Business Daily

Arunoday Mukherjee, BBC India Business Correspondent, explores the rise of India’s “Cockroach movement,” born from an online joke about unemployment. He discusses exam leaks, fierce competition for scarce well-paid jobs, educated youth taking to the streets, and why economic growth has failed to create enough work. The movement’s potential political impact also comes under scrutiny.

David Kuo, Singapore-based financial commentator and co-founder of The Smart Investor, joins Emily Peck, a New York journalist covering business and the future of work. They examine the $110bn Warner Bros Discovery merger, streaming’s uncertain economics and rising bond yields. They also explore AI’s gender divide, protests over housing and schools, and whether Gen Z may be worse off than their parents.

Michelle Fleury, BBC North America correspondent, and Will Bain, BBC business journalist, explore whether economic anxiety will decide America’s midterms. They examine cost-of-living pressures, energy prices, tariffs, AI data centres and immigration-driven labour shortages. The conversation also follows shifting Democratic candidates and the battle for control of Congress.

Janice Bryant Howroyd, founder of global workforce-solutions company ActOne Group, became the first Black woman to own a billion-dollar business. She recalls growing up as one of 11 children in the segregated South, arriving in Los Angeles with $900, and turning a chance opportunity into a worker-focused enterprise. She also discusses self-doubt, structural barriers, AI, and preparing her company for life beyond its founder.

Cocoa prices quadruple after weather devastates West African harvests, but supermarket chocolate stays expensive even after markets cool. Farmers, processors and chocolate makers reveal how disease, fixed pricing systems, freight costs and delayed contracts shape the supply chain. With another El Niño threatening harvests, the future of chocolate looks increasingly uncertain.

Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professor and former IMF chief economist, joins Sarah Quinn, a University of Washington sociologist studying finance and debt. They trace bonds from Italian city-states and a 1648 Dutch water-board IOU to wars, infrastructure and modern government borrowing. The conversation explores how financial engineering amplified hidden risks, why bond markets wield political power, and whether today’s debt burden could spark another crisis.

Jennifer Pak, an NPR China correspondent, and economist Justin Wolfers examine the global housing crunch, from an elderly woman’s eviction in Spain to young people squeezed by rents in India, Britain and Nigeria. They explore fuel prices as a political flashpoint, falling car sales and the electric shift, China’s surprising mahjong trade boom, renewed interest in Mao, and pressure on OPEC.

As the AI race accelerates, can companies truly police themselves? The discussion explores existential threats, cyberattacks, job losses and bias, while weighing innovation against safety. It examines the global power struggle between the US and China, the role of liability, lessons from social media, and why citizens and critics are missing from key AI decisions.

Cameron Adams, Australian designer, entrepreneur and Canva co-founder, shares his unconventional path from blogging about web design to Google and eventually building a billion-dollar company. He recalls Google Wave’s celebrated failure, Fluent’s dramatic growth crisis and the meeting that led to Canva. He also discusses preserving startup spirit at scale, AI as a creative partner and Canva’s ambitions beyond profit.

Stephanie Spendler, a longtime Oktoberfest tent operator whose family has run the Löwenbräu tent since 1953, reveals where the €15.90 Maß really goes. Explore the brewery’s dominant share, soaring tent construction and staffing costs, servers’ commission-based work, and Munich’s cut. The numbers behind the festival’s beer economy are surprisingly complex.