Bloomberg Businessweek

in brief

The U.S. blacklisted eight Chinese technology giants, including two video surveillance companies and the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. For the first time in the trade war with China, the administration cited human-rights abuse as its rationale behind an order. ▷ 35 Donald Trump lost a bid to avoid scrutiny of his tax returns. A federal court in New York dismissed his suit to block prosecutors from getting the documents for their investigation into whether the Trump Organization falsified records related to hush payments. While it considers his appeal, the Second Circuit in Manhattan will not enforce the ruling. “ISIS is not defeated, my friend. The biggest lie being told by the administration is that ISIS is defeated.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, normally a close Republican ally of the U.S. president,…

trump won’t stop his abuses of power

One could be forgiven for thinking that President Donald Trump wants to be impeached. On Oct. 4, on live television in front of the White House, he reiterated his call for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, his leading rival in the 2020 election. He then invited China to do the same—“because what happened in China was just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” Trump has never specified what he thinks Biden did. He has, however, engaged in a globe-spanning effort to get others to find out. It bears repeating that federal law prohibits soliciting anything of value from foreigners to aid an election campaign. But more to the point: The president is making it abundantly clear that he intends to keep abusing his power to advance his…

the scandal of london’s air

A year ago, my wife, Leslie, and I embarked on an adventure, moving with our two sons from Seattle to London. We put the boys’ playhouse on the street, hugged our cedar tree goodbye and, seemingly in an eyeblink, landed at Heathrow, where the kind crew of the British Airways 747 brought our sons, then 7 and 5, into the cockpit. They perched on seats covered in furry sheepskin while the captain, strangely, confided his disappointment in his daughter’s new career as a veterinarian. It was a kind of homecoming. I’d lived in London in my 20s, during the heyday of Oasis and Tony Blair—Cool Britannia—and was excited to return as a seasoned journalist. We moved into a semidetached house in Crouch End, near cricket pitches and tennis courts, across from…

can the nike of china go global?

Chinese President Xi Jinping is rarely seen wearing clothes with visible logos. So when a state television segment in 2017 showed him in the ski town of Zhangjiakou—a venue for the 2022 Winter Olympics—wearing the national team parka, investors were riveted by the insignia on his chest: the red logo of Anta Sports Products Ltd. Was it just a show of support for the games? Or a tacit endorsement of Anta, China’s emerging challenger to Nike Inc. and Adidas AG? Investors have voted for the latter: Shares of the Fujian-based apparel company rose 8% over the next two days. Revenue is up 80% in the two and a half years since. China is expected to surpass the U.S. this year as the world’s biggest consumer market, but it’s yet to mint a…

aramco’s giant ipo is finally set

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had only just started his rise to global notoriety when he stunned the global business community in early 2016 by promising to sell shares in the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the state oil producer. Now, after several false starts, the initial public offering of Saudi Arabia’s crown jewel—Aramco, which pumps 10% of the global crude oil supply from abundant fields under the kingdom’s desert—is finally going ahead. The government is set to make a formal announcement in late October. While details of the offer haven’t been made public, people involved in the transaction say about 2% of Aramco may be sold at a price that would value the entire company at $2 trillion, raising $40 billion and outstripping the $25 billion collected in 2014 by Chinese…

cut the script. bring on the feathers

As Netflix, Amazon, and Apple steal viewers from traditional TV, one German broadcaster is fighting back—with a green-suited grasshopper, a rainbow-hued cockatoo, and a fuzzy pink monster with shimmering wings. The creatures appear in The Masked Singer, a mashup of game show and talent competition that ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE aired live on Thursday nights this summer. B-list and C-list celebrities don outlandish disguises and belt out pop songs, while fans vote on who progresses to the next round—and try to guess who’s hiding under the sequins, fur, and feathers. The Masked Singer averaged 7 million-plus viewers an episode, and for the finale the audience hit 9.5 million—helping the network reach its highest daily market share in 22 years. It won’t likely win Emmys, but these are tough times for traditional broadcasters,…