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More companies are cancelling their Facebook advertising campaigns amid the #StopHateForProfit boycott, a movement aiming to hold social media and tech companies like Facebook accountable for hate speech and online harassment on their platforms.

However, as Statista’s Willem Roper notes, while large companies like Target, Microsoft, Starbucks and others are removing ads from Facebook, revenue data for the social media giant shows just how little it affects the company’s overall advertising profits.

You will find more infographics at Statista

According to the Wall Street Journal, the top eight boycotting companies by spending made up just $57 million of Facebook’s advertising revenue in May. Microsoft, the largest, spent roughly $10.4 million, and Starbucks was right behind with around $8.1 million. Those top eight were just over 10 percent of what the top 100 U.S. advertisers spent on Facebook for the month. Compare those numbers to $34 billion – what Facebook made from just U.S. and Canada companies in 2019. Globally, Facebook made nearly $70 billion in 2019 from advertising revenue alone.

While large companies boycotting Facebook attract news headlines, these numbers show that they have very little impact on the company’s overall advertising revenue.

The Wall Street Journal also showed how 76 percent of Facebook’s total $69 billion in global advertising revenue is from small to medium-sized companies, with just 24 percent from larger corporations and companies.

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Znamya Truda, a Russian professional soccer team, has announced that Ivan Zaborovsky, a goalkeeper for the team, went to intensive care after being struck by lightning during training.

People being seriously harmed or killed by lightning strikes is rare. In America, the United States government’s National Weather Service relays that, in the ten years of 2009 through 2018, there were an average of 27 deaths and 243 estimated injuries each year from lightning countrywide. While the risk of an individual being struck by lightning is real, it is also quite small. The National Weather Service lays out the likelihood as follows: a one in 1,222,000 chance of being struck by lightning in a given year and a one in 15,300 chance of being struck in one’s lifetime.

A professional athlete like Zaborovsky being injured by lightning is a very unusual occurrence. In contrast, we hear regularly of professional athletes from just about every sport testing positive for coronavirus. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), for example, 25 players, about seven percent of NBA players, have tested positive for coronavirus in testing of players in the last couple weeks. Plenty of athletes in other professional sports leagues have also tested positive. Other professional sports players surely have had coronavirus but were never tested because they had no to minor health issues at the time.

Where are the many intensive care hospitalizations and deaths among these athletes who have had coronavirus? We are not hearing about that.

This makes sense given that coronavirus tends not to be a major threat to people the more healthy and young they are.

[ZH: In case you need a little more context on the COVID fatality rates, Holger Zschaepitz tweeted the following stunning chart: ]

DB’s Reid stresses major difference between Spanish flu and Covid-19. For Spanish flu of 1918, young working-age population were severely affected. Death rate from pneumonia among 25-34year-olds in US was >50% higher than that for 65-74year-olds. Remarkable difference to Covid-19 pic.twitter.com/w5fZPkimMQ

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) July 6, 2020

For many top athletes in their 20s and 30s it may make more sense to be worried about being struck by lightning than about having coronavirus. And, for competitors in outdoor sports, the threat from lightning can be well above that experienced by the average person. Many professional athletes, weighing the risks, may find it is a better decision to stay inside on occasion because of a thunderstorm than to avoid practicing and competing in their sports for an extended period because of worry about coronavirus.

It could be a drag for professional sports players to stay indoors now and then for a few minutes to a few hours to ensure they are not struck by lightning. Many of them may find doing so to be excessively cautious, especially if it prevents them from doing something they see as particularly important or desirable. In comparison, players may see eliminating their ability to compete for a significant chunk of their prime athletic years — to refrain from using and developing the skills they have dedicated their lives to mastering — as a tragedy, especially when that restriction is imposed due to a disease that is nearly certain not to threaten them with major negative health consequences.

Russian carmaker Aurus, best known for producing President Vladimir Putin’s new bulletproof limo, recently released a video showing one of its sedans slamming into a barrier at a high rate of speed with crash dummies inside.

The video was first released via Russian broadcaster Zvezda, and then reported by Sputnik, which shows two mannequins, one in the driver’s seat and another in the front passenger seat of the sedan, crashing into a barrier at 64kph (40mph). 

The luxury sedan, listed for a quarter-million dollars, or about 18 million rubles, had the front end completely crushed from the impact. However, both mannequins remained in the car, protected from a full coverage airbag system. 

Russia has dumped $190.6 million, or about 12 billion rubles, into the Aurus car program (includes a limousine, a sedan, a minivan, and an SUV). The automaker is set to begin series production of Putin’s bulletproof limo this year, which will be marketed to heads of states around the world. 

Aurus Senat 

Aurus Limo

Aurus Arsenal

Last year, Aurus sent the limo to Siberia for rugged testing, operated in -50°C (-58°F) conditions. 

Russia is trying to diversify its oil economy – now attempting to compete with high-end luxury automotive brands like Rolls Royce and Bentley.  

By Mustafa Zaidi, Research Director at Clarmond Wealth

As Hong Kong was being handed over in early July 1997, my old colleague and I began a series of short visits throughout the Pearl River Delta, from Macau to Shenzen to Canton; all rather sleepy spots relative to the towering buzz of Hong Kong. In Macau there was an unexpected statue of Jorge Alvares, the Portuguese explorer, who arrived here in 1513; he was soon followed a few years later by his colleague Rafael Perestrello, who happened to be a cousin of Christopher Columbus…so strange to think a single family produced explorers that sailed west to America and east to China.

At the end of our visit we concluded that the area had potential but given the lack of transport, communication and legal integration, it would be a very lengthy commitment and we reported back accordingly. It was too long term for the principals.

Today this long integration is on the verge of being complete and it will make the Pearl River Delta, now renamed as the “Greater Bay Area” (GBA), a rival to the great urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

To give a sense of the GBA its population is 71m and comprises ten key cities. The ‘Big Three’ are Hong Kong with GDP of$340bn, Shenzhen ($330bn) and Guangzhou ($320bn). The GDP of the whole GBA is $1.5tr. In comparison New York (pop. 20m) has a GDP of $1.6tr, San Francisco (pop. 7m) $800bn, and Tokyo (pop. 40m) $1.9tr.

The GBA is already one of the most valuable urban clusters on the globe and will certainly overtake its cousins. Over the last decade key road, rail, and bridge projects have been completed. Projects include the HK-Zuhai-Macau bridge, the Shenzhen-Zhongshan bridge, and high speed rail from Hong Kong to Guangzhou (the XRL). With completion of the transport and communication infrastructure now in sight, the final step is to bring the two Special Administration Regions (HK/Macau) into a seamless zone, where each city has specialisations: finance for HK, high tech manufacturing for Shenzhen, which is where Huawei is based along with its outlandish European-style campus called Oxhorn, Macau for entertainment, and Guangzhou for shipping; the other smaller cities will grow and find their own “flavor”.

The current step by step reduction of HK autonomy needs to be seen through the lens of the GBA, given that HK becomes a smaller component of the regional economy and a very small one of the national economy.

Hong Kong, as we wrote a year ago, is following a similar trajectory to Trieste, once the key city of commerce for the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became just another Italian city. The global commotion about HK misses how the current rulers see the status of HK in the larger GBA scheme, which for the Chinese Communist Party is going to be the engine of their growth – they are forecasting doubling over the next decade.

According to the New York Times, the U.S. Mint is upping its coin production after shortages of coins have been reported in the U.S. as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

On June 15, the Federal Reserve had first implemented quotas for distribution locations to further protect its coin inventories, which were running low. As a result, banks and other distributors of coins received less than what they ordered or even less than their usual allotments, according to the Times. Especially businesses are routinely turning to banks in order to receive coins and other tender to fill up their registers.

Chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, said that closures of parts of the economy due to COVID-19 were responsible for disrupting the normal flow of coins through the system.

Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that, according to numbers by the U.S. Mint, coin production for circulation has actually decreased during the last couple of years and because of COVID-19 restrictions for Mint workers, has had some particularly slow months in the first half of 2020.

In the second half of 2020, the Mint expects production increases to 1.2 billion coins in June and 1.35 billion coins per month for the rest of the year– which would add up to a projected total of 14.2 billion coins produced in 2020.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Members of the public who want to deposit coins into their banks to aid circulation can do so.

Officials also said that the public can also aid businesses and those who cannot operate without coins by paying electronically whenever possible.

Wouldn’t they love that?

Now that Hong Kong is facing a creeping monetary boycott by the US, and more importantly, by the US financial system as a result of its de facto annexation by China, a pesky question has emerged: how will China procure those much needed dollars which are oh so critical to keep the Chinese financial system, all $40 trillion of it, functioning smoothly. 

While there has been surprisingly little discussion of this critical topic in the financial media, which looking at soaring stocks in China and the US is left with the false impression that all is well, one person who has continued to hammer this topic home has been Rabobank’s Michael Every, who this morning once again raised the alert level over China’s USD access:

Note this South China Morning Post article titled “Time for China to decouple the yuan from US Dollar, former diplomat urges”. Zhou Li, a former deputy director of the CCP’s International Liaison Department is “the latest in a series of voices in China” to warn the USD Weapon is real and “has us by the throat”, will pose an “increasingly severe threat” to Chinese development –USD oil sanctions seen as a key area of vulnerability– and so preparations for gradual decoupling and CNY internationalisation should begin “now”. Li adds China should “give up the illusion” of friendship and instead prepare for full-fledged conflict with the US.

His specific proposal is to increase cross-border payments and clearing, local FX settlement, and maximize CNY usage in industrial supply chains. The problems in internationalizing CNY are manifold, however, which is why the USD weapon exists. The capital account would need to be opened, precipitating a collapse in CNY as money floods out.

So with the natural gateway for more inbound dollars suddenly clogged up, China has to find other, just as effective ways to attract US dollars into its economy: by drawing foreign investors into its stock market. Here is Every again:

To try to counter that, it’s China bubble time again – not just in property, but in stocks: the Shanghai exchange was up 4% at time of writing today, and 7% last week, as Chinese press openly talk up a new bull market –despite a flat economy– going so far as to imply this is part of the struggle between the “world’s powers”, according to Bloomberg: with different percentages, the same dynamic is of course true in the US. Yet for both this is lethal can-kicking at best that only creates far larger problems.

There is just one problem: if Beijing relies on existing inertia it will fail miserably, because as the following Chart of the week from Goldman shows, China-dedicated equity funds saw an 11th consecutive week of net outflows.

And as a result of the substantial outflows, Goldman believes that “underweight positioning may have contributed to the outsized gains in Chinese shares and the Yuan at the start of this week.”

Maybe, but what is far more likely is that Beijing turned on turbo boost in the infamous National Team, aka China’s Plunge Protection Team, which led to a stunning rally in Chinese equities since March, with the CSI300 surging 32% since its Q1 troughs, and 14% in the past 5 trading days, while the Shanghai Composite soared almost 6% on Monday, its biggest one day gain since the bubble of 2015.

So why the massive intervention and ramp of stocks by Beijing officials?

The answer is simple: taking a page of the Robinhood playbook, China is desperate to halt and reverse the massive equity outflows as it urgently needs the flow of US Dollars to reverse into Chinese markets, instead of away from. To do that, it needs to create an initial upward momentum in prices which halts the selling/outflows and prompts a reappraisal of Chinese asset values. Ideally, it will also capture the euphoria of US daytraders who will buy Chinese, not US stocks.

Whether China succeeds is unclear, however it simply has no option and must follow through this plan until the bitter end, even if it means blowing an even bigger stock bubble than in 2015.

And as we reported this morning, Beijing is clearly on board: realizing that the economy is far weaker than a SHCOMP print of 3,400 will support, Beijing still sent a message to the Chinese population when a front-page editorial in the state-owned China’s Securities Journal said that fostering a “healthy” bull market after the pandemic is now more important to the economy than ever.

Why? Because without the “bull market” the equity outflows would continue, and soon China will run out of dollars, an outcome which would have far more catastrophic financial, monetary and geopolitical consequences for both China and the the entire world than a 2nd (and 3rd and 4th) Covid wave, coupled with a Biden win and a permanently jammed Fed money printer.

And so far it’s working: the Shangai Composite is up 2% in early trading…

Like many of our readers, we first learned about Quibi last spring, when Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HP Enterprise, started doing the rounds on CNBC, sitting first for a lengthy interview with David Faber, then for a longer interview alongside Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Walt Disney Studios chairman and Dreamworks co-founder who was now the husband in this odd couple.

Together, they delivered their jargon-laden pitch: a “TV in your pocket” focusing on “white space” “short-form” “bites” bringing together “the best of Hollywood and the best of Silicon Valley.” Whitman’s description of Quibi – pronounced “Quibby” – was equal parts glib and startlingly short-sighted. Did these two billionaire boomers really think they knew the secret cheat code to crack the mobile-streaming market, and earn a seat at an increasingly crowded table? Just because Americans are watching ten times as much streaming video on their smartphones as they were in 2012? We just weren’t buying it.

At times, Whitman sounded so out of touch, we couldn’t help but chuckle. Just minutes into her first solo interview, she revealed that the name “Quibi” is a portmanteau of “Quick Bites” – “as you probably guessed”. It was then that we knew this would be a supremely entertaining corporate trainwreck. And like the blind leading the blind, Whitman and Katzenberg, both of whom staked a tremendous amount of capital on the venture, were taking their buddies along for the ride.

When the entire world shut down in March because of the coronavirus, just as Quibi was coming to market, we marveled at the timing: maybe Quibi wouldn’t crash and burn quite as quickly as we expected. But then the first leaked subscriber numbers hit. And they were really, really bad.

Despite an unprecedented marketing blitz featuring a procession of beloved celebrities, from Chance the Rapper, to Chrissy Teigen and beyond, the app had managed to rack up just 1.3 million subscribers, not even 1% of Netflix’s total subscriber base.

Apparently, Quibi had been so hyper-focused on the ‘TV in your pocket’ concept, that they built an app that was designed exclusively for mobile viewing. When they first tried to download Quibi, millions found that it simply didn’t have the functionality to play on a TV or laptop. And while watching a video on your phone might be ideal on the subway, it makes binge-watching content almost impossible.

And that, we realized, was Quibi’s biggest blunder: that Whitman and Katzenberg were somehow so focused on the “mobile” concept that they completely forgot about how millennials’ favorite activity is to snuggle up with a tub of Ben and Jerries and watch 10 episodes of “Friends” over the course of a Saturday afternoon. And at $4.99 for the ad-supported version, Quibi was basically just a crappier, more expensive version of YouTube, with an extremely limited library of (albeit premium) content that nobody really even wanted to watch.

Now, executives and employees are abandoning ship, and Whitman and Katzenberg are trying to navigate a turn-around starting with making the product more “binge-able”. But on Monday morning, New York Magazine delivered something we had long been waiting for: a long-form inside look at how “Quibi” came to be.

And boy did NY Mag deliver.

In order to establish immediate legitimacy in Hollywood in accordance with the stature of its founders, Quibi started paying the talent gobs of money – “$100,000 a minute”, one insider quipped. Producers were being paid production costs plus 20% to take the risk on an unproven platform. Katzenberg reckoned that if he poured a billion dollars into the content, the viewers would come –  the old “Field of Dreams” approach.

One comedian who went in for a pitch described Quibi’s lavish officers and the ‘cockiness’ of the team: everybody was acting like they had a guaranteed hit in hand.

“I can honestly say I’ve never been in such a cocky pitch environment,” Gairdner recalls. “I would describe the atmosphere as almost Wolf of Wall Street, not in terms of actual debauchery, but it’s an incredibly nice office that just goes and goes. They had two lobbies; you went in and checked in at a nice, big lobby, then you were moved to another lobby. There’s massive jars of expensive, nice-seeming candy everywhere. It’s sleek and modern, and you see hundreds of people passing by. And there’s this energy of people who really believe they’ve got the next big thing.”

Quibi was to launch in the spring of 2020 with 50 original shows, and another 125 were to be rolled out by the end of the first year. Recognizing the risk of making something for an unproven platform, Katzenberg typically offered to pay producers’ costs plus 20 percent. “People on Quibi have $100,000 a minute to make content,” Katzenberg tells me. “That doesn’t exist on other platforms.” Producers who went into meetings with him skeptical walked out thinking he might be onto something. “He pitched me at Nate ’n Al’s, and my eyes lit up,” recalls Jason Blum, whose horror-focused Blumhouse Productions was behind Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Get Out. Blum signed on to make Wolves and Villagers and, later, two other series.

And for a brief moment after the app launched on April 6, it looked like Quibi might have landed. It peaked at No. 3 most popular in the Apple app store before beginning a descent that has landed it at around No. 300 most popular. There are ad-supported version of bejeweled with more downloads than Quibi.

Now, the company appears to have set a land speed record for going from launch to the butt of late-night jokes.

That Quibi managed to spend ungodly amounts of money for high-gloss Hollywood content with A-list talent only to end up without a discernible hit has inspired a substantial amount of Schadenfreude. Jimmy Kimmel, hosting a virtual version of Disney-ABC’s annual upfront, said, “Here I am, standing here like a fucking fool with nobody watching. I feel like every show on Quibi right now.” Gairdner, who walked out of Quibi without a deal (“It was just clear that if we didn’t have a celebrity attached, they weren’t interested”), unveiled a satirical website called Swippi, in which longer videos are arbitrarily broken up into short chunks, sometimes in the middle of a scene. “We realized people want to take Swift Sips of content,” he says dryly.

Another detail: the ground-breaking “technology” that Whitman spoke of is the app’s “Turnstyle” technology, which allows users seemlessly flip their phone from vertical to horizontal and back without compromising the viewing experience. It’s arguably better than Netflix’s landscape technology.

During her initial round of interviews on CNBC, Whitman alluded to an affinity for the novelist Dan Brown.

Before Quibi even had a name, Katzenberg was singing the gospel of chapterized stories for your cell phone. “I believe there is going to be an enterprise ten years from now that will be as big as the television business is today,” he told a conference crowd in early 2017. He viewed the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, with its 105 chapters, as validation of the thesis that consumers want entertainment in small chunks. He believed that, despite most shortform video sites’ reliance on user-generated content, every medium has room for a premium offering. And he considered the TV streamers to be playing a different game altogether than what he was envisioning.

If anyone in Hollywood could conjure something new purely through force of will, it was Katzenberg, who, though he’s approaching 70, remains a not-so-young man in a hurry. An NYU dropout, he studied gambling for a time in order to run a club in the city, and he learned how to count cards well enough that he was banned from several Las Vegas casinos. He eventually landed a job as Barry Diller’s assistant at Paramount, where the patronizing nickname bestowed on him by Diller and Michael Eisner was “Golden Retriever.”

After recruiting Whitman, Katzenberg set about winning over “investors” to back his vision with an interesting scheme: for every dollar invested in Quibi by a major studio, Quibi would commit to spending on dollars.

Because NewTV’s point was to charge for content, it had to start out by raising an enormous amount of money in order to afford content worth charging for. In August 2018, just five months after Whitman’s arrival, Katzenberg announced that NewTV had raised $1 billion. (It would eventually amass a total of $1.75 billion.) Its biggest investors included Madrone Capital, an investment vehicle for the Walmart Waltons, and Alibaba, the Amazon of China. But the most important investors were those Katzenberg had brought aboard: every major studio, from Disney to Viacom to Comcast-Universal to 21st Century Fox to Sony. “People doubted that we’d ever be able to pull all the entertainment companies into one boat at one time to support the new venture,” he says. “In the 100-year history of Hollywood, that never happened.”

Without their support, NewTV would be locked out from all the best talent, who tend to have exclusive deals with studios, and from intellectual property like Reno 911! and Punk’d (another show Quibi rebooted), both of which are owned by ViacomCBS. Katzenberg was able to make hay of the studios’ involvement, too, as a show of industry support for his start-up, even though the investments were relatively small — “in the $20 million range,” a studio executive says.

From the studios’ perspective, the investment provided schmuck insurance in the event that NewTV took off, and perhaps most important, according to two studio veterans, the deals came with assurances that NewTV would spend an equal amount on services and products provided by the investor. This is known as “round-tripping.” If Disney invested $20 million, NewTV would commit to spending $20 million on content and production supplied by Disney. There was really nothing for the studios to lose. (“Many of them asked that Quibi reciprocate their level of investment,” a Quibi executive says. “Quibi did not agree to that.”)

Unsurprisingly, the name “Quibi” was an invention of Whitman and Katzenberg after they discovered that their first choice, “NewTV”, was taken.

The investments helped secure a slate of A-list directors and producers for the launch of the app, which was no longer called NewTV. (It turned out — whoops — that there was already a company named NewTV.) The new name was Quibi. Katzenberg had originally wanted to call it Omakase, after the sushi tasting menus he enjoyed at least once a week at Nobu Malibu. “That would have really won over Wisconsin,” a former insider notes. Ultimately, Quibi won the day. “They never asked staff to weigh in on it,” this person says. “People on staff thought it was cringey and would ask, ‘Is it too late to change it?’ Meg loved it.” Though arguably no sillier-sounding than Hulu, Quibi would be roundly mocked by people who thought it sounded like a “quinoa-based doggy snack” or “the cry of an attacking Ewok.”

Six months before launch, Whitman and Katzenberg had seen their relationships wither to the point where they were no longer on speaking terms. The two would frequently get into fights over Katzenberg dipping into areas that weren’t “his purview”.

When Quibi was preparing to move offices, “they had a huge fight when [the design consultant] took Jeffrey to see the new office without Meg knowing, because the new office was Meg’s purview,” says a person with firsthand knowledge of the company’s inner workings. (A Quibi executive denies that this happened.) Once Quibi had moved into the 49,000-square-foot space, “they carved up North and South Korea, and they drew a DMZ line each doesn’t cross.” Whitman sits on the third floor, Katzenberg on the fourth. “Katzenberg was in the content corner. Meg did everything else.” On occasion, Whitman would have to discourage Katzenberg from reaching out to people in departments she oversaw, with marketing being a particular flashpoint. “It was like, ‘Oh, Mom and Dad are fighting again,’ ” this source adds. (“We’ve formed a strong partnership based on strength and authenticity,” Whitman says. “We’re friends who admire and respect one another.”)

At some point during the process, somebody apparently challenged Katzenberg to explain why the world needed Quibi to break up content into “snackable” bits when it seemed consumers were already having an easy enough time doing that on their own. After this, Katzenberg set about trying to prove that Quibi was “different” by adding features that seemed to deliberately hamstring the product, like the fact that the initial iteration of Quibi couldn’t even be streamed to a TV.

To combat the idea that Quibi would be providing something that already existed, Katzenberg leaned into making Quibi seem different. To emphasize that this wasn’t just TV on your phone, he declared that Quibi wouldn’t even be available on your TV when the app launched. He also heavily hyped Turnstyle, and once Quibi was all in on this phone-only tech, the decision not to prioritize casting to TV was even harder to reconsider. In interviews, Katzenberg would adamantly emphasize Quibi’s novelty.

But the juiciest part of the New York Mag article came when the writer finally got around to the big question: what drove Katzenberg, and then Whitman, to believe that they had some special insight into the untapped desires of the millennial generation.

When pressed by the reporter on this topic, the two seemed at a loss.

People have wondered why Katzenberg and Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people. When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.” But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”

Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant. In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes. When Gal Gadot came to the offices and delivered an impassioned speech about wanting to elevate the voices of girls and women, Katzenberg wondered aloud whether she might become the new Jane Fonda and do a workout series for Quibi. (“Apparently, her face fell,” says a person briefed on the meeting.)

At a casting session this year, while watching a tape test for a Daily Essentials host who was a Black man with an Afro, Katzenberg said the man didn’t look “authoritative.” Content executive Shawna Thomas, an Emmy-winning journalist from Vice News and NBC, was used to the political incorrectness endemic to casting conversations, but as a discussion of the candidate’s hair went on and on, she felt increasingly uncomfortable and left the room to avoid becoming visibly upset. That evening, she and Katzenberg had a long phone chat in which she explained why she makes a point of wearing her hair in a natural style on TV — so that, say, a little Black girl watching MSNBC could see someone authoritative who didn’t conform to the predominant white American standard of beauty. Afterward, she felt Katzenberg had understood her. “The discussion was frank, honest, and positive and might not have gone as well at another company,” Thomas says.

Moreover, Quibi’s offices were stocked with young employees, but all of them knew that challenging the inherent biases of their two bosses was not a road to success. During an enterprise where even one well-placed dissenting voice might have averted a disaster – for instance, if somebody had just pointed out to Katzenberg that it makes no sense to deliberately cripple a product’s functionality just to try and stand out – maybe this whole disaster could have been averted. Or at least mitigated.

But the one line that everybody knew not to cross was, of course, the money: “You never dissented on that point,” recalled one employee, referring to the notion that millennials might not pay up for the product in numbers large enough to satisfy Whitman’s models. “Their fund-raise was predicated on a plan that showed revenue targets, so they could never unwind that.” By doing this, Katzenberg might have backed himself into a corner. When asked why Quibi didn’t try out a free ad-supported version, Katzenberg reportedly responded that “Literally,” he said, “you cannot do the math.”

In July, all of the subscribers who signed up for Quibi’s 90-day free trial will start being asked to pay for the content. In just a few weeks, the public might have a better idea of how many millennials are truly willing to pay up for Whitman’s vision.

And once that happens, well, let’s just say that one doesn’t need the discerning wit of Judge Chrissy Teigen to figure out what happens next.

China’s offshore yuan extended its spike in early Asia trading, pushing back below 7/USD – its strongest vs the greenback in almost four months…

That triggered weakness in the dollar…

US equity futures are tumbling back from early gains…

And gold is bid…

What is China doing?

Are they pumping the yuan and stocks to provide a cushion for when Trump’s rising rhetoric turns into executive orders?