Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition December 13, 2021

● Global coronavirus cases have topped 266 million, and almost 5.3m people have died. Authorities around the world are imposing fresh restrictions to curb the spread of the omicron strain, closing nightclubs and schools and mandating vaccines for private-sector workers. ● The U.S. won’t send officials to the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which start on Feb. 4, citing human-rights abuses. China, which denies the allegations, has threatened the U.S. with unspecified retaliation for the diplomatic boycott. ● “Things we did not do in 2014, we are prepared to do now.” U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said President Joe Biden told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that the U.S. won’t stand by idly if Ukraine is invaded, a departure from the response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. ● Amazon.com’s cloud-computing arm suffered an outage…

Almost two years into the pandemic, U.S. students are still suffering. Disruptions to in-person schooling have caused significant learning loss in math and reading and widened racial achievement gaps. Millions of students have a basic need: more time in the classroom. The good news is that public-school districts have resources to make that happen, thanks to the Covid-19 relief bills passed by Congress. Yet with cases rising and the omicron variant adding to the uncertainty, some schools are once again curtailing in-person instruction. Even if limited in duration, such closures are wrong—and risk doing irreparable academic harm to the students who can least afford it. At this point, the evidence against remote learning is overwhelming. A study released in November by the National Bureau of Economic Research compared standardized test scores from…

▶ Olaf Scholz will for the first time represent Germany as chancellor at the European Council summit. Topics at the Dec. 16 meeting range from Covid to Brexit. ▶ The Federal Reserve sets rates on Dec. 15, followed the next day by the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. Many central banks have signaled an end to ultralow lending. ▶ Saudi Arabia is ready to unveil its budget the week of Dec. 12. Look out for clues that the oil-rich country is moving its economy away from fossil fuels and toward areas like infrastructure. ▶ Dec. 15 is the deadline to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. The Treasury Department has warned that the government could have difficulty meeting its obligations after that date. ▶ French President Emmanuel Macron visits Hungary on Dec.…

If there’s one area of bipartisan consensus to be found in Washington these days, it’s China policy. Everyone, whether Democrat or Republican, is a China hawk, no matter how much they may differ about everything else, from mask mandates to the causes of inflation. It’s a remarkable change from 20 years ago, when a healthy majority in Washington supported China’s Dec. 11, 2001, accession into the World Trade Organization. And one major and well-documented reason for the shift is the work of economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. Since 2013 they’ve been detailing the dislocation in the U.S. economy caused by a surge in imports from China, which had led to a loss of as many as 2.4 million jobs by 2011. What’s now known as the China shock has…

Thirty-five years ago drug manufacturer Merck & Co. invented a groundbreaking treatment for river blindness, a disease that affects millions of people in Africa. The company donated billions of doses and frequently touted its philanthropy, building a narrative about the good a drugmaker can do. Few people had ever heard of the tropical disease treatment until this year. Now that antiparasitic—ivermectin—is a household name, and the story is well out of Merck’s hands. In the midst of the Covid‑19 crisis, anti-vaxxers embraced it as a treatment for the virus despite a lack of scientific evidence to support its use. Merck has recently developed molnupiravir, a Covid treatment the company hopes will soon become a key tool in stemming the pandemic, even though it’s entering a world in which rampant misinformation could…

Here’s a sure sign that a SPAC-lash is afoot. Electric vehicle startup Lucid Group Inc., whose market value once soared past that of General Motors Co. this year, said on Dec. 6 that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was probing its barely five-month-old blank-check merger and business projections given to investors. The admission sent the stock reeling. It was a surprise disclosure from a company that’s seen as having real potential in the electric vehicle race. Lucid Chief Executive Officer Peter Rawlinson came from Tesla Inc., and in September the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certified that the company’s Air sedan can travel a world-best 520 miles on a single charge. And Lucid had gone public with far more credibility than fellow SPAC newbies Nikola Corp. and Lordstown Motors Corp., both…