Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition February 13, 2023

● Worldwide, there have been 672 million cases of coronavirus and almost 6.9m deaths. With the world more or less reopened—and people spending fewer and fewer hours in videoconferences—Zoom announced on Feb. 7 that it’s eliminating 1,300 jobs, 15% of its workforce. ● War in Ukraine ▶ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made a surprise visit to the UK on Feb. 8, meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and addressing Parliament. “We know freedom will win,” he told the lawmakers. “We know Russia will lose. And we know that victory will change the world.” ▶ Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu warned NATO on Feb. 7 that its shipments of tanks and longer-range missiles to Ukraine “could bring the escalation to an unpredictable level.” ● A man navigates the rubble in Hatay, Turkey, on Feb. 7.…

President Joe Biden’s administration recently issued a pointed warning: Russia is failing to comply with the terms of the New Start Treaty, the last remaining arms-control agreement between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. Given President Vladimir Putin’s record of nuclear threats and disregard for international law, Biden can have no illusions about Russia’s willingness to abide by negotiated limits on the size of its arsenal. To preserve the treaty, the US would be wise to make clear what Russia stands to lose by abandoning it. Signed in 2010, the New Start agreement limits the number of long-range nuclear warheads each side can deploy and the vehicles used to deliver them. To verify compliance, each country agreed to 18 on-site inspections a year conducted by officials from the other. Even as…

▶ On Feb. 16, the US Federal Open Market Committee publishes the minutes from its latest rate-setting meeting, at which it raised its benchmark to a range of 4.5% to 4.75%. ▶ The US releases its monthly inflation data on Feb. 14. The rate has fallen for six consecutive months, reaching 6.5% in January, and forecasters believe it will drop again. ▶ The UK reports its unemployment rate on Feb. 14. Analysts expect it to stay near 3.7%, suggesting the workers who went on strike for pay raises on Feb. 1 still have plenty of leverage. ▶ This week we’ll see earnings from Marriott and Coca-Cola on Feb. 14; Cisco and Kraft Heinz on the 15th; Airbus and Nestlé on the 16th; and Mercedes-Benz and Deere on the 17th. ▶ The biggest Nascar race…

At the start of January, Nelson Peltz returned from doing whatever billionaires do over the holidays and told Walt Disney Co. it stunk. That’s not verbatim. But when someone says you have “prominent cracks in the flywheel,” what else can it mean? Activist hedge funds make their money by seeking out just such cracks. Their playbook, of which Peltz is a famed exponent, says that companies (read: share prices) can be improved (read: go higher). The whole process—storied corporations being picked apart by belligerent, publicity-hungry rich guys—can be the stuff of high drama, yet for the past few years it hasn’t been. The stock market was rising so high that activists struggled to find juicy targets among the big names. Instead they went after smaller, weaker, more boring companies. Barely a month…

In late summer, as Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. faced plunging sales and a revolt by suppliers angry over unpaid bills, the company’s management called a meeting. Interim Chief Executive Officer Sue Gove told staff at headquarters in Union, New Jersey, that more face time would help address the retailer’s mounting woes, according to six former managers and employees who attended but asked not to be named talking about internal company business. To many employees—most of whom had already returned to the office three days a week starting last March—the request seemed like just another example of how executives were mired in minutiae as the chain barreled toward bankruptcy. One employee spoke up and said an extra day in the office wouldn’t turn around the struggling company. Many in the room…

When Nestlé SA’s peanut allergy medicine first hit the market in 2020, Robert Wood, the director of pediatric allergy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, started preparing to offer it to the children he treats. But Covid-19 soon derailed in-person treatment, so over the next year and a half, Wood and his colleagues told some 1,000 patients about the new drug instead, suggesting they consider it when the pandemic abated. Their responses came as a shock. Only six people were interested in a medicine that had been billed as a game changer for life-threatening allergies—the first of its kind to be cleared by US authorities. Three years later, Wood has yet to prescribe the drug, Palforzia, and he isn’t alone. Doctors and patients from California to Germany appear to be shunning…