Gucci sales were hit hard early in the coronavirus crisis due to the fashion group's reliance on Chinese customers, owner Kering said on Tuesday, adding that it was premature to say how quickly China sales would rebound. The health crisis first hit China - a major market for high-end goods - late last year before spreading elsewhere, and several European countries, including Italy and France as well as the United States, have since gone into lockdown to try to cope. Kering sales fell 15.4% to 3.2 billion euros ($3.47 billion) in the first quarter, impacted, like its rivals, by store closures and also by the shutdown of production sites in Europe....
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- For most of the nation’s history, the idea that people over the age of 65 would voluntarily herd themselves into special communities built around their needs would have seemed absurd, even dystopian. Yet a largely voluntary movement towards segregating people by age has reached extreme levels in recent years – and without receiving much attention at all. The coronavirus outbreak could put an end to it.In 1850, nearly 70% of individuals age 65 or older lived with their adult children. Most of the rest tended to live in close geographical proximity. As a consequence, older people were more or less evenly distributed throughout the country.This arrangement was highly functional: The elderly needed help as they aged, and children and grandchildren provided it. In return, the elderly took care of young children, and otherwise pulled their weight around the house.Home was not the only place where people of different...
Lawmakers and former officials are making a last-ditch push to persuade the Trump administration to halt plans to invest billions of federal employee retirement dollars in Chinese companies that Washington suspects of human rights abuses or threatening U.S. security, according to sources and documents seen by Reuters. The campaign, which includes letters and calls from Republicans and a sharply worded memo shared with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, coincides with heightened U.S.-China tensions over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. At issue is whether administrators of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), a retirement savings fund similar to a 401(k) for federal employees and members of the military, should allow its $50 billion international fund to track an index that includes some China-based stocks of companies under scrutiny in Washington....
