🏎️ 🛩 EU plans to fight climate change spare one particular group from footing the bill, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph. “The very rich.” Take petrol cars, due to be phased out by 2035. Italy’s climate minister, Roberto Cingolani, wants supercars such as those made by Ferrari and Lamborghini to be exempt. Funnily enough, he used to be a non-exec at Ferrari. It doesn’t stop there. The EU also plans to exempt private jets from a planned tax on aviation fuel on the basis that they are an “aid to the conduct of business”. Incredibly, there is a separate exemption for those same Cessnas and Gulfstreams for “personal and recreational” trips.
Nike’s boss is a fad fanatic
💧 🧘🏻♂️ Nike CEO John Donahoe is addicted to fads, says Lane Florsheim in The Wall Street Journal. The 61-year-old starts every day at 5.45am by drinking “precisely 33 ounces of water”, then takes a fistful of vitamins. “I almost don’t even know what… I’m willing to try anything.” When he took over the reins at Nike last year, it had a reputation for treating its female staff and athletes badly. So he arranged a “100-day global listening tour”. Last month the company shut its offices around the world, giving staff a moment to “rest and recharge”. Rest is close to his heart: he sleeps for an average of “70 hours every 10 days”. And in the snatches of downtime he can manage during the day, he practices mindfulness. “I have an app on my phone… even commuting into work, I’ll just do gratitude practice, which in this moment in time is a really helpful and useful thing.”
Workers of the world, unite at KPMG
👨🏻🔧 🧐 KPMG has become the first big UK company to set a quota for the number of workers it hires from the “working class”. By 2030, the accounting and consulting giant wants 29% of its partners and directors to have parents with “routine and manual” jobs, such as plumbers, electricians or butchers. At the moment just 20% of the firm’s 1,297 directors are from such backgrounds, and they are typically paid 8.6% less than colleagues whose parents are professionals.
Driving the change is the company’s chairwoman, Bina Mehta, who says she comes from a working-class background and argues that greater socio-economic diversity will bring fresh thinking to KPMG. Former chairman Bill Michael resigned earlier this year after calling unconscious bias training “complete and utter crap” and telling staff to “stop moaning” about the pandemic. All 16,000 staffers will now undergo training to help them spot the “invisible barriers” that hold back employees from poorer backgrounds.
El Salvador’s Bitcoin bump
🇸🇻 📉 El Salvador became the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday – and the price of the cryptocurrency slumped by more than 10%, says Michael Stott in the Financial Times. President Nayib Bukele, 40, was undeterred, announcing on Twitter that his country’s tiny treasury would be “buying the dip”, followed by a winking emoji. Bond markets haven’t taken such a whimsical view: investors have been dumping Salvadoran bonds since Bukele announced his reckless crypto gamble. As one investor put it, “there’s a real risk this all ends in tears”.