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It’s not over yet

February 02, 2021
Evening Briefing
Bloomberg

The fallout from last week's short-squeeze madness continued on Monday. Robinhood Markets' biggest backers kept on plowing billions of dollars into the beleaguered online brokerage. The cash infusions came as the trading app grappled with outraged customers and heightened regulatory scrutiny following its reaction to a day-trader assault on shorts of a certain video-game retailer. After absorbing a $20 billion hit, GameStop bears look like they're starting to cover their positions as the company's stock plunged 34%. Short interest in GameStop plummeted to 39% of free-floating shares from 114% in mid-January. Meanwhile, the broader markets had some good news today. Here's your markets wrap. —David E. Rovella

Bloomberg is tracking the progress of coronavirus vaccines while mapping the pandemic globally and across America. 

Here are today's top stories  

South Korean traders piled into U.S. stocks like GameStop and Tesla  in January, driving their buying of overseas equities to a record high. Korean individual and institutional investors bought a net $5 billion of foreign stocks in January.

Before you think this wild Wall Street episode is over, think again. Silver spiked to an almost eight-year high, extending a surge that started with that same day trader retail investor frenzy. Most-active futures rose as much as 13% to $30.35 an ounce on the Comex, the highest since February 2013. That followed a weekend buying binge that overwhelmed online sellers of silver coins and bars from the U.S. to Australia. BlackRock's iShares Silver Trust, the largest exchange-traded product tracking the metal, recorded an unprecedented $944 million net inflow on Friday. But this time around, a big Wall Street player might be making bank on the latest Reddit play.

First it was Bitcoin. Then GameStop. Now silver. Like everything else bouncing from online chats to the broader investing world, silver's turn in the spotlight can be traced to a now-infamous Reddit group. Investors don't seem to care though that the forum entertains debunked, decades-old conspiracy theories. So let's pause for a moment and consider whether you should be investing in silver in the first place.

Silver bars piled high in a vault at the Rochester Silver Works in upstate New York.

Photographer: Bloomberg 

A year has passed, and there have been 103 million confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide, though experts caution that the true number is likely much higher. More than 2.2 million people have been confirmed to have died from the virus, also a figure far lower than the actual toll. In Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to offer all Germans a vaccine by the end of September and Bayer agreed to produce CureVac's experimental vaccine to help speed its rollout. America continues to lead the world in both infections and death, recording almost 100,000 fatalities in January alone. More than 2,000 Americans died just yesterday from Covid-19. However, daily deaths in the U.S. following the latest wave are beginning to fall. Here is the latest on the pandemic.

Inside U.S. President Joe Biden's White House, there's debate about how to meet his promise to issue Americans another $1,400 each in Covid relief checks. At least two of the Democrat's top economic advisers have privately expressed reservations about the size of the checks, and at what level they would begin to phase out for higher-income people.

As Biden decides whether to work with or ignore Republicans who proposed a miniature version of his rescue package (Democrats in Congress are leaning toward the latter response), the president faces a new foreign policy test. By seizing power, Myanmar's generals are pushing the administration to counter the appeal of China's authoritarian model.

And now for something completely different—and yes, it involves him. It seems that Elon Musk is bragging that one of his startups has a monkey that's able to play video games (it has wires going into its brain).

What you'll need to know tomorrow 

What you'll want to read in Bloomberg Pursuits

Millennials Dictate Future of Luxury Real Estate

In sharp contrast to the "slacker" stereotype that has defined their generation, millennials aren't living in parents' basements. In fact, they're buying multimillion-dollar homes. Breaking from the notional "starter home" older generations embraced, wealthy millennials are going big.

This $17.5 million, six-bedroom home is on the market in Austin, Texas. 

Photographer: JP Morales for Kuper Sotheby's International Realty

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Invest Talks with Mark Carney: Join us Feb. 10 when Bloomberg's Jason Kelly speaks with former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, now Brookfield Asset Management's head of ESG and impact fund investing. Carney will discuss his outlook for sustainable finance, the broader economic horizon and the shape of the coming global recovery. Register here.

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