Ivanka Trump’s new job

IVANKA TRUMP is not the first presidential child to be a close assistant to her father. Anna Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1944 and accompanied Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta conference of world leaders in February 1945. George H.W. Bush listened to the advice of his sons George and Jeb. Yet Ms Trump is the first child whose spouse also plays an important advisory role. She and her husband, Jared Kushner, both have security clearance, access to top-level presidential meetings and offices in the West Wing of the White House, home to the offices of the president. Their roles have raised eyebrows ever since Donald Trump was inaugurated as America’s 45th president.

After a particularly rough week for his new administration, Mr Trump tried to calm mounting concerns over potential conflicts of interest among members of his family. On March 29th the White House announced that Ms Trump would become an unpaid federal employee, with the title “assistant to the president”, subject to the same rules as all other federal employees. Her appointment comes after Norman Eisen and Richard Painter, two ethics lawyers, expressed concern in a letter to Donald McGahn, counsel of the White House, “about...Continue reading

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YouTube May Need to Change its Tune

Google’s embattled YouTube business could use all the friends it can get these days. In the music industry, it may need to buy some.

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Why Americans Aren't Spending Like They Used To

For many Americans, the big lesson from the financial crisis was that they needed to be more careful with their money. That pattern wasn’t something they were going to unlearn just because of a changing of the guard at the White House.

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A new Israeli settlement on the West Bank

IN RESPONSE to international pressure, Israel has built no new settlements in the occupied West Bank for over two decades, focusing instead on construction within the 120 or so that are already there. But on March 30th the Israeli government announced it would be building a brand new settlement 25km (15 miles) north of Jerusalem.

The new settlement is to be built as part of an agreement with the 42 Israeli families evicted on February 1st from the Amona outpost, following a ruling by the High Court that they had built their homes on privately owned Palestinian land. Despite authorising the new construction, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also told his cabinet that henceforth, any further building would take place only within the boundaries of the current settlements. This is to accommodate the wishes of America’s president, Donald Trump, who at a joint press conference in Washington on February 15th declared to Mr Netanyahu: “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit.”

Mr Netanyahu’s decision, to press ahead with one new settlement while in effect restricting all other construction, is closely co-ordinated with the White House. His...Continue reading

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South Africa’s president sacks the finance minister in a cabinet reshuffle

JACOB ZUMA waited until the dead of night to tell South Africans that he had fired their respected finance minister. Rumours of a cabinet reshuffle had been swirling for months. Finally, in a press statement released just after midnight, President Zuma announced that he was shuffling 20 posts in his cabinet including the axing of the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, as well as his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas.

The potential fallout of removing Mr Gordhan had been clear for some time. Each time it seemed likely that Mr Zuma, a president facing 783 corruption charges, was preparing to prise Mr Gordhan’s hands from the purse strings, the rand would wilt and investors would dump South Africa’s bonds. Well before the move, senior members of Mr Zuma’s party, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) were speaking out in support of Mr Gordhan, and business leaders were sounding warnings that South Africa’s credit rating could be cut to junk. Despite all of this, Mr Zuma’s dislike of Mr Gordhan and his deputy was so great that he sacked them anyway, consequences be damned.

And indeed the consequences are damning. Within hours the rand slumped, taking it down almost...Continue reading

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South Africa: Big Political Challenge Could Present Opportunity

Investors have seen South African finance ministers come and go before. But their recent bullishness on emerging markets makes the firing of Pravin Gordhan a bigger challenge.

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Westinghouse Bankruptcy Doesn't End Toshiba's Woes

Shares of Japan’s venerable Toshiba have been rallying, but there are plenty of uncertainties ahead.

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China's Tectonic Shift in Bank Funding

Most Chinese banks have long relied on deposits to fund their lending. But those once-ample trapped savings are withering away.

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China Can't Carry Global Economy if U.S. Stumbles

China is primarily exporting the wrong kind of inflation, rather than growth, to the West. If the U.S. economy stumbles along with Trump’s agenda, a stronger China won’t be there to pick up the slack.

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South Korea’s president is arrested on charges of bribery and abuse of power

PARK GEUN-HYE has had a tough ten days: 14 hours of interrogation by prosecutors, followed by another nine spent in a local court yesterday. The prosecutors had been waiting for months to serve the former South Korean president with an arrest warrant; it took the judges an extraordinarily long day of deliberation to weigh the merits of their request. As the former South Korean president left her home in Seoul to attend the hearing, flag-waving supporters lined the streets; several lay down in the road in an attempt to block her path to court.

It was to no effect: shortly before dawn on March 31st, Ms Park was arrested at the prosecutors’ office. The justice who approved her pre-trial detention said that the main charges against her were “demonstrable” and that, were she allowed to leave, she might destroy evidence. Prosecutors had submitted 120,000 pages of documents to the court earlier this week concerning the 13 charges against Ms Park. In their warrant they noted that Ms Park had “let down the trust of the people”, was “consistently denying objective facts”, and “showing no signs of remorse”.

Yet her early imprisonment does not rule out a...Continue reading

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A stalled treaty with China highlights Australia’s geopolitical dilemma

LI KEQIANG, China’s prime minister, could not have been more tactful during his recent visit to Australia. On March 25th he joined Malcolm Turnbull, his Australian counterpart, at an Australian rules football match between Sydney and Port Adelaide. Having been presented with a scarf in Port Adelaide’s colours, he requested one in Sydney’s too, and wore them both throughout the match in spite of the heat, so as not to show any favouritism. He must have been disappointed, therefore, by the poor manners of his host after the match. Just two days after Mr Li flew on to New Zealand, Mr Turnbull’s conservative government scrapped a planned parliamentary vote to ratify an extradition treaty between Australia and China.

An earlier conservative government concluded the treaty ten years ago, but it has never been ratified. Julie Bishop, the foreign minister, championed the deal as recently as March 28th, saying it was “in Australia’s national interest”. But a loose alliance of opposition parties and even some government MPs had their doubts. They expressed concern that alleged criminals whom Australia extradited under the treaty might be dealt with unfairly by China’s...Continue reading

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Lululemon Shows Athleisure Market Is Out of Breath

Lululemon’s earnings report may be the latest sign of a the end of rapid growth in the market for ‘athleisure.’

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Democrats should be more comfortable discussing economic growth

STEVE BANNON is right. This week, in a New York Times Magazine piece otherwise dedicated to the President’s dance with Congress, he offered this: 

I think the Democrats are fundamentally afflicted with the inability to discuss and have an adult conversation about economics and jobs, because they’re too consumed by identity politics. And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government—which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.

Lose the bit about identity politics, and you have a clear summation of American macroeconomics. Republicans are lost in theory, unburdened by empirical evidence. Democrats don’t seem to have much of a theory at all. And as Republicans dust themselves off and turn to rewriting America’s tax code, Democrats could use a working theory of economic growth. Judging from last year’s campaign, they aren’t ready to commit to one. Should they develop an interest, however, there are several to hand.

Grossly simplified, there are...Continue reading

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Fed Sees Car Trouble Down South

Delinquencies on auto loans are rising to worrying levels in some southern cities.

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Justices consider the case of an immigrant who received bad legal advice

HOWEVER the Supreme Court decides Lee v United States, a vexing case argued on March 28th, criminal defendants would be wise to heed this warning: client beware. Your lawyer may be a nitwit.

Jae Lee would be much better off today had he received that admonition years ago. Now he rues the day he hired Larry Fitzgerald to represent him in a drug case. Mr Lee came to America as a teenager from South Korea with his parents in 1982. He has been a lawful and entrepreneurial permanent resident ever since—opening a couple of restaurants in Memphis—and has never returned to his birth country. Unlike his parents, Mr Lee did not become an American citizen. So when he was caught with 88 ecstasy pills and a loaded rifle in 2009, his first priority was to ensure his immigration status would not be imperiled.

Don’t worry, Mr Fitzgerald told his client as he mulled a plea bargain, there's nothing to fear. Pleading guilty to a charge of intent to distribute drugs—in exchange for a reduced sentence of one year and one day—would protect him from deportation. With “30+ years of living in the US and strong ties” to his community, a “lack of prior criminal history” and the “small...Continue reading

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Islamic State is losing land but leaving mines behind

One down, many thousands to go

SCENES of jubilation greeted Kurdish-led forces when they routed Islamic State fighters from the city of Manbij in northern Syria last August. In the streets, women set fire to the long black veils the jihadists had forced them to wear since they seized the city in January 2014. Men shaved off the beards they had been obliged to grow. One old woman was photographed puffing merrily on a cigarette, an activity punishable with prison in the “caliphate”. For many, however, the giddy joy of liberation soon gave way to tragedy.

“The first explosion killed our neighbour and his sister-in-law when they entered their house,” said Ali Hussain Omari, a former fighter from the city. “Three days later another mine killed my cousin. His 11-year-old daughter’s leg was amputated and their house was destroyed. A week later another mine in an olive tree exploded. My neighbour lost his leg.”

The amount of land that IS controls is shrinking quickly in both Iraq and Syria. But the group can still kill and maim, even in areas it no longer occupies. Within ten days of Manbij’s liberation, booby-traps and mines...Continue reading

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Famine menaces 20m people in Africa and Yemen

OUTSIDE a thatched hut in Panyijiar, in South Sudan, Nyakor Matoap, a 25-year-old woman, clutches the youngest of her three children. Dressed in a silky emerald shawl, she hides the baby, named Nyathol, underneath its folds. Her other children crowd happily enough around her legs. But the baby is in a bad way. Though almost a year old, he is scarcely larger than a newborn. When he cries, it is quiet and gasping, his tiny ribs pushing out his chest. His swollen head lolls uncomfortably on his emaciated frame. Asked whether he will survive, she replies simply, “I do not know.”

Before 2013 Mrs Matoap cultivated a patch of land near Leer, some 80km (50 miles) further north. But then civil war broke out in South Sudan, and her husband went to join rebel fighters. In August last year, government forces came into her village. They pulled the men out of their huts and shot them; the women fled. She found herself in the murky waters of the Sudd, a vast swamp which spreads either side of the White Nile. For seven months she has lived off wild fruit and the roots of water lilies. She last saw her husband in 2015, when her son was conceived. Though Panyijiar is friendly territory, and...Continue reading

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Bibi Netanyahu takes on the media

ISRAEL’S prime minister recently told an American audience that “there is no country in the world where the press is freer [than Israel]. There is no country in the world that attacks its leader more than the Israeli press attacks me. That’s fine. It’s their choice. They are free press and they can say anything they want.” Yet even as Binyamin Netanyahu extols the virtues of a free press and Israel’s democracy abroad he is risking the survival of his governing coalition by trying to take control of parts of the media at home.

The prime minister has embarked on a campaign against Israel’s new public broadcasting corporation, which is scheduled to begin operating on April 30th. Despite having voted three years ago in favour of a law disbanding the old, unwieldy Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA), Mr Netanyahu is now convinced that its replacement threatens his government. He wants to institute controls over the new corporation, to be called Kan (“Here”), although he has still not spelled out precisely what these might entail.

The controversy pitted Mr Netanyahu against his finance minister, Moshe Kahlon, leader of the centrist Kulanu Party....Continue reading

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Why Egypt’s ruler loves Donald Trump

DONALD TRUMP’S decision to give up his salary as president was not inspired by similar gestures made by previous American leaders, such as Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy. Rather, Mr Trump was “following in the footsteps” of Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the president of Egypt, claimed two Egyptian newspapers. Mr Sisi, after all, is Mr Trump’s “role model”, said an Egyptian television host. He was on top of Mr Trump’s guest-list for the inauguration, reported an Egyptian news website.

Such fake news is easily debunked. Mr Trump promised to forgo his salary before ever meeting Egypt’s strongman. Mr Sisi, who cut his own salary only by half, did not attend the inauguration. But the relationship between the two leaders, who will meet in the White House on April 3rd, has captivated Egypt’s scribes and talking heads. Many of them see Mr Trump’s affection for Mr Sisi as a matter of national pride worth celebrating—and exaggerating.

Take Mr Trump’s phone call to Mr Sisi in January, which the White House described in anodyne terms. Egyptian journalists, by contrast, were ecstatic. Newspapers cited officials who claimed that the call heralded a new era...Continue reading

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France’s presidential race is a clash of worldviews

Two against the EU

WHAT did Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s National Front, expect to gain by visiting Moscow on March 24th? Her core supporters relished seeing her with Vladimir Putin, a strong woman standing next to a strongman. Ms Le Pen came away claiming that the world now belongs to nationalist populists such as Mr Putin, Donald Trump, India’s Narendra Modi and, implicitly, herself. Interestingly, the visit did not seem aimed at the usual goal of candidates who go abroad: reassuring voters that they can safely be trusted with foreign policy.

In French campaigns, gravitas-enhancing trips beyond the Hexagone (as mainland France is known) are especially popular with candidates who have little experience of governing. This year Ms Le Pen has been to America (where she was seen sipping coffee in Trump Tower in New York), Germany, Lebanon and Chad. Emmanuel Macron, the young centrist who is tied with her for first place in the polls, has been to Algeria, Britain, Germany, Jordan and Lebanon, in part to reach out to expat voters and donors.

Ms Le Pen’s trip to the Kremlin was risky. She needs to broaden her...Continue reading

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Aleksei Navalny brings Russia’s opposition back to life

NOBODY inside or outside Russia saw it coming. The government seemed to have established complete control over politics, marginalising the opposition with nationalist adventures in Ukraine and Syria. Vladimir Putin’s approval rating had stabilised at more than 80%. After Donald Trump’s victory in America, the Kremlin had proclaimed the threat of global liberalism to be over. And yet on March 26th, 17 years to the day after Mr Putin was first elected, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in nearly 100 cities to demonstrate against corruption, in the largest protests since 2012.

The protests began in Vladivostok and rolled across the country to Moscow and St Petersburg, which saw the largest crowds. Riot police arrested more than 1,000 people in Moscow alone. The state media ignored the demonstrations; the top Russian search engine, Yandex, manipulated its results to push reports of them down the page. The Kremlin was speechless.

The marches came in response to a call from Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner who wants to run for president next year. Despite the government’s crackdown on activism, Mr Navalny has...Continue reading

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As the world sours on trade, the EU sweetens on it

WHAT a difference a few months makes. Barely half a year ago the European Union’s (EU’s) trade policy was a mess. A much-touted trade and investment partnership (TTIP) with the United States was on life support, trashed by NGOs and consumer groups, and disowned by some of the politicians who had asked for it in the first place. A deal with cuddly Canada (CETA) barely survived an encounter with a preening regional parliament in Belgium. Governments were scrapping over how to respond to state-subsidised Chinese steel, and Britain, among the club’s weightiest pro-trade voices, had voted to leave the EU, a decision made flesh by the government’s Article 50 letter this week.

And now? Trade is “going to be huge in the coming months”, says a European diplomat. His word choice is a reminder of the reason for the change: Donald J. Trump. One of the American president’s first acts was to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal covering a dozen countries around the Pacific Rim. Mr Trump complains about Germany’s trade surplus, and his administration hints that it will ignore rulings from the World Trade Organisation. The leader of the free world is...Continue reading

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Banks’ equity-research operations are in decline

EQUITY research, the business of providing analysis of companies’ financial performance, may be a stodgy industry but it is not a simple one. Regulators fret about the sector’s Byzantine payment structure: investment banks dominate the market, but do not charge for it. They dole it out free to clients in the hope of future trading business. The understandable fear is that this set-up produces conflicts. Banks may be wary of issuing reports critical of companies; fund managers may end up choosing banks because of their research rather than the efficiency of their brokerage services. New regulations will overturn this model entirely.

MiFID 2, an ambitious set of European financial rules coming into effect next January, will force asset managers to disclose how much they spend on research. So banks will have to “unbundle” their services, billing clients for research and trading separately. Although the rules are being introduced by European regulators, banks across the world will have to change their pricing practices to comply.

These rules will be hugely, and beneficially, disruptive to a grossly inefficient industry. At present, banks blast...Continue reading

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Lacklustre power demand in Asia throws a cloud over coal

THE Hazelwood power station in Australia’s state of Victoria started generating electricity 52 years ago. The stark symbol of an era when coal was king, Hazelwood was one of Australia’s dirtiest: its fuel was the Latrobe valley’s brown coal, a bigger polluter than the black sort. The station was due finally to close on March 31st. Days earlier, chimney stacks were demolished at Munmorah, a black-coal station north of Sydney, already closed. Australia has shut ten coal-fired power stations over the past seven years, yet coal still generates about three-quarters of its electricity.

This fits a pattern across much of Asia, which accounts for two-thirds of the world’s coal demand. The biggest economies besides Japan, which hopes to replace nuclear with “clean” coal, are either closing down old plants or rethinking plans to build new ones. This is casting a deepening cloud over the coal industry.

Two reasons explain the looming overcapacity in countries ranging from China and India to Australia (South-East Asia remains hooked on coal). Firstly, electricity demand is stagnant, falling or growing less strongly than expected, which has put considerable financial...Continue reading

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Indonesia’s tax amnesty passes its deadline

LAST year Indonesia’s finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, invited chief executives, directors and shareholders from the country’s leading industries to banquets at her ministry. As they munched, she would give presentations setting out who among them had—and, by omission, who had not—signed up to the government’s tax amnesty. “This may be the most expensive dinner in your lifetime,” the 54-year-old economist recalls telling them.

Indonesia’s tax amnesty, which began in July 2016, ended on March 31st. More than 800,000 evaders declared 4,700trn rupiah ($350bn) in assets previously hidden from the authorities. That is a staggering sum, equivalent to 40% of Indonesia’s GDP and 90% of the money supply, and revealing of the epic scale of tax-dodging.

The willingness of tax cheats to come clean partly reflects the generous terms on offer. Assets declared in the first three months were taxed at just 2-4%, compared with the individual income-tax rate of up to 30%. Those declared in the next three months were taxed at 3-6%, and those in the final three months at 5-10%. The government collected additional revenue of 125trn rupiah, equivalent to less than...Continue reading

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The life and times of an Italian non-performing loan

MARIO (not his real name) from the pretty Italian city of Vicenza opened an account at a local bank in 1992. It afforded him an overdraft of the equivalent of €10,000. He needed it to pay the bills of his wholesale textiles company. Over the years his firm’s cash problems worsened. In 2013, after Mario had exceeded his overdraft limit by €7,000 ($9,300), the bank gave him an unsecured loan of €50,000.

The first repayment was due in January 2014, yet by June Mario had filed for voluntary bankruptcy. The bank—now owed €70,300—presented itself to the court as a creditor. It entered into an arrangement, but in December sold the loan for 5% of its book value to Banca IFIS, an Italian lender building a portfolio of soured debts. Banca IFIS employed an external debt collector and by the following April, Mario had repaid €17,000. Having made a tidy profit on its investment, Banca IFIS told the bankruptcy court the debt had been cleared.

It seems puzzling that Mario was granted a loan after being overdrawn for so long. Andrea Clamer, head of Banca IFIS’s bad-loans division, says such mysteries are central to understanding Italy’s bad-loan...Continue reading

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An improbable global shortage: sand

INDIA’S “sand mafia” is doing a roaring trade. The Times of India estimates that the illicit market for sand is worth around 150bn rupees ($2.3bn) a year; at one site in Tamil Nadu alone, 50,000 lorryloads are mined every day and smuggled to nearby states. Gangs around the country frequently turn to violence as they vie to continue cashing in on a building boom.

Much of the modern global economy depends on sand. Most of it pours into the construction industry, where it is used to make concrete and asphalt. A smaller quantity of fine-grade sand is used to produce glass and electronics, and, particularly in America, to extract oil from shale in the fracking industry. No wonder, then, that sand and gravel are the most extracted materials in the world. A 2014 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates they account for up to 85% by weight of everything mined globally each year.

With house-building in the West yet to recover fully from the 2007-08 crisis, Asia has been, by far, the main source of demand. Figures from the Freedonia Group, a market-research firm, suggest that, of the 13.7bn tonnes of sand mined...Continue reading

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Stockmarkets give up some of their Trump bump

HONEYMOONS don’t last for ever. Having been a reluctant bride to President Donald Trump when courted in the run-up to November’s election, the American stockmarket quickly melted into a mood of romantic euphoria. Shares rose by 12% between election day and March 1st (see chart). But in recent days, sentiment has dimmed. There is talk of the “Trump-disappointment trade”.

For the markets to experience some kind of sell-off is hardly a surprise. The S&P 500 index had gone more than 100 days without a 1% decline, the longest such streak since 1995. And the setback should not be exaggerated. The S&P 500 remains well above its pre-election level, compared with the dollar, which has given up around half its gains. The ten-year Treasury-bond yield, which hit 2.62% on March 13th, has dropped back to 2.38%.

The immediate cause of the retreat seemed to be the failure of Mr Trump to repeal his predecessor’s health-care bill. That logic was hardly a great advertisement for capitalism, implying that the fewer Americans had access to health insurance, the happier investors would be. But the broader rationale seemed to be that, if the Republicans...Continue reading

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An outspoken Singaporean blogger wins asylum in America

LIKE many teenage boys, Amos Yee, a Singaporean blogger, is crude, insensitive and confrontational. In 2015, just days after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder and long-time leader, Mr Yee posted a profanity-laced video to his YouTube channel calling Lee “a horrible person”, an “awful leader” and a “dictator”. For a small part of that video (around 30 of its 519 seconds), he also mocked Christianity. He challenged Lee Hsien Loong, Lee’s son and Singapore’s current prime minister, to “come at me, motherfucker”.

Prosecutors did so instead. Convicted of “wounding religious feelings” and obscenity, for posting a crude cartoon showing Lee Kuan Yew doing something unspeakable to Margaret Thatcher, Mr Yee was imprisoned for four weeks. Then just 16 years old, Mr Yee served two weeks in a mental asylum for adults and two weeks in an adult prison. The experience failed to deter him: he pleaded guilty a year later to insulting Islam and Christianity, and was imprisoned for six weeks.

But Mr Yee learned his lesson: late last year he boarded a plane to Chicago and applied for asylum, claiming that he would be persecuted for his political...Continue reading

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The loser in South Korea’s last presidential race has another go

A gesture Moon may soon be repeating

“MY BEST quality is that I am persistent. My worst is that I am no fun.” Moon Jae-in’s assessment of himself in “South Korea Asks”, a series of interviews published in January, is one with which many South Koreans, whether they like or loathe him, would probably agree. Most have an opinion of him. He has been in the political arena for well over a decade, as chief of staff to the late liberal president Roh Moo-hyun from 2003 to 2008; then as a presidential candidate himself in 2012, when he lost a two-way race to Park Geun-hye, by 48% to 52%.

Ms Park’s term came to an early end on March 10th when the constitutional court upheld a motion parliament approved in December to impeach her. The country now faces a snap presidential election on May 9th. After almost a decade of conservative rule, the ballot looks likely to be a victory for the more socially liberal Minjoo party: its support is the highest it has ever been, at 50%. Mr Moon, who led the party until January last year, has topped the polls for president for almost three months. The latest sounding puts his support at 35% in a crowded...Continue reading

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India decriminalises attempted suicide

GORAV GUPTA has spent his life helping the mentally ill. But when suicidal patients seek help at his psychiatric hospital in Delhi, he turns them away. Mr Gupta says he cannot handle the “legal hassle” that might ensue if they try to end their lives while in his care.

Attempted suicide, as well as “any act towards the commission” of suicide, has for years been a crime in India. But on March 27th the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house, passed a package of mental-health reforms, among them one that decriminalises attempted suicide. The bill declares access to psychiatric care to be a right for all Indians, and promises a huge boost in funding to help provide it.

Policymakers in India have long argued that people driven to attempt suicide need rehabilitation. But under the previous law, they instead faced punishment: a fine and up to a year in prison. Prosecution was rare, but the threat of it to extract bribes from the families of those who attempted suicide was not, says Soumitra Pathare, who helped draft the new legislation. Others point out that the government has previously used laws against attempted suicide to lock up activists who stage...Continue reading

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Bangladesh’s counter-terrorism campaign has a long way to go

A lime-green fiasco

FOR four days all eyes in Bangladesh were on Atia Mahal, a lime-green, five-floor apartment block in the north-eastern city of Sylhet. The police cordoned off the building on March 24th after receiving word that a group of Islamic militants had holed up in one of its flats. But it was only on March 27th that a special anti-terrorism unit managed to kill the last of the four besieged terrorists. Two days earlier, one of the four had put on a suicide-vest and blown himself up at the police cordon some 400 metres from the hideout, killing six people and injuring 50. It was the first indiscriminate suicide-attack on civilians in Bangladesh.

Islamic State, the jihadist group that runs a dwindling portion of Syria and Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack, its 28th in Bangladesh since 2015. The deadliest of those was an assault on a restaurant in Dhaka, the capital, last year, in which 22 civilians, two policemen and five terrorists were killed. The government insists—to near-universal disbelief—that the perpetrators are a new faction of a home-grown group called Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Either way, the government does...Continue reading

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Aung San Suu Kyi’s first year running Myanmar has been a letdown

ASTRONOMICAL downtown rents, power cuts, traffic that gets worse by the week: these are Yangon’s growing pains. But they pale in comparison with its growing pleasures: cranes everywhere, a steady stream of new businesses and, most important, optimistic citizens. Signs of progress abound, some flashy—swish new restaurants and hotels—and others mundane—co-ordinated bus routes that have ended the lunatic system whereby the packed vehicles of competing firms raced from stop to stop to snaffle the waiting customers.

Outside the city, however, the lustre fades quickly. Booming Yangon uses perhaps half of Myanmar’s electricity and accounts for as much as a quarter of its economic output, but most of the country’s population is still rural. They fish or farm, often using primitive methods, a fact that becomes glaringly apparent as soon as you leave Yangon. The military regimes that ruled Myanmar for 50 years left it isolated and impoverished.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who opposed the generals for decades before assuming the country’s leadership last March, entered office with the wind at her back. The military junta had begun liberalising the economy before it handed...Continue reading

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When is it OK to shoot a child soldier?

ONE of the worst dilemmas soldiers face is what to do when they confront armed children. International law and most military codes treat underage combatants mainly as innocent victims. They offer guidance on their legal rights and on how to interrogate and demobilise them. They have little to say about a soul-destroying question, which must typically be answered in a split second: when a kid points a Kalashnikov at you, do you shoot him? Last month Canada became the first country to incorporate a detailed answer into its military doctrine. If you must, it says, shoot first.

Such encounters are not rare. Child soldiers fight in at least 17 conflicts, including in Mali, Iraq and the Philippines. Soldiers in Western armies, sometimes acting as peacekeepers, have encountered fighters as young as six on land and at sea. More than 115,000 young combatants have been demobilised since 2000, according to the UN. For the warlords who employ them, children offer many advantages: they are cheap, obedient, expendable, fearless when drugged and put opponents at a moral disadvantage. Some rebel armies are mostly underage.

In 2000 a group of British peacekeepers in Sierra Leone...Continue reading

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What the tourist industry reveals about Cuba

TOURISTS whizz along the Malecón, Havana’s grand seaside boulevard, in bright-red open-topped 1950s cars. Their selfie sticks wobble as they try to film themselves. They move fast, for there are no traffic jams. Cars are costly in Cuba ($50,000 for a low-range Chinese import) and most people are poor (a typical state employee makes $25 a month). So hardly anyone can afford wheels, except the tourists who hire them. And there are far fewer tourists than there ought to be.

Few places are as naturally alluring as Cuba. The island is bathed in sunlight and lapped by warm blue waters. The people are friendly; the rum is light and crisp; the music is a delicious blend of African and Latin rhythms. And the biggest pool of free-spending holidaymakers in the western hemisphere is just a hop away. As Lucky Luciano, an American gangster, observed in 1946, “The water was just as pretty as the Bay of Naples, but it was only 90 miles from the United States.”

There is just one problem today: Cuba is a communist dictatorship in a time warp. For some, that lends it a rebellious allure. They talk of seeing old Havana before its charm is “spoiled” by visible signs of...Continue reading

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Upgrading Brazil’s political class

“DECENCY now!” That slogan, on a banner at a demonstration in São Paulo on March 26th, sums up what Brazilians want from their politicians. They have come to expect the opposite. Rodrigo Janot, the chief prosecutor, has asked the supreme court to open 83 investigations into politicians whom he suspects of taking part in a scheme to extract billions of dollars in bribes from construction firms, which in turn benefited from inflated public contracts. Eight ministers in the cabinet of President Michel Temer, the Speakers of both houses of congress and grandees from all the main parties are reportedly on the list. (All deny wrongdoing.) That adds to the dozens of officials already caught up in the Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) investigations into the scandal, which is centred on Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company.

Revelations of misdeeds by politicians have turned Brazilians’ attention to the question of how to elect better ones. Today’s system encourages political diversity at the expense of quality. Any new party that secures 486,000 signatures (from a pool of 143m voters) has a right to money from the state and to free television time. There is no nationwide vote...Continue reading

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The president’s executive orders won’t do much for coalminers

Unaccompanied miner

“YOU’RE going back to work,” Donald Trump told miners on March 28th. Gathered in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they saw him sign an executive order to review and revise Barack Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan. Among other measures, the order also requests the reversal of a moratorium on coal-leasing on federal lands and dispenses with rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas sites. It rolls back internal rules for government agencies on how to tot up the social costs of environmental damage, too.

The Clean Power Plan was unveiled in August 2015. It directed states to work out how to cut emissions from power plants to avoid pollution equivalent to the exhausts from 80m cars by 2030. The policy was meant to get America almost halfway to meeting its pledge to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2025, as measured against 2005 levels, for the Paris agreement (which seeks to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures). But legal challenges from 27 states and several companies saw the Clean Power Plan put on hold by the Supreme Court a little over a year...Continue reading

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Trump and Russia, the never-ending story

Nice whitewash

CHARGES of collusion over an inquiry into collusion, probes and counterprobes: the swirl of hearings and allegations stemming from Russian meddling in the presidential election is becoming wearyingly hard to follow—which, for some, may be the point. This week, after a bizarre episode in which Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, met a source on the White House grounds, then rushed to brief Donald Trump about his supposedly explosive findings, senior Democrats, and even the odd Republican, called for him to recuse himself from his committee’s investigation. (He refused.) The stunts and partisan rows make it seem worryingly unlikely that what are, in effect, whispers of treason can be either substantiated or dispelled.

Be clear what the real allegation is, and what it is not. It is not that Vladimir Putin stole the election. No sane observer thinks the Kremlin persuaded 63m Americans to vote for Mr Trump. Even the milder version of that claim—that Russia’s propaganda and its hacking of Democratic e-mails tipped the result in tight swing states—cannot be either confirmed or refuted. That unverifiability may...Continue reading

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Colleges with rich students see more protests against speakers

YALE UNIVERSITY is perhaps the epicentre of the campus activism so voguish today. Two professors stepped down from pastoral roles last year after a controversy about whether students should police their own offensive Halloween costumes, rather than letting the university do it for them, provoking protests from hundreds of students. Yale is currently debating whether to discontinue using the word “freshman” in favour of the more gender-neutral term “first-year”.

That Yale is also one of America’s most prestigious universities is not coincidental. Across the country, colleges with richer, high-achieving students are likelier to see protests calling for controversial speakers to be disinvited (see chart). Recent flare-ups at Middlebury College, which tried to prevent Charles Murray, a conservative writer, from speaking and left the professor interviewing him with a concussion, and at the University of California, Berkeley which had to cancel a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, an over-exposed provocateur, are but the tip of a larger pile.

Following the work of Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias of the Brookings Institution, The...Continue reading

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How bad is this farm slump?

THE farm crisis in the 1980s left a deep mark on the Midwest. It was the worst downturn in farming since the Depression. After an unprecedented boom in demand for wheat ended, thousands of farmers faced ruin. Agricultural banks and makers of farming equipment were washed away by a wave of bankruptcies. Midwestern farmers look at parallels with the 1980s whenever their cyclical industry is heading downwards. Prices for corn, wheat and other agricultural commodities started to fall after their peak in 2013, since when the comparison has been raised again.

Exports of wheat and soyabeans nearly tripled in the 1970s, thanks to the weakness of the dollar after America abandoned the gold standard in 1971, and the Russian wheat deal in 1972, when America sold the Soviet Union about 440m bushels of wheat for around $700m. Until then the Soviets had imported hardly any American foodstuffs. The sudden bonanza was such that farmers bought more and more land, with more and more debt. This went well until interest rates jumped up, the dollar strengthened and exports to the USSR were halted after the invasion of Afghanistan. Farmers’ biggest asset, land, dropped in value, which in turn...Continue reading

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Reforming taxes will not be easier than abolishing Obamacare

TO BRING House Republicans good luck in passing their replacement for the Affordable Care Act, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas wore a brown suit to the chamber, in honour of Ronald Reagan. After the vote was pulled from the House floor, Republicans in Washington moved on to the next big thing, which is tax reform. They may be about to prove again that dressing like the Gipper is easier than governing like him. Though there has long been some bipartisan agreement that both corporate and individual income-tax rates could be cut and loopholes eliminated, Congress has not pulled off a tax reform of the type now being contemplated since 1986. And that one almost failed.

Compared with other rich countries, the most striking thing about tax in America is its complexity. Since that 1986 tax reform the number of carve-outs in the tax code has multiplied, part of a bigger change in the way Congress does business. Where once the passage of bills was smoothed by including federal money for pet projects in congressmen’s districts, tax breaks are now the preferred lubricant. The growth of the federal tax code, which has tripled in length in the past 30 years, is often cited as proof...Continue reading

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Will robots displace humans as motorised vehicles replaced horses?

IN THE early 20th century the future seemed bright for horse employment. Within 50 years cars and tractors made short work of equine livelihoods. Some futurists see a cautionary tale for humanity in the fate of the horse: it was economically indispensable until it wasn’t. The common retort to such concerns is that humans are far more cognitively adaptable than beasts of burden. Yet as robots grow more nimble, humans look increasingly vulnerable. A new working paper concludes that, between 1990 and 2007, each industrial robot added per thousand workers reduced employment in America by nearly six workers. Humanity may not be sent out to pasture, but the parallel with horses is still uncomfortably close.

Robots are just one small part of the technological wave squeezing people. The International Federation of Robotics defines industrial robots as machines that are automatically controlled and re-programmable; single-purpose equipment does not count. The worldwide population of such creatures is below 2m; America has slightly fewer than two robots per 1,000 workers (Europe has a bit more than two). But their numbers are growing, as is the range of tasks they can tackle, so...Continue reading

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The Depressing Logic Supporting Standard Chartered's Shares

Profitability remains under pressure, though, like HSBC, bank could pay dividends despite limited growth

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Samsung Needs a New Structure Alongside Its New Phone

Samsung Electronics is hoping to move on with the unveiling of its latest model, the Galaxy S8, but the world’s leading smartphone maker could gain lasting benefits from an uncluttering.

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Donald Trump redrew the map to win office. He’s now lost

IF DONALD TRUMP were a European politician, the structural flaws that threaten his presidency would be easy to see. If President Trump were sua Eccellenza, his great challenge would be the mismatch between the electoral coalition that (narrowly) carried him to victory and the collection of parties that he needs in order to pass laws. It is not hard to imagine the factions that might elect a Signor Trump in a country with dozens, rather than two, major political parties. On the right, his most ardent voters might come from a Law and Order Party, a Small Business Party, and a Christian Nationalist Party (with notably fierce views on Muslim immigration). Redrawing the electoral map, he might also attract votes from left-leaning parties hostile to globalisation and happy with hefty doses of state intervention: a Pensioner’s Union, perhaps, and an Agrarian and Industrial League.

Alas for il Presidente Trump, in this thought-experiment an overlapping but subtly different coalition won the most recent congressional elections: a “Republican” majority dominated by a pro-business Conservative Party, a National Party (led by defence hawks), a Christian Values Party and a...Continue reading

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Smartphones: The High Price of a Screen Grab

Upsizing screens has worked for Samsung and Apple before, but the cost of staying competitive keeps going up.

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Investors Don't Have Too Much of a Good Thing

There are plenty of warning signs in today’s market, but earnings growth isn’t one of them.

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RH's Hard-to-Believe Restoration

Shares of the home-furnishings company formerly named Restoration Hardware surged after its earnings report, but evidence of a turnaround is still in short supply.

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New and Improved Drug Prices May Lower Political Side Effects

New high-price drugs look reasonably priced compared with peers.

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Time for Lululemon to Get Off the Mat

Lululemon’s historically rich valuation finally looks compelling enough ahead of Wednesday’s earnings results.

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Who kidnapped the son of Slovakia’s president?

IN AUGUST 1995 Michal Kovac Jr, whose father was president of newly independent Slovakia, was stopped in his car by armed men who handcuffed him, forced him to drink two bottles of whisky and began driving him to an unknown destination. When he tried to jump out of the car, they beat him and shocked him with a stun gun. The 34-year-old Mr Kovac woke up in Austria, where police arrested him in connection with a German financial probe. They said they had been tipped off to his whereabouts by a Slovak informant. An Austrian court soon released him because of the illegal manner of his detainment. He was never charged.

Slovak police and justice officials investigating the kidnapping were frustrated when a key witness went into hiding and his police contact was killed with a car-bomb. Still, they managed to prepare an indictment, which was later leaked. It pinned the crime on private thugs hired by the Slovak secret services (SIS), whose head, Ivan Lexa, was the right-hand man of Vladimir Meciar, the prime minister at the time (pictured). The senior Mr Kovac was a political opponent of Mr Meciar’s. But before charges could be brought, Mr Meciar passed an amnesty law that buried...Continue reading

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Portugal cuts its fiscal deficit while raising pensions and wages

NO ONE would have called António Costa, Portugal’s Socialist prime minister, a fiscal hawk when he took office in November 2015. After finishing second to the centre-right Social Democrats in an inconclusive general election, he cobbled together a coalition with the far left, promising to “turn the page on austerity”. Conservatives dubbed his pact with radicals and communists the geringonça, a term for an improbable contraption. He pledged both to reverse the austerity measures attached to Portugal’s bail-out during the euro crisis and to meet stiff fiscal targets. Many called it voodoo economics.

Yet Mr Costa has kept his word. In 2016, according to official figures released on March 24th, his minority government cut the budget deficit by more than half to just under 2.1% of GDP (see chart), the lowest since Portugal’s transition to democracy in 1974. His administration restored state pensions, public-sector wages and working hours to...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court bolsters rule against executing prisoners with low IQs

ANTONIN SCALIA warned fifteen years ago that prohibiting the execution of intellectually disabled criminals as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment would turn “capital trial[s] into a game” where defendants would “feign” mental retardation in order to escape the ultimate punishment. The prediction has not been borne out. Instead, Atkins v Virginia, the 2002 ruling from which Mr Scalia dissented, has been gamed by states determined to execute low-IQ individuals. In 2014, in Hall v Florida, the Sunshine state was scolded by the Supreme Court for inappropriately interpreting IQ tests. Now another recalcitrant state has now been chastened by a 5-3 vote. In Moore v Texas, announced on March 28th, the justices have told the Lone Star state that its resistance to medical science has no place in death-penalty jurisprudence.

The case centres on Bobby James Moore, then 20, who was sentenced to die in 1980 after fatally shooting a grocery store clerk during a botched burglary in Houston. The crime was a violent capstone to a tragic childhood. Mr Moore repeated...Continue reading

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Podcast: Luxury for the masses?

The Chinese middle class led a boom in demand for luxury goods. But a government crackdown made consumers wary about showing off their wealth. How has China’s new modesty affected the luxury business as a whole? Also: India’s power sector has until now been dependent on using dirty coal but things are changing. And sand has become a scarce resource, leading to a burgeoning trade in illegal mining. Simon Long hosts.

Investors Face Brexit Quiet Before the Negotiating Storm

The U.K. has been in a curious position: in the EU but with a much weaker currency that reflects the market’s judgment of its prospects outside the single market. Now the clock is ticking on Brexit.

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Trump's Free Hand on Bank Deregulation

The Trump administration has the power to enact substantial bank deregulation on its own without legislation.

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Tencent Hits a Speed Bump With Tesla

The Chinese tech giant’s $1.8 billion stake in the U.S. electric-vehicle company looks wasteful.

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Donald Trump launches an attack on climate-change policy

DONALD TRUMP continues his assault on environmentalism. On March 28th he signed an executive order instructing America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw and replace Barack Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan. Among other measures, the "Energy Independence" order requests the reversal of a moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands and dispenses with rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas sites. Courtrooms and lawyers surely await.

The Clean Power Plan was unveiled in August 2015. It directed states to work out how to cut emissions from power plants to avoid 870m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 (as measured against levels of emissions from 2005). The policy was supposed to have the equivalent effect of taking 80m cars off the road. It was also meant to underpin international climate pledges made by America. But legal challenges from 27 states saw the Clean Power Plan put on hold by the Supreme Court a little over a year ago.

Because it has never been implemented, the Clean Power Plan’s demise hurts less than green groups suggest. Mr Trump’s action could prove largely symbolic. Around 30 states already require power companies and...Continue reading

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Snap Investors Don't Like Facebook's Latest Move

Facebook’s ability to encroach on Snap’s turf raises questions about the depth of Snap’s competitive moat.

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Tencent Makes It Harder to Bet Against Tesla

Tencent’s purchase of a 5% stake in Tesla makes skeptics’ case against the electric-car pioneer tougher.

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Justices ask whether religious hospitals must guarantee workers’ pensions

ONE in six American hospitals is affiliated to the Catholic church; many more are sponsored by Lutheran, Methodist, Jewish and other religious organisations. The combination of faith and medicine sometimes leads to struggles over access to women’s reproductive care. Advocate Health Care Network (AHCN) v Stapleton, a case the Supreme Court heard on March 27th, shows that the synthesis may pose another problem: shaky retirement security for millions of employees.

Pensions are not what they used to be. In the 1970s, more than half of American workers could expect to collect monthly cheques upon retirement. Today, defined-benefit pensions are mainly the preserve of public-sector workers; most companies instead offer defined-contribution plans where the employer and employee set aside funds to incubate a retirement nest egg, with no promise of the income it will generate. But both types of private-sector plan are offered some protection by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a 1974 law. It sets standards for vesting, requires employers to invest sufficiently to cover future pension liabilities and, through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, offers insurance for retirement...Continue reading

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If Stocks Wobble, Will Bonds Be There To Absorb the Blow?

Bonds normally provide a countervailing cushion when stocks fall. But a big bond rally faces challenges of its own.

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Chinese Bidder for AC Milan Gets Capital Controls Assist

Getting in early on a surge in foreign-currency financed Chinese acquisitions such as soccer club AC Milan might be a smart move for hedge fund Elliott Management.

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SoftBank's Vision Fund Will Keep Tech Unicorns Happy

SoftBank’s $6 billion investment in Didi Chuxing would have been enough to buy all of the Chinese ride hailing app two years ago, around the time Softbank made its earlier investment into the company.

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China's Booming Car Market Fueled by Credit

Auto-financing penetration numbers aren’t startling compared to the developed world. The pace of growth however, is.

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Carnival Shareholders Are Having Fun Now, Too

Carnival shares are at records, having fully recovered from last year’s Zika-related concerns, and appear to have more upside if bookings hold up and international growth remains strong.

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The Brexit arguments work for Scotland too

THERE is an old chess short story about the grand master who ends up in a remote village. Short of money, he agrees to pay two locals; his meal will be free if he wins both matches. But there is a catch; in one game, he must play as white, in the other as black. As soon as the matches start, he realises his mistake when the man playing white in the second game simply copies the grand master's moves as white in the first.  No matter what the master does, he cannot win both games; if he wins in the first, he must lose in the second.

The three-way negotiations between Britain, the European Union and Scotland could yet work out the same way. Every argument used by Theresa May against the EU can be used against her by Nicola Sturgeon.

Taking back control. The Leave campaign clearly resonated with voters when it talked about the need for Britain to take back control of its laws from a remote Brussels bureaucracy. But the argument applies just as well in Scotland where the Conservatives last won most seats in 1955; in the 2010 and 2015 elections, the Tories got one seat but the Scots still ended up with a Conservative prime minister. It will probably happen in 2020 as well....Continue reading

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Texans worry about trade with Mexico under Donald Trump

TIME is precious in the Texas legislature, which meets for just 140 days every other year. Since January 10th, when the 85th regular session began, nearly 8,000 bills and resolutions have been filed. Many of them will quietly die of neglect. And yet earlier this month, the Texas House’s International Trade and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee announced that it would take the time to reflect, learn and grow. “We are not gonna hear a lot of bills in this committee,” said Rafael Anchia, a Democratic representative who serves as the committee’s chair, calling the hearing to order. “We are gonna learn and we are gonna raise consciousness in this in this body about international trade and how important it is to Texas.” As an example, he cited Texas’s ties to its trading partner and neighbour, Mexico.  

Over the next few hours a clear consensus emerged. Carlos González Gutiérrez, the Consul General of Mexico in Austin, said that no other state in America had benefited from the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as Texas had.  “What you sell to my country is worth 6% of your state GDP, compared to 1.3% nationally,” he said. No one disagreed. “Geography’s not going...Continue reading

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Time to Redo the Math on Tax Reform Prospects

Any investors who think the failure of health-care reform was somehow a positive because it cleared the way for tax reform may be about to be rapidly disabused of that notion.

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U.K. Banks Need to Show They Can Withstand a Pound Crisis

U.K. stress tests this year will measure how banks will weather a pound crisis and sharply higher interest rates. That should give a clear view of the risks in U.K. lenders’ recent rush into unsecured consumer lending, which has kept the U.K. economy humming since the Brexit vote.

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Anti-corruption demonstrations sweep across Russia

VLADIMIR PUTIN won his first presidential election on March 26th 2000. Exactly 17 years later, tens of thousands of Russians across the country came out to protest the corruption that has come to define his tenure. The demonstrations, the most significant challenge to Mr Putin’s regime since 2012, began on Russia’s Pacific coast, where hundreds marched through Vladivostok. Throughout the day reports of rallies, most of them unsanctioned, flowed in from dozens of cities, including metropolises like Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, industrial centres like Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil, and even Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, a North Caucasian region where Mr Putin regularly receives more than 90% of the vote. The largest crowds emerged in Moscow and in St Petersburg, where they spilled onto Palace Square—an echo of the 1917 Russian revolution that is unlikely to be lost on the Kremlin.

The Sunday marches came in response to a call from Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner. Mr Navalny recently released a film alleging that Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, has used charities and shell companies to amass a collection of mansions, yachts...Continue reading

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Bulgaria’s election is unlikely to do much to clean up corruption

AS OF a few months ago, it was possible to hope that Bulgaria’s parliamentary election on March 26th might be fought over the crucial issue of corruption. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, of the centre-right GERB (“coat of arms”) party, called the elections in November after his party’s candidate lost the presidential race to Rumen Radev, a former air-force general backed by the rival Socialists. Mr Borisov, who became prime minister in 2014 after a banking crisis and a wave of anti-corruption protests, had turned the presidential vote into a referendum on his leadership. Voters, disappointed by slow anti-corruption efforts as well as controversial reforms in education and health care, gave him a thumbs-down.

The polls are showing a tight race, with GERB and the Socialists each getting about 30% support. “None of the big parties has a clear lead,” says Daniel Smilov of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think-tank. Meanwhile, a new anti-corruption party, Yes Bulgaria, hopes to capitalise on anger against self-dealing elites. The party models itself on the Save Romania Union, which won 9% of the vote in Romania’s elections in December. But Yes Bulgaria’s...Continue reading

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Spoiled-Milk Lending Flows to a Chinese Insurance Giant

Bank owned by big insurer Ping An is exposed to the plunge in China Huishan Dairy’s shares.

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Walking Back 'Forward Guidance' Could Leave Investors Lost

Forward guidance was a useful tool to reassure markets that rates would stay low for a long time. But now policy is tightening, the potential for market confusion has risen.

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Why the 'Trump Slump' Still Stings for Mom-and-Pop Investors

In a market that has churned higher since the election without much getting in the way, investors shouldn’t be fazed by the first sign of volatility. The problem is, they usually are.

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China Tanked Oil Once, It Can Do It Again

In late 2013, oil was range trading, U.S. drillers were ramping up and China was entering a tightening cycle—much like today. Six months later, the oil market collapsed.

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Hong Kong names a new leader

THERE was no doubt who would win the election in Hong Kong for the post of chief executive, as the territory’s leader is known. The choice was made on March 26th at Hong Kong’s harbour-front convention centre by nearly 1,200 members of a committee stacked with supporters of the Communist Party in Beijing. Carrie Lam, the party’s favourite, won 67% of their votes. As the outcome became clear, Mrs Lam’s supporters in the public gallery cheered and waved Chinese flags. Much more in doubt was whether Mrs Lam could command the support of the public. After she was declared the winner, protesters in front of the stage held up yellow umbrellas—a symbol of those who demand that the chief executive be chosen by the public. Mrs Lam will take over a bitterly divided society. 

Pro-democracy members of the election committee (about a quarter of the total) mostly backed a rival candidate, John Tsang. Until last year Mr Tsang had served as Hong Kong’s financial secretary, one of the territory's most senior positions after the chief executive and that recently...Continue reading

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Oil Exporters Nearly Back to Square One on Deal

OPEC and its oil exporting ally Russia could feel pressure to extend or deepen output cuts now that most of the post-November gains have faded.

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Obamacare Lives But the Health-Care Bull Is Mortal

The demise of the American Health Care act should please investors for now. However, the risks of changing health policy have shifted rather than evaporated.

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Why PTC's Revenue Still Raises Eyebrows

Software maker PTC has said its shift to a subscription model is attracting new customers, but its numbers look different from others that have undergone similar transitions.

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Republicans pull their health-care bill

“WE are going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.” With those words the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, admitted that Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump—proud author of “The Art of the Deal”—have failed their first big test as a governing party.

For seven years Republicans have run against Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), calling it socialism, a government power-grab and accusing the law of instituting “death panels” that could deny older Americans care by bureaucratic fiat. When Barack Obama was still in the White House and wielded the veto pen of a president, House Republicans voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA, knowing that these were empty show votes.

On taking power in January Republicans announced that their first priority was a law repealing as much of the ACA as possible, using fast-track rules that apply to certain sorts of budget bills, with some replacement elements to follow in two further stages. The repeal bill was rushed through committees and readied for a vote, though it was far from clear that it had the numbers to pass. In a signature move from Mr Trump’s business...Continue reading

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Nintendo Switch May Not Flip GameStop's Prospects

GameStop hopes new consoles will attract more people to its stores, but the retailer must grapple with an increasing shift to digital downloads and gamers buying fewer titles.

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Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s ex-president, is set free

SIX years after the Arab spring, during which Egyptians toppled Hosni Mubarak, their president for nearly three decades, the country’s political regression can be summed up by its roster of prisoners. It includes Muhammad Morsi, who became Egypt’s first democratically elected president in 2012, and many of his fellow Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood, who dominated the post-revolution parliament. After Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, then a general, now president, ousted Mr Morsi in 2013, the authorities also began locking up liberal activists—many of them the very people who had helped push Mr Mubarak out.

Notably absent from the list are any of Mr Mubarak’s former allies and, as of March 24th, Mr Mubarak himself. Egypt’s former strongman was released from state custody after three years confined to a military hospital in Cairo, in a room with a view of the Nile. Though he still faces an investigation into alleged corruption involving gifts from a state-owned newspaper, his release all but ends the protracted, and largely unsuccessful, effort to hold him accountable for the many misdeeds committed during his rule and its chaotic ending. He is now back in his mansion in...Continue reading

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The noose is tightening in Syria

THE last caliph to make the Syrian city of Raqqa his capital was a lover of fine wine, art and women. Although certainly brutal (he had his most loyal adviser cut into three pieces in 803), Harun al-Rashid is best remembered for his lasciviousness, which inspired some of the raunchiest tales in “The Arabian Nights”.

By contrast, Raqqa’s current overlord—the self-declared caliph of a self-declared caliphate—will be remembered for unleashing a spasm of grotesque violence that erupted in Iraq and spread as far as the shores of Libya and the mountains of Afghanistan. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will have also presided over one of the shortest-lived “caliphates” in history.

The fall of the capital of Islamic State (IS), which the extremists captured in January 2014, looks imminent. Since November, a combined force of Kurdish and Arab fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has swept through the desert from the north, sealing the city from the north, east and west. Backed by air strikes from the American-led coalition against IS and supported by American special forces on the ground, the SDF’s closest front line is now just a few...Continue reading

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Kenya tries to ban plastic bags—again

LITTERING in graveyards is generally frowned upon. But at the edge of Kangemi, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, a patch of land that used to be a final resting place for humans now serves as a rubbish dump. A few mangy goats roam around, picking out scraps of food. Men, too, scrabble around. “This is where we find our daily bread,” says George Kimani, who collects aluminium cans and plastic bottles and sells them to recyclers. But one thing is not of use, he says: plastic bags. Left behind by goats and men alike, they form a carpet of green, blue and white on the ochre earth.

Since their invention in the 1960s, disposable plastic bags have made lives easier for lazy shoppers the world over. But once used, they become a blight. This is particularly true in poor countries without good systems for disposing of them. They are not only unsightly. Filled with rainwater, they are a boon for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Dumped in the ocean, they kill fish. They may take hundreds of years to degrade. On March 15th Kenya announced that it will become the second country in Africa to ban them. It follows Rwanda, a country with a dictatorial obsession with cleanliness, which outlawed...Continue reading

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