CNBC.com’s Pippa Stevens brings you the day’s top business news headlines. On today’s show, CNBC.com’s Yun Li reports on how the SEC’s scrutiny of meme stocks is getting serious. Plus, Federal Reserve officials step down amid controversy over stock purchases.
Famed investor Michael Burry revealed on Twitter that he received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its investigation into GameStop, a wildly speculative stock that the “Big Short” trader once bet on.
“So, who got an SEC subpoena over $GME? Actually, I know who, they’re on my subpoena. With all that’s going on in the world…” Burry said in a now-deleted tweet on Friday. He attached a copy of the SEC letter dated Sept. 21.
Burry, who leads Scion Asset Management, shot to fame by betting against mortgage securities before the 2008 crisis. Burry was depicted in Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short” and the subsequent Oscar-winning movie.
The hedge fund manager had been trading GameStop shares and publicly commenting on the meme stock for the past few years. At the end of 2018, Burry first revealed a $6.8 million position in the video game retailer, according to InsiderScore.com. Over the next few quarters, the investor trimmed, exited and reentered the stock multiple times, and his stake was worth more than $17 million at the end of the third quarter of 2020 until he closed the position the next quarter.
Amazon on Tuesday announced its long-rumored home robot. It’s called Astro and will sell for $999. I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can’t do, and why Amazon decided to build a home robot.
Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business.
Notably, Astro is a “Day 1 Edition” product, which means it won’t be sold to everyone at first. Instead, Amazon will ask people to sign up and then invite them to order the robot. That allows Amazon to avoid building too many gadgets it won’t sell and a public flop like the Amazon Fire Phone, which was discontinued in 2015.
Amazon said Astro will go on sale later this year but did not give a specific launch date. It’s worth noting that Amazon has made similar promises about future products that either never launched or were severely delayed.
Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan became the second regional central bank leader to resign Monday, saying he was stepping down early following a recent controversy over stock market trades he made.
Kaplan’s early retirement follows an announcement earlier in the day from Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who said he will leave as well but cited health concerns and not the issue over his investment portfolio activity.
“The Federal Reserve is approaching a critical point in our economic recovery as it deliberates the future path of monetary policy. Unfortunately, the recent focus on my financial disclosure risks becoming a distraction to the Federal Reserve’s execution of that vital work,” Kaplan said in a statement.
His retirement takes effect Oct. 8. The resignations come a day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell is to spend two days on Capitol Hill updating legislators on the central bank’s efforts to combat the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
