In this issue

A venti-size to-do list for Starbucks’s incoming CEO.

The death of cheap money brings an outpouring of financial grief.

The Inflation Reduction Act puts carbon capture into high gear..

Anybody Worried?

The pillars of prosperity have crumbled, and it's not clear they can be rebuilt

6 mins

The Biden Agenda for 2023

For Joe Biden, 2022 was a turnaround year. He entered it bruised and stumbling as inflation soared, Covid-19 raged and Russia invaded. By the end, he and fellow Democrats had secured a series of victories in Congress, staved off the customary midterm election massacre and beat back skeptics within the party, helped by a resilient job market and receding inflation. It’s left Biden in a buoyant mood heading into 2023, emboldened and all but certain, at age 80, to announce a reelection bid soon.

5 mins

Hot Seat: Bank of Japan

Haruhiko Kuroda, the longest- serving Bank of Japan governor, is set to step down in April. Over the past decade, Kuroda oversaw one of the world’s most radical experiments in monetary policy, including yield curve control, in which a central bank commits to buying government bonds in order to keep yields at a target interest rate.

1 min

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.

2 mins

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.

4 mins

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.

3 mins

Supreme Court Weighs In On Social Media

A set of US Supreme Court cases could transform the legal landscape for social media companies by the end of the court’s term in late June, with potentially wide-reaching implications for political discourse and the 2024 elections.

3 mins

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.

3 mins

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.

3 mins

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.

5 mins

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.

3 mins

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.

4 mins

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.

4 mins

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.

3 mins

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.

2 mins

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.

1 min

R.I.P. Cheap Money (2008-22)

Cheap money-an incredibly popular and influential feature of finance that led to a surge of wealth, speculative trading and booms in ridiculous investments such as meme stocks and digital images of cartoon monkeys died suddenly in 2022. It was 14 years old. Cheap money is survived by its estranged relative, expensive money.

4 mins

The Reeducation of Young Bankers

Life on Wall Street has been so smooth for Drew Pettit’s generation that the 33-year-old Citigroup Inc. strategist decided to study financial pain. He started reading “the most bearish, miserable set of books I could potentially find.”

5 mins

Private Credit Prepares for Its Big Test

War, inflation and recession fears proved to be devastating for financial markets in 2022. Yet in private credit-one of the most opaque corners of Wall Street, where small groups of institutions and financiers make loans directly to companies—the picture has never looked brighter.

3 mins

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.

2 mins

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.

3 mins

Carbon Capture GOLD RUSH

Past efforts to capture carbon dioxide so it doesn’t worsen climate change have been small-scale and littered with expensive failures. But supporters say the new tax incentives in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are transformative enough that, combined with the lessons of the past 20 years, the technology is finally ready to take off.

4 mins

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.

3 mins

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.

1 min

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.

2 mins

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.

2 mins

Your Home Will Become a Power Plant

A home can be many things—a refuge, an investment, a money pit. So why not a power plant? In 2023 more US homes equipped with solar panels and batteries will start generating surplus electricity they can sell to their local utility.

3 mins

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.

1 min

Pursuits – A Bold Epoque for Art in Paris

Paris was crowned Europe’s preeminent contemporary art capital in October, when the international jet set descended for the inaugural edition of the inelegantly named Paris+ par Art Basel fair.

4 mins

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.”

3 mins

HOT SEAT DAVID ZASLAV

Stop, drop and roll, David Zaslav.

1 min

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.

4 mins

Why You'll Want to Extend Your Stay at Extended-Stay Hotels

Traditionally, residence hotels have targeted either the jet-setter—take the $8,000-a-night Hyde Park suite at Mandarin Oriental London—or, as with the $95-a-night Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham in Sterling, Virginia, the budget-conscious business traveler.

3 mins

Are You Ready for Some Big Data?

When the National Football League began seriously studying concussions six years ago, its focus initially was head trauma. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags were placed in helmets, shoulder pads and even mouthpieces to gather metrics about each player’s speed, distance, orientation and the direction his head moved. (The tags are placed on every player for all games and practices.)

2 mins

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