🌏 TTFN, Toshiba

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Here’s what you need to know

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 Japan’s biggest brands going private.

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.

Iceland’s 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 Nio’s 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. They’re protesting pay and benefits, and have been underground for two days.

The business game changers that were named as Quartz’s 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 Quartz’s 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 stories—find the other 20 here.

🏦 Will Bunq’s Ali Niknam bring his AI-powered bank to the US?

🛰️ How hyper-sensitive satellites could combat climate crises from space

🧠 How one designer is helping dementia patients unlock forgotten memories

🩺 How this privacy expert is ensuring women’s most intimate data stays secure

🚜 Why the future of farming is taking lessons from commercial real estate

Real estate woes are a bankruptcy alarm for US regional banks

It’s 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). That’s because more investors are expected to default on their commercial real estate loans, and those defaults could trigger uninsured depositors to run on the banks—like they did with Silicon Valley Bank in March.

Quartz’s Laura Bratton dug into the details of the report and its implications for banks. Read the full story.

Quartz’s most popular

🏗️ Why Japan’s Nippon Steel is spending big to buy US Steel

🚢 The world’s biggest shipping companies are boycotting the Suez Canal

⌚ You only have a few days to buy the fancy Apple Watches

👚 Online luxury retailer Farfetch is getting a last-second, $500 million tug out the mud

🚘 12 of the biggest failures in the driverless car industry in 2023

🤗 Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wants an AI democracy

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 Earth’s magnetic field. It isn’t static, and how it interacts with objects can help us date them, too.

There’s a Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster. It is colorful and twinkly but it’s not shaped like a tree if that’s 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.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple | Google | Pandora

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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, Taters streams, and Christmas trees to [email protected]. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.