Happy Friday.
If you have a Yahoo (YHOO) account, it’s time to change your password. The company announced yesterday it had a massive cyber attack back in 2014. Because this wasn’t known at the time the deal was struck, it could affect Yahoo’s merger agreement with Verizon.
The breach would logically undermine the value ascribable to each user, given the chance of those users abandoning Yahoo’s services sooner than otherwise thought as a result. Verizon said it had only learned about the hack “within the last two days,” and had only “limited information.” Yahoo says it didn’t know at the time of the deal either, but admits to having followed up reports of user details being made available on the dark web already in July in what it thinks were an unrelated episode.
Meanwhile, since many of you seem determined to suss out my political leanings, let me save you time. I’m a registered independent, and have voted for Republican presidential candidates as often as Democratic candidates over the years. The only discernible pattern is that I seem to have an aversion to giving anyone a second term. Perhaps that comes from spending too much time in Washington.
In the current campaign, I share the temptation of many CEO Daily readers to vote “none of the above.” But I will not vote for Trump, both for economic reasons – his repudiation of the global free market policies that have powered post-World War II prosperity – and because of his blatant race-baiting.
Having said that, the Trump and Sanders campaigns this year have highlighted a serious flaw in our current economic system. A substantial sector of the American public feels, with some justification, that the rising tide is no longer lifting all boats. This is the pressing issue of our times. And with the dysfunction in Washington unlikely to improve after the election, the business community must take the lead in addressing these issues.
At Fortune, this has become one of our two guiding missions. (The other is to help our readers navigate the accelerating pace of technological change on their businesses.) It is why we started the Change the World list, which focuses on companies that address major global social problems as part of their core business. And it is why we are taking 100 leading global CEOs to the Vatican in December, to engage them in a serious discussion about how to make the global economic system work better for all.
I’ll be on vacation next week. Fortune Deputy Editor Clifton Leaf will be writing this column.
Enjoy the weekend.
