Table of contents for August/September 2022 in Fortune

IN A VERY STRESSFUL YEAR, the 33rd annual Fortune Global 500 list tells a cheerful story. Our annual ranking of the world’s biggest companies posted powerful numbers: Revenue for the group was up 19% year over year, and profits hit an all-time high of $3.1 trillion. Here’s the catch: Those numbers reflect financials from 2021, when the world was starting to bounce back from COVID-19. This year has brought a new truckload of challenges, and nobody’s celebrating. A recent Fortune and Deloitte survey of CEOs found that 67% are “pessimistic” or “very pessimistic” about prospects for the global economy over the next 12 months. That’s up from just 12% in January. European business leaders have been feeling the pain longer than most. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is raging in their…

Demand for Old Navy fleeces, home furnishings, and laptops is limp. But consumers seem to be just fine with paying extra for Gatorade, Doritos, and roundtrip airfare to Denver. Meta and Alphabet’s Google predict “serious times” and “headwinds” as they freeze new hires, joining Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Netflix in slowing or outright cutting headcount. Meanwhile, President Biden has been crowing to Americans—and he isn’t fibbing—that private-sector job growth is at an all-time high. It’s been a long, strange summer of mixed signals. Depending on which Wall Street pro, CEO, or household bookkeeper you ask, we’re heading for a recession, we’re already in one (even though everyone’s got a job), or we’ll be just fine. “I can’t think of a time when the economy has been like this. In…

IT WAS 4 A.M. in London on Feb. 24 when Ian Borden, McDonald’s president of international operations, texted urgent news to his boss, CEO Chris Kempczinski, in Chicago. Vladimir Putin had announced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an hour earlier, and attacks had begun in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and elsewhere. Borden told Kempczinski the company’s 107 Ukraine restaurants had been closed, and an employee hotline had been set up. In Chicago it was 10 p.m. Until then, Kempczinski, 53, had been watching the Ukraine situation like everyone else and doubting it would come to hostilities. “There seemed to be this sense of a lot of saber rattling. Surely this isn’t going to lead to any sort of invasion,” he recalls. Now he realized, “Okay, yeah—we’re in a different world.” Over…

Sam Bankman-Fried does not look like the most powerful man in crypto. Friendly and rumpled, with an unruly halo of curly hair, the 30-year-old widely known as SBF has an affinity for League of Legends, fidget spinners, and other trappings of nerd culture. But underneath the goofy facade is a trading wunderkind whose ambition knows no limits. An MIT physics grad, SBF honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research. In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built. 1 Already a multibillionaire entrepreneur (his fortune is valued at $11.5 billion or so), today SBF has a new identity: crypto’s white knight, swooping in to save some of…

The corporations that make up our annual ranking of the world’s largest companies reaped record-busting profits in 2021. But this year’s turmoil has confronted the leaders of the Fortune Global 500 with a new set of crises—many of them political as well as economic. In the following pages, we track the global commodity traders Trafigura and Glencore(PAGE 68) as they ride out the supply-chain storm created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We delve into the latest efforts by Meta(PAGE 58) to navigate its disinformation dilemma. And we look at one CEO’s long-shot fight to preserve the status of Hong Kong (PAGE 78) as Asia’s financial capital. For the full scorecard on the winners and losers in global business, turn to The Lists (PAGE 88). FOR MORE COMPANY DATA, AND…

THIS MAP-AND-CHART package captures one of the top business stories of the past two decades: China’s rise in the global corporate hierarchy. Greater China (including Taiwan) surpassed the U.S. for the largest number of Global 500 companies for the first time in fiscal 2018; it widened its lead in 2020, when COVID shut down much of the world and China kept humming. One striking subplot in this story is the degree of state involvement in China’s big businesses: 87 of the companies from mainland China on this year’s list are majority or entirely government-owned. (In the U.S., just three fit that description: the Postal Service and real estate finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) Can state-owned companies act nimbly and stay competitive in a fragmenting global economy? That’s…

While the implosion of the crypto markets has led most survivors to hunker down and conserve cash, SBF has seized the moment as a buying opportunity. As his web of influence grows, will he get too big for an industry that prizes decentralization? Or, despite his Bahamian address, might he attract the ire of U.S. regulators? We’ll see. In the meantime, a look at some of his recent deals, which he has conducted both as an individual and through various corporate vehicles he controls. ▸ BlockFi At the height of the crypto boom, the lending company was offering consumers returns of 9% or more through simplified access to so-called DeFi markets. But like many of its peers, BlockFi ran into liquidity trouble this spring. SBF swooped in with a…

The work-from-home boom has sent more young families on the hunt for bigger houses, but inflation and rising rates have made it harder for them to buy. One result: spikes in rent, especially in Sunbelt cities. 13% AVERAGE INCREASE IN RENT IN U.S. CITIES, 2019–22 SOURCE: FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE: THROUGH 6/1/22 14% AVERAGE RENT INCREASE IN HOUSTON, 2019–22 32% AVERAGE INCREASE IN ATLANTA, 2 01 9–22 42% AVERAGE INCREASE IN TAMPA, 2019–22 SOURCE: ZILLOW NOTE: THROUGH 4/30/22…

GLOBAL 500 Meta Platforms RANK 71 COUNTRY U.S. 2021 REVENUE $117.9 BILLION With Sheryl Sandberg’s departure, global affairs chief Nick Clegg wields more influence than ever at Meta as Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto No. 2. Can the former U.K. politico persuade the world’s governments to trust the social media giant again? ● AS A MOB stormed up the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shouting “Stop the steal!” and brandishing posters that referenced QAnon conspiracy theories, much of the world watched in dumbstruck shock. In few places was the sense of horror greater than inside the offices of Facebook. For weeks before Jan. 6, engineers, disinformation experts, and executives within the company were fighting a losing battle to contain the spread of misinformation from groups making…

1-152 / 500 A rebound from the worst depths of the pandemic created a huge tailwind for the world’s largest companies by revenue. Aggregate sales for the Fortune Global 500 hit $37.8 trillion, an increase of 19%—the highest annual growth rate in the list’s 33-year history. Walmart landed at No. 1 for the ninth straight year, trailed at No. 2 by Amazon, which grew revenue by $84 billion to reach its highest ranking ever. Chinese energy giants State Grid, China National Petroleum, and Sinopec rounded out the top five. And for the first time, the aggregate revenue of Global 500 companies based in Greater China (including Taiwan) exceeded revenue from U.S. companies on the list, accounting for 31% of the total. 153-288 / 500 After a tough 2020, cumulative…

DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS METHODOLOGY Companies are ranked by total revenues for their respective fiscal years ended on or before March 31, 2022. All companies on the list must publish financial data and report part or all of their figures to a government agency. Figures are as reported, and comparisons are with the prior year’s figures as originally reported for that year. Fortune does not restate the prior year’s figures for changes in accounting. REVENUES Revenue figures include consolidated subsidiaries and reported revenues from discontinued operations, but exclude excise taxes. For banks, revenue is the sum of gross interest income and gross noninterest income. For insurance companies, revenue includes premium and annuity income, investment income, realized capital gains or losses, and other income, but excludes deposits. Revenue figures for non-U.S.…