The Indian government is preparing to ban private cryptocurrencies and allow the country’s central bank to launch an official digital currency. The proposed legislation follows a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in China, where financial regulators and the central bank have made all digital currency transactions illegal. The Indian proposals were flagged in a parliamentary bulletin listing upcoming legislation which included one paragraph on “The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021”. The accompanying description of the bill appeared to leave some room for using cryptocurrencies, however. “To create a…
Tag: E-Commerce
Alibaba Faces Reckoning Over Harassment
At an employee dinner, women were told to rank the attractiveness of the men at the table. During a team-building exercise, a woman was pressured to straddle her male co-worker in front of colleagues. Top executives traded lewd comments about male virility at company events and online. The e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of China’s most globalized internet companies, has often celebrated the number of women in its senior ranks. In 2018, the company’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Ma, told a conference in Geneva that one secret to Alibaba’s success was that…
Luxury’s Gray Market Is Emerging From the Shadows
Imagine you are hunting online for a pair of square-toed slides from Bottega Veneta, one of the most-hyped luxury brands of the moment. A new season pair can cost more than $550 from the brand’s website, an old-guard department store like Neiman Marcus or a newer e-commerce player like Net-a-Porter. But what if you chose to buy from Cettire, a website offering discounts of up to 30 percent on the latest fashion styles? You would be a player in the multibillion-dollar luxury “gray” market, a fast-growing sales sector that has…