Nandagopal Jayakumar Nair

With the euro zone emerging from its longest recession on record and confidence picking up, more people are buying new cars. Sales in July rose in Germany, France, the UK and Spain, pushing overall registrations 4% higher. Ford, the Detroit automaker that’s been outperforming its American peers in Europe, reported a robust 8.7% increase in July sales. But those numbers disguise a grimmer picture.

South Korea’s highly unionized labor force is holding its car makers to ransom, yet again. Workers for the country’s top automaker, Hyundai Motor, and its affiliate Kia Motors have voted to strike, after talks with the management over increased pay and better benefits collapsed. The unions and management now have to enter a mandatory 10-day mediation process involving the country’s labor relations commission.

India’s Congress-party-led government, battling a falling currency and record current-account deficit, has a new headache: Soaring onion prices. Heavy monsoon rains destroyed crops, sending retail prices doubling in two weeks, and wholesale rates soaring 40% in three days to never-before-seen levels. The surge is adding considerable strain to household budgets already thrown out of whack by high inflation.

Things are about to get tougher for foreign banks in India. The central bank is set to unveil new norms that will force new foreign banks entering the country to form separately capitalized local subsidiaries, instead of simply setting up branches of the parent bank. Existing foreign players will be encouraged to make the same switch.

Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi are locked in a multi-billion dollar race to build the biggest, swankiest airport in the Middle East. They are hoping to leverage their location—all three cities are around six hours from two-third’s of the world’s population—to build global travel hubs that boost revenues for their national carriers, tourism and real estate developments.

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Four years after narrowly averting bankruptcy, Ford finds itself facing a far more desirable problem: Demand is outstripping its production capacity in the US.

Never let a crisis go to waste, they say. India’s dairy farmers are hoping to take advantage of the contamination scare in New Zealand to boost their exports to China and other emerging markets.

The numbers: Surprise surprise. Tesla defied analyst expectations of a loss, reporting an adjusted profit of $0.02 a share. Even including one-time items, the net loss narrowed to $30.5 million versus $105.6 million a year earlier, driven by strong sales of its flagship Model S sedan. Revenue surged to $405.1 million, while margins improved to 22%. The stock, which has more than tripled this year, rallied almost 15% in after-hours trading.

It would be hard to name a more qualified candidate to take over the Reserve Bank of India. But despite his long list of career successes, Raghuram Rajan, who takes the helm in September, may do a terrible job—though it probably wouldn’t be his fault.

Having wrested the initiative back from rebel forces in the civil war that started in March 2011, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is training his guns on a new enemy: the dollar.

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Global pharmaceutical companies are finding the going tough in emerging markets, with corruption and pricing probes in China and inventory management woes in Brazil. Now the patent regime in India is becoming increasingly hostile.

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Asia’s manufacturing sector is running out of steam. After a positive start to the year, the HSBC-Markit Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for the region’s six major economies are all either hurtling towards 50, the point that separates expansion from contraction, or are already languishing below it.

The turmoil in countries like Egypt and Syria may have wrecked their economies, but some of their neighbors are doing nicely out of it. International investors are driving Dubai’s real estate market, accounting for more than 60% of the 53 billion dirhams ($14.4 billion) worth of investments in the first half of 2013, and while Indians, Pakistanis and Britons remained the top foreign buyers, there’s a new investor class making a big splash: Buyers from crisis-hit Arab regions.

The numbers: Steady earnings, weak outlook. Fiat’s second quarter earnings handily beat analyst expectations driven by strong sales from its US subsidiary Chrysler. Revenues increased 3.7% to €22.3 billion ($29.5 billion) (pdf), while trading profit, or earnings before interest, taxes and one-time items, crossed the €1 billion mark, rising 9% from the year-ago period. But the Fiat stock fell almost 5%, after the company said that the Chrysler unit could miss its operating profit target by as much as 13%.

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With its first all-electric car, the i3, BMW seems to be gunning for a new type of electric car customer: people who don’t like electrics. The German carmaker still wants to attract the environmentally conscious consumer, but it’s also hoping to appeal to conventional car customers who have bristled at the high price and low performance of existing electric car models. BMW’s solution has been to design a lower-priced electric vehicle with novel perks that compensate for weaker performance compared with gas-powered cars. Here are some examples of the new approach of the i3, which launches later this year:

General Motors finds itself at the center of controversy in India.  On Wednesday, the company announced the voluntary recall of 114,000 units of its Tavera model to address issues related to emissions and specifications. Now it appears there was more to the recall than meets the eye.

The race to become the world’s largest automaker is heating up. Toyota hung on to the pole position in the first half of 2013, selling 4.91 million vehicles, compared to General Motors’ 4.85 million. But as the carmakers head into the home stretch, the momentum is firmly with GM.

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The numbers: Not as bad as expected. General Motors reported second quarter earnings of $1.2 billion, down from $1.5 billion for the same period last year. The automaker took a one-time hit of $500 million due to a tax expense. Excluding the one-time charge, profits were 84 cents a share, well above consensus estimates. Booming sales of pickups in the US and Cadillacs and Buicks in China lifted revenues by 3.9%. The stock was up in early trade.

Prices of essential food grains are surging in India, eating into household budgets and hurting consumer sentiment. Cereal prices rose 17.8% in June from 6.6% a year earlier, pushing wholesale price inflation to an uncomfortably high 4.86%. But instead of stepping in to shield consumers, the government is exacerbating the demand-supply mismatch by withholding its stockpiles of food grains. The reason: It doesn’t want to take a loss on its inventory.