Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition 4/30/2018

● The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 425 points on April 24, as industrial and tech stocks took a beating. Meanwhile, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit 3% for the first time in four years. ● Amazon.com started delivering packages to parked cars in 37 cities. The option, which depends on couriers being able to unlock the trunk, is only available for now to owners of General Motors or Volvo vehicles. ● Oscar Munoz, CEO of United Continental, said he’ll forgo his bonus for 2017. The company also said Chairman Robert Milton was stepping down. In April 2017, a listless passenger was dragged from one of the carrier’s planes. In March, a dog died after a flight attendant made its owner put it into an overhead bin. ● The U.S. Department of…

The world’s rich countries face a looming challenge in education: Too many of their citizens lack the skills and credentials for the jobs of the future. To keep people productively engaged in the coming decades and to ensure that economies maintain robust growth, governments, educators, and employers need to make lasting investments in a new class of students: adults. The trouble for now is demographics. Although the share of people age 18 to 24 going to college is growing, the population of young adults is shrinking in the U.S. and Europe. So college enrollment is largely in decline. Meanwhile, the population of older workers keeps growing. By the middle of the next decade nearly one-quarter of the U.S. workforce will be over 55. Many adults lack the post-high school education and…

▶ The Plight of the $1,000 Phone With Apple preparing to announce its second-quarter earnings on May 1, analysts are sounding funereal. The company’s key suppliers have reported sharply slower growth, suggesting that sales of the iPhone X fizzled after the winter holidays. ▶ The U.S. Federal Reserve, meeting on May 1-2, is expected to leave borrowing costs unchanged but lay the groundwork for a June rate hike. ▶ More than 40,000 people will gather in Omaha on May 5 for the annual meeting of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. ▶ This year’s Facebook Developer Conference, on May 1-2 in San Jose, will explore a host of topics, including “Authenticity and Quality in News Feed.” ▷ 43 ▶ On May 4, the U.S. Department of Labor issues its employment report for April. Job gains are…

Abdul Razak Hussein, a revered former premier in Malaysia, didn’t think his son was cut out for politics. Turns out Prime Minister Najib Razak is quite skilled at the mortal combat required for public life, despite his stately manner and posh, accented English. He’s withstood a multibillion-dollar financial scandal at a state fund, known as 1MDB, that caught the attention of investigators in the U.S., Singapore, and Switzerland. His onetime political mentor has also turned on him, posing a serious challenge to Najib. Yet he’s still favored to prevail in a May 9 election that could keep him in power well into the next decade. His political instincts and cunning have allowed him to sideline threats at home and conduct affairs of state unimpeded overseas, even charming Donald Trump at the…

Businessweek.com Kraft Heinz Co. was supposed to be different. The packaged-food giant, created in a 2015 merger orchestrated by private equity firm 3G Capital and investor Warren Buffett, was viewed, on Wall Street at least, as immune to the headwinds pummeling its peers in the industry. Sure, it’s tough to find sales growth, with consumers looking for fresher and edgier products and grocers improving their house brands and increasingly giving shelf space to upstart names such as Halo Top and Chobani. But for Kraft Heinz, it almost didn’t matter. The marriage was never about selling more Maxwell House coffee, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Oscar Mayer deli meats. It was about 3G finding another company to buy and doing what its notoriously thrifty managers do best: slashing costs and making money—big money—for…

With their reputation for skid row stations, grueling rides, and stinking toilets, intercity buses have long been the travel option of last resort. But in Europe, a startup called FlixBus has given buses a trendier, eco-friendly, sharing-economy vibe. Now it’s aiming to take on Greyhound Lines Inc.in the U.S. Since introducing a handful of routes in Bavaria when Germany liberalized its long-distance bus market five years ago, Flix has become Europe’s biggest network, serving 1,700 destinations in 27 countries. More than 100,000 people board one of the company’s 1,500 bright-green coaches every day, embarking for destinations as far-flung as Kiev, Lisbon, and Oslo. With backing from private equity companies General Atlantic LLC and Silver Lake Management LLC, Flix in March added train travel in Germany and is experimenting with long-distance electric…