Day: May 19, 2020

Liability protections are top GOP priority in next coronavirus bill, McCarthy says

wayne May 19, 2020

Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Treasury secretary, from left, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky,U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence listen as President Donald Trump speaks before signing the H.R. 748, Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, March 27, 2020.

Erin Schaff | The New York Times | Getty Images

Republican leaders including Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are set to discuss their priorities for another coronavirus relief bill Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said.

McCarthy, R-Calif., told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the leaders will be “looking at ways of where we can work together to move forward on what we do need” in a legislative package. That search would start with liability protections for doctors and businesses, McCarthy said.

“Liability protections would be the No. 1 thing I would look at,” McCarthy said. “No bill will pass without it.”

Democrats on Friday night passed a sweeping $3 trillion bill, nearly $1 trillion of which would go toward funding state and

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The man who made Moderna

wayne May 19, 2020

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Good morning.

The big news yesterday—and possibly the best news since the pandemic began—is that Moderna Therapeutics announced positive Phase I test results from its COVID 19 vaccine candidate. It’s a small test—just 8 people—but all developed antibodies from the vaccine, suggesting a path to success by early next year.

Last week, I interviewed the man who gave birth to Moderna—Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Pioneering—for our podcast, Leadership Next, out this morning here. It was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had during lockdown, and well worth listening to.

Flagship is a portfolio company, which creates and incubates life sciences companies, and its goal, Afeyan says, is “innovation at the extreme.” An excerpt from the interview:

“Everything we do is to create completely new possible solutions that don’t exist today. When we start these things, they are completely unreasonable, and therefore dismissed…I believe humanity has largely used up all the obvious things to do to have social impact. We have to work on things that are un-obvious and unreasonable, and identify from those the subset that might turn out …

10 big business deals that are changing the pet industry

wayne May 19, 2020

The pet industry has long been almost boringly stable, having proven itself to be recession-proof (or at least recession-resistant). But it has also been ripe for innovation, with new products and services and new ways of selling to consumers as customers’ behaviors and tastes change—along with the ways they project those behaviors and tastes onto their pets.

For more, see “It’s a dogfight at America’s pet stores as COVID-19 upends the $96 billion industry.”

In recent years, those factors have earned the $95.7 billion industry plenty of attention from mergers-and-acquisition bankers and tech investors alike. Here are some of the biggest deals of the past five years, in both spaces, according to data from Dealogic (for M&A) and Pitchbook (for venture-capital deals).

Big buys in the pet aisles

A big blue deal

In 2018, Fortune 500 food giant General Mills bought Blue Buffalo Pet Products for $8 billion. General Mills’ sales of processed food and cereals had been languishing; this deal made it a major player in the pet industry overnight.

Who owns your vet?

Mars PetsCare bought veterinary giant VCA for $7.7 billion in 2017. Mars is best known as a maker of food (for humans and …