Your Evening Briefing
Your Evening Briefing
It may be the summer high season, filled with vacations, beach outings and barbecues, but it’s also a popular time of year for natural disasters. Specifically, hurricanes. Sure, it’s been a bit of a cyclonic yawn in the Atlantic so far, but don’t be fooled: The next six weeks are regularly the most dangerous and active time for storms to develop.
Here are today’s top stories
Following yesterday’s nightmare on Wall Street, U.S. stocks finished the day higher after a volatile session. Treasury yields, however, plummeted to levels unseen in years. Soothsayers have been warning for awhile now that a recession is just around the corner. Investors are worried that they may finally be right.
The death of Jeffrey Epstein—with questions flying over whether guards were checking on him and the removal of his suicide watch—just got much darker. The Justice Department quickly labeled the alleged sex trafficker’s death in federal custody as an apparent suicide, but a broken bone found in Epstein’s neck may be more in line with homicide.
U.S. President Donald Trump told Israel it should bar two Muslim Congresswoman from visiting. The women were two of the four Trump has attacked with language widely criticized as racist. Israel decided to bar the representatives, despite a statement last month by its ambassador that no members of Congress would be kept out. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Israel’s decision “is a sign of weakness.” Eli Lake, in Bloomberg Opinion, had something similar to say.
Since the American Civil War, farmers have been turning the desert green with Colorado River water. Now they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars off of city folks who want some of the water, too. The problem is that agricultural communities have been using too much of it. More than a century of overuse, combined with climate change, is bringing a reckoning to the Southwest, and maybe to the rest of the country.
Back in March 1979, America flirted with its own Chernobyl. Three Mile Island came close to being a full-blown cataclysm. Instead, it turned the nation against nuclear energy. Now the notorious complex is closing—just as some say it still has a role to play in the battle against global warming.
Pricey gym chain Equinox is struggling to smother a growing brushfire as members quit over its association with billionaire real estate magnate Stephen Ross, a fundraiser for Trump. Other fitness companies, like cycling chain Flywheel, have a more mundane problem: competition.
What’s Joe Weisenthal thinking about? The Bloomberg news director said he’s trying to figure out why so many people have it in for meat-alternative superstar Beyond Meat. Sure, the stock is pricey and it still loses money. But Joe thinks all the haters are using the company as a political target, since it’s the earth-friendly answer to industrial meat makers who feed climate change. And, Joe says, eating meat is apparently associated with manliness, so that may be part of it, too.
What you’ll need to know tomorrow
- China is calling Trump’s bluff on tariffs and Hong Kong.
- Japan is now America’s largest creditor, not China.
- Turkey’s biggest bank dumps Venezuela, avoiding U.S. wrath.
- Julian Castro has proposed a new inherited wealth tax.
- Bernie Madoff’s nemesis has turned his sights on General Electric.
- Boycotting donors may do damage to the American museum.
- Asia’s richest man is grooming heirs to his $50 billion fortune.
What you’ll want to read tonight in Pursuits
Unless you’re developing a fertilizer, you probably don’t expect to disrupt the golf industry from the spare room of a sewage company. But that’s where Dean Snell found himself four years ago, holed up in an office with a single computer. “In the mornings, we were walking past the trucks that pump out the port-a-johns,” he says with a laugh. Now he’s part of a massive disruption of the $420 million golf ball market.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.