Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition March 20, 2023

● Anxiety in the Alps ▶ Credit Suisse shares plunged 24% on March 15 to their lowest level on record, after the bank’s top shareholder, the Saudi National Bank, ruled out providing more assistance. Mounting concerns about financial companies are making it harder for the bank’s leaders to convince investors they can pull off a turnaround. ▷ 22 ▶ Late on the 15th, the Swiss National Bank said it would provide CS with liquidity if necessary. The central bank asserted that “the problems of certain banks in the USA do not pose a direct risk of contagion for the Swiss financial markets.” ▶ For investors still on edge after the rapid-fire collapse of three regional US banks, the Swiss crisis provided a new reason to sell risky assets. By the market’s close, benchmark…

The demise of Silicon Valley Bank has put the US government in an uncomfortable position, backstopping depositors like never before to prevent a broader and potentially devastating bank run. Given the risks, officials did the right thing. The hard part will be figuring out how to handle the consequences. SVB’s failure shouldn’t have presented a systemic threat. The cash crunch that forced it to sell assets at a loss was specific to its tech-startup customers (page 22). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was amply capable of handling its liquidation, which would entail reimbursing insured deposits and possibly imposing some losses on uninsured ones. The FDIC has successfully resolved hundreds of other banks this way. But SVB went down differently. Its customers, goaded by industry influencers, proved surprisingly quick to pull out their…

▶ The Bank of England meets to set its interest rates on March 23. The BOE has said it thinks inflation in the UK has peaked, suggesting it may slow the pace of rate increases. ▶ The UK and Japan report inflation data on March 22 and 23, respectively. Germany follows on March 30. And the EU, France and Italy publish theirs on March 31. ▶ Foot Locker and Nike report earnings on March 20 and 21; Chewy and Petco, on the 22nd; General Mills and Accenture, on the 23rd; Lululemon and Walgreens, on the 28th. ▶ March 31 features two Guggenheim openings: In New York, see Sarah Sze’s dramatic site-specific installations; in Bilbao, take in the lush oil portraits of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. ▶ Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, April 2, is International Children’s Book…

Take a tour through US recessions of the past 50 years, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Silicon Valley Bank will turn out to be the banana peel that upends an already unsteady economy. When the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, as it is now, recession is always a risk. And slumps tend to come suddenly after an unexpected shock deals a blow to confidence during a particularly vulnerable time. “The combination of the Federal Reserve trying to slow things down to deal with inflation, financial conditions tightening and then—under the stress—you’re going to see some breakage,” says Peter Hooper, global head of economic research for Deutsche Bank AG. Sometimes an external blow tips over a slowing economy, as in 1990 when oil prices spiked in reaction to Iraq’s invasion of…

On March 5, one week before the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s screenwriting elite gathered at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel near Beverly Hills for their own love fest: the 75th Writers Guild Awards. In what augured an enviable sweep at the Oscars, the absurdist, genre-bending film Everything Everywhere All at Once from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won the night’s most coveted honor, best original screenplay. Accepting that accolade, Kwan doled out thanks to an unusual recipient: his “picket captain,” a colleague overseeing preparations for a potential work stoppage by the writers behind virtually every American show, movie and streaming series. “If you don’t have a captain yet, go find one,” Kwan told the crowd in the hotel’s ballroom. “Let’s give ’em hell.” The Writers Guild of America, a union of 25,000 film,…

Over the past decade, Foxconn Technology Group has followed increasingly complex plans from Apple Inc. to turn silicon, glass, plastic, copper and other materials into hundreds of millions of iPhones. And Apple is just one of the Taiwanese company’s dozens of A-list customers; Google, Microsoft, Sony and many others have hired it to make phones, computers, tablets, game consoles, servers and more. So it’s not much of a stretch to think Foxconn might do the same for cars. So far, though, cars are turning out to be a tougher slog than electronic gadgets. Last year, Foxconn paid $230 million for a former General Motors Co. factory in Lordstown, Ohio, aiming to make it the center of a US auto-manufacturing push. As part of the deal, the previous owner of the 6.2 million-square-foot…