Bloomberg (May 21)
“The world’s biggest businesses were doing fine until Covid-19 arrived. Now they’re doing even better. The top 50 companies by value added $4.5 trillion of stock market capitalization in 2020, taking their combined worth to about 28% of global gross domestic product. Three decades ago the equivalent figure was less than 5%.”
Tags: 2020, Businesses, Capitalization, Companies, COVID-19, Stock market, Top 50, World's biggest
Institutional Investor (March 9)
“Shareholder activists pulled in their horns in 2020, targeting 10 percent fewer companies than in 2019 and winning 16 percent fewer board seats.”
Tags: 2019, 2020, Activists, Board seats, Companies, Fewer, Shareholders, Targeting
USA Today (February 18)
“The U.S. lost a whole year of life expectancy – and for Black people, it’s nearly 3 times worse.” These preliminary results are based on only the first half of the year. Full year figures for 2020 will almost inevitably paint an even grimmer picture as they will include “the fall and winter surges that led to record COVID-19 deaths.”
Tags: 2020, Black people, COVID-19, Fall, Grimmer, Life expectancy, Surges, U.S., Winter
Wall Street Journal (January 29)
“You know political spin is at work when the economy grows by 4% in the fourth quarter but the headlines are that growth fell for the entire pandemic year. Everyone already knows the economy fell off the cliff in the first half of 2020. The news is that the economic recovery is continuing despite the winter Covid surge.”
Wall Street Journal (January 15)
“Rising temperatures last year capped the world’s warmest decade in modern times.” Moreover, according to the same NASA findings, 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest year ever. This came “despite cooling ocean currents and a drop in greenhouse gas emissions” associate with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tags: 2016, 2020, Cooling, COVID-19, Emissions, GHG, NASA, Ocean currents, Pandemic, Rising temperatures, Warmest decade, World
WARC (November 19)
“The seismic events of 2020 will echo long into the coming year: marketing strategies are being reshaped to suit the new e-commerce reality, media budgets have been slashed, brand-building activity is on hold…. Performance marketing is accelerating the trend toward digital channels, with Amazon and TikTok among the growth stories…. Brands must find new creative solutions to achieve distinctiveness in the post-pandemic marketplace.”
Tags: 2020, Amazon, Brand building, Creative solutions, Digital channels, E-commerce, Echo, Marketing, Media budgets, Pandemic, Reshaped, Seismic, Strategies, TikTok
Reuters (September 3)
“Publicly listed family-owned firms, defined as those where the founder of their family owns 20% of shares or votes, returned 3 percentage points more than non-family owned stocks during the virus-struck first half of 2020.” It might be a coincidence, “but the same thing happened after the last crisis…. The effect persists across sectors, regions and company size,” perhaps because the firms have less debt and invest more in R&D.
Tags: 2020, Crisis, Debt, Family-owned, Founder, Listed, R&D, Regions, Sectors, Shares, Size, Stocks, Virus
WARC (August 27)
“Lockdowns have lasted longer than the 66 days research suggests it takes to form a new habit – so 2020 really will be an inflection point when we witness a paradigm shift.” COVID-19 has overturned our entrenched attitudes and assumptions, “halting much of what we have taken for granted, imposing new ways of living our lives and creating new boundaries.”
Tags: 2020, 66 days, Assumptions, COVID-19, Entrenched attitudes, Habit, Inflection point, Lockdowns, Overturned, Paradigm shift, Research
BBC (January 15)
“According to Nasa, Noaa and the UK Met Office, last year was the second warmest in a record dating back to 1850.” Moreover, “the past five years were the hottest in the 170-year series” and “the Met Office says that 2020 is likely to continue this warming trend.”
Forbes (January 13)
“Recession fears are back in full force: 97% of CFOs said that an economic downturn has already begun or will begin in 2020—up from 88% who said the same thing last year, according to Deloitte’s latest CFO Signals Survey.”
