The long-running dispute between the U.S. and France over taxes on technology giants takes another move forward today with Washington set to announce details of tariffs on $500 million to $700 million of goods. The duties aren't expected to come into effect, though, until French authorities start collecting taxes on companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. It's not only tech companies caught in the crosshairs of geopolitics, global banks operating in Hong Kong face huge regulatory headaches as they try to follow China's new security law while staying on the right side of possible U.S. sanctions. (Bloomberg)

Tyson Foods the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, currently relies on about 122K workers to churn out about 20% of chicken, beef and pork produced in the U.S. That's changing after the coronavirus pandemic showed supply chain vulnerabilities. The company is now pushing further into robotics, developing an automated deboning system destined to handle some of the roughly 39M chickens it processes each week. At Pilgrim's Pride the second largest U.S. chicken processor, deboning machines now trail humans by only 1% to 1.5% in terms of meat yield per chicken. (SA)

S&P 500 is down 21, and the NASDAQ is down 59. The MSCI International Index is up down 4/10’s%. 

The International Energy Agency said that demand for crude should rebound sharply over the next three months as economic activity resumes, while bloated stockpiles will diminish as OPEC and its allies persevere with production cuts. The forecast warned however that the outlook could be derailed by the upsurge in the virus. It seems oil traders are paying more attention to the warning than to the optimistic outlook,

With Northwest Quadrant Wealth Management, a Registered Investment Advisor I am Josh Fenili.