WorldcrunchFrance’s top business daily, Les Echos covers domestic and international economic, financial and markets news. Founded in 1908, the newspaper has been the property of French luxury good conglomerate LVMH (Moet Hennessy – Louis Vuitton) since 2007.
-OpEd- PARIS — My conversation partner is a Japanese banker. He has just returned from Amman, the capital of Jordan. And he’s talking about the Chinese who were also there at a joint meeting of the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). “They were everywhere and everyone […]
French experts doubt that a machine can help you find your soulmate better than trusting the eternal language of love.
The Silicon Wadi, as Israel’s tech sector is known, has a penchant for creating innovative new companies. But rather than grow to maturity, they’re often sold off early to larger, foreign firms.
With facial recognition cameras and Big Data, the Chinese leadership is pushing its penchant for surveillance to new heights.
PARIS — Block construction, robotics and basic coding — all in one package, and especially designed for a non-tech-savvy public. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Mindstorms, which toymaker Lego first introduced two decades ago to teach people (children primarily) about programming, but in a fun way — by creating educational robots that walk, talk, etc. For the first versions of Mindstorms, the two Lego engineers who came up with the toy — Gaute Munch and and Erik Hansen — worked closely with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Munch is now director of advanced technology at […]
With technology rapidly advancing, what may set human workers apart is their ability to reason as much as their technical skills.
With its mineral resources and cheap labor, the country has significant potential for growth, but economic openness could undermine its dictatorship.
Our political leaders are woefully inefficient and too often dishonest. So maybe we should let machines decide policy instead.
-Analysis- PARIS — A historic, surreal handshake between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. A G7 summit in Canada that officially confirmed the rift between Europe and the United States on international trade. And, between these two events, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani gathered for the […]
The U.S. president talks lots about the ‘art of the deal.’ But when it comes to diplomatic negotiations, his liar’s-poker tactics are seriously misplaced.
PARIS — The address is not by chance. Courbet, a jewelry designer that sells synthetic diamonds, has decided to open at the world’s most prestigious location for any jeweler: the Place Vendôme in Paris. Setting up shop at No. 7, becoming neighbor to establishments like Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, is a daring move, […]
It’s time for other countries to push back rather than just sit back and accept the consequences of Trump’s me-first approach to trade and diplomacy.
Bill Clinton once called it ‘the most terrifying place on earth.’ A no-man’s land with barbed wire and robot sentries, the area between the two Koreas has also become an unlikely wildlife refuge.
-OpEd- PARIS — At a time when nationalism is coming back to life across the continent, the pro-European activism of Emmanuel Macron is to be applauded. The emergence of a new sheen of European sovereignty, which the French president regularly calls for, would allow commercial, environmental, banking, digital or migration issues to be dealt with […]
Climate change is a real and alarming problem. But there’s another — and intimately related — ticking time bomb threatening our planet: overpopulation.
The violent protests that struck Paris last week weren’t the start of a new, 1968-style uprising. But people are angry and disillusioned. And that’s a problem.
Countries like France can either prepare, and make research into artificial intelligence a national priority, or allow themselves to become digital colonies.
FANUC churns out 6,000 industrial robots per month, double that of its closest competitor. For a company on the cutting edge, it’s surprisingly conservative.
The shift toward electric cars is picking up pace, but the road ahead has plenty of obstacles still.
-OpEd- PARIS — Public opinion was outraged, and rightly so, by revelations from the so-called Paradise Papers investigation and the publication, before that, of the Panama Papers. But no one ever questions the root causes of these tax scandals. It’s not enough to complain and condemn. We must deal with the root causes of the […]
Today’s terrorism is different, with a specific way of scripting the violence that echos popular culture. Of course, these aren’t actors. Especially, the victims.
Upstarts no longer, the so-called BAT companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — are a force to be reckoned with.
The world has mostly embraced technological advances. But as fallout over the Facebook data-breach scandal suggests, the reaction could get nasty.
The U.S. may boast the world’s largest economy on one hand and a deeply problematic president on the other. But under the surface, things are bleak.
We should not be proud of of the insufficient response against the Damascus regime, but total inaction would be even worse.
China has quietly become a major coffee producer — mostly for export. But its people are developing a taste for the beverage as well, much to the delight of vendors like Starbucks.
For decades, economists scorned protectionism as a losing proposition. Now some have begun to admit that not everyone benefits from open markets.
The bipolar world of yesteryear is gone. In its place is a shifting geopolitical landscape of circumstantial alliances and ascendant authoritarianism.
The new generations in the job market have a much more fluid relationship with their employer. How should HR respond?
Rest assured, computers aren’t that smart. They lack common sense. Or so we assume: for if a computer could become conscious, how would we really know?
In a time of Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, Europe represents a democratic ideal alone—respectful of both humanity and the planet. And Europe needs a revival of the Berlin-Paris alliance to make it possible.
–OpEd- PARIS — The year is 2050. Cash has disappeared. People now pay for their purchases with their smartphones. And as in so many other sectors, Apple and Google are the big winners — along with Microsoft, who makes a small chip, which people implant under their skin to use as an electronic wallet. For […]
MOSCOW — Rumor has it that Vladimir Putin is something of a techie. Though the man in charge at the Kremlin has been vague about his economic priorities after the March 18 presidential election, Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister, says that Putin “is obsessively interested in new technologies and the digital economy.” During […]
By becoming president for life, Xi Jinping is bringing China back to its imperial history, taking advantage of the exceptional development of his country but also of America’s mistakes. But Chinese coming fortunes are still very much up in the air.
-Analysis- PARIS — With his new sweeping round of protectionist tariffs on steel and aluminum, it looks like Donald Trump has decided to extend to the economic field the “madman strategy” he had already applied to the Korean Peninsula. That was the take last week from former CIA Director David Petraeus. Developed by the Nixon-Kissinger […]
-Analysis- PARIS — It’s a plan of titanic proportions, with a budget of close to $1 trillion and transport projects, for both land and sea, on almost every continent. No single fund can finance it, and the development bank created for it brings together more than 60 countries. The “New Silk Road,” and the figures […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Michiel Van Aarnhem is a young and elegant advisor to the Dutch finance minister. He’s also an award-winning video producer. The educational video Bitcoin, Money of the Future?, which he made with his friend Jason Halbgewachs, a Justice Ministry official, took first prize in the European Central Bank (ECB)-sponsored Euro Video Challenge […]
-OpEd- PARIS — While leafing through the newspapers in an English pub last weekend, I was surprised to see The Sunday Times, hardly a tabloid, portraying the three fiercest Brexiters as “musketeers.” A rather flattering image assuming Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg — the three men in question — are not offended by […]
-OpEd- PARIS — At the Beauval Zoo in central France, visitors line up every day for a chance to glimpse at His Majesty Yuan Meng. The animal’s birth, on Aug. 4, 2017, was followed by 26 million people on social media. Baptized with great pomp and circumstance by French First Lady Brigitte Macron in a […]
-OpEd- PARIS — A people brings glory upon itself up when it is able to confront the complexity of its history. On the contrary, it dishonors itself when it takes on a defensive posture with its past. In Poland, both houses of the legislature have now voted in favor of a law criminalizing any reference […]