Headlines

Brazil on Thursday ditched a trade complaint against Canada over aircraft subsidies and called for wider negotiations between all aircraft producing nations to halt a slide toward aircraft trade wars, sidestepping the World Trade Organization, Reuters reported. The abrupt move by Brazil, home to the world’s third largest planemaker Embraer, comes as larger rivals Airbus and Boeing remain locked in a 16-year-old fight at the WTO that led to tit-for-tat transatlantic tariffs.

Chinese coffee chain Luckin Coffee said yesterday that its board had found no evidence of misconduct by Chief Executive Jinyi Guo during a month-long investigation into allegations made by some employees, Reuters reported. Guo, who took over after the competitor to Starbucks ousted co-founder and chairman Charles Zhengyao amid an internal fraud investigation, had denied the allegations. The coffee chain’s explosive growth was halted last year by an investigation into its accounts for overstating 2019 revenue and understating net loss.

For households trying to balance their budget each month, the fact that European countries are incurring trillion-euro debts is dizzying, the New York Times reported. In France alone, the national debt has topped 2.7 trillion euros ($3.2 trillion) and will soon exceed 120 percent of the economy. But governments are far from worried about piling up debt right now, as rock-bottom interest rates empower them to spare no expense to shield their economies from the pandemic. Billions of euros are being deployed to nationalize payrolls, suppress bankruptcies and avoid mass unemployment.