AT&T’s loss could be your living room’s win

Follow Us Get the newsletter This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a failing merger of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Today's Agenda AT&T is cutting its Time Warner losses. Time to kill the Jones Act. Beef can be good for the planet. Musk, Wood and other memelords are struggling. M&A bankers loved this one too. Photographer: STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images AT&T's Conscious Unbundling M&A banking is of course not a con game. But if it were, then AT&T might be its juiciest mark.  Just four years ago, AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner for $85 billion, generating a lot of debt and M&A banking fees to buy an asset already infamous as a dubious merger partner. That came just two years after AT&T agreed to spend $49 billion on DirecTV. More debt, more fees. Now AT&T is NOPE-ing away from both deals as hard as it can. In February, it announced it was spinning off DirecTV. What's that? More fees? You got it. Today it said it would sell Time Warner to Discovery. Hope you like fees. On the other hand, you must credit AT&T for recognizing the error of its ways and cutting its losses quickly, writes Tara Lachapelle. Former CEO Randall Stephenson tried to build a pipes-and-content empire but failed to convince investors it made any sense: Stephenson's replacement John Stankey will now have a clean slate, and a little less debt, to focus AT&T on its core business of charging through the nose for wireless and internet service. As for Time Warner, history's saddest serial acquisition target, Discovery might finally be its forever home. Yes, it's a home filled with programming you only sort of half-watch, such as "House Hunters" and "Naked and Afraid," writes Tara Lachapelle. "Game of Thrones" it ain't. But presumably Discovery CEO David Zaslav realizes he's got a chance to turn HBO Max and Discovery+ into a streaming powerhouse that appeals to every level of brow — high, middle and low — in the audience. That's what it will take to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime and other rivals. Meanwhile, the bankers will have to find other marks, er, clients. Paid Post Importing spreadsheet data shouldn't require messy CSV templates or expensive services teams. Flatfile's intuitive data import wizard guides users to import even the messiest data, securely, and with confidence. No Excel formatting, no custom import scripts, and no need to build vs. buy. Get a demo The Many Emergencies of President Joe Biden Running the United States is difficult in normal times, which these are not. Joe Biden got elected to handle a few massive emergencies — pandemic, recession, democracy's death — but new emergencies keep annoyingly arising, as they do. Everybody's panicking about inflation, for example, partly as a byproduct of Biden's efforts to fix the pandemic and recession. Matthew Yglesias suggests some things Biden can do to alleviate food and energy inflation, even if the Fed can't (and shouldn't) be bothered with such niceties. Jonathan Bernstein counters there's only so much a president can do about food prices and that maybe some emergencies are better left to the experts to handle, particularly when they're almost impossible to solve. Then there's Colonial Pipeline. For that emergency, to get gasoline quickly to Georgia so people would stop filling Ziplocs with it, Biden helped by waiving the Jones Act. This law mandates that stuff shipped between American ports can only ride on American-owned and -crewed ships. It's a super-dumb law, writes Bloomberg's editorial board, generating costs and carbon emissions and routinely failing in emergencies. Biden and Congress should just kill it with fire and find other ways to support American boats and workers. Biden and/or Congress could also bulk up America's reserves of refined products, writes Julian Lee. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a bunch of crude oil sloshing around in caves, is essentially useless when people need gasoline to get to work yesterday. This has the benefit of solving several future crises at once. Bonus Editorial: Biden can't just reject GOP ideas on infrastructure. He needs them to pass a good bill.  Green Acres Is the Place to Be A few weeks ago, as you probably have tried to forget, the culture wars were being fought over beef. Conservatives claimed Biden was making it illegal. He wasn't. It was a big to-do. The truth is, beef as it's currently farmed is pretty bad for the planet. We'd all be better off eating much less of it, at least until lab-grown meat really takes off. But there is another way: Amanda Little profiles a Georgia farmer using prehistoric ranching methods to lock carbon in the soil, making his beef actually carbon-negative. His technique, which involves cows roaming free among clover and trees, also makes for happier animals, which all carnivores know are more delicious.    Further Green-Technique Reading: Factories should get help building local, sustainable energy sources so they don't burden the grid. — Ellen Wald  Telltale Charts Not long ago, Elon Musk, Chamath Palihapitiya and Cathie Wood were infallible masters of fad and meme investments, guiding their diamond-handed followers to a promised land on the moon. Lately they have fallen very much back to earth, writes Chris Bryant. And the diamond-handed are learning hard lessons about the importance of old-fashioned investment values, such as "diversification" and "profit." (Although Musk still has the magic power to control crypto prices, notes Matt Levine.) If you want "to own the libs by not owning the libs," as Liam Denning and Nir Kaissar put it, you might not want to invest in the American Conservative Values ETF. It's basically an extremely expensive index tracker.  Further Reading Israel has worse problems than Hamas, including its alienated Arab citizens, its fading image and its refusal to change. — Pankaj Mishra  China's Bhutan incursion is the latest example of how the Pax Americana prohibition against invading other nations is eroding. — Hal Brands  Big banks are giving credit to people without scores. It's a long-overdue step to reach marginalized people. — Brian Chappatta  We may get to the point where we must force people to get Covid vaccines for the public good. — Clara Ferreira Marques  The Archegos collapse exposed three things we must do to reduce the risks of family office funds. — Martin Gruenberg  Psychedelic drug legalization is following the same path as marijuana's, and it will probably succeed. — Noah Feldman  We should start making our kids financially savvy at a much earlier age. — Eddie Yoon  Eight travel tips for Americans looking to go to Europe. — Brooke Sutherland  ICYMI Biden is sending U.S.-approved vaccines abroad. New York is easing its mask mandate. We're running short on everything. Kickers Cranes may be returning to Ireland after a 300-year vacation. (h/t Ellen Kominers) How to build a carbon-neutral sailboat. Foil Russian hackers with this one weird trick. Nothing can prepare you for how good this Brooklyn Nets dunk is. Notes: Please send razzle-dazzle passes and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.   Like Bloomberg Opinion Today? Subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more.   You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022