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For brands, there’s a fine line between purpose and “woke-washing”It’s hard to fake authenticity. That doesn’t stop the advertising industry from trying.
Updated July 21, 20222 min read
It’s hard to fake authenticity. That doesn’t stop the advertising industry from trying.
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“France is maybe the best place to start a company,” said Jean-Rémi Kouchakji, co-founder of PayinTech, a Paris-based fintech firm that was among the 9,000 startups at the Viva Technology conference this year. Paradoxically, he said, it’s a difficult place for small- and medium-sized companies to thrive, a necessary step for building a corporate titan.
Every May, crowds gather at an ice rink in Sochi for a gala promoting the Night Hockey League, an amateur organization founded by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2011. Ex-professionals and other prominent figures, including Putin himself, take to the ice for an exhibition match that has become a showcase for the president’s hockey prowess.
The Milken Institute Global Conference is now underway in Los Angeles. Speakers this year include… deep breath… IMF chair Christine Lagarde, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump, CBS host Gayle King, former basketball player and entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson, U2 guitarist The Edge, Hollywood bigwig Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sesame Street’s Elmo, and former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.
JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon published his annual letter to shareholders (pdf) today. The musings of the CEO of the largest bank in the US by assets are always closely followed. People who turned to the letter today got a window into Dimon’s thoughts on banking, business, regulation, markets, politics…
“There was nothing to fear in Q4 but fear itself.” The stock market’s terrifying tumble at the end of last year proved short-lived, noted Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
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For Boeing, the week began with the terrible news from Ethiopia that one of its 737 Max aircraft had crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. It ended with all of the next-generation model—some 300 planes in operation—grounded across the world. Well over 4,000 737 Max planes are on order but yet to be delivered, representing a huge liability to Boeing if it can’t convince buyers that the aircraft is safe.
Oh, to have the deep pockets of a bank CEO.
The price of bitcoin peaked in mid-December 2017. Since then, it’s lost roughly 80% of its value. Of course, this isn’t the first time the cryptocurrency went ice cold.
Every year around this time, Barcelona becomes the center of the mobile world. More than 100,000 people from the tech and telecoms industries gather at Mobile World Congress to see the latest devices and hear about the newest developments in network technology.
Timing is everything.
When Levi’s recently filed to go public, its registration documents dutifully listed all the potential risks to its business, such as shifting market demand and changing trade policies, as required by regulators.
It’s become trite to say that while cryptocurrencies are a fad, blockchain technology is here to stay. I’ve heard this so much, though, I’m starting to believe it.
It’s all downhill from here.
Everybody likes pizza, right?
Deutsche Bank, at least by Deutsche Bank standards, reported some good news today: Executives touted that they’ve met or exceeded recent goals, and the German lender posted its first annual profit since 2014. But meetings with analysts and journalists suggest that many think the only way forward is a shotgun wedding with another bank.
From the election of Donald Trump to the Brexit referendum, in many cases the face of the anti-establishment, populist backlash in recent years has been male. Rabble-rousing nationalists have garnered support by tapping the resentments of men over their perceived loss of status in society and anger over the supposed slights against them by government, business, and the media.
If you bought into the Dow index of blue-chip US stocks at the start of 2018, you were sitting pretty nine months later, with a gain of around 8%.
Donald Trump joined Twitter in March 2009. Among the 40,000 or so tweets he has sent since then, some older missives appear to contradict the opinions he taps out now, as president. (It’s become a thing.)
Juha Aarnisalo set out to be a banker. Before long, though, he was drawn to the family business. His father, Raimo, opened an antiquarian bookstore in Helsinki in the early 1970s, called Kulku-Katti (“Stray Cat”). When Juha took over the operation in its current location in 1986, on the edge of the now trendy Kallio neighborhood, he called it Kulku-Katin Poika (“Son of Stray Cat”).
In all the squiggly charts that traders see every day, recognizable patterns occasionally emerge. Some investors take these coincidences very seriously. One of the most serious patterns of all is the “death cross,” in which a market’s short-term moving average drops below its long-term moving average (generally, the 50-day average crossing the 200-day average) as both are declining. This pattern signals further falls ahead, the theory goes.
“I have this feeling that we are onto something and we better move as fast as possible.”