Commerce

After spending seven months investigating whether China is engaged in unfair trade practices, the Trump administration announced March 22 that it will impose tariffs on as much as US$60 billion in Chinese imports. The tariffs are meant to address two problems: intellectual property theft by China and a steep and persistent trade deficit. As an...

Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that WILLIAM McFARLAND pled guilty today to one count of wire fraud in connection with a scheme to defraud investors in a company controlled by McFARLAND, Fyre Media Inc. (“Fyre Media”), as well as its subsidiary (“Fyre Festival LLC”), which...

One of the most admirable and arguably underrated qualities of leadership is the capacity for reflection. Confucius called it the most noble way to learn wisdom. But when we talk about what makes someone a successful leader, we typically describe attributes like the ability to innovate, make strategic decisions or manage uncertainty. We rarely mention...

  The government-commissioned Farmer Review warned in 2016 that the UK construction industry was “facing challenges that have not been seen before”. In no uncertain terms, it called for major industry-wide change. The “overwhelming risks” foreseen in the review sadly seem to have come to pass. Major contractor Carillion’s collapse comes shortly after an autumn...

To the west of Ethiopia near the Sudanese border lies a place called the Asosa zone. This may be the location of the oldest gold mine in the world. Dating back some 6,000 years, it provided a key source of gold to the ancient Egyptian empire, whose great wealth was famous throughout the known world....

It will take 217 years for women to achieve equal pay, at the current rate, according to the World Economic Forum. So we can expect many more stories of women earning far less than their male peers – such as the recent case of Carrie Gracie at the BBC, who recently resigned over a pay...

Ingvar Kamprad, who started Ikea as a teenager, has died at the age of 91. He started with stationery and stockings, but went on to build one of the world’s biggest furniture companies. And the way he did it has revolutionised how retailers operate. There are two facets of modern life that we have Ikea...

  In a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, French President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to “make France a model in the fight against climate change” and promised to shut all coal-fired power plants by 2021 – two years earlier than the timetable put forward by his predecessor. While...