The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy | Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight | New Covid Variants: What to Know About BA.2.86 and EG.5 | Opinion

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click).
For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy - The Atlantic

Private equity has made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?

One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.

Continued here

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight - TIME

The invitation to his speech at the National Archives in Washington had gone out to several hundred guests, including congressional leaders and top officials from the Biden Administration. Billed as the main event of his visit in late September, it would give him a chance to inspire U.S. support against Russia with the kind of oratory the world has come to expect from Ukraine’s wartime President. It did not go as planned.

That afternoon, Zelensky’s meetings at the White House and the Pentagon delayed him by more than an hour, and when he finally arrived to begin his speech at 6:41 p.m., he looked distant and agitated. He relied on his wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska, to carry his message of resilience on the stage beside him, while his own delivery felt stilted, as though he wanted to get it over with. At one point, while handing out medals after the speech, he urged the organizer to hurry things along.

The reason, he later said, was the exhaustion he felt that night, not only from the demands of leadership during the war but also the persistent need to convince his allies that, with their help, Ukraine can win. “Nobody believes in our victory like I do. Nobody,” Zelensky told TIME in an interview after his trip. Instilling that belief in his allies, he said, “takes all your power, your energy. You understand? It takes so much of everything.”

Continued here

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

New Covid Variants: What to Know About BA.2.86 and EG.5 - The New York Times

EG.5 is spreading quickly, but experts say it’s no more dangerous than previous versions. Another new variant, called BA.2.86, is being closely watched because of its mutations.

Concern is rising about the Covid-19 variants EG.5 and BA.2.86. In August, EG.5 became the dominant variant in the United States, and the World Health Organization classified it as a “variant of interest,” meaning it has genetic changes that give it an advantage and its prevalence is growing.

BA.2.86 is much less widespread, making up only a tiny fraction of cases, but scientists are alarmed by how many mutations it carries. So how worried should people be about these variants?

Continued here

Opinion | The Lost Promise of the Oslo Accords - The New York Times

A few days after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, I remember an Israeli acquaintance telling me that however terrible the circumstances of his death, it had established Mr. Rabin as a martyr for peace. As a result, the Oslo peace process he had begun, named after the city where it was secretly hatched, had become irreversible.

It certainly seemed that way at the time. I had just arrived as a correspondent in Israel, and an aura of hope still hung over the pair of agreements signed in 1993 and 1995, which granted the Palestinians a degree of self-government and, more important, started a peace process meant to reach a permanent settlement within five years. The handshake on the White House lawn in 1993 between Mr. Rabin, a gruff, chain-smoking warrior-politician who had led Israel in great military victories, and his archenemy, Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization who had dedicated much of his previous life to “uprooting the Zionist entity from our land,” had become something of an icon for how even the most intractable conflict could be resolved.

My interlocutor’s prophesy soon proved tragically wrong. Seven months after Mr. Rabin’s death, following a spate of Palestinian suicide bombings and a controversial Israeli military operation in southern Lebanon, a 46-year-old critic of the Oslo accords named Benjamin Netanyahu won the first of his many political victories. In fits and starts, the Oslo process ground to a halt, and the Israeli “peace camp” that had championed it disintegrated.

Continued here

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber.
We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials.
Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month
If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here
Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 93544947