Tractor Supply (TSC): up nicely today.
BK: increases its dividend. Whoo-hoo. Had been 31 cents for eight consecutive quarters. Will increase dividend by ten percent to 34 cents and authorizes repurchase of $6 billion of common stock.
Ten-year treasury watch: yield = 1.37% or thereabouts. Early this morning, the yield "flash-dropped" to 1.25%.
AAPL watch: closer to $150 than $149. But that is changing minute-to-minute today. Later: drops below $149.
Bolt: GM tells Chevy Bolt owners park it outside and away from structures. Link here.
Saudi: self-reporting -- its crude production rose by 383K bpd month-over-month, to slightly less than 9 million bopd. Link here.
Meme stocks:
- Melvin and Mapleland, The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2021;
- Melvin Capital, The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2021;
Morgan Stanley: doubles dividend and makes notable stock buyback announcement. Unusual for a bank.
Virgin Galactic: plunges. Link here. Posted yesterday, the freefall. Due to announcement that Virgin says it will authorize new stock equity sale.
Oman: link to Simon Watkins.
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Covid-19 -- The Japanese Olympics
From The LA Times:
Japan’s COVID cases rise as Olympics near
In a week, the now anachronistically named Tokyo 2020 Olympics will finally get underway.
It’s a moment Japan has long been preparing for — since March of last year when the Games were pushed back because of the pandemic; since 2016, when Japan’s then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the baton from Rio de Janeiro in a Super Mario get-up; since 2013, when the country first clinched its hard-fought bid.
Even so, the country heads into the Olympics with a resignation and a reckoning over how leaders handled a pandemic marring what should be a marquee moment for national pride. Many Japanese are thinking less about races and gold medals than the fact that Tokyo is in a fourth state of emergency. COVID-19 infections are again on the rise, and supply problems have stalled a vaccination program.
With a week to go until the opening ceremony and fears the highly infectious Delta variant will bring more danger, less than a third of Japan’s 120 million people have received one dose of the vaccine, and less than 20% are fully inoculated.
The best-case scenario the Japanese public can hope for is an uneventful Games that ends with the country — and the world — not much worse off than going into it. Hardly an Olympian aspiration.
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