Channel 4: Britain’s Publicly-Owned Misfit and the Global Spectacle of Selling Your Weird Uncle By the time you finish this paragraph, at least three governments on three separate continents will have floated the idea of flogging their state broadcasters to the highest bidder. Yet only the United Kingdom has managed to turn the ritual into…
Larry Gies: How One Mid-Western Billionaire Accidentally Became a Global Economic Weather Vane By the time the news reached a café terrace in Lisbon, the name “Larry Gies” was already doing the rounds in four languages and two conflicting conspiracy theories. To the hedge-fund analysts hunched over €7 cortados, Gies’ latest $150 million pledge to…
Apple’s share price—those three crisp capital letters that look so tidy on a Bloomberg terminal—has become the planet’s most polite form of geopolitical warfare. From the glass canyons of Shenzhen to the granite lobbies of Frankfurt, the daily flicker of AAPL is now less a measure of gadgets sold than a referendum on who still…
Apple Stock: The World’s Most Expensive Fruit Salad Keeps Getting Pricier By Matteo “Still Uses a 2012 iPod Classic” Rossi PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, a new planetary constant has emerged: Apple’s share price. From Seoul’s neon canyons to São Paulo’s favelas, the Cupertino ticker has become the Esperanto of modern capitalism—a…
Dow Jones: The World’s Most Expensive Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker’s Chief Correspondent, somewhere between an airport lounge and existential dread The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened Tuesday like a hung-over aristocrat—wobbly, entitled, but still convinced the planet should curtsy. Thirty-odd American companies, stitched together into a single numerical shrug, managed to send tremors from…
NEWS FROM THE NUMBERS COALFACE 10-Year Treasury Yield: A Moody Barometer for a World That Can’t Decide If It’s Dying or Just Napping SINGAPORE—Every morning, somewhere between the first espresso and the last muttered curse at Bloomberg, traders around the planet glance at one figure the way medieval sailors once checked the North Star: the…
**The Wagyu Whopper: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast Food Fodder** TOKYO—In the land where cattle once lived better than most humans, the news landed like a sake bomb in a hostess bar: Burger King Japan has unveiled the “Wagyu Whopper,” a ¥1,980 (US$13) slab of allegedly premium beef wedged between…
The Global Game of House: How a Medieval Pawnshop Became the World’s Most Beloved Shackle By the time you finish this sentence, another 47 human beings somewhere on the planet will have signed a mortgage—an elegant term that translates from Old French as “death pledge.” Linguists insist that etymology merely implies “until death,” but after…
The World’s Favorite Chain Letter: A Global Tour of the 30-Year Promise By the time you finish this sentence, three more human beings will have signed a thirty-year IOU in exchange for a set of keys, a mailbox, and the illusion of permanence. We call the ritual a “mortgage,” which sounds civilized—like “mort” (death) plus…
UnitedHealth Group’s ticker, UNH, has become the planet’s barometer for how much we’re collectively willing to pay not to die. From Singapore to São Paulo, analysts watch the same squiggly line crawl across their Bloomberg terminals, interpreting each uptick as proof that sickness remains the world’s most reliable growth industry. The stock hit another all-time…
Hasbro: How a Rhode Island Toymaker Became the Soft-Power Emperor of a Planet on the Brink By the time the first Ukrainian kid unpacked a donated box containing a My Little Pony action figure still labeled in Cyrillic for the Moscow market, the cosmic joke was already complete. Somewhere in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a middle…
**The Wagyu Whitewash: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast-Food Fodder** *By our correspondent in the departure lounge of dietary disillusion* TOKYO—In the beginning, there was the cow, and the cow was good—so good, in fact, that Japanese emperors once forbade commoners from eating it. Fast-forward eight centuries and the same bovine…
