The lights are looking a little dimmer lately (Georg Wendt/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
The lights are looking a little dimmer lately (Georg Wendt/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
Hey Snackers,
Don’t bad-mouth your cat Kiwi in front of your other cat Lunchbox if you don’t want her to hear about it: a new study found that cats recognize the names of the other felines they live with. (Side note: who’s commissioning these studies?)
Stocks fell again yesterday, sliding even closer toward bear-market territory. The S&P is now 19% below its January peak (bear market = 20% decline).
Down and to the right… Booming buy now, pay later (BNPL) startup Klarna reportedly wants to raise money at a valuation a full third lower than its last raise. Klarna became Europe’s most valuable fintech startup in June after it raised a chunk of change from SoftBank at a $46B valuation. But since then markets have plunged, forcing cash-strapped Klarna to fundraise at a reduced valuation — aka a “down round.”
What goes up… sometimes comes down. It wasn’t just Klarna: startups raised a record $600B from VCs last year, twice as much as the year before. But as tech stocks have fallen to Earth, so has investor confidence: startups raised 26% less $$ last quarter than at the same time last year.
Corrections aren’t choosy… They devalue public and private companies alike. Experts say private startups usually lag behind public companies in seeing the effects of market slumps. Shares of Affirm, a publicly listed Klarna rival, are down a staggering 75% this year— and now Klarna’s hurting too. It could spell trouble for private tech companies as public tech giants lost $1.3T in the early months of this year.
Bipartisanship lives… Democrats and Republicans agree on something: a bipartisan group of senators have introduced a bill that would force Google to break up its hugely lucrative ad biz. It’s one of the toothier antitrust bills winding its way through Congress.
Antitrust cheat sheet… The bill is aimed directly at Google, which brought in a whopping $55B from ads last quarter alone. But it’s not the only regulation targeting Big Tech’s market power that has found bipartisan momentum in DC. Also in play:
The window for lawmakers to make these laws is closing… Congress goes on recess in August, and then it’s election season (read: nothing gets done). In the likely event that Republicans win control of either the House or the Senate in November, antitrust legislation is unlikely to be a priority — especially now that polls show a shrinking number of Americans see it as one. That leaves the next two months as potentially do or die for any of these bills.
The average building wastes 30% of the energy it consumes
Authors of this Snacks own: shares of Apple, Amazon, and Google
ID: 2211560