CATEGORIES

STARBUCKS COULD REALLY USE SOME CAFFEINE THIS YEAR

The prospect of union drives at its thousands of US coffee shops may be the most visible challenge facing Laxman Narasimhan when he takes over the world’s largest coffee chain on April 1, but it’s hardly the only one.

CLIMATE SCIENCE Leaves the Lab

A chemist at Stockholm University first scrawled out equations describing the greenhouse effect in 1896. Since then climate science has steadily advanced largely at research institutions and government agencies. They were the only places with the expertise, interest and budgets to fund research into geophysics and, later, computer models that simulated climatic changes.

Here Comes the US Battery BOOM

If President Joe Biden gets his way, this year will kick off a bonanza of battery manufacturing across the US.

China Needs to Fire Up Its Consumers

China’s U-turn on Covid Zero is a big deal. But Beijing needs do more if it wants to push economic growth anywhere near the pre-pandemic rate of 6% a year.

Brazil Has Investors on Edge

New presidents usually start by trimming spending before loosening the purse strings toward the end of their term. But Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is kicking off his government with a fiscal blast and asking investors to trust he’ll balance the budget later.

HOLLYWOOD HOPES FOR A RETURN TO THE OLD NORMAL

In 2021, as the pandemic raged, the talk of Hollywood was Project Popcorn: an initiative from WarnerMedia (then owned by AT&T Inc.) to simultaneously release all its films in theaters and on its HBO Max streaming service.

XI'S LONG GAME ON CHIPS

China’s government is protecting some of its chipmakers by spending lavishly to shore them up, just as weak demand is making it hard for chip manufacturers across the globe.

Upcycled Flour Is Rising To Meet the moment

About 50 miles north of London, Cambridge Science Park has earned the nickname “Silicon Fen.” The Fenlands region office hub is the UK home to Amgen Inc., AstraZeneca Plc and other biotech companies.

Five Ways Wine Will Change in 2023

Wine news in 2022 was both concerning and upbeat. Once again, scorching heat, record-breaking drought, spring frosts, hail storms and wildfires reminded vintners of the dire threat and cost of climate change, which will cause more eco-anxiety in 2023. On the positive side, vintners and drinkers are taking sustainability ever more seriously, and more innovations and adaptations are coming.

HOT SEAT DAVID ZASLAV

Stop, drop and roll, David Zaslav.

The Year of the Corporate Bond, Finally

Investors found few places to hide from last year’s demolition derby, which hit corporate bonds harder than it did stocks on a global basis. But if Wall Street’s credit managers and prognosticators are right, 2023 will be the year that corporate bonds boom.

VEHICLE DEFLATION IS PUTTING THE BRAKES ON THE USED-CAR MARKET

Right before the global financial crisis, former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Chuck Prince famously said that as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. In the pandemic-era car-buying frenzy, no business spent more time on the dance floor than the global auto industry, which had never before enjoyed so much pricing power.

Return of the Jumbos!

As global air travel comes roaring back from its pandemic-induced slump, airlines are racing to provide enough capacity, particularly for premium tickets on the long-haul flights enjoying a stronger-than-expected rebound.

Green Shoots Amid Europe's ENERGY WOES

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, European governments vowed to slash their dependence on imported natural gas and speed the shift to clean energy.

Another OILY COP

The annual climate conference known as COP (for Conference of the Parties, in United Nations-speak) will take place from late November to mid-December in Dubai.

A Path Out of Poland's Isolation

Voters in Poland will head to the polls this fall. The results of the election could ripple through the rest of the European Union.

TECHNOLOGY DOWN WITH THE AD DUOPOLY

For more than a half-decade, Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. have ruled the digital advertising market—the money machine that funds the modern internet. They’ve collected more than half of all online ad dollars, year after year, to the point that competitors and regulators feared there would be no realistic way to break their hold.

Real Estate Recovery? Depends Where You Live

For millions of Americans, the end of cheap money hit home—literally. The Federal Reserve’s rapid-fire interest-rate increases paralyzed the housing market as buyers decided to wait for lower prices and relief from mortgage rates that had doubled. Would-be sellers kept inventory scarce by clinging to low-interest loans and memories of home values that hit records in the pandemic. Pending sales plunged 39% in November from a year earlier to the second-lowest level on record—behind only April 2020, when the US was locked down.

TRAINING YOUR REPLACEMENTS

In November a lawyer and computer programmer named Matthew Butterick sued the tech companies GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, saying a tool called GitHub Copilot that automatically generates computer code is essentially plagiarizing the work of human software developers in a way that violates their licenses.

HOT SEAT: Masayoshi Son

For years, SoftBank Group Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son directed unprecedented sums of money to hundreds of startups, inflating valuations worldwide by forcing rivals such as Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital to match his big bets.

SWALLOWING THE STARTUPS

The conventional goal for startup founders is to take their company public, with a top consolation prize being a lucrative sale to a larger company.

F1 to Women: We want you

Only five women have competed in Formula One. The last one to start in an F1 race was Lella Lombardi … in 1976. A former delivery van driver for her family’s butcher shop in Italy, Lombardi won fans with her punishing speed and grit. When a journalist asked her how it felt to pilot such big cars, she replied, “I don’t have to carry it, I just have to drive it.”

Hot Seat: ESG investing

Only a year ago, finance executives were waxing lyrical about environmental, social and governance investing, or ESG, a strategy that weighs risks from societal problems such as climate change and inequality and spots ways to profit from addressing them.

California Wants to Run Out of Gas

In late august, California air regulators announced that the state would ban the sale of most gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, a policy aimed at encouraging a shift to electric vehicles (E.V.s). A week later, amid a massive heat wave, California officials begged E.V. owners not to recharge their cars during peak evening hours so as not to overload the state's energy grid.

Can Ron De Santis Ride 'Woke' To the White House?

The Florida governor’s attacks on business leaders who promote progressive values are finding traction with the Republican grassroots

New York, Decarbonized

A 2019 city law threatens big fines for landlords who don’t clean up their buildings

At This CES, Pragmatism Reigns

After years of focusing on nascent technologies, interest shifts to areas with near-term profit

FTX Was Targeting Main Street

○ Before it collapsed, the crypto exchange saw novice small investors as its future

Muffling Mumbai

Activists battling the cacophony say they can show the way for other noisy places

In a World of Data, A Power Play Over Chips

In 2022 the whole world seemed to wake up to the idea that semiconductors, rather than data, are the new oil. A confluence of factors—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the fallout from Covid-19—has turned a thesis into a widely accepted doctrine that’s spurring almost $100 billion in new state investment.