Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition November 7, 2022

● Worldwide, there have been 631 million cases of Covid-19, almost 6.6m people have died, and more than 12.7 billion vaccine doses have been given. David Cutler, an economist at Harvard University, puts the cost of long Covid in the US alone at $3.7 trillion to date. ▷ 44 ● The US Federal Reserve announced its fourth straight 75 basis-point interest-rate increase on Nov. 2. Chair Jerome Powell said interest rates may peak at higher levels than previously thought, though officials could begin slowing the pace of increases as soon as their December meeting. ● Mourners at a makeshift shrine at the site of the Oct. 29 crush in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood that killed at least 156 Halloween revelers. South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said the lack of sufficient crowd management may…

With energy prices soaring, thanks partly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, countries around the world have been experimenting with a hodgepodge of interventions to ease the pain, including consumer subsidies, price regulation and ad hoc nationalizations. Because all of these measures come with significant potential downsides, one other supposed solution has been getting increased attention: windfall taxes. Such taxes aim to collect a surcharge from companies that benefit from high energy prices and then use the proceeds to aid ailing consumers or businesses. The European Union recently proposed a “solidarity contribution” of at least 33% of the “surplus taxable profits” of oil and gas companies. It would also cap the revenue of renewable energy and nuclear power companies whose profits are linked to gas prices. So far, more than a dozen…

▶ The UN’s COP27 conference on climate change runs through Nov. 18. Host country Egypt joins other vulnerable nations in demanding aid from the developed world. ▶ Analysts expect the UK’s preliminary third-quarter GDP figures, due on Nov. 11, to show stagnation. The period included Prime Minister Liz Truss’s brief but disastrous tenure. ▶ On the heels of a tense standoff with Russia over Ukraine’s Black Sea grain shipments, the UN is publishing its biannual report on global food markets on Nov. 10. ▶ The Eurogroup finance ministers meet in Brussels on Nov. 7 to discuss the economic outlook for the euro zone at the start of a winter of high energy prices. ▶ China reports its year-over-year inflation rate for October on Nov. 8. Analysts expect it to hold steady at about 2.8%.…

Imagine there are two types of policymakers in the world: those who are looking to increase the size of the global economic pie and those who are focused on fighting for their own share of it. For most of the past few decades, pie-expanding economists were the major force pushing reforms in China and shaping US-China relations. That’s no longer the case. China’s recent Communist Party Congress saw a generation of pro-market officials pushed out—and a former president who gave them room to operate literally ushered offstage. In the US, meanwhile, it’s now pie-protecting national security hawks calling the shots. For China’s development, and for relations between the world’s two largest economies, these shifts have profound consequences. The leadership group unveiled by President Xi Jinping last month looks vastly different from those…

From the beginning, there were plenty of warning signs that Adidas AG’s collaboration with the rapper Ye was destined for debacle. But for anyone still unsure of the trajectory, the wake-up call came on the morning of May 3, 2018. Kanye West, as he was then called, had just suggested to celebrity gossip site TMZ’s newsroom that Black people in America had made a choice to remain in slavery for 400 years. Amid the outcry that followed, Adidas’s shares plunged, calls for boycotting its sneakers grew, and Chief Executive Officer Kasper Rorsted appeared to do all he could to avoid tackling the subject head on. In a Bloomberg TV interview that day to discuss Adidas’s recent earnings, Rorsted said he wouldn’t speculate about every statement from all of his company’s external…

Angry over the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June, Deborah Willoughby wanted to do more than attend a rally or make a donation. So she sat down at her computer and placed an order for a pack of abortion pills from India sold under the brand name Unwanted. India has many online pharmacies offering to sell mifepristone and misoprostol, drugs commonly used to terminate pregnancies—no questions asked and no prescription required. Plan C, an American group that provides information on how to obtain at-home abortion medication, needed volunteers to test online suppliers’ delivery claims. Willoughby signed up and placed an order via Secureabortionpills.com, which describes itself as an online international pharmacy selling generic drugs. She received instructions to describe the shipment as “family maintenance” or “medical treatment for…