Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition October 3, 2022

● Worldwide, there have been 617 million cases of Covid-19, and more than 6.5m people have died. On Oct. 1, Canada removed border restrictions and abolished mandatory vaccination, testing, and quarantine requirements for international travelers. ● War in Ukraine ▶ At least 200,000 Russians have fled to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and the EU to evade President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilization. ▶ Moscow declared landslide victories in the hastily organized “referendums” on annexation it held on Sept. 27 in the Ukrainian territories Russia occupies. Ukraine and its allies dismissed the elections as a “sham.” ▶ The US warned of “catastrophic consequences” should Putin use nuclear weapons to regain the upper hand in the conflict. ▶ The Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea suffered major damage on Sept. 26, causing a massive natural…

Amid the stir that President Joe Biden’s proposal to cancel student loan debts has caused, far too little attention has been paid to another far-reaching reform: the administration’s change to a lending program known as income-driven repayment (IDR). If widely applied, Biden’s proposal would provide additional relief to millions of borrowers—and make the US student loan system even costlier and more dysfunctional. Unlike in a standard 10-year loan, in which payments are fixed, borrowers in an income-driven plan pay a percentage of their earnings each month, plus interest on the principal. The terms of such plans have become more generous since they were introduced in the 1990s. Current students who enroll in an IDR plan pay 10% of their earnings above 150% of the poverty line and have their outstanding balances…

▶ The World Aviation Festival starts on Oct. 4 in Amsterdam. Industry executives will debate how to avoid a repeat of the chaotic travel season that just finished in Europe. ▶ Quarterly US auto sales data, due on Oct. 3, will provide a measure of the transition to battery-powered models—and consumers’ appetite for them—at a time of high inflation. ▶ The 33rd OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting takes place on Oct. 5. The coalition is facing growing calls to stem the oil price slide by cutting production further. ▶ On Oct. 3, SpaceX will launch its fifth crewed mission to the International Space Station for NASA, carrying two Americans, one Japanese, and one Russian. ▶ The Women’s Rugby World Cup gets under way on Oct. 8 in New Zealand. The local team, the Black…

Germany’s government made an extravagant promise as it announced its second multibillion-euro nationalization of an energy company in a week. Speaking in Berlin on Sept. 21, Economy Minister Robert Habeck pledged that “the state will do everything” to minimize disruptions in natural gas supplies. The message was intended to instill calm at a time of high anxiety, with Europe scrambling to replace imports of oil, coal, and, above all, gas from Russia. But Habeck’s choice of words also underscored that we’re living in a new era of big government. Whether it’s replacing lost income for workers and businesses during pandemic lockdowns or ensuring that there’s enough fuel to heat homes and power industries, state intervention is back in vogue in a way not seen since the early 1980s, when a toxic…

Swedish scientist Karin Lore used to depend on China to keep her laboratory running. A professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet, Lore studies the immune system’s interaction with vaccines, and safety tests on monkeys are critical to her research. But after Covid-19 hit, Beijing halted exports of the primates central to her work amid concerns that live animals could spread the virus. More than two years later, monkeys from China are in increasingly short supply, leaving Lore and scientists around the world struggling to complete their research. “I can see some studies will never be done,” Lore says. An executive at a Western pharmaceutical company, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified, backs her up, saying the shortage has already led to delays in the production of…

Two decades ago, Shoprite Holdings Ltd. unveiled an ambitious plan to expand beyond its home base in South Africa, and over the following years the company entered more than a dozen countries north of the border. Along the way, it became the continent’s biggest grocer by tapping into markets with rapidly growing populations but little formal retail. Investors loved the idea, confident that developing economies would spur demand for bread, Champagne, and just about everything else. And Shoprite seemed the right vehicle for their optimism, given that it had outperformed competitors in South Africa and proved its aptitude for selling basic groceries, housewares, pharmaceuticals, and luxury goods. Today, Shoprite has largely retreated back to South Africa and a few nearby places after shutting its operations in eight countries farther north. In…