most in voting for President, a 32% plurality of voters said “a strong leader.” Among those citizens, 71% voted for Trump. That figure was even higher in heavily Latino Florida, where 81% of such voters did likewise. Americans who selected other qualities—especially “good judgment” and ability to “unite the country”—swung overwhelmingly for Biden.
Long before the 2020 election, Trump was also celebrated in rap music as a folk hero, as a symbol of manly power and entrepreneurial cunning. That’s not surprising. The ideal male in much hip-hop is Trumpian: He is brazen, tough, and flashes garish emblems of financial success and power.
A steady stream of rap artists have expressed admiration for Trump’s power, including Kayne West, 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, and Lil Pump, among others. Kayne West famously said that he and Trump are both fierce creatures: “We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.” Lil Pump endorsed Trump by questioning Biden’s strength: “Fuck sleepy Joe.” Rap artist 50 Cent, meanwhile, has repeatedly noted that Trump has the “attitude of a rapper.”
After spending the past few years living in working-class Democratic communities that voted for Trump, we are not surprised by the President’s cultural appeal across racial lines. Because they are also shaped by honor cultures, the people we spoke with sometimes even expressed admiration for minorities who share Trump’s bravado.
We met one woman who spent her life as a trucker and working in a corn processing plant in Iowa. When we asked about Trump, she told us: “I thought he’s got some braggadocio and he’s got some self-confidence we haven’t seen in ages.” She then compared Trump to Muhammad Ali: “He was a braggadocio [sic] and he performed. And people accepted him for that, they loved him for that.”
More often, the citizens we encountered praised Trump in general terms, for his “strength,” “energy,” and “balls.” They also admired long-serving Democratic politicians who respect their local honor culture.
Consider Joe Polisena, the Democratic mayor of Johnston, R.I., a heavily Italian-American town that unexpectedly supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. Polisena never lets an insult slide. As one local explained, “He could have 100 people who agree, one person not, and he’ll focus on the one person who doesn’t. And it kinda irks him.” Another said the mayor “rules with an iron fist.”
Polisena described his politics in ways that echo the code of the street. “I’m kinda like a street fighter when it comes to politics, because that’s the only thing that people understand,” he told us.
These common and more working-class cultural sensibilities, shared broadly across racial and ethnic groups, have been obscured for many reasons. One is simply because these groups have been divided politically. Black Americans, in particular, feel a strong group loyalty to the Democratic Party, one that is often reinforced by Trump’s unwillingness to repudiate white nationalists.
Honor culture is also hard for most journalists and academics to notice because they rarely live in one. Some may be reminded of such cultures when they watch plays like Hamilton, which recalls an age when our national leaders died in duels. But perhaps Hamilton misleads them too, at least insofar as it suggests that honor culture is a historical relic—a strange set of folkways in an age long gone.
Yet honor culture is not only alive and well—it is constantly renewed in America because it is a nation of immigrants. Long before waves of Latino immigration revitalized this cultural tradition in their urban enclaves, so too did the Irish, Italians, Japanese, and Portuguese. As long as we remain a nation of immigrants, some ethnic groups are bound to gravitate toward Trumpian candidates.
Stephanie Muravchik, an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and Jon A. Shields, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, are authors of Trump’s Democrats.


fortune--2020-11-06--How Stacey Abrams and other Georgia activists laid the groundwork for 2020

“Until you’ve proved it’s possible, then it’s always potentially impossible.”
That’s what Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader who ran for governor of the state in 2018, said four years ago about the prospect of turning Georgia blue.
That project—which includes a strong focus on ending voter suppression—has been her singular focus since her thwarted bid for the governor’s mansion two years ago. It’s a goal that builds on her lifelong commitment to voting rights, chronicled in a recent book and documentary, and on her own 2018 race, which she has maintained was lost owing to voter suppression by her opponent and not because of the true results of the political matchup.
The years Abrams and her allies spent convincing Black and brown voters in Georgia that their voices mattered—and her efforts to convince the Democratic establishment to pay attention those voters in the state—paid off this week.
The Biden ticket pulled ahead of Trump in Georgia early Friday morning, helping to tilt the presidential election in favor of the Democrats in the homestretch. The last time Georgia voted for the Democratic presidential nominee was in electing Bill Clinton to his first term in 1992.
While Abrams credits the efforts of Georgia voters, activists, and volunteers far beyond herself—including the late Rep. John Lewis—it’s undeniable that her hard work and vision played a crucial role in this achievement for the Democratic Party.
In 2016, Abrams explained her Georgia strategy: as President Obama did in North Carolina in 2008, turn out Black and brown voters likely to vote for the Democratic Party while simultaneously appealing to white moderates. But, because of differences between Georgia’s electorate and North Carolina’s, she argued that the white moderate approach should be a smaller part of the equation for Democrats in the Peach State. Georgia Democrats, Abrams said, should put their resources behind the Black and brown voters who, if encouraged to turn out, would support the party.
In her own 2018 election, Abrams had the opportunity to put that strategy to the test. Her GOP opponent in her bid for governor was Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state. In that role, he controlled the election process while also running in the race. In the course of the campaign, Kemp’s office purged voters from the rolls and closed polling places. Abrams, who ultimately lost by a narrow margin, has said that those actions, along with resulting long wait times at polling places, especially for Black voters, were the deciding factors in her defeat.
Despite the loss, Abrams’s run significantly narrowed the 200,000-vote lead Republicans had held in the state for two decades in most races, according to Charles Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia who studies politics in the state and in the South. In the 2018 governor’s race, that Republican lead was closer to 45,000 votes, while in this week’s election, Biden was ahead by a margin of about 1,000 votes on Friday. “She set it in motion,” Bullock says of Democrats’ surge in the state.
Abrams’s strategy included not just engaging Black voters but getting former nonvoters registered; in Georgia, her organization Fair Fight helped register 800,000 new voters in Georgia in the lead-up to this election. Before her run for statewide office, Abrams founded the New Georgia Project, which similarly worked to register new voters of color in the state.
The strategy doesn’t appear to have been enough to flip districts in down ballot races this year, although Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux has eked out ahead of her opponent in the state’s Seventh Congressional District, and Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath held on to her seat in the Sixth. Georgia’s two Senate races are headed to runoffs in January.
In the past two years, Abrams has expanded her view beyond Georgia as she’s taken on voter suppression as an issue nationwide. Her organization Fair Fight has recruited volunteers across the country to reach voters and monitor elections.
There's a lot of totally correct talk about how @StaceyAbrams was pivotal to winning Georgia. Folks: Stacey & her team were pivotal to flipping Wisconsin too. And every other battleground. They worked with us to build massive, supercharged voter protection teams—starting *early.* — Ben Wikler (@benwikler) November 6, 2020
This month’s election, however, saw far fewer allegations of voter suppression than Georgia’s June primary. “The primary may have served as a shakedown,” says Bullock. “Things seemed to go smoothly.”
Abrams’s book about the cause of voting rights was released this summer, shortly after that Georgia primary.
“It should also show that progress is possible, especially when we don’t allow voter suppression to defeat us and instead use it to galvanize us,” Abrams said in June of the primary election. “We saw record turnout. That record turnout did not diminish the existence of suppression, but it challenged it. We have the power now to demand better.”


fortune--2020-11-06--AstraZeneca’s stock is soaring on COVID, but the pandemic has dented its growth

AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, is one of the leaders in the race to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market, a position that has helped boost its stock to record highs and made it one of the most valuable companies in London’s FTSE 100 index.
But the company’s third-quarter earnings, released earlier this week, should be a reality check for investors.
While Pascal Soriot, the company’s chief executive officer, said AstraZeneca was on track to deliver results from Phase III clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year, and discounted reports that the company will miss deadlines for delivering tens of millions of doses to the U.K. government, the link between the firm’s COVID-19 vaccine and its future earnings potential are tenuous at best.
After all, it is still unclear if the vaccine, which AstraZeneca is developing in partnership with scientists from the University of Oxford, will actually work.
Even if it does, AstraZeneca has promised to make no money from the vaccine until the pandemic is over—and it remains unclear how big a money spinner the vaccine will be in the longer term, even if the whole world requires an annual vaccination against the disease, similar to the seasonal flu. AstraZeneca has promised to keep the vaccine’s price low, at least in the developing world, in perpetuity. Analysts at Jefferies estimate that the vaccine might boost AstraZeneca’s shares by about 3% at most.
Instead, AstraZeneca’s future earnings potential is entirely predicated on its performance in three main areas: oncology; cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic disease; and respiratory illness and immunotherapy.
And here AstraZeneca’s third-quarter results should have been sobering. The pandemic, which has slowed diagnosis and treatment of some patients with serious medical conditions, has slowed AstraZeneca’s drug sales. The company’s revenues in the third quarter limped forward at just 3%, and its earnings narrowly missed analysts’ consensus forecasts.
Oncology has remained the company’s best-performing area, with revenues increasing 13% at constant exchange rates, lead by sales of Tagrisso, its lung cancer blockbuster, which saw revenues up 30% for the quarter compared with the same period in 2019. But sales in its cardiovascular and renal medicines were weaker, up just 8% in constant currency. Sales of its respiratory and immunology drugs, meanwhile, fell 12%.
The company has seen a string of regulatory approvals for its oncology and cardiovascular products this year, and it has a number of promising clinical trials underway for specialized cancer therapies, such as Lynparza, which may be successful in treating several different types of cancer, as well as breast cancer treatment Enhertu and blood cancer drug Calquence.
But the fact remains that while these medicines could be future blockbusters, there is not much in AstraZeneca’s current revenue and profit picture to underpin the 33% increase in the company’s share price since the start of the pandemic.
Soaring debt
Meanwhile, the company has continued to borrow heavily to meet its dividends and make big lump sum payments to joint-venture partners, such as Japanese pharma company Daiichi Sankyo, with which it is developing several cancer therapies: AstraZeneca’s net debt has climbed $1.86 billion so far this year.
In light of this, the sluggish growth in AstraZeneca’s top line may be particularly worrying, since Soriot’s strategy has been to spend heavily on R&D and partnerships to rebuild the company’s product pipeline, with the expectation that profits will eventually follow. Back in 2014, during its bruising effort to see off a hostile takeover attempt by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer, the CEO had promised shareholders that AstraZeneca would reach $45 billion in annual sales by 2023. With a current run rate of only $26 billion, the company has a long way to go.
The disconnect between AstraZeneca’s middling profit and cash flow growth and its rocketing share price is one reason some think the company may be eager to do a deal: using its richly-priced stock as currency to purchase a rival. That logic helped propel market rumors—neither confirmed nor denied by the company—that it approached U.S. drugmaker Gilead about a merger back in May. While that deal never materialized, a tie-up with another pharmaceutical company remains a distinct possibility.
Back in July, Soriot told Fortune that analysts who have been critical of the company’s valuation, pointing out its perennial weak cash flows and tendency to use disposals of legacy drug units to hit its earnings targets, were like people who “looked at their shoes rather than looking at the horizon.”
But, as this week’s earnings announcement shows, the horizon remains shrouded in fog—and the ground beneath the company’s feet is rough. AstraZeneca’s share price continues to rest on faith in Soriot’s vision and his soothing reassurances rather than on rock-solid fundamentals.


fortune--2020-11-06--Stock rally falters, yields climb as vote count continues

Wall Street’s best week since April is taking its first breather on Friday, and stocks are slipping following their big rally on enthusiasm about the upside of potential gridlock in Washington.
Optimism was still pumping through other areas of the market, though, and Treasury yields climbed after a report showed U.S. employers hired more workers last month than economists expected. They’re the latest swings in a wild week dominated by Tuesday’s election, where the winner of the White House is still unknown.
The S&P 500 was down 0.4% in midday trading, though it remains 6.8% higher for the week. It had jumped at least 1.2% in each of the last four days, with the gains accelerating after early results indicated control of Congress may remain split between Democrats and Republicans. That raised investors’ expectations that business-friendly policies may stick around, regardless of who wins the presidency.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 123 points, or 0.4%, at 28,266, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% lower.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 0.81% from 0.78% late Thursday after the U.S. government said employers added 638,000 jobs last month. The stronger-than-expected tally suggests the economic recovery may still be intact, though it also marked another slowdown in monthly job growth.
The rally helped the 10-year Treasury yield claw back some of its recent slide. It had been above 0.90% earlier this week when expectations were rising that a Democratic sweep of Tuesday’s elections could open the door for a big stimulus effort for the economy.
Electoral results so far, though, have sharply cut the prospects for such a “blue wave.” Democrat Joe Biden looks to be closing in on the presidency, with votes still being counted in several key states, but Republicans held onto several seats in the Senate that were considered vulnerable.
The upside of gridlock for markets is that it may prevent Democrats from approving some of the measures investors feared, such as higher tax rates and tougher antitrust policies for big technology companies. But the downside is that a still-divided Washington makes any support package for the economy coming from Congress likely to be less generous than if Democrats had swept the election.
Investors and economists say the economy needs such stimulus, particularly when the country’s new coronavirus cases are setting records once again. Europe is also facing a troubling rise in infections, and governments there have already brought back restrictions on businesses in hopes of slowing the spread.
Even if the strictest lockdowns don’t return in the United States, the worry is that the worsening pandemic will scare consumers by itself and erase profits for businesses.
The Federal Reserve still has the accelerator floored on its support for the economy, “so the wildcard for the recovery is whether Congress and whichever future Administration is willing to step up with sensibly crafted, and well-targeted, fiscal policy to support the recovery until the pandemic is under greater control,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.
Another risk for the market is that of a drawn-out, disputed election for the presidency. Markets see cause for optimism if either Biden or President Donald Trump wins, and what investors want more than anything is for a clear winner to emerge.
Biden appears to be closing in on the needed electoral votes to win, but Trump took to the White House briefing room on Thursday evening to launch a litany of claims, without proof, about how Democrats were trying to unfairly deprive him of a second term.
His campaign has already filed legal challenges in several states. If the election drags on through court challenges, the resulting rise in uncertainty could send stocks spinning, analysts say.
“Financial markets probably will look past the lawsuits, if Biden can win without Pennsylvania or Georgia,” said Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
Control of the Senate by Republicans is also still not a certainty, even if indications lean that way. A surprise there could upset markets, which have rallied so strongly this week.
Among Wall Street’s biggest losers Friday was Live Nation Entertainment, whose shares slumped 4.6%. It reported a worse loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected as the pandemic throttles the concert and live-entertainment industries.
In European stock markets, France’s CAC 40 fell 0.3% and Germany’s DAX lost 0.5%. The FTSE 100 in London rose 0.3%.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.9%, South Korea’s Kospi added 0.1% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 0.1%. Stocks in Shanghai slipped 0.2%.
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AP Business Writer Joe McDonald contributed.