| | | | | | | Presented By Google | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · Jul 19, 2022 | | Happy Tuesday. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,480 words ... 5½ mins. Edited by Noah Bressner. 😷 Situational awareness: Dr. Anthony Fauci, 81, says he plans to retire by the end of President Biden's current term, which ends in January 2025. He's been in his current job since 1984 — 38 years. | | | | | | 🗳️ 1 big thing: No yoga voters | This isn't an ad by Republican Dan Cox, a candidate for Maryland governor in today's primary. It's a Democratic ad. Screenshot: YouTubeIn today's gubernatorial primary in Maryland, Democrats are boosting a hard-right Republican, figuring he'll be an easier target in November. - Dems are doing it by targeting an almost comically specific voter: She loves hunting and country music ... but has no interest in yoga or public libraries.
Axios' Lachlan Markay discovered that menu by digging into the Meta ad-targeting data for a Democratic Governors Association ad campaign touting Republican Dan Cox's conservative bona fides. - It's one of a handful of GOP primaries across the country where Dems have meddled on behalf of hard-right Republicans — seen as weaker for November than more moderate contenders.
Why it matters: The Facebook and Instagram data offer an unusually raw look at how political operatives slice and dice voter groups. What's happening: Today's primary pits Cox, who's been endorsed by former President Trump, against Kelly Schulz, who's backed by Gov. Larry Hogan, a centrist Republican. - They're running to replace Hogan, who's term-limited, The crowded Democratic field includes former DNC Chair Tom Perez.
Screenshot: Meta ad disclosure data The intrigue: To boost the Trumpy candidate, Dems are targeting people interested in hunting, fishing, yachting, baseball, country music and the petroleum industry. - They're also targeting people in the wealthiest 5% of U.S. ZIP codes, which include the high-end Montgomery County areas of Bethesda, Potomac and Chevy Chase.
The ad targeting specifically excludes Facebook and Instagram users interested in yoga, environmental science, "education and libraries" and "social change." |     | | | | | | 2. Wall Street's COVID-era golden age is over |  | | | Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios | | | | Profits for America's biggest banks are shrinking with the end of "easy money" policies that made the COVID era a boom time on Wall Street, Matt Phillips writes in Axios Markets. What's new: The latest earnings reports. The big picture: The free-money era on Wall Street — a side effect of the emergency monetary policies the Fed used to keep the pandemic from destroying the economy — has more or less ended over the last few months. Backstory: Starting in March 2020, the Fed slashed interest rates to near zero — and began printing what would ultimately be several trillion dollars and pumping them into financial markets. - That supercharged Wall Street businesses — running public stock offerings and corporate bond sales, advising and financing big mergers and acquisitions and operating trading desks.
- Bank share prices surged. A year after the stock market bottomed on March 23, 2020, Morgan Stanley was up nearly 200%. Goldman Sachs was up about 150%. Bank of America and Citigroup had doubled. (The S&P 500 was up about 75% over that time.)
What's happening: Interest rates have surged this year, rapidly changing the conditions in financial markets and slowing down bubbly businesses. - High rates crushed stock prices and pushed the S&P 500 into a bear market, dissuading companies from selling shares.
- The business of managing corporate bond offerings slumped as interest rates rose.
Reality check: It's not all bad on Wall Street. - Volatile market conditions can be good for bank trading desks that make the right calls. Trading was a bright spot for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup this quarter.
- Higher interest rates can boost the amount of money banks make by charging interest. (Bank of America did just that.)
💰 Get the Axios Business Suite. | | | | | | | | 3. 📊 Axios-Ipsos poll: We'll never be rid of COVID |  Data: Axios/Ipsos poll. Chart: Simran Parwani/Axios 78% of Americans think we won't be rid of COVID in our lifetimes, Axios senior health care editor Adriel Bettelheim writes from a new installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index. - Why it matters: The poll is new evidence that most Americans have moved past the pandemic, and are more focused on inflation and making ends meet than what variant is spreading.
Keep reading. | | | | | | | | A message from Google | | Making sign-in safer with two-step verification | | |  | | | | Adding two-step verification to your account is the best thing you can do to help prevent cyberattacks. That's why Google has made it easy to sign into your account with this additional layer of protection. Just one tap and you're in. Learn more. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Ken Cedeno/Reuters Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska, in Washington for a series of high-profile meetings, is greeted by USAID Administrator Samantha Power at the Ronald Reagan Building yesterday. | | | | | | | | 5. Experts saw Europe's dire heat coming | | The heat wave wreaking havoc on Western Europe signals the arrival of a new era: extreme heat events that would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global warming, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes. - Why it matters: The fact that we're here — deadly extreme heat virtually shutting down major industrialized nations, with emissions not cut meaningfully despite years of warnings — is baffling to scientists.
🇬🇧 Last night was Britain's hottest ever — and today is forecast to be its hottest day ever, as Europe's historic heat wave spreads north. Temperatures are forecast to soar above 104°F in the U.K. today. Such temperatures can be deadly even to healthy people. - Climate scientist Simon Lee says 3 of the 4 hottest days in U.K. history have been in the last 4 years.
🇫🇷 Parts of France are experiencing record highs, with temperatures in the southwest climbing to 108.68°F yesterday. - Massive wildfires have been burning in southwest France, and in Spain and Portugal, displacing thousands.
💭 What we're hearing: The calamity has left some climate scientists shaken and dejected at how prescient their warnings were — yet how little the global agenda has changed. - Andrea Dutton, a climate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us via email: "[T]his summer will be one of the coolest for the rest of our lifetimes unless we decide to treat the climate crisis like the emergency that it is."
Michael Wehner of the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who studies heat extremes, said: "To my great disappointment, we were right." | | | | | | | | 6. 🏛️ First look: Jan. 6 report will be major publishing event |  | | | Cover: Twelve Books | | | | We don't yet know when the House Jan. 6 committee will issue its report. But when it does, it'll get the treatment seen in the past for the Watergate and 9/11 reports: - Twelve Books, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, will announce later today that it plans to publish "The January 6 Report" in partnership with The New York Times.
- The edition will include "exclusive reporting, eyewitness accounts and analysis ... from New York Times reporters who've covered the story from the beginning."
Because the report is in the public domain, expect versions from multiple publishers. Chairman Bennie Thompson gavels last week's hearing closed. Photo: Shawn Thew/Pool via Reuters ⚡ Committee plans multiple reports: The House Jan. 6 committee now plans to issue a "scaled-back" preliminary report, likely in September, to be followed by the long-planned full report, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told Axios' Andrew Solender and other reporters at the Capitol. - "We're just getting a significant amount of information we didn't have access to, and so because of that ... we can't meet what we felt was an optimistic timeline," Thompson said, citing the panel's subpoena of the Secret Service on Friday.
- Thompson said the panel will hold a public hearing on the interim report and "probably do another" on the full report.
🔮 What's next ... Thursday's prime-time hearing (Hearing 8) will include live testimony from two Trump officials who resigned on Jan. 6: former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews. —Axios' Alayna Treene | | | | | | | | 7. 🚙 GM CEO vows to stay downtown | | Renaissance Center, headquarters for GM, seen from the Detroit River. Photo: Paul Sancya/AP CEO Mary Barra says GM will keep its HQ in the seven-building downtown Detroit complex that includes Michigan's tallest building. - "Our headquarters will always be in Detroit, in the RenCen," Barra said in an interview with AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher, using the name locals give the Renaissance Center, the centerpiece of the city's skyline just across the Detroit River from Canada.
- "Right now the plan is for it to be at the Renaissance Center. That's our home."
Barra qualified her remarks, saying she can't predict what will happen in five, 10 or 15 years. - GM takes up about 1½ towers in the RenCen, built in the 1970s by a civic group led by Henry Ford II.
- Much of GM's workforce, including product development and engineering, is north of the city in suburban Warren. After GM's 2009 bankruptcy, the company considered moving its HQ there.
🏡 Get Axios Local — covering America, from America. | | | | | | | | 8. ⚾ All-Star Game's new tiebreaker | The Washington Nationals' Juan Soto won yesterday's All-Star Home Run Derby at Dodger Stadium. Photo: Abbie Parr/AP Lots of fans — and players — will be rooting for a tie after nine innings at the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium tonight, AP's Ronald Blum writes. - In that case, a Home Run Derby will decide whether the winner is the National or American league.
How it works: Three players from each league would take three swings apiece to decide the final result. - With the All-Star Home Run Derby always popular the night before the game, Major League Baseball decided to make a slugging showcase part of the Midsummer Classic.
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