Week InReview
Friday | Jan 22, 2021
Take a break.
Pajamas in their natural habitat, and parading through the local supermarket. 
Illustration: Jack Richardson/WSJ
Throw on some sweatpants. Any pair will do, but here's a guide to turning sleepwear into perfectly respectable daytime duds to work from home in.

Pajamas are the new sweatpants. How to wear them everywhere.
let's recap...
A desire for balance sheet improvement stands at the top of fund managers’ wishlists, but its dominance declined over the second half of 2020.
Illustration: Financial Times
U.S. companies are sitting on trillions of dollars in cash that they borrowed to survive the coronavirus shock of 2020. The question now is what they do with all that money, especially if an economic recovery takes hold. (Financial Times | Jan 20)

The newly installed Biden administration wants a review of a Labor Department investing rule that took effect earlier this month requiring retirement plan fiduciaries to put financial considerations above all else in their decisions. The department’s so-called “do-good” investing rule codified the previous administration’s position against environmental, social, and corporate governance funds. The rule limited plan fiduciaries to investment decisions based on “pecuniary factors,” or solely the financial interests of plan participants and their retirement benefits. (Bloomberg Law | Jan 20)

A federal banking regulator’s grant of the first national trust bank charter to a cryptocurrency startup may touch off a turf war over which agency is best suited to oversee the burgeoning financial technology market. (Roll Call | Jan 19)

Yellen says she won't seek weaker dollar, wants market-set rates...
...and she gets Wall Street buzzing about 50-year Treasuries. 
(Bloomberg Politics/Markets | Jan 19)

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a webinar that the Fed's regulatory work on stablecoins is a "very high priority" because they "could become systemically important overnight." Regarding the establishment of a central bank digital currency, Powell said the Fed is "determined to do this right rather than quickly, and it will take some time... measured in years rather than months." (The Block | Jan 14)
the cyber cafe
The SolarWinds hackers used tactics other groups will copy
One of the most chilling aspects of Russia's recent hacking spree – which breached numerous U.S. government agencies among other targets – was the successful use of a “supply chain attack” to gain tens of thousands of potential targets from a single compromise at the IT services firm SolarWinds. But this wasn't the only striking feature of the assault. After that initial foothold, the attackers bored deeper into their victims' networks with simple and elegant strategies. Now researchers are bracing for a surge in those techniques from other attackers.
— Wired

U.S. cyber agency warns of intense attacks on cloud infrastructure
Hackers are taking advantage of vulnerabilities in cloud services set-ups as individuals working remotely use a combination of personal and corporate devices to access company networks, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an alert this week. CISA advices several safeguards, such as restricting the use of email forwarding and using multifactor authentication "without exception." 

Ransomware now biggest CISO cybersecurity concern
A survey of chief information security officers and chief security officers (CSOs) by cybersecurity Proofpoint found that ransomware is now viewed as the main cybersecurity threat to their organization over the course of the next year.
— ZDNet
MORE CYBER SECURITY NEWS HERE:
binge reading disorder
Illustration: Daniel Castro Maia/The New York Times
A 'members-only' model is helping restaurants and luxury travel survive
While the rest of the tourism industry hangs on for dear life, private travel clubs are on the rise. Restaurants are recognizing the benefits of membership, too. Strategies differ depending on the place.

A new era of presidential pets
Throughout history, presidential pets have come from all corners of the animal kingdom: President Theodore Roosevelt had a badger named Josiah, while the Benjamin Harrison family had two opossums. The children of Abraham Lincoln had goats, Mr. Hager said, and Tad Lincoln once tied his chair to a goat and let it drag him through a group of visitors in the East Room.

The dark side of investor conferences
Prior academic research finds that conferences are important information events that are accompanied by positive price and volume reactions, increases in institutional investor and analyst following, and improvements in liquidity. A new paper examines whether investor conferences are accompanied by one particular form of managerial opportunism: “hyping” the stock to sell shares at inflated prices.
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