Week InReview Friday | Jul 1, 2020

What #backtowork could look like.

Follow Kat , a fictional U.S. office worker, for a glimpse of what your office might look like when you return. The office features thermal testing and Bluetooth sensors that let businesses know how much time employees spend six feet apart from their colleagues. ‘Kat’ Returns to the Office. Her Employer Is Watching Her Closely. —  The Wall Street Journal

ICYMI

Fed mulls explicit forward guidance, stays wary of yield targets Federal Reserve officials showed no readiness at their June meeting to commit to yield-curve control, but did reveal an eagerness to provide more guidance, including 'state-based' forward guidance, in coming months on the future path of interest rates and asset purchases. (Bloomberg Economics | Jul 1) see also Powell says path forward extraordinarily uncertain (Bloomberg Quint | Jul 1) OMB debuts new regulatory playbook after virus delay A comprehensive list of all regulations federal agencies plan to advance or cut over the next year was released by the White House Office of Management and Budget, revealing some surprise upcoming labor and environmental moves. The mandatory report to Congress, known as the unified regulatory agenda and made public Tuesday, details an array of new regulatory and deregulatory proposals agencies will push through early 2021. (Bloomberg Law | Jun 30) Mnuchin, Powell differ over how soon economy will recover Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered differing opinions Tuesday on how quickly the U.S. economy would recover from the coronavirus recession. In testimony before a House committee, Powell and Mnuchin offered disparate forecasts for a budding economic recovery despite broadly agreeing on the success of the federal response so far. (The Hill | Jun 30) U.S. has dropped ball on regulating nonbanks in shadow banking sector, contributing to crisis: Brainard, Yellen U.S. authorities have failed to temper known financial stability risks posed by nonbanks in the shadow banking sector, contributing to the current economic crisis, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard and former Fed chair Janet Yellen said. Brainard and Yellen agreed that Financial Stability Oversight Council powers over money market mutual funds, hedge funds, insurers and other nonbanks have been weakened. (MLex | Jun 30) Deals resume is sale of risky loan funds One of the hardest-hit corners of the global debt markets is showing signs of revival after being virtually shut down by Covid-19. Sales of new collateralized-loan obligations, or CLOs, have rebounded sharply over the past six weeks as debt investors resume their reach for higher-yielding, riskier debt. (The Wall Street Journal | Jun 29)

the cyber cafe

Companies rush to implement identity systems for remote working Amid the myriad security challenges that stem from the Covid-19 pandemic, one area has emerged as a critical investment for companies — ensuring the people who connect to a corporate network are who they say they are. —  The Wall Street Journal New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears The threat of ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven't been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple's Mac computers since the first full-fledged Mac ransomware surfaced only four years ago. So when Dinesh Devadoss, a malware researcher at the firm K7 Lab,  published findings  on Tuesday about a new example of Mac ransomware, that fact alone was significant. It turns out, though, that the malware, which researchers are now calling ThiefQuest, gets more interesting from there. —  Wired Microsoft releases emergency security updates for Windows 10, Server Microsoft has quietly pushed out  two emergency security updates  to fix remote code execution bugs in Microsoft Windows Codecs Library. Windows Codecs Library handles how the OS compresses large multimedia files such as photos and videos, and then decodes them for playback within applications. The out-of-band updates, addressing a critical-severity flaw ( CVE-2020-1425)  and important-severity vulnerability ( CVE-2020-1457) , were sent out via Windows Update Tuesday night and affect several versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. Both vulnerabilities allow for remote code execution “in the way that Microsoft Windows Codecs Library handles objects in memory,” according to the updates. —  Threatpost

MORE CYBER SECURITY NEWS HERE:

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binge reading disorder

Markets bombed, investors carried on It’s going to take a lot more than a single market meltdown for small investors to chicken out of stocks. One of the biggest surprises in the first half of 2020 was what didn’t happen: most individual investors, despite their reputation as nervous Nellies who sell into every panic, didn’t dump their stocks even when the market meltdown was at its worst. —  The Wall Street Journal On the fate of cheek kissing and handshakes post-pandemic Will people ever shake hands again? Will cheek kissing become passé? These once standard greetings have become dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic — and many are left wondering what etiquette will look like in a post-pandemic world. —  People Can I trust this map? 4 questions to ask when you see a map of the Covid-19 pandemic Maps have shown us how the events of this disastrous year have played out around the globe, from the Australian bushfires to the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. But there are good reasons to question the maps we see. Maps often inform our actions, but how do we know which ones are trustworthy? —  The Conversation

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