Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett have collectively more wealth than the 160 million poorest Americans, or half the population of the United States. That’s according to a new report from the progressive Washington, D.C.-based think tank Institute for Policy Studies. The report, published Wednesday, calls attention […]
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BOSCH is everywhere. It has 440 subsidiaries and employs 400,000 people in 60 countries. Its technology opens London’s Tower Bridge and closes packets of crisps and biscuits in factories from India to Mexico. Analysts call it a car-parts maker: it is the world’s largest, making everything from fuel-injection pumps to windscreen wipers. Consumers know it […]
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WHEN staff at the Louvre in Paris head to the bathroom, the toilet lid opens as they approach, a warm seat heats their derrières, and, once done, their nether regions are washed and dried precisely. Selling the equipment is a coup for Toto, Japan’s biggest producer of “shower toilets”. Toto and its rival Lixil carve […]
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THE titans of media in America have decided this is an opportune moment to join together in mega-mergers, the better to take on the giants of Silicon Valley. The problem for them is that the Department of Justice (DoJ), and President Donald Trump himself, are less keen. On November 8th reports surfaced that the DoJ […]
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IN RECENT months Google and Facebook have made changes that may escape the notice of most of their billions of users, but not of news organisations. Facebook began displaying the logos of publishers in some of its posts, so readers can identify the news source. And Google for the first time gave publishers the ability […]
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IN THE 1980s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both proud of their efforts to expand home ownership. In Britain, Thatcher presided over a fire sale of state-owned homes to tenants. In America, Reagan deregulated financial markets and expanded mortgage lending. At the time both countries provided generous mortgage-related tax breaks, making it easier to […]
Read moreThe history of housing and mortgage finance in this country has always been focused in one direction. For at least two hundred years, the policy of the United States has always emphasized that, for the good of the nation, people should own their own homes. This policy goes back to George Washington and his desire […]
Read moreCurrency, United States Finance
European politicians ‘need to be courageous’ to catch up with China on tech, investor says
Politicians in Europe need to make courageous steps on policy and regulation to push the continent’s tech industry closer to that of China’s, a venture capitalist said Thursday. Klaus Hommels, founder and CEO of Lakestar, said that China’s tech giants have benefited from a regulatory environment in a way that Europe’s have not. “I think […]
Read moreCNBC’s John Harwood sat down with National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn to discuss a range of topics, including the matter of luring companies to stay in America. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript of their conversation. Harwood: Do you think the economic effects you’re describing will take place even if firms don’t take […]
Read moreGary Cohn was in some ways an unlikely choice for Donald Trump‘s White House. He is a Democratic Wall Street veteran serving a Republican president who cast himself as the champion of “forgotten people” battered by economic change. But Cohn, 57, jumped at the chance to leave a top job at Goldman Sachs and become […]
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