Executive Summary

• This week’s note “From the Desk of Deborah Weinswig” discusses new trends in fashion retail as well as the needs and desires of the mass market.
• The amount of money that Amazon lost on shipping—the net cost of landing all those boxes on doorsteps in record time—reached an all-time high of nearly $7.2 billion in 2016, according to an analysis by GeekWire.
• German supermarket group Aldi has said that it will invest an additional $1.6 billion in its US operations as the competition among its American rivals intensifies. The group is already in the process of growing its store number to 2,000 by 2018, an expansion worth more than $3 billion.
• Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial announced a surprise deal to acquire international payment service MoneyGram for $880 million last month, but that looks like just the start of its M&A activities. It is now reportedly close to raising nearly $3 billion in debt financing in order to bankroll further acquisitions.