Business

Facebook’s retirement plan

“WHITE HOT”, a new documentary, traces the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, an American fashion label that soared in the early 2000s before crashing just as dramatically. The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism and sexual harassment. But just…

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Can Chinese big tech learn to love big brother?

JACK MA, CHINA’S most famous entrepreneur, has not been one to mince his words about the role of government and business. At a meeting with corporate leaders in Bali in 2018 he told the audience that it is not the government that makes business and innovation happen. That is the work of entrepreneurs, he insisted:…

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Lakshmi Mittal transformed steelmaking. Can his son do it again?

LAKSHMI MITTAL has two passions: the steel industry and his family. His embrace of the first turned a poor boy from Rajasthan into the “Carnegie from Calcutta”, a man who built the world’s second-biggest steel empire from scratch, culminating in a takeover in 2006 of Arcelor, a European champion. The second sometimes sounds like tabloid…

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Porsche and Volkswagen are set to uncouple—at last

PURCHASING A NEW Porsche often involves a long wait. If limited production and aloof dealers weren’t enough of a bottleneck, some buyers face further delays after a fire that broke out last week mid-Atlantic on a ship carrying 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, from the stable of brands owned by Volkswagen (VW).Listen to this story. Enjoy…

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What is Carl Icahn’s beef with McDonald’s?

FOR MOST of his life Carl Icahn was vilified for his abrasive personality and his activism as an investor. His mother said he had the spirit of Genghis Khan. Oliver Stone based Gordon Gekko, a fictional predator-in-chief of the junk-bond boom, in part on Mr Icahn. Bill Ackman, no softie, called him a bully who…

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Private equity is buying up America’s newspapers

AMERICA’S LOCAL newspapers have been struggling to stay afloat for years. Since 2005 roughly 2,200 of them have folded. Private-equity firms, which often swoop on businesses in distress, have descended on the industry. The share of American newspapers owned by private-equity groups increased from 5% to 23% between 2001 and 2019 (see chart). The covid-19…

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The unseen costs of dirty work

THE TERM “dirty work” was coined by Everett Hughes, an American sociologist, to capture the attitudes of ordinary Germans to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Hughes used it to convey the idea of something immoral but conveniently distant, activities that were tacitly endorsed by the public but that could also be disavowed by them.…

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