Weekly news summary for June 4 to 10, 2021
Friday, June 4,2021: Global M&A Activity Reaches $2.4T in May
Dealmakers seemed to be having a record-breaking year as mergers and acquisitions worldwide rose to a record high for the third straight month in May.
Data from Refinitiv showed the overall value of pending and done deals stated from January to May reached $2.4 trillion, registering an increase of 158% from the same period in 2020 and marking as the highest year-to-date total going back to 1980 when Refinitiv records started.
Monday, June 7,2021: G7 Countries Agree to Minimum 15% Corporate Tax
The Group of Seven (G7) countries decided over the weekend to support a 15% minimum tax on global corporate income as part of a bigger agreement on how to levy multinational companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC.
The deal marks a significant step towards change in a global practice that has enabled corporate giants to save billions in tax bills by switching jurisdictions and paves the way for taxes on multinational companies in countries where they profit, instead of just where their headquarters are based.
Tuesday, June 8,2021: Fastly Major Website Outage Caused by Software Bug
A global outage of numerous major websites and apps took place for around an hour on Tuesday after cloud service provider and major content delivery network (CDN) Fastly encountered a widespread technical problem.
The issue was caused by a software bug that activated when one of Fastly’s customers changed their settings, but it was immediately identified and dealt with, allowing the US company’s stock to rebound from a loss of about 4% and close nearly 11% higher on Tuesday.
Wednesday, June 9,2021: GameStop Names New CEO, CFO as Q2 Beats Forecasts
Former Amazon executives Matt Furlong and Mike Recupero have been chosen to be GameStop Corp.’s chief executive and chief financial officer, respectively, with the company seeking to step up its digital transformation.
The announcement came as the video game retailer reported a $0.45 loss on a $1.28 billion revenue for the second quarter, above forecasts of a $0.68 loss on a $1.13-billion revenue.
Thursday, June 10,2021: Dollar Up Ahead of US Inflation Data, ECB Meeting
The US dollar climbed in early European trade on Thursday, with traders practicing caution as they await critical US inflation data and a European Central Bank (ECB) meeting that may provide hints on future direction.
The dollar index gained 0.1% to $90.243, swinging narrowly around the psychologically-important 90 level, while the euro dropped 0.1% to 1.2161 against the greenback to retreat from a one-week high of 1.2218 reached in the previous session.
