“NO ONE buys furniture in a crisis,” laments Konstantinos Vourvoulakis. He and his father used to sell handmade furniture, but as customers became strapped for cash, they shut up shop in 2014. A chatty man with a sunny disposition, he started driving a taxi instead, ferrying tourists around Athens and offering travel tips. But he doubts he will be able ...

IT IS the summer of 1979 and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the everyman-hero of John Updike’s series of novels, is running a car showroom in Brewer, Pennsylvania. There is a pervasive mood of decline. Local textile mills have closed. Gas prices are soaring. No one wants the traded-in, Detroit-made cars clogging the lot. Yet Rabbit is serene. His is a Toyota ...

IN THE tiny Croatian town of Zabok patients arrive in their thousands each year from across Europe and the Middle East, seeking replacement hips or knees at the St Catherine hospital, which specialises in orthopaedic work. Some come for treatment they cannot get at home, others to escape long waiting-lists for public health care or high prices for private operations. ...

THE maelstrom that hit global financial markets a decade ago is known in Japan as the Lehman Shock, after the bankruptcy of the American investment bank that caused it. Japanese banks themselves escaped relatively unscathed, owing to defences built during the 1990s, when the country struggled with deflation and excessive debt. But they seem to have forgotten the lesson. Risk-taking ...

“SELL in May and go away,” say the denizens of Wall Street, and to the usual summer lethargy is added the excuse of a heatwave. But for those working in private equity, there is no let-up. The “shops”, as private-equity funds like to call themselves, are stuffed with money and raising more: $1.1trn in “dry powder” ready to spend around ...

THE question of who would replace Sergio Marchionne has been in the air for a year or more, ever since the chief executive of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) announced that he would step down in 2019. But the way the answer came was both shocking and sad. Mr Marchionne’s death, at the age of 66, was announced on July 25th, ...

DOES anyone still care about the BRICS? Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa concluded their tenth official summit in Johannesburg on July 26th. The widespread perception is that the group has failed to live up to the hype the acronym helped to generate. But that is only half true. The combined GDP of the original quartet (which did not ...

“DEAR Donald, let’s remember our common history,” wrote Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, on a picture of a military cemetery in Europe that he presented to President Donald Trump during talks on July 25th. The reminder of shared values and sacrifices may have helped nudge the two men towards a truce in the incipient transatlantic trade war ...