Your Evening Briefing
Your Evening Briefing
(Bloomberg) --
For many Republicans in Congress, it wasn’t enough that President Donald Trump asked a foreign power to interfere in the 2020 campaign; they wanted a quid pro quo. On Tuesday, a top U.S. diplomat reportedly testified that Trump required Ukraine to probe the son of former Vice President Joseph Biden as a condition for receiving military aid already passed by Congress. William Taylor, Democrats said, kept “meticulous” notes about his concerns and interactions with colleagues regarding attempts by lawyer Rudy Giuliani to influence Ukraine’s government on Trump’s behalf. —Josh Petri
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Here are today’s top stories
Boris Johnson’s pledge to take the U.K. out of the European Union in nine days’ time was temporarily derailed as Parliament blocked his plan to rush his Brexit deal into law. The votes on Tuesday did however move the U.K. away from a prospect of a no-deal Brexit. The pound still fell.
The world economy is stumbling toward disaster, writes Bloomberg’s Editorial Board. If a new recession strikes, the Trump administration will get—and deserve—much of the blame.
Trump has been privately testing the idea of replacing his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who’s swiftly fallen out of favor, especially since admitting that Trump sought a quid pro quo with Ukraine.
One nurse slept on the job. Another didn’t show up. A third scalded a child so badly that her skin peeled. A fourth failed to check on a toddler who depended on a breathing tube. The child died. When private equity took over a nursing company, profits grew and patients died.
The original space race was between superpowers vying for supremacy. Now it’s all about business. In the first episode of Giant Leap, a four-part Bloomberg Originals video series, we explore the risk and rewards awaiting startups battling over the multibillion dollar-market for satellite rocket launches.
Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. Now its whittling down those free services and prodding users toward a new paid subscription.
What’s Joe Weisenthal thinking about? The Bloomberg news director is thinking about the morality of startup culture. Most fail. Years of an employee’s life can go down the drain on a mission with no payoff. For more than a decade, we’ve essentially seen leverage risk transferred outward from investors to the individual employee, who Joe says are encouraged to take on student debt and move to an expensive city in the highly improbable hope of a big score. Unlike venture capitalists, who can spread their bets around, most individuals are all-in. Today, we’re seeing the downside as more and more employees of these companies find themselves underwater on their stock options. Yes, Adam Neumann is out at WeWork, but he will leave a billionaire. Many of his long-term employees, who spent years of their lives thinking they were on the verge of multi-millionaire status, will probably get wiped out in the latest Softbank bailout.
(The Oct. 21 edition of the Evening Briefing incorrectly identified so-called Austrian century bonds.)
What you’ll need to know tomorrow
- Elizabeth Warren wants answers about the repo market turmoil.
- Silicon Valley CEOs appear to have chosen their 2020 candidate.
- Facebook shares slide as more states join antitrust probe.
- These are the 50 companies to watch in 2020.
- Justin Trudeau wins a second term as Canada’s prime minister.
- These $50 chicken nuggets were grown in a lab.
- U.S. air quality was improving. Now it’s getting worse.
What you’ll want to read in Climate Changed
Big Oil has profited from the sale of fossil fuels for the better part of a century, helping poison the atmosphere and speed global warming. In recent years, U.S. cities, states and environmental groups have turned to the courts, hoping to punish these energy giants. Specifically, they allege that executives hid their knowledge of humanity’s role in climate change while casting doubt on those who raised the alarm. A major test of this strategy gets under way this week in Manhattan, as New York squares off against Exxon Mobil. Environmentalists hail the case as the first of its kind, but that label comes with a caveat. Instead of seeking to lay blame for a planetary crisis at the feet of oil companies, the trial will instead focus on something more mundane: whether Exxon cooked its books.
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