Wednesday, April 6, 2022

☕️ That’s a lotta satellites

Shein is worth as much as SpaceX...
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Morning Brew

E*TRADE

Good morning. Our colleagues at the Sidekick newsletter have compiled a sweet, sweet collection of jobs-focused content to help you make informed decisions about your career this year. Sound interesting? Check it out here.

Max Knoblauch, Jamie Wilde, Neal Freyman

MARKETS

Nasdaq

14,204.17

S&P

4,525.12

Dow

34,641.18

10-Year

2.554%

Bitcoin

$45,892.38

Salesforce

$210.14

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 9:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

  • Markets: Stocks went from bad to worse after Fed Governor Lael Brainard said it was "of paramount importance to get inflation down." The threat of aggressive action from the central bank stung tech stocks, which are disproportionately affected by tighter monetary policy.

SPACE

The Amazon of space will be Amazon

Photo illustration of a constellation of Amazon satellites spelling out the company name Illustration: Dianna "Mick" McDougall, Photos: Getty Images

Space race 2.0, or "The Battle To Become the Internet King," is heating up. Yesterday, Amazon announced a massive multibillion-dollar investment in its satellite internet service.

Project Kuiper, Amazon's answer to SpaceX's Starlink, secured up to 83 launches in the next five years to ferry its proposed fleet of more than 3,000 satellites into orbit. If completed, the satellite constellation would provide broadband internet service to consumers, businesses, and government agencies.

Deals with three separate rocket companies have been inked for the launches.

  • United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will conduct 38.
  • Arianespace, which recently launched the James Webb telescope, will conduct 18.
  • Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's true love aside from the Amazon Lord of the Rings show, will conduct at least 12 (with the potential for an additional 15).

Notably absent from the list is Elon Musk's SpaceX, which dominates the commercial launching business with more than 50% of the global market share excluding China as of 2021. The choice to bypass SpaceX is a clear signal that Project Kuiper will be competing directly with Starlink in the broadband market.

Bezos vs. Musk: In Space

After all, it's not unheard of for a competitor to launch a space company's satellites. Last month, when its deal with Russia fell through amid the war in Ukraine, OneWeb (SpaceX's primary competitor in the market) inked a satellite launch deal with Musk's space company.

But the Musk–⁠Bezos rivalry goes deep. The two founders and their respective companies have been battling it out for orbital supremacy for years now, competing for lucrative government contracts and trading criticisms of one another's space ventures.

  • Last year, when NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin sued the agency, but lost.
  • In response to the challenge, Musk tweeted, "Can't get it up (to orbit) lol" about Bezos.
  • Bezos has also criticized the idea of living on Mars—central to SpaceX's vision for the future—saying living on Mount Everest would be a paradise in comparison.

Amazon and Blue Origin will have some catching up to do, though. Starlink has already launched around 1,900 satellites and has about 250,000 subscribers.—MK

        

WORLD

Tour de headlines

President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, addresses a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York City Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

The West cranks up the economic heat on Russia. The US barred Russia from paying its debts in US dollars through American banks, increasing the risk of a Russian default. Western governments will also announce more sanctions against Russia today in response to reports of civilian massacres in Kyiv's suburbs.

Elon Musk joins Twitter's board. That didn't take long. One day after Musk's 9.2% stake in Twitter was revealed, CEO Parag Agrawal introduced him as the company's newest director, saying Musk was both a "passionate believer and intense critic" of Twitter. Musk promised "significant improvements" in the coming months, but he won't be able to own more than 14.9% of Twitter stock while on the board, per the deal terms.

JetBlue thinks it could use a splash of yellow. The airline made a $3.6 billion offer for Spirit Airlines, sending Spirit shares up more than 22%. JetBlue's offer could start a bidding war with Frontier, which already agreed to merge with Spirit less than two months ago. Spirit, blushing from all the newfound attention, said it would evaluate JetBlue's proposal.

        

ECONOMY

The Buzz Killingtons are predicting a recession

Buzz Killington on Family Guy Family Guy/FOX

Deutsche Bank became the first major bank to predict that the US economy will fall into a recession late next year. Its argument: The Fed was too late to the rate-hike game and will not be able to achieve its goal of bringing down inflation without sending economic growth into reverse.

  • Sound smart: A recession is typically defined as two straight quarters of negative gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, in a recession, the economy is shrinking.

While Deutsche Bank is the only one that went full Babe Ruth and made the call, other prominent finance folks say there's a pretty good chance that a recession will occur. Moody's Analytics put the odds of one at 33% (at least), Goldman Sachs estimates there's a 35% chance, and former president of the New York Fed, William Dudley, said it was "virtually inevitable"—so let's go with 99%.

If a recession does arrive, economists tend to agree that it wouldn't hit for at least a year and would be as mild as an LA Chargers fan. Deutsche Bank predicted that unemployment would peak above 5% in 2024 (compared to 14.7% in 2020), helping bring inflation down to the Fed's target level by the end of that year.—NF

        

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GRAB BAG

Key performance indicators

David Solomon Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Safe & Sound

Stat: A record 236,000 people globally applied for internships at Goldman Sachs, meaning the number of college students applying to be future DJ D-Sols jumped 16% over 2021, according to CNBC. The acceptance rate for a Goldman internship is 1.5%.

Quote: "I don't show up to an event unless I think I can win it."

Tiger Woods said he planned to play in this week's Masters golf tournament, just over a year after he was hospitalized following a serious car crash. Woods said it wasn't the golf that would prevent him from playing well—walking the course would be the biggest hurdle.

Read: The future of the dollar. (Chartbook)

        

RETAIL

The fast-fashion site worth as much as SpaceX

Screenshots of Shein haul videos Shein via Instagram

Shein just nabbed a gigantic $100 billion valuation in its most recent funding round, per the WSJ. The fast-fashion brand is best known for turning that matching set you saw on TikTok into an affordable dupe within three days—and then partnering with influencers like Addison Rae to promote it.

Shein's reported $100 billion valuation means…

  • It's worth more than H&M and Zara combined.
  • It's worth as much as SpaceX and $5 billion more than the payments giant Stripe.

In other words, it might be time to tear up the narrative about young consumers opting for sustainable clothing over fast fashion, which has been criticized for the environmental impact of its heavy use of plastic and petrochemicals.

The backstory: Founded in 2008, the online retailer (it doesn't have a single store) was a tiny operation based in Nanjing, China, that specialized in wedding dresses. But then it expanded its focus to women's fashion and had a better pandemic than tie-dye, surpassing its rivals—Forever 21, H&M, and Zara—in terms of sales this summer, according to Earnest Research. It also grew its valuation from $15 billion to $100 billion in the span of 20 months.

Looking ahead…Morgan Stanley predicts Shein could pull in $20 billion in revenue this year, making it the fourth-largest apparel company in the world by sales.—JW

        

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

  • The Biden administration will reportedly extend the student loan freeze through Aug. 31 in an announcement today.
  • Mortgage rates spiked to above 5% for the first time since 2018.
  • The UK, in trying to position itself as a hub for cryptocurrencies, will issue its own NFT by this summer.
  • Fortnite raised $144 million for Ukraine relief efforts in two weeks.

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BREW'S BETS

Don't make life too hard: Here are 100 ways to improve your life without even trying.

Marcel is back: In the trailer for the upcoming A24 film Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, he's on a quest to find his family.

Daily crypto knowledge: If you're into all the things the cool kids are talking about, like Web3, NFTs, and digital assets—check out Blockworks, the newsletter delivering the latest trends and news in those markets.

GAMES

The puzzle section

Word Search: How well do you know the planets of the solar system? Try to identify the heavenly bodies in today's Word Search.

For the gram

Can you find the grammatical errors in the following WSJ sentences?

  1. The semiautonomous city, which until January logged less than 13,000 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, is discovering 6,000 a day.
  2. Economists had forecasted 5.5% growth.
  3. One day while swimming laps, the coach's whistle blew.
  4. Is a single boiled egg surrounded by a layer of ground meat enough to comprise a meal?

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ANSWER

  1. Fewer than 13,000, since the cases are countable.
  2. It should be "forecast" for the past tense and past participle.
  3. Dangler. The coach's whistle doesn't swim laps.
  4. It should be either "constitute" or "compose" a meal, not comprise.

✳︎ A Note From E*TRADE

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The material provided by E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley or any of its direct or indirect subsidiaries (E*TRADE) is for educational purposes only and is not an individualized recommendation. This information neither is, nor should be construed as, an offer or a solicitation of an offer, or a recommendation, to buy, sell, or hold any security, financial product, or instrument discussed herein, or to open a particular account or to engage in any specific investment strategy.

Consolidation is not right for everyone, so you should carefully consider your options. Before deciding whether to retain assets in a retirement plan account through a former employer, roll them over to a qualified retirement plan account through a new employer (if one is available and rollovers are permitted), or roll them over to an IRA, an investor should consider all his or her options and the various factors including, but not limited to, the differences in investment options, fees and expenses, services, the exceptions to the early withdrawal penalties, protection from creditors and legal judgments, required minimum distributions, the tax treatment of employer stock (if held in the qualified retirement plan account), and the availability of plan loans (i.e., loans are not permitted from IRAs, and the availability of loans from a qualified retirement plan will depend on the terms of the plan). For additional information, view the FINRA Website.

E*TRADE Securities LLC, Member SIPC, and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, Member SIPC, are separate and affiliated subsidiaries of Morgan Stanley.

         

Written by Jamie Wilde, Max Knoblauch, and Neal Freyman

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