Month: April 2023

Heavy explosions and gunfire have continued to rock parts of Sudan’s capital Khartoum and its twin city Omdurman despite a ceasefire. At least 500 people have been killed, including reportedly two American citizens, as fighting reaches two weeks amid the power struggle between two rival generals representing Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces.

“Many areas that saw very active fighting at the beginning have become quieter than before. Yet, I cannot say there is a total ceasefire in those places,” a Khartoum resident told Al Jazeera on Friday. “I don’t think anyone has gone to school in the last 14 days. I don’t think anyone has been to a hospital.”

A massive foreign evacuation effort involving many countries sending military transport planes has continued for the better part of a week. The United States administration, however, has said that it is not conducting a large-scale evacuation operation for the estimated 16,000 US citizens who live in Sudan, many of them dual nationals who have made the country their home. 

But this international rescue effort appears to now be coming under threat, after new reports that a Turkish evacuation plane came under gunfire while landing at Wadi Seyidna airport outside Khartoum. The aircraft, a C-130, had its fuel supply system damaged by the ground gunfire. 

The Turkish defense ministry confirmed the damage but without naming a culprit. “Light weapons were fired on our C-130 evacuation plane … Our plane landed safely. Although there are no injuries to our personnel, necessary repairs are being carried out on our aircraft,” it said.

The national army said the Rapid Support Forces of Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo mounted the attack on the plane as it was landing, but the RSF rejected the accusation as part of the national army “spreading lies”. 

“Our forces have remained strictly committed to the humanitarian truce that we agreed upon since midnight, and it is not true that we targeted any aircraft in the sky of Wadi Seyidna in Omdurman,” the RSF said. Fighting has been witnessed elsewhere in the country, which could signal a slide toward full-scale civil war, as the AFP is reporting 74 dead in two days of fighting in the West Darfur capital of El Geneina.

Sudan army and a rival force agree to extend an existing ceasefire even as battles rage.

Fighter jets have pounded paramilitaries in Khartoum while deadly fighting and looting flared in Darfurhttps://t.co/W2PQp0X2M1 pic.twitter.com/KwpzkAwkSj

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 28, 2023

The rival military factions reached an agreement to extend their ceasefire from midnight local time (22:00 GMT on Thursday) for an additional three days, but by many accounts it’s barely holding, if at all.

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

European equities should stay supported despite growth faltering somewhat as a global cyclical upturn driven by China builds momentum.

The initial look at 1Q euro-area GDP came in slightly below expectations, at 0.1% quarter-on-quarter, versus a 0.2% estimate, and 1.3% year-on-year versus 1.4%.

That is a far cry from weak expectations last year in the heat of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine and a sharp rise in energy prices. However, a lot of the positivity around Europe came from rock-bottom expectations that swung to comparatively euphoric once markets realized the worst wasn’t going to happen.

The chart below shows that economic surprises were greatest in soft, i.e. survey, data over the last year. Now, though, soft data is disappointing.

And hard data too are disappointing, with household, retail and labor releases all recently coming in lower than expectations.

We can see the soft-data weakness in the PMIs, which picked up from their lows, but are now mostly falling again.

However, sentiment can only take you so far and there will be a re-evaluation of Europe’s growth prospects as it is realized that just because the situation is not as bad as feared, that does not mean there is nothing at all to fear.

European equities have surfed the wave of this upswing in optimism, coming in ahead of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Japan this year. While they are beginning to reflect this less upbeat outlook, that does not mean they are doomed to lose all of their mojo.

Europe is highly sensitive to China and global growth, and the cyclical upswing that is gradually, but surely, building momentum as easing in China gains traction will keep European equities supported, and continuing to outperform the US.

Semiconductors are one of the best bellwethers of global cyclical growth, and after struggling through most of 2021 and 2022, chip stocks have bounced strongly, pointing to a rise in European earnings.

Revenues are the main positive support of European equity returns, compensating for the drag from margins and multiples. However, a pick-up in earnings should make up for the expected decline in revenues as the economy slows through the year, keeping prices supported.

In a slap to the face of all those who naively expected that the BOJ would finally unveil some hawkish pivot (ignoring the fact that it owns more than 100% of Japan GDP in JGBs, has a DV01 in the tens of billions, and any market recoil to a hawkish BOJ pivot would instantly implode the world’s 2nd biggest bond market) overnight the BOJ scrapped a key part of its forward guidance on interest rates in Kazuo Ueda’s first board meeting as governor, signaling the first step towards unwinding its ultra-loose monetary policy… an unwind which won’t come for over a year however, if ever, and by then Japan will be back in deflation with deeply negative rates anyway so nobody will remember any of this and the BOJ will be back on its merry debt monetization course.

Which is not to say the BOJ did nothing: with Japan’s inflation scorching and sticky above 3%…

… Kuroda’s successor Ueda had to do something, which is why the BOJ head announced a plan to review its past monetary policy moves, laying the groundwork to gradually phase out his predecessor’s massive stimulus programme. But not yet: for now the BOJ kept its ultra-low interest rates on Friday, and maintained a commitment to “patiently” keep policy accommodative while saying it would spend one to one-and-half years on the review, which will look into various unconventional monetary steps taken over the past 25 years during Japan’s battle with deflation and low inflation, Ueda said.

The idea was to use lessons learnt from the review in guiding policy during his five-year term, Ueda said, though he added that the BOJ could always change policy before concluding the review.  At the same time, the central bank removed a pledge from its guidance for interest rates to stay at “current or lower levels” in a move that yen bulls see giving the BOJ more leeway for a future policy tweak.

Ueda’s debut policy meeting marked a cautious start for the 71-year-old governor who took office this month, leaving room for him to make future changes but sending a clear signal to markets that he would be in no rush to do so.

In a news conference, the new chief said the broad-based review won’t be tied to near-term policy shifts and stressed the need to wait for more evidence to conclude inflation would sustainably achieve the BOJ’s 2% target.

“While trend inflation is gradually heightening, it will take some time to achieve our inflation target,” Ueda said after the BOJ’s widely-expected decision to make no changes to its yield curve control (YCC) policy. Unlike in the US where a wage-price spiral terrifies the central bank, in Japan the BOJ would give a kidney if it could get a burst of sustained wage inflation.

“The risk of missing our price target with premature monetary tightening is bigger than the risk of experiencing inflation exceeding 2% due to a delayed tightening. The cost of waiting for trend inflation to heighten is low,” he said, in a 180 reversal from what western central bankers have been saying.

The yen tumbled, and Japanese bonds and stocks rallied after Ueda crushed hopes for an early hawkish pivot and would take his time to withdraw the stimulus of his dovish predecessor, Haruhiko Kuroda, who retired this month after a decade at the helm.

“The fact that the BOJ left a reference to further easing as needed confirmed its stance to continue monetary easing,” said Naomi Muguruma, senior market economist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.

Some analysts saw the BOJ getting some breathing space with the 10-year yield having fallen below its 0.5% cap, thanks in part to a decline in U.S. Treasury yields on expectations the Federal Reserve will soon pause its interest rate hike cycle.

“The Fed and the U.S. economy are bailing them out from doing something right away, buying them some time. It doesn’t mean we get no change to YCC for the next one to 1-1/2 years,” said Jim Leaviss, CIO of public fixed income at M&G in Tokyo.

There is uncertainty on how soon the BOJ may end ultra-easy policy, as it weighs emerging signs of wage growth against lingering headwinds from slowing global growth. In fresh quarterly projections released in a report issued on Friday, the board revised up its core consumer inflation to 1.8% in the current year ending in March 2024, and 2.0% in the following year. Under previous projections made in January, the BOJ expected inflation to hit 1.6% this year and 1.8% in fiscal 2024.

But the BOJ projected inflation to slow to 1.6% in fiscal 2025 and said risks to that price outlook were skewed to the downside, highlighting a lack of conviction among central bank policymakers on the durability of price growth.

“Our forecasts show that we’re getting quite close to achieving (our price target). But we’re not quite confident about our longer-term inflation forecast,” Ueda said.

The growing side-effects of YCC, such as market distortions caused by the BOJ’s huge bond buying and the strain on bank profits from ultra-low interest rates, also complicate the timing of an exit, analysts say.

Ueda said the BOJ must be vigilant to such side-effects, even as it keeps monetary policy ultra-loose.

“It’s true we’re seeing side-effects here and there. We need to closely scrutinise these developments,” he said. “We must avoid getting the balance of benefits and costs wrong, so will be vigilant and disclose information as much as possible.”

The German tabloid Bild on Wednesday published a story titled “17 kilos of explosives intended to kill Putin” – which alleged that Sunday’s Ukrainian drone crash near Moscow had been part of an assassination operation to kill the Russian president. The downed drone was found in a forest Monday, according to AFP.

Bild further alleged there is a Kremlin cover-up in progress, given the ability of the kamikaze drone to penetrate that deep into Russian territory and crash near where Putin was expected to visit. But the Kremlin has rejected the report as fake news and part of Kiev’s “fabrications”. 

The drone allegedly reached a distance of some 500km from the Ukrainian border, but it wasn’t the first time a Ukrainian drone was able to travel that distance inside Russia. 

The Bild report described further:

Ukrainian activist Yuriy Romanenko , who is said to have close ties to Kiev’s intelligence services, said in a letter claiming responsibility: “Last week our intelligence officers received information about Putin’s trip to the industrial park in Rudnevo. Accordingly, our kamikaze drone took off, which flew through all the air defenses of the Russian Federation and crashed not far from the industrial park.”

And more via a machine translation of the German article: “Several private Russian media reported a UJ-22 drone crash near the village of Voroskogo, east of Moscow. The crash site is about 20 kilometers east of the Rudnevo Industrial Park.”

There’s also the dubious claim of US-supplied explosives carried by the drone. 

Recordings show that there were 30 C4 explosive blocks with a total weight of 17 kilograms on board the drone. The explosive charges of the type M112 are used by the US Army and the armed forces of Canada, among others

Pro-Ukraine social media channels have used the incident to claim Ukraine’s drones can get ‘close’ to Russian leaders; however, the Kremlin has rejected all of this as a fiction.

Bild published the following map of the drone’s flight path…

Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said there was no assassination attempt on the president, dismissing the allegations as “yellow fabrications.”

When asked about the Bild report by journalists on Friday, Peskov responded: “No, we are not familiar with these reports,” and stressed “There are many such ‘yellow fabrications’ these days. There’s no reason to pay them any mind.”

The only documented attempted drone assassination against a head of state was the 2018 televised incident while Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has giving an outdoor speech in the center of Caracas.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro escaped a drone ‘attack’ unharmed. The leader is calling it an assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/KI5zmQ3Rai

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 5, 2018

While Maduro had called it a failed plot as part of US-backed coup efforts, there were many different theories at the time, including speculation that it could have been an ‘inside job’ – or a government stunt that would allow Maduro to crackdown on the political opposition and denounce its Washington backers.

A busy end to the week for macro appears to be settling the narrative that we are facing stagflationary pressures as growth slows but inflation signals remain far stickier than expected.

This morning’s final UMich report confirms the flash inflation expectations have jumped dramatically with longer-term inflation expectations actually increasing inter-month to +3.0%…

Source: Bloomberg

The Headline sentiment ticked higher MoM…

Source: Bloomberg

Net change in confidence in commercial banks, unsurprisingly, plummeted since last fall, a consequence of the recent well-publicized failures of SVB and other banks. Note, though, that the survey grouped all commercial banks together and did not distinguish between large and medium-sized or regional institutions.

In fact, it’s one thing that brings all political cohorts together…

UMich notes that despite the increasingly negative news on business conditions heard by consumers, their short and long-run economic outlook improved modestly from last month.

Notably, sentiment declined most for the richest respondents…

However, these improvements were balanced by worsening assessments of personal finances due to higher expenses, reflecting the ongoing pain stemming from continued high prices.

Finally, we note that the market is now fully pricing in the 25bps hike next week by The Fed and the blackout window means no FedSpeak to push back against exuberant narratives, but bear in mind the clarity that Jay Powell offered ‘fake’ Zelensky in the revealed clip yesterday – while dated, it would appear his views are far more hawkish than the market expects going forward.

Submitted by Jack Raines via Young Money,

In the opening chapter of The Reality Bug, the fourth novel in the Pendragon fantasy series, protagonist Bobby Pendragon finds himself walking through Rubic City, a metropolis in the foreign world of Veelox. Rubic City is similar to the cities in Bobby’s native Earth, with paved streets and towering skyscrapers, but there is one striking difference: there aren’t any people. Rubic City resembles a post-apocalyptic Manhattan where society has disappeared but its constructs remain.

Bobby eventually crosses paths with a local, Aja, who explains that the planet isn’t empty, but most of its population have opted to spend their time in a digital world called Lifelight, which is housed in a large metallic pyramid overlooking the city.

Lifelight is an immersive virtual reality program that brings one’s deepest desires to life, and the experience is so enthralling that few of its users wanted to return to the physical world after their first taste of this new euphoria.

When Bobby arrived, 99% of Veelox’s citizens were spending every waking hour in Lifelight, and the remaining outsiders all worked as computer engineers maintaining the virtual world and physical caretakers looking after participants’ bodies.

While millions of people were lost in their own digital wonderlands, the real world around them was slowly rotting away.

As the pandemic raged two years ago, the term “Metaverse” went mainstream, conjuring dystopian images of Lifelight and various Black Mirror episodes in my mind.

The hype exploded in October 2021 when one of the world’s tech giants, the company formerly known as “Facebook,” opted to change its name to “Meta,” signaling the entry of a new digital age.

Suddenly, every company faced a decision: launch a Metaverse division or risk being left behind. Mark Zuckerberg invested billions into his company’s “Horizon Worlds,” a virtual reality designed for communal meet-ups. Nike built Nikeland on Roblox’s platform to let fans meet, socialize, and take part in a wide array of brand experiences. And of course, the “Metaverse” became intertwined with “Web3” when platforms like Decentraland launched, allowing users to buy digital plots of land as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.

Respected banks like JPMorgan Chase published 17-page research memos breaking down “Metanomics” for curious investors, athletes changed their profile pictures to $100k JPEGs of monkeys, venture capital firms launched $600M funds to invest in the Metaverse, and corporate brand Twitter accounts began communicating in the cringe-heavy jargon of Web3:

it seemed inevitable that the future of the world would be spent playing virtual reality tennis in the Wii Sports Resorts with our eight billion closest friends… until one day, the funniest thing happened: no one cared about the Metaverse anymore.

Daily active users on Sandbox and Decentraland, two Metaverse platforms both valued at $1B+, peaked at 4,503 and 675 individuals respectively before declining to 522 and 38 in October 2022.

Meta’s Horizon Worlds boasted 300,000 monthly users in February 2022, and company management projected 500,000+ users by the end of the year. Just eight months later, monthly usage fell below 200,000 users as most visitors didn’t return after their first month.

Of course, it’s hard to blame users for not returning when Meta’s own VP of Metaverse had to beg his own employees to spend more time in Horizon Worlds, saying in an internal memo, “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

And now, as company after company shuts down their Metaverse divisions, I believe this digital experiment is on its last legs.

I, for one, am glad that the dystopian Metaverse from Bobby Pendragon’s adventures failed to become a reality, but this whole experiment raises an important question: How did “the Metaverse” become such a large phenomenon in the first place?

I have some thoughts:

1) Extrapolating one-off scenarios is a dangerous game.

Much of the world spent the greater part of two years locked in the confines of their homes, so it’s no surprise that web activity saw a significant uptick during the pandemic.

However, this Metaverse-centric environment wasn’t some permanent evolution of the human condition, it was the response to a once-in-a-century tail risk, Covid-19. And sooner or later, that risk was going to be mitigated.

The Lindy Effect states that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing, such as a technology or idea, is proportional to its current age. Basically, stuff that has been around for a while will continue to be around for a while.

Taking a stroll through the city with friends and family on a nice summer day is Lindy.

Attending concerts and live sporting events is Lindy.

Crushing cold ones with the boys is Lindy.

Seriously, the ancient Sumerians created a hymn to their goddess of beer in the 18th century BC (!!!), giving us this all-time line: “He who does not know beer does not know what is good.” Crushing cold ones with the boys is a 4,000-year-old tradition.

Do you know what isn’t Lindy? Watching a digital Travis Scott concert in Fortnite. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that real-life socialization quickly rebounded once pandemic measures were lifted.

The thing is, when a temporary shift in consumer trends provides tailwinds for your business or idea, it is natural to hope that this aberration becomes a permanent change. But we live in a mean-reverting world, and bold projections that ignore mean-reversion rarely work out.

2) You can spend a lot of money on really dumb stuff when cash reserves are sitting at all-time highs and interest rates have collapsed to all-time lows.

Burning $36B to remake a worse version of The Sims sounds stupid until you realize that the alternative is throwing your cash at T-Bills that pay nothing while inflation is 8%.

When fixed-income assets don’t generate yield and investors have trillions of dollars that need to be deployed, they are going to deploy somewhere, and insane valuations for ridiculous long-shot bets begin to look a lot more rational.

At different times, I have jokingly said that several things were low-interest rate phenomena, but there is some truth to that idea. It’s not that low-interest rates somehow create outlandish ideas, but the pursuit of yield in the face of few investment options can send a lot of capital to the outer realms of rationality.

The problem, of course, was the assumption that T-Bills would always pay nothing and cash reserves would always be abundant. Snap back to reality, ope, there goes gravity.

3) Institutions are susceptible to FOMO too.

Would JPMorgan have published a research memo on the economics of the Metaverse and the value propositions offered by tokenized digital real estate in 2019? Of course not. Half of the words in the previous sentence didn’t even exist in 2019.

But 2022 was a different story.

Whether you’re an insecure college freshman considering a pair of New Balances to fit in on Greek Row or a billion-dollar institution considering adding bitcoin to its balance sheet as an “inflation hedge,” the temptation to follow the crowd grows damn-near irresistible as more and more of your peers adopt a trend.

Self-doubt increases and logic goes out the window as you think, “Well, I don’t understand this idea, but if everyone else must see something I don’t. Maybe we should get involved too.”

And that’s how a $377B bank ends up sponsoring a lounge in a Metaverse world that resembles Minecraft if you played it on your toaster oven.

Rest in pieces to the Metaverse, it was fun while it lasted. I guess.

During a military training mission on Thursday, two Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters collided in Alaska, resulting in the deaths of three soldiers, while another sustained injuries, according to a press release from US Army officials.

US Army’s 11th Airborne Division said the two Apache helicopters were “returning from a training mission when they collided in flight.” 

Two AH-64 Apache helicopters from the 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Wainwright crashed today near Healy, Alaska, returning from a training flight.

— Eleventh Airborne (@11thAirborneDiv) April 28, 2023

“Two soldiers were declared dead at the scene of the crash and a third died en route to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. The fourth soldier is being treated at Fairbanks Memorial for injuries sustained in the crash,” the Army said. 

The two helicopters were AH-64 Apache helicopters originally based at Fort Wainwright near Fairbanks. First responders are reportedly on the scene near Healy, Alaska, about 180 miles from Anchorage. https://t.co/qHgCTmjcOP pic.twitter.com/Rc1DS7YKe9

— TieDye Intel (@TieDyeIntel) April 28, 2023

CNN said the crash occurred 100 miles south of Fort Wainwright, where the helicopters are stationed. The military base is located in Fairbanks. 

Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commanding general of the 11th Airborne Division, said in the release:

“This is an incredible loss for these soldiers’ families, their fellow soldiers, and for the division.

“Our hearts and prayers go out to their families, friends and loved ones, and we are making the full resources of the Army available to support them.”

The incident was the second military helicopter crash in less than 30 days. In late March, nine soldiers were killed when two HH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, operated by the 101st Airborne Division, crashed during a nighttime training mission near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

That interview says it all, doesn’t it?

Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”

This was before AOC decided to be the next Pelosi, instead of the next Sanders. The above sit-down on MSNBC shows the transformation. Having shed the mantle of an outsider who shook the old guard with online savvy, she appeared in soft light for a softball “interview,” by a literal Biden official (Inside With Jen Psaki is as close as you can get to a formal dissolution of the line between White House and media). In it, she seemed to argue for the outlaw of Fox News. “We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said, adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”

I was attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things. Every liberal morality play in the seventies, eighties and nineties featured a finger-wagging moralist who couldn’t stomach an obscene joke (Jerry Falwell, over a Hustler parody), “obscene” art (Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos), “objectionable” music (Tipper Gore, in the now-seems-tame record-labeling furor), or unpredictable humor (NBC, in its attempts to put Richard Pryor on tape delay for Saturday Night Live). Pryor’s favored writer Paul Mooney objected so much to all the hoops they had to jump through to be allowed on air, he ended up writing a parody “job interview” skit that sent SNL’s ratings soaring, though ironically it would probably never air today:

Hollywood made self-congratulating feature films about nearly every one of those speech clashes, from The People vs. Larry Flynt to Dirty Pictures (starring James Woods, about the Cincinnati episode!) to Parental Advisory. The movie Field of Dreams features Ray Kinsella’s wife Annie telling off “IRATE MOTHER” in a school library debate about banning writer Terrence Mann, with Annie saying after: “Fascist. I’d like to ease her pain!” (The actual book Shoeless Joe featured J.D. Salinger, one of America’s most-censored authors). From To Kill a Mockingbird to Dead Man Walking liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds. I mentioned this before, but Rob Reiner’s The American President — a naked hagiography of Clintonian politics — came to a climax with “President Andrew Shepherd” defending his flag-burning girlfriend’s honor, saying:

You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing…

That scene, which sounds like it should apply to any Democrat thinking about someone like Carlson, would become ironic later. Back to AOC and Fox: like so many other things in America, the marketplace of ideas is no longer a market. Voices with organic appeal are artificially restricted. Watching “approved” news these days is like watching scab baseball: you know most of the players the crowds really want to see aren’t even in the dugout. By no means is this phenomenon confined to the right.

As far back as the spring of 2017, when Google introduced “Project Owl,” a new tool designed to “surface more authoritative content,” outlets like the World Socialist Web Site, Alternet, Truthdig, Democracy Now!, and Consortium News reported dramatic drops in audience. Wikileaks traffic plummeted (that site’s content is extremely difficult to access for a variety of reasons now). Years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google employed “maintainers” to tend to an “‘anti-misinformation’ blacklist” to prevent sites from “appearing in Google News and other products.”

The next big event was the removal of Alex Jones from Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. No fan of Jones, I was struck by how quickly critics moved to looking around for the next targets. Rob Reiner, the “acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil” auteur, said on MSNBC, “You have Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, and Alex Jones, which has now been taken off of Facebook, thank God…” Senator Chris Murphy said Jones was just the “tip of a giant iceberg” and “companies must do more than take down one website”:

Apple CEO Tim Cook insisted the Jones episode was not coordinated with the other firms, saying, “I’ve had no conversation. And to my knowledge, no one at Apple has.” Later stories like the Apple-Amazon squeeze of Parler ended the ruse that the major distribution platforms were not working together to create private agreements on speech, and the #TwitterFiles showed countless episodes of supposedly independent companies engaging in seeming anticompetitive behavior, coordinating on everything from election “misinformation” to pandemic messaging and holding regular “industry meetings” with government to discuss moderation issues.

Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…