Even before the big game kicked off on Sunday, Uber Eats was flagged for a penalty. The gist of the company's Super Bowl commercial was that to remember something — like Uber offering food delivery in addition to its ride-share service — means you have to forget something else. At one point, a man allergic to peanuts eats from a jar of peanut butter, breaks out into hives, and asks, "There's peanuts in peanut butter?"
Besides being painfully unfunny, the joke gained the ire of the nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education, which said it was "incredibly disappointed" with Uber for making fun of a life-threatening condition for tens of millions of people. In response, Uber removed that segment of the ad. That's addition by subtraction even when the average Super Bowl commercial will set you back about $7 million — and that's just for 30 seconds.
BANKING
US Lenders Have $1 Trillion Tied Up in Shadow Banks
There's a lot of money piling up in the dark.
The Federal Reserve reported late last week that at the end of January, US banks had loaned out more than $1 trillion to non-deposit-taking financial institutions, also known as shadow banks.
Stumbling Around in the Dark
A shadow bank is really any private credit lender that's not a commercial bank and thus not weighed down by regulatory oversight. Hedge funds, fintech groups, major investment banks like Goldman Sachs, and even certain divisions of commercial banks all fall under the shadow umbrella. Rather than deposits, they take investments or loans, and the money isn't insured by the federal government. Essentially, they act as middlemen between traditional lenders and potentially unsafe endeavors like investing in startups and making risky mortgage loans.
For many big lenders, interacting with shadow banks is just good business. Last month, Citibank led a $310 million loan to buy-now, pay-later service Sunbit, the latter's largest transaction to date. Meanwhile, Wells Fargo partnered in September with private asset management firm Centerbridge to pump billions of dollars into creating Overland Advisor, a business development company. According to Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, the move was part of the bank's never-ending goal of "finding ways to best serve our clients."
However, the pace at which commercial banks are lending money to shadow banks could be entering dangerous territory:
Traditional banks' loans to their dark counterparts have jumped about 12% year-over-year, outpacing overall loans, which have gone up just 2% from a year ago. By the end of 2021, shadow banks controlled roughly 14% of the world's financial assets.
Regulators aren't too thrilled about the situation. This month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee that shadow banks "are reliant on short-term financing that may be a lot less stable than deposits, and in stressful times, their credit lines can be pulled. There is concern that in stressful market conditions we could see the failure of one of these."
Turn on the Lights: Regulators are pushing for more transparency in how commercial banks report where they lend money. Right now, shadow banks are all considered "nondepository financial institutions," but late last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation proposed getting more granular, creating categories like private equity firms and credit funds. It may not pump the breaks on investments into shadow banks, but it would give the public a set of high beams.
When The Motley Fool slapped their "Ultimate Buy" recommendation on Netflix stock in June 2007, even their seasoned investing experts could never have guessed it would skyrocket by 19,736%.
(No, really. If they had, they probably would've bought more and would finally have that villa on Lake Como… but we digress.)
Cut to today, and both "Ultimate Buy" and "Netflix" are on the tip of their tongues again – but for very different reasons.
The company they're betting on may be only 1/50th the size of Google, but it has everything in place to capitalize on the mass cable-cutting migration going on.
Amazon Prime Scores NFL Playoff Game for 2024 Season
We know who will be in next year's NFL playoffs: Amazon.
Ahead of last weekend's big game, the NFL said it's sending one of its post-season games next year exclusively to Amazon Prime Video, which just finished its first season streaming Thursday Night Football.
All Out Blitz
Call it a sequel to the much-maligned Peacock Bowl. Earlier in this year's postseason play, the NFL sold exclusive rights to a wild card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins to NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service in a deal reportedly worth $110 million. The result: the most live-streamed event in US history, according to Nielsen, as well as quite a few angry fans scorned by the $5.99 per month subscription sign-up fee to watch the game. According to subscription analytics firm Antenna, Peacock scored 2.8 million new subscribers over a three-day period, good for the single-biggest subscriber acquisition moment the firm has ever observed.
A record live-stream audience, however, pales compared to a typical broadcast one. Still, the NFL says it is committed to putting at least one playoff game a year on a streaming service. And by connecting with Amazon next year, it may split the difference:
This year's Peacock game drew around 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen. A day later, the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Packers drew 40 million viewers on a Fox broadcast.
But Peacock only has around 31 million paying subscribers overall, according to parent company Comcast's most recent earnings report. By comparison, around 167 million Americans have an Amazon Prime subscription, which includes access to Prime Video.
Win it All: Amazon Prime Video's impressive subscriber base actually places it far ahead of the reach of traditional pay-TV, like cable or satellite bundles, which now service around just 60 million US households (most NFL games are still available on broadcast networks). And that figure is likely to drop below 50 million by 2027, according to Insider Intelligence. This may explain why Disney, WarnerBros Discovery, and Fox plan to launch a joint sports-only streaming service later this year. The history of co-owned media operations is shoddy, to say the least (just about every legacy media player once squabbled over how to run the formerly co-owned Hulu, after all), but rest assured the NFL tends to find available eyeballs with as much accuracy as Patrick Mahomes.
Written by Brian Boyle
HEALTHCARE
Psychedelic Biotech Firms Record Major Fundraising Mark
Funding for biotech firms focused on psychedelic treatments is sprouting like mushrooms again.
There's a reason the investor class has taken a particular interest in hallucinogenic drugs, and it has nothing to do with 1960s hippie nostalgia. According to one peer-reviewed study featuring multi-stage trials published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, psilocybin — the naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in over 200 species of fungi — produces a sustained and significant effect treating patients suffering from depression who were unresponsive to at least four other antidepressant drugs. That group could be as high as one-third of patients seeking treatment for depression, or about 9 million Americans.
Investor interest peaked in March 2021, when eight deals generated nearly $190 million in VC fundraising. Investors turned on the money-hose again last month, with plenty of reason to believe the industry can only grow:
Psychedelic-focused biotech firms scored $163 million across five fundraising deals in January, according to PitchBook and the FT. Over 50 psychedelic biotech firms have already gone public in the US, with a combined value of $2 billion that some analysts predict could reach $12 billion by 2030.
That's in part thanks to two ongoing landmark trials — one conducted by Nasdaq-listed Compass Pathways and another by Lykos Therapeutics — that are widely expected to publish results this year, which could lead the FDA to reclassify some substances for clinical treatments.
Around the World: As is typical in any trendy emerging industry these days, psychedelic firms have drawn the interest of sovereign wealth funds, including Singapore's $300 billion Temasek fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala fund, sources told the FT. What makes that weird is both countries boast some of the world's most draconian anti-drug policies, with Singapore in the past two years alone executing at least 15 people for drug-related offenses.
Written by Brian Boyle
Extra Upside
Playtime's over: Consumers bought fewer toys in 2023, hinting at overall monetary strain.
Turn on the Lights: Regulators are pushing for more transparency in how commercial banks report where they lend money. Right now, shadow banks are all considered "nondepository financial institutions," but late last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation proposed getting more granular, creating categories like private equity firms and credit funds. It may not pump the breaks on investments into shadow banks, but it would give the public a set of high beams.
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