Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition October 10, 2022

● Globally, over 620 million people have had Covid-19, and almost 6.6m have died. While nearly 12.8 billion vaccine doses have been given, progress on boosters has been slow. In the US, only 2.7% of the eligible population—which is anyone 12 years and older—has received the new shot formulated to fight omicron. ● Liz Truss had to make a U-turn on a significant part of her economic plan: abolishing the UK’s 45% top income tax rate. The prime minister’s reversal came after the pound slumped, leading the Bank of England to intervene to calm markets. ● Russian shells hit a convoy of Ukrainian civilians on the road to Svatove, in Luhansk, killing 20. Ukraine is rapidly retaking territory there and in the other three provinces—Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—that Russia illegally annexed. ● Brazilian President…

Pension funds are supposed to be among the least exciting financial institutions. Their job is to make long-term investments to meet the predictable needs of future retirees. They should be immune to short-term shocks. Yet in the UK, they were recently the center of an incipient financial crisis. What led to this was a novel variation on a well-known theme: Leverage meets unforeseen events. The danger when these two collide isn’t confined to any one country or market, so regulators everywhere ought to take note. Banks are somewhat safer than they were before the crash of 2008, but risks that start outside the traditional financial system still require greater attention. The UK pension funds’ embarrassment (page 24) shows how subtle those risks can be. The funds used derivatives, so they believed, to…

▶ The Swedish Riksbank announces its annual Nobel Prize in economic sciences on Oct. 10. Last year three US-based academics shared the 10 million-kronor ($921,000) prize. ▶ NATO defense ministers meet Oct. 12-13 in Brussels. Ukraine, where tension is rising after Russia vowed to defend the provinces it illegally annexed, tops the agenda. ▶ Facebook parent Meta holds an event on Oct. 11 to explore the future of virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg will need to build buzz for a vision that’s failed to excite investors or users. ▶ JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo report third-quarter earnings on Oct. 14. Twitchy markets probably lifted trading revenue and hurt investment banking. ▶ Australia ends its mandatory Covid-19 isolation requirements on Oct. 14. The country had some of the world’s strictest lockdown restrictions at the height…

Months of legal barbs exchanged between Twitter Inc. and Elon Musk—who urgently wanted to own the company and then changed his mind—came to a head on Monday, Oct. 3, with an apparent peace offering. The world’s richest man said in a letter to Twitter’s board that he would buy the social network after all. He plans to honor the original $44 billion price tag he agreed to in April, plus everything else in that contract. Twitter shares jumped more than 20% the next day, indicating investors expect a done deal. But Twitter stopped short of declaring victory or dropping the suit it filed to force Musk to complete the transaction, which is set to go to trial on Oct. 17. Twitter has good reason to be cautious. While Musk has secured the…

Pfizer Inc. emerged from the pandemic as the world’s most visible drugmaker, with the windfall from its coronavirus vaccine almost doubling its revenue in just one year. And now the shot, coupled with Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral pill, is poised to make up more than half of its expected $100 billion in sales in 2022. That’s left the company with a cash hoard of $28 billion and a big problem: how to engineer a second act. The pressure is clearly on for Pfizer to show that the muscle it built during the pandemic won’t atrophy. Big Pharma companies don’t normally double revenue so quickly, and nobody expects that kind of growth to continue. But one thing’s clear: Pfizer can’t go back to the sluggish path it was on for years, when it…

Seven years ago, Adidas AG was gaining momentum with hot-selling shoes co-designed by influencers such as Pharrell Williams and Kanye West. But some investors thought managers were spending too much in their quest for cool and started calling for new leadership. They found their man in Kasper Rorsted, a famously frugal Dane whom Adidas hired as its chief executive officer after he produced record earnings at soap and detergent maker Henkel AG. Rorsted quickly sold off the hockey and golf units and doubled down on e-commerce, fueling profits and prompting Germany’s Manager magazine to name him the country’s CEO of the year in 2019. But since Adidas’s shares peaked last year, various blows, blunders, and plain bad luck have conspired to erase most of Rorsted’s progress. With its profit margins and…