ITK Daily | September 21

Happy Wednesday.

To be ITK, know this.

Pop quiz: Where was the header photo taken?

Bloomberg: China loses allure as European firms rethink investments

+ Ideology trumping economics in China, says EU chamber’s Wuttke

+ Future investment from Europe can’t be “taken for granted”

Read this: Top European business group blasts Beijing for letting ‘ideology’ and commitment to COVID zero block economic growth Fortune

+ The environment for foreign business and China is at its most precarious point in years due to China’s harsh COVID zero policies and the government’s “inward turn” since the beginning of the pandemic, the European Chamber of Commerce in China warned in a new position paper published on Wednesday.

+ “Although Europe and China already sit at opposite ends of a shared continent, it seems they are drifting further and further apart.” -- EUCCC president J?rg Wuttke

+ “China’s move away from the rest of the world… indicates that, at the moment, ideology is trumping the economy”

Read this: Vietnam's battle to climb the global value chain: The country earns global factory status but fears it will remain an 'assembly platform.' Nikkei

+ Flip over an Apple Watch or MacBook box in the future, and it might say, "Assembled in Vietnam."

Read this: Would you geotag your home for your government? 50 million Indians did: A BJP political campaign encouraging people to upload their selfies and location has privacy advocates alarmed. ROW

+ “No country has ever executed such a massive scale of geotagging of its own citizens as we see in the Har Ghar Tiranga scheme,” Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India, told Rest of World. “Previously, some fragmented attempts have been made to geotag citizens with an intention of digital commerce; however, not at this scale with an intention of electioneering.”

Read this: Italy under pressure to boost appeal of Milan stock exchange: Borsa Italiana has lost several high-profile companies this year but says it is working on simplifying its rules. FT

+ “The broader issue is that many companies find the Milan stock exchange increasingly less attractive compared to other countries,” said Giancarlo Giudici, a corporate finance professor at the Politecnico di Milano School of Management.

+ The FTSE MIB index, Italy’s flagship stock market index, has fallen roughly 20 percent this year, underperforming other main European indices.

+ While it lacks any significant tech companies, the exchange is home to several luxury groups, reflecting their standing in the domestic economy.

With ceremonies over, King Charles III faces biggest task: AP reports now King Charles III faces the task of preserving a 1,000-year-old monarchy that his mother nurtured for seven decades, but that faces an uncertain future. The challenge is immense.

Read this: Liz Truss admits UK trade deal with US is not on the agenda: Prime minister’s assessment leaves a hole in government’s post-Brexit trade strategy. FT

+ Liz Truss has admitted that a UK-US trade deal, long seen as one of the biggest prizes of Brexit, is not on the horizon, as she arrived in New York on her first overseas trip as prime minister.

Modern slavery: An estimated 50 million people worldwide in 2021 were living in modern slavery conditions, with 3.3 million of them being children.

Bloomberg: World’s average adult will be worth $100,000 by 2024, says Credit Suisse

+ Credit Suisse sees the number of millionaires growing 40% by 2026

+ China is among the countries that will add the most millionaires

Read this: BeReal is hotter than TikTok. So TikTok is copying it. Social media’s giants are racing to crush the industry’s latest upstart. WP

Look for my four-week BeReal strategy workshop coming soon.

TikTok is already over.

+ A two-year-old French photo-sharing app is earning the highest form of flattery from Big Tech’s social media titans: imitation.

+ BeReal, which prompts users once per day to snap and share a quick photo from wherever they happen to be, is topping app charts with a social media experience that prioritizes spontaneous connections over image-conscious curation.

+ TikTok became the latest big platform to respond to BeReal’s surge, announcing a new feature called TikTok Now that will give users daily prompts to share impromptu photos or short videos using the phone’s front and rear cameras.

+ Instagram has confirmed it is working on a similar feature, called IG Candid Challenges.

+ Like Snapchat before it, BeReal presents itself as a refreshing alternative to the big social media platforms, with their addictive feeds, polished content, and professional influencers.

Apple plans to create more kinds of ad inventory in the App Store by the end of the year.

70%: Percentage of Roblox played on mobile devices.

Air Canada bought 30 short-haul electric planes.

Hertz plans to order up to 175,000 Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, and BrightDrop EVs from GM over the next five years.

Among the Fortune Global 500, 63% of companies have now set 2050 targets for emissions reductions, up 12 percentage points in the last year, and 47% have set more ambitious 2030 targets.

Eataly agrees deal to sell majority stake: WSJ reports a European private-equity firm agreed to buy a controlling stake in the Italian marketplace chain, with the aim of helping it continue to expand globally.

+ "And that is why Regenerative Finance (aka ReFI) is so interesting to me. ReFi is an idea, like DeFi, based on a set of web3 technologies and economics, that suggests that efforts to combat climate change can and will be funded by the crowd." -- Fred Wilson

PA-SEN: Doug Mastriano, a GOP state senator running for Pennsylvania governor, has yet to air a single general-election TV ad seven weeks before the election.

Wild.

Politico: McCarthy reaches for the GOP’s brass ring: A unifying agenda

+ The House Republican leader is modeling his party blueprint on 1994's Contract With America and aiming for conservative buy-in that isn't a given.

+ Kevin McCarthy will announce it in a red Pittsburgh suburb, not on the Capitol steps. In most other ways, though, his Friday GOP agenda rollout will mirror Newt Gingrich’s 28-year-old Contract With America.

"We back": After a six-year hiatus, the Clinton Global Initiative returned to New York City this week.

Read this: Will Welch leads GQ to ‘the new masculinity’: When he got the job as top editor, a friend told him, “Yikes.” Now, with an assist from Brad Pitt, he has remade the men’s magazine for the post-MeToo age. NYT

+ Under Welch, the magazine has put less emphasis on lengthy feature articles and lavished attention on its website, social media accounts and videos.

+ A series of GQ cover images that caught fire online, a necessity at a time when newsstands have become almost irrelevant to a magazine’s success

+ “You want a cover to make people sit up and take notice, and get them talking — what is the point of a cover otherwise?" -- Anna Wintour

+ It is hard for a magazine to get noticed. “The challenges are in plain sight — for all of us. How do you capture your audience’s attention, month after month, day after day, across all of GQ’s platforms? How do you surprise them, and how do you support important journalism right now?” -- Anna Wintour

Hottest fall movies:

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

The Banshees of Inisherin

Bones and All

Casa Susanna

The Fabelmans

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

The Inspection

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

No Bears

Other People’s Children

Saint Omer

Tár

Theater of Thought

Women Talking

The Wonder

LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman will spend the week in Washington, DC, meeting with lawmakers as part of a push to educate them about the upstart league’s vision for pro golf.

Read this: LIV long and prosper? Probably not: It’s more like the XFL than the American Football League. Kevin Cook

La Liga recently raised Barcelona’s spending limit by $803 million.

+ Harry Kane will wear a rainbow captain’s armband during the World Cup in Qatar to send a message against discrimination — homosexuality is illegal in the host nation.

Bloomberg: Ares Weighs joining bid for French football team Lyon

Phoenix Suns + Mercury owner Robert Sarver announces that he has started the process to sell both franchises.

Told ya’.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

Caracal is a geopolitical business intelligence firm specializing in global business issues at the intersection of globalization, disruption, and politics.

Clients are Chief Communications Officers with global responsibility who rely on Caracal for help navigating today's interconnected business environment with political intelligence, research, strategic planning, public affairs, and communications.

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