đ Bankrupt banks and bad real estate
Plus: Quartzâs 2023 Innovators.

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More than $30 billion of cargo has been diverted from the Red Sea. The threat of attacks from Houthi militants has escalated since the Israel-Hamas war started in October, and is sending ships all the way around Africa instead of through the Suez Canal and Red Sea.
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Toshiba will be delisted today from the Tokyo exchange after 74 years. A decade of scandal and upheaval at the conglomerate has ended with one of Japanâs biggest brands going private.
Icelandâs capital is under a pollution warning after a volcano began erupting Monday. The country has been bracing for an explosion for weeks as earthquake activity has increased in the region around Reykjavik.
An Abu Dhabi investor bet $2.2 billion on Nioâs resurgence. The Chinese electric vehicle company lags behind American rival Tesla and homegrown challenger BYD.
More than 2,000 mine workers are striking in South Africa. Theyâre protesting pay and benefits, and have been underground for two days.
Real estate woes are a bankruptcy alarm for US regional banks
Itâs no secret that the US commercial real estate industry is on a shaky foundation.
Its downturn could lead to bankruptcy for up to 385 American banks, most of them smaller, regional ones, according to a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Thatâs because more investors are expected to default on their commercial real estate loans, and those defaults could trigger uninsured depositors to run on the banksâlike they did with Silicon Valley Bank in March.
Quartzâs Laura Bratton dug into the details of the report and its implications for banks. Read the full story.
The business game changers that were named as Quartzâs 2023 Innovators
AI-powered banks. Hyper-sensitive satellites. Video therapy to help unlock forgotten memories.
The minds behind those ideas are just some of those featured on Quartzâs 2023 Innovators list, and all of them have used bold technologies and industry-changing ideas to imagine better ways of doing business. Below are five of their storiesâfind the other 20 here.
Surprising discoveries
Space got its first cat video. A 15-minute stream of Taters chasing a laser was sent across the great beyond.
Ancient bricks from Mesopotamia may help us better understand Earthâs magnetic field. It isnât static, and how it interacts with objects can help us date them, too.
Thereâs a Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster. It is colorful and twinkly but itâs not shaped like a tree if thatâs what you were hoping for.
TikTok creators are being tipped more than $11 million a day. This has gone too far.
Your next favorite shirt may be harvested from the seafloor. What beautiful, albeit a little slimy, resource captures carbon way better than its counterpart on land, while also providing a sustainable textile and replacement for harmful dyes? Quartz deputy editor Gabriela Riccardi and our editor in chief Heather Landy dive deep into seaweed in the next episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast.
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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, Taters streams, and Christmas trees to [email protected]. Todayâs Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.