Bloomberg Businessweek

happy anniversary, christine!

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its third-quarter GDP estimate on Oct. 29. Analysts predict a sharp rebound from last quarter’s –31.4%. ▷ 28 Also on Oct. 29, the Conference Board reports its gauge of U.S. consumer confidence. Economists say the number should edge slightly higher from September’s figure. The Bank of Canada meets to set interest rates on Oct. 28. Forecasters don’t anticipate a change from the bank’s current rate of 0.25%. In Germany, the Federal Statistical Office on Oct. 30 is expected to report a 9% decline in third-quarter GDP, following the second quarter’s 9.7% drop. The Nov. 1 Caixin Manufacturing PMI should show a modest uptick in manufacturing in China. On Oct. 18 the country reported third-quarter GDP of 4.9%, near pre-Covid levels. Sotheby’s fall sale of impressionist and modern art…

covid threatens women pilots’ progress

Growing up in Amsterdam, Rachna Sharma Reiter felt like the exception. At age 7, she knew she wanted to be an airline pilot but never met any girls her age who shared that ambition. At flight school in the U.S., she was one of three women in a class of 150. After 16 years in the cockpit, she still finds herself being viewed as an anomaly. “It seems like things haven’t really changed,” says Reiter, who works for U.K. discount airline EasyJet Plc. “Whenever I go somewhere, they always tend to think I’m a flight attendant, even when I’m in my pilot’s uniform.” The path to the flight deck has never been easy for women. Beyond the gender assumptions, there are the structural forces impeding progress. Male-dominated militaries have long fed…

e-commerce turns fashionable

“So, what are you looking for?” the Lululemon staffer cheerfully asks. She handpicks a couple of pairs of yoga leggings that cost upwards of $100, but there’s a catch: There’s no way to try them on because the consultation is over Zoom. The half-hour conversation ends with the purchase of high-rise tights in heathered graphite gray, which show up two days later and fit. Retailers had been toying with features such as video chats and livestreaming to make e-commerce more pleasant and personable even before the coronavirus forced store closures. But months into a pandemic that still has people wary of going to the mall, the online shopping experiment is pivoting from hype to a longer-term strategy. Covid-19 has supercharged the threat e-commerce poses to brick-and-mortar chains—U.S. online sales in the…

a bounce you can’t trounce

Fears that a resurgence of the virus would cause the economy to lapse back into recession are fading. Economists polled by Bloomberg predict slightly stronger-than-normal GDP growth for the current quarter and all of 2021. That should cause the unemployment rate—which peaked at 13% ① in June—to drift down to about 6% by the end of 2021, the median prediction in the Bloomberg survey. Women’s participation in the labor force ② plunged in April, possibly because mothers dropped out to care for kids when schools closed, but has partially recovered. Two things explain the economy’s rebound. States ended the general shutdowns that squelched growth in the second quarter. And Congress and the Federal Reserve came to the rescue with unprecedented fiscal and monetary relief. Expectations that the recovery will continue rest on…

spifs or scofflaws?

When U.S. prosecutors sought last month to throw a Chinese scientist in jail until her trial for visa fraud, a judge refused, saying they had sought to paint her as a “foreign spy” without backing up the claim. “The government suggests that this court should treat this case as one involving espionage charges, even though no such charges have been filed,” wrote U.S. District Judge John Mendez in Sacramento of the indictment against University of California at Davis researcher Juan Tang. In July, when the U.S. announced charges against Tang and three other researchers who were working in American university labs, the top U.S. Department of Justice official responsible for national security said their presence in America was “part of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan to take advantage of our open…

an audience of one

Dan Ball, a host for One America News Network, looked disgusted. It was Tuesday, Sept. 29, and the first debate between President Trump and Joe Biden had just ended. Across social media, people were criticizing the moderator, veteran Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who’d struggled to control the proceedings. Now Ball wanted to take a whack for OAN, a slavishly pro-Trump cable channel that’s been positioning itself as more loyal to the MAGA cause than Fox News. Ball pulled out a box of tissues. “I brought something with me for Chris Wallace,” he said. “Chris should use that to get the brown stuff off of his nose.” For the next half-hour, OAN’s panel of analysts piled on. Wallace, they agreed, had been incredibly favorable to Biden, failing to fact-check his falsehoods,…