Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition 7/3/2017

Americas ● A police helicopter allegedly pummeled Venezuelan government buildings with bullets and grenades during the night of June 27. President Nicolás Maduro called it an act of terrorism, but his opponents have accused him of staging the attack to justify military intervention in the crisis-ridden country. ● The Trump administration escalated a trade war with Canada, announcing duties of as much as 7.7 percent on imported softwood to prevent dumping on the U.S. market. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for the wedding of Charlie Craig and David Mullins. ● The International Monetary Fund, citing skepticism that the Trump administration’s promised tax cuts and infrastructure spending will come to fruition, trimmed its outlook for the U.S. economy from a 2.3…

By 1997, the South Koreans were pretty cocky, and for good reason. For 30 years, the East Asian country had been one of history’s economic marvels, transforming itself from a poor, war-torn wasteland into a rich industrial powerhouse. The economy wasn’t perfect: Korea’s big companies were prone to amassing too much debt and investing it in outlandish projects. But the Koreans had shrugged off such problems again and again. The future seemed secure. It wasn’t. On July 2, 1997—almost exactly 20 years ago—authorities in Thailand relinquished their control over the national currency, the baht. With market watchers already anxious it would plunge in value, the move tipped off the Asian financial crisis, an economic storm that crashed through Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, then slammed into South Korea as it spread tremors…

Almost a month after Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states cut off trade and diplomatic ties with Qatar, an American official finally seems to have a plan to resolve the standoff. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t someone from the Trump administration. Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker intends to block all U.S. arms sales to Gulf Cooperation Council nations until they end the dispute (and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has the authority). This includes the $110 billion in sales agreements announced during President Trump’s visit to Riyadh in May. Foreign policy is ordinarily more under the purview of the executive than the legislative branch. But with this dispute, which harms both U.S. interests and regional stability, Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have been on different pages since the…

“Rather than compete by lowering net prices, the drug companies compete by raising list prices” David Hernandez, a 44-year-old restaurant worker and Type 1 diabetic, didn’t have insurance from 2011 through 2014 and often couldn’t afford insulin—a workhorse drug whose list price has risen more than 270 percent over the past decade. As a result of his skimping on dosages, Hernandez in 2011 suffered permanent blindness in his left eye, and three years later he experienced kidney failure. He’s since received a lifesaving kidney transplant covered by Medicare and has drug coverage under a New Jersey program for the disabled. But Hernandez’s eligibility expires next January, at which time he’ll have to pay about $300 a month out of pocket for insulin. “I don’t really have that kind of money,” he…

“I’m trying to find a solution for the people who are leaving” Since its founding in 2005, Chobani has grown into an almost $2 billion-a-year thorn in the side of the dairy aisle’s established giants. It introduced Americans to Greek yogurt by promoting its thick texture and higher protein content, and now Chobani is the top-selling yogurt brand in the U.S., having surpassed General Mills Inc.’s Yoplait last year. But lately sales of the Greek variety have slowed, falling almost 5 percent in the past year. That’s causing Chobani LLC Chief Executive Officer Hamdi Ulukaya to embrace an unlikely product to fuel growth: conventional yogurt. Despite having long branded the traditional variety as overly sweet, boring, and stuffed with artificial ingredients, Chobani has begun rolling out Smooth, a set of five flavored…

In 2016, Americans purchased more Toyota Camrys than any other car for the 15th straight year. But even the brand’s long popularity and perennial top ranking in quality surveys of midsize cars by J.D. Power & Associates Inc. haven’t made it immune to the auto industry’s dramatic shift away from the once-dominant family sedan. Toyota Motor Corp. found that out the hard way in the last few years when it got caught flat-footed as car buyers defected in droves to roomier pickups and sport-utility vehicles. The main factory producing Camrys for the U.S., in Georgetown, Ky., is Toyota’s largest assembly plant. The size of 156 football fields, the facility was running at just 80 percent of capacity in April, according to Dan Antis, vice president for manufacturing, and was barely breaking…