Not for the first time, China is attempting to buy oil in yuan rather than dollars, and now it may have found a willing seller. Saudi Arabia, which sells a quarter of its exports to China, is considering making these sales in yuan, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Russia has to pay out $117 million in interest payments on dollar-denominated bonds on March 16—except that sanctions may not allow it to make the payments in dollars, as required. The impending default will be Russia’s first on foreign debt since 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.
China locked down Shenzhen, its tech hub and second biggest port, and imposed severe curbs on Shanghai, its biggest port, as nationwide cases doubled in a day. But what is being called China’s worst outbreak in two years still refers only to 66 new cases registered on Mar. 13 in Shenzhen, a city of 17 million people, and 65 cases in Shanghai, a city of nearly 25 million.
This week, when McDonald’s and Coca-Cola suspended their sales in Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the country slid back towards the Soviet era, a time of isolation, scarcity, and a controlled economy.
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Aeroflot, Russia’s flag carrier, will stop all international flights on Mar. 8—partly because Western governments have closed off their airspace to Russian planes, but also because companies that have leased planes to Aeroflot are trying to repossess them.
For Russians, the collapse of the Soviet Union granted entry into the world of consumer capitalism, and over the past three decades, the middle class has grown increasingly accustomed to the products and services of the West.
Sanctions are forcing Russians to queue up at ATMs, causing the ruble to crash, and strangling livelihoods across the country. But the plight of the ordinary citizen is unlikely to move Vladimir Putin, who is not exactly the most democratic of leaders.
Ukraine produces around 70% of global neon gas exports, and a purified version of that gas is so crucial to the semiconductor industry that the Russia-Ukraine war threatens to disrupt supplies and make the ongoing microchip shortage even worse.
The European Union is planning to freeze Vladimir Putin’s overseas assets, as part of a larger slab of sanctions designed to punish Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Among Joe Biden’s options to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are disruptive cyberattacks—the kind that Russia itself often unleashes on other countries. Even more broadly, sanctions experts have discussed the possibility of cutting countries off from the global internet entirely, the way governments do to stifle unrest in domestic regions.
Crude oil neared $100 a barrel on Tuesday (Feb. 22) over fears that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, or had perhaps even already begun. The price of a barrel of Brent crude briefly touched $99.38, the highest since September 2014, before hovering around $98 for the remainder of the morning, even as the West finalized sanctions on Russia.
A shortage of semiconductor chips continues to plague European car manufacturers, as car sales fell for a seventh straight month on the continent. Just 680,000 new cars were registered across the European Union in January—a new historic low for the first month of the year going back to the early 1990s, when the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (EMEA) first started keeping track of these numbers.
Not long after covid-19 forced Patty Fiore to move her therapy practice to Zoom, she started noticing a new affliction. Her new clients, many of whom were from San Francisco, described to her how the crypto industry was wrecking their mental health. Crypto’s wild ride, Fiore said, was affecting their psyche. “‘Should I have sold it at a higher price?’ ‘Should I have done it two months ago?’ All these questions were cropping up, along with regret, depression, and anxiety.”
For supply chain managers, 2021 was the year their job became cool. Work once relegated to the dry, party-killing details of cargo schedules and warehouse management became the gripping headline sagas of snarled transport webs, clogged ports, and ships stuck in the Suez. The very phrase “supply chain” stopped being jargon and started being the deciding factor between a gift-filled Christmas and one marred by IOUs.
Two brewing companies, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Molson Coors, account for two-thirds of the $94.1 billion beer market in the US. The lack of competition is one of the factors forcing beer drinkers to pay more for their beer, a new Treasury department report has found.
The Russian army may be poised to annex Ukraine, but America’s most activist ice cream manufacturer thinks US troops should stay at home instead of heading to Eastern Europe to fight.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has made his contempt for cryptocurrency clear, calling it “worthless” during the great crypto boom in October 2021. But now, he says, he has stopped even calling them “currencies.”
Joe Rogan didn’t help, admittedly. But Spotify’s stock price has been falling from its mid-pandemic peak for months now—even before Neil Young and other artists started pulling their songs from the streaming platform for hosting Rogan’s podcast and its flimsy views on vaccines. It’s an uncomfortable fact that Spotify has to contend with as it prepares to announce its fourth-quarter results today (Feb. 2).
Once upon a time, not very long ago—until the first quarter of 2016, in fact—three beautiful dolls named Barbie, Elsa, and Anna lived together. Barbie was 57 but, with her lustrous blonde hair and unfeasible bust-to-waist ratio, didn’t look a day over 19.
For nearly a decade, Jorge Contreras has been railing against the broken system of scientific publishing. Academic journals are dominated by the Western scientists, who not only fill their pages but also work for institutions that can afford the hefty subscription fees to these journals. “These issues have been brewing for decades,” said Contreras, a professor at the University of Utah’s College of Law who specializes in intellectual property in the sciences. “The covid crisis has certainly exacerbated things, though.”
Workers on gig-economy platforms are protesting, Washington DC and Brussels are cracking down on Apple and Google, and the Chinese government is intent on curbing the influence of its technology firms. But a new survey shows that people trust the tech industry more than any other—even more than healthcare, the sector the world has relied on most heavily during the pandemic.
When the history of Hong Kong circa 2022 is written, the Great Hamster Massacre will be a watershed event: an exemplar of how the city’s relentless, irrational pursuit of zero-covid led it into absurd territory.
