Good morning! Protests in France roll on, with thousands marching against President Macron’s proposal to raise the pension age to 64, and over 900 fires lit on the streets of Paris yesterday. Today we're exploring:
Bad rap
Block, the fintech company responsible for payment platforms Square and Cash App, has become the latest target of Hindenburg Research, just 2 months after the infamous short-seller went for the Adani Group.
Hindenburg accuses Block — which is still run by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — of obfuscating the user numbers of its service Cash App. The report claims that somewhere between 40% and 75% of Cash App accounts reviewed “were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual”. The report also accused Cash App of facilitating crime, owing to how easy it is to get an account, even going so far as to put together a compilation video of rappers who claim to use Cash App for various nefarious deeds.
On a frantic day of trading yesterday, some $8bn+ of Block stock changed hands, with the share price down 15% despite the company's protestations that the report was “factually inaccurate” and “designed solely to allow short sellers to profit from a declined stock price”.
Appetite for a fight
This latest report puts Hindenburg in the firing line for another potential legal battle, as the firm continues to argue its case against Adani Group — the Indian conglomerate that it accused of fraud in January. Indeed, according to Bloomberg, Hindenburg has now bet against some 30 companies since 2020, with its standard procedure — shorting the stock and making a lot of noise about it — proving effective. Bloomberg estimates that six months after a report is published, a typical Hindenburg target is down ~26%.
Restricted reading
New data from the American Library Association (ALA) reveals that the number of attempts to ban books nearly doubled in the US last year, with 1,269 restrictive challenges waged against reading materials and other resources in America’s public and school libraries.
The number of unique titles affected by banning efforts is rocketing too, with challengers broadening their scopes — 40% of books targeted were in motions relating to 100+ titles.
Bans in the USA
The vast majority of 2022’s challenged titles are written by or about members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color. And, while book banning in the US isn’t a new phenomenon, the current surge is part of what’s being labeled an “era like none other in the country’s history” — linked, inextricably, with the rise in political polarization across the country.
That sentiment is firmly supported by the ALA’s latest figures — the Association has been gathering data on censorship in US libraries for over 20 years, but it’s only since the pandemic that attempts to ban books have properly taken off. With thousands of public and school libraries shuttered during Covid, attempts to blacklist books fell to a 20-year low. Banners have hit the books hard since, with demands rising sharply in the last 2 years.
Delectable
Darden Restaurants, the company behind Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse and 6 other chains, just raised its annual sales forecast again after a particularly tasty quarter for the restaurant operator.
Same-restaurant sales were up 11.7% across the 8 Darden brands, with Olive Garden revenues — which accounted for nearly half of its parent company’s quarterly sales — rising some 12.3% to $1.3 billion in Q3.
The magic garden
Olive Garden has been the Darden Restaurant family's main course since 2014, when the group sold Red Lobster for $2.1bn to focus on the chain famed for its unlimited salad and much-loved breadsticks. Olive Garden’s unfussy menu, packed with comforting Italian-inspired favorites, has been a winner for consumers who still want to dine out, but might be keeping their purse strings a little tighter in the economic climate. Olive Garden’s average check size? Just $21 — less than a quarter of the $92 average tab at Darden’s higher-end brand Capital Grille.
Indeed, Olive Garden has hauled in some $3.6 billion in the fiscal year to date, 47% of the company’s sales. That’s almost twice as much as Darden’s second-biggest brand Longhorn Steakhouse, which has seen sales hit $1.9 billion in FY23. Darden’s other casual diners, Bahama Breeze, Yard House, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, and Seasons 52, have brought in $1.6 billion so far.
• Moneyball: on average, buying an MLB team will now set you back a whopping $2.3bn, up 12% this year.
• Interesting study on the power of branding in the bottled water market.
• IT and consulting giant Accenture is cutting 19,000 jobs… that’s still just 2.5% of its workforce.
• Bad Bunny, the most-streamed artist on Spotify for the last 3 years, is facing a $40 million lawsuit for sampling voice recordings of his ex-partner without her permission.
• Fearless to Folklore, Red to Reputation — charting Taylor Swift’s most popular albums.
• Interesting analysis from The Economist showing that online daters are less open-minded than their filters suggest.
Off the charts: Which film franchise, set to return to theatres in April, is in the table below? [Scroll down for answer].
Answer here.
