Heineken vs. Bud: Investors Should Choose Wisely

The world’s two largest brewers, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken, both sold more beer than expected in the second quarter, helped by warm weather in Europe as well as a late Easter but investors were much more excited about AB InBev’s results.

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Ukrainian immigrants are powering Poland’s economy

POLAND’S most literal labour market begins shortly after dawn. About 30 women and a similar number of men wait in separate groups beside a road half an hour’s drive south of Warsaw. The eager crane their necks to search for cars, the more resigned pace and smoke. When a Volvo pulls up they dash towards it, awaiting offers of work. The youngest is 20, the oldest a gap-toothed 53-year-old. All are Ukrainian.

The number of Ukrainians in Poland has soared since fighting began in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Around 1m are estimated to be working in Poland at any time. Most did not flee the war but its economic consequences: a recession that lasted two years, unemployment and a plunging currency.

They can earn five times more than at home, picking tomatoes, mixing cement or driving for Uber, the ride-sharing firm. Companies can register them to work for six months at a time, but some, like those at the roadside, work illegally. Ivan, 28, glugs an energy drink as he waits...Continue reading

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HSBC Is a Cash Machine With Plenty Left to Give

HSBC promised a new slug of buybacks, and there could be more where that comes from.

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Chinese Banks' Dash for Capital Gets Under Way

Ping An Bank said last week that it plans to issue $3.9 billion of convertible bonds, and it is unlikely to be the last bank seeking fresh capital.

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China's Industrial Dragon Burning Less Hot

After months of strength, China’s manufacturing purchasing managers index showed signs of faltering momentum in July.

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These Booming Chip Makers Have a Long Memory

A handful of key earnings reports last week suggest the peak in memory prices isn’t yet at hand.

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Asset Managers: Spending Money to Make Money

Prominent asset managers fell back to earth last week as the fundamental challenges they face resurfaced.

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Pakistan’s prime minister is pushed out by the Supreme Court

DISQUALIFIED yesterday by Pakistan’s Supreme Court on grounds of dishonesty, it would seem there is no way back for Nawaz Sharif (pictured, right), the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s 70-year-history. Only devoted loyalists now share the belief of his daughter, Maryam, that Mr Sharif will soon “return with greater force”, something he managed after two previous ousters, in 1993 and 1999. 

Mr Sharif’s disqualification will certainly last beyond the next scheduled elections, due mid-next year, and could yet be interpreted as being permanent. All five Supreme Court justices agreed that his failure to declare the $3,000 monthly salary he earned—but left untouched in a foreign bank account—from an offshore company, Capital FZE, broke the law. Though a technicality, it was enough for the judges to send him packing. The court also passed on meatier allegations of money-laundering to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption...Continue reading

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Shinzo Abe’s ratings are tumbling amid allegations of wrongdoing

AFTER winning election for Japan’s premiership four times in a row, Shinzo Abe has a reputation for arrogance. Before parliament broke up in June for the summer he jeered his opponents and called their questions “stupid”. At one point he told ministers to read newspaper articles on his policies instead of bothering him for an explanation. A noticeably humbler Mr Abe was grilled this week in both houses of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, over allegations—which he denies—that he abused his office to grant a favour to a chum. Amid the furore, his popularity has plummeted.

His troubles were evident earlier this month when his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered its worst result ever in an election for Tokyo’s regional assembly. On July 24th a poll by the Mainichi, a liberal newspaper, put support for Mr Abe at 26%, the lowest since his stunning return to power in 2012 after years in the political wilderness, and ten percentage points lower...Continue reading

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India’s once-shoddy transport infrastructure is getting much better

JUST after 1pm on July 31st 2012 lights blinked out across northern India. It was the world’s biggest-ever blackout, affecting more than 600m people. It was also a swingeing blow to a transport system that had struggled to cope at the best of times. Hundreds of trains came to a halt in open country and in the tunnels of Delhi’s underground railway. Some passengers had to wait for hours in shirt-drenching heat.

Five years on, India’s famously creaky transport infrastructure is starting to look strong. The power on which parts of it depend has also become far more reliable. The embarrassing system-wide collapses of 2012, and an earlier one in 2001, are now scarcely conceivable. A rush to expand the electricity supply has been so successful that analysts now warn of a looming excess of generating capacity.

On paper, India has long claimed some of the world’s most extensive road and rail networks. That belied reality: roads were twisting, bumpy, crowded and dangerous....Continue reading

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In the Philippines, Duterte breaks his vow to reform labour laws

No end to their complaints

AS A presidential candidate, Rodrigo Duterte had strong views about “contractualisation” and “endo”—big firms’ habit of hiring employees indirectly, via temping agencies, often on renewable five-month contracts. He agreed with labour activists that corporate giants use these practices to avoid providing health care and other benefits, and said they should be banned. Indeed, he promised to lean on Congress to ban contractualisation in the first week of his presidency. “Pay the benefits,” he growled on the campaign trail. “Don’t wait for me to catch you because I will be unforgiving. You will not only lose your money, you will lose your pants.”

Over a year into Mr Duterte’s term, employers remain clothed. In March Silvestre Bello, Mr Duterte’s labour secretary, signed an order that sets stricter guidelines about when firms can hire temporary workers through employment agencies. But banning third-party hiring...Continue reading

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How wigs tell the story of modern South Korea

“SELL your hair,” clamoured sweet-sellers in Seoul in the 1950s. The capital of South Korea had been pulverised by a three-year war with North Korea. Southern women were cutting off and selling their tresses, typically worn in a long plait or a low bun, for dollars, rice and rubber shoes.

The hawkers sold the jet-black locks to wigmakers in Guro, a district of south-western Seoul that was home to the first industrial complex built in South Korea after the war for the export market. (A year into the fighting, half of the country’s factories were in ruins.) In the 1960s thousands of female labourers soaked, stitched and styled the hair of their destitute countrywomen in Guro’s factories.

The wig industry in South Korea has proved remarkably resilient. Today it is South Korean women who are its fastest-growing source of demand. They snap them up for $1,000 apiece from Hi-Mo, a maker of custom wigs that began business in 1987 as an exporter and now dominates the domestic...Continue reading

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Tesla's Big Reveal Shows a Rough Road Ahead

Tesla’s new Model 3 will struggle to live up to Elon Musk’s mass-market hype.

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Donald Trump sacks Reince Priebus as chief of staff

UNDER the best of circumstances—when America has a president who is disciplined, willing to hear harsh but necessary truths and loyal to those he trusts—the post of White House chief of staff is “perhaps the second most powerful job in Washington”, according to James Baker, a political giant who held that post for two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Even under ideal conditions it is also the “toughest job in government”, Mr Baker has told interviewers, explaining why most hold it for less than two years (Dick Cheney, a chief of staff to Gerald Ford, is said to blame the job’s stresses for his first heart attack, aged 37).

Reince Priebus, the hapless establishment Republican ousted as chief of staff to President Donald Trump on July 28th, lasted a smidgeon over six months. After weeks of increasingly public humiliations and amidst near-chaos at the White House, Mr Priebus is being replaced by John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general lauded by Mr Trump for doing an “incredible” job as secretary of...Continue reading

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Where There's Smoke There's Fire for Tobacco Stocks

Curbs on nicotine could be disastrous for tobacco stocks such as Altria, and the dip after the news doesn’t make the stocks cheap enough to represent a buying opportunity.

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More of the Same Ain't So Bad for Economy

GDP growth brings the average for the first half to 1.9% which, while far from exciting, is par for the course and leaves the economy far from recession.

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Ukraine strips one of its president’s rivals of his citizenship

 

THEY were just students when they first met. Petro Poroshenko and Mikheil Saakashvili were two ambitious undergraduates at Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko University in the late 1980s. Mr Saakashvili went on to become president of Georgia in 2004, where he pursued an aggressive agenda of reforms before his party lost power in 2012. Mr Poroshenko became the wealthy owner of a huge confectionery company, and won Ukraine’s presidency following the Maidan revolution in 2014. For help turning his country around, he turned to his old schoolmate, inviting Mr Saakashvili in May 2015 to head the vital region of Odessa. Mr Poroshenko granted him Ukrainian citizenship and declared him “a great friend of Ukraine”.

It took little more than a year for the old friends to become bitter foes. In November 2016 Mr Saakashvili resigned and went into opposition. On July 26th the authorities announced that Mr Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship had been annulled. Since Georgia’s...Continue reading

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The Trump administration still has the power to wreak havoc on Obamacare

REPUBLICANS’ latest efforts to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s health care law, failed in the Senate on the night of July 27th. Three of their Senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowksi  of Alaska and John McCain of Arizona—joined all 48 Democrats to vote down “skinny” repeal (see article).  The amendment was the last option available after the Senate earlier rejected both the fuller bill crafted by Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader, also the total defunding of Obamacare sought by those on the right of the party. With all three options voted down, the legislative effort to repeal Obamacare looks over for now.

Democrats rejoiced at the news. But is Republicans’ cause dead? Yesterday, they announced that they would seek tax reform, their next priority, through “regular order”, under which bills require 60 votes to avoid a filibuster in the Senate...Continue reading

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Europe's Investment Banks Suffer American Envy

Across the board, most European banks’ revenues are falling further behind.

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The Great Transatlantic Bond Divergence Unwind

For more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. and German bonds were like soldiers marching in step. That changed a few years ago, but signs are for this important trade to reassert itself.

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Republicans claim to have made progress towards tax reform

THE thing about Donald Trump’s tax plans, writes Alan Cole, of the Tax Foundation, a think-tank, is that they get “progressively less detailed” over time. Almost two years ago Mr Trump released a fanciful but relatively detailed plan for lower tax rates (see blog). After he won the Republican nomination, this went through several more iterations, but confusion over some of the details crept in. Once in office, Mr Trump’s administration produced a list of “principles” that would underpin tax reform, such as a promise to reduce the number of income tax bands. Today Steve Mnuchin, Mr Trump’s treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, his economics adviser, and Republican leaders from both houses of Congress released a still shorter set of principles on which they all profess to agree. Despite the apparent regression, they have promised to start the ball rolling on reform in the autumn.

The statement is most notable for what it rules out. Republicans...Continue reading

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Twitter Results Disappoint Again

Twitter has found a way to moderate its revenue declines, but it told investors not to get too excited about it.

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A veto gives the rule of law in Poland a reprieve

FROM the mountain resort of Zakopane in the south to the Hel peninsula in the north, tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets last week in protest against proposed reforms that would have sacked all of the members of the Supreme Court and politicised the legal system. In Warsaw thousands marched night after night, holding candles and chanting “konstytucja!” (constitution). Even in the eastern city of Lublin, where the inhabitants tend to support the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government, the rallies drew hundreds of people. By one count, there were protests in over 220 cities.

They appear to have worked. On July 24th Andrzej Duda, the president and a trained lawyer, vetoed two of the three most controversial laws, saying they “would not strengthen the sense of justice”. But the threat to the rule of law in Poland is far from over. The proposed laws were only one part of a larger plan developed by PiS and its increasingly authoritarian chairman,...Continue reading

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Moderate unions may help Emmanuel Macron pass labour reforms

FRENCH reformists have promised for decades to streamline the country’s 3,000-page labour code, only to be stymied by the country’s mighty trade unions. Emmanuel Macron has vowed to break the jinx, and is likely to face the same sort of resistance. The conventional wisdom holds that the showdown will come in September, once the government publishes details of its plans. These include limiting the ability of courts to order lavish compensation for sacked workers, simplifying worker councils inside firms and making it possible to negotiate more issues at the company level rather than in national sector-wide agreements. Parliament’s lower house voted on July 13th to let the government pass the reforms by ordinance, without much further debate.

That will let Mr Macron deliver faster on his promise to free up the jobs market. But his leftist opponents call the process undemocratic. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left leader whose bloc has 17 MPs, calls it a “social coup...Continue reading

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Turkey’s latest trial of journalists is surreal even by its own standards

On trial for telling the truth

THRONGS of relatives and lawyers pushed their way past a metal barrier manned by security guards, fighting for a spot in the crowded courtroom. The area where the accused sat was crowded, too. The 17 journalists whose trial began on July 24th were the core of the editorial staff of Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper and one of the few media outlets that has refused to play by the rules of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s autocratic president. In a case widely considered a perversion of justice even by Turkish standards, they face prison terms of up to 43 years for “assisting an armed terrorist organisation”.

For one of the accused, Ahmet Sik (pictured on poster), this is far from his first trial. Mr Sik has been a thorn in the side of the state for decades. In the 1990s he investigated disappearances in the Kurdish south-east, torture in prisons and killings of journalists (including that of a...Continue reading

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A summer reading list for Brussels’s bureaucrats

“HOW hard it is to escape from places,” Katherine Mansfield, an author from New Zealand, once wrote to a friend. She had a point, but long paid holidays and low-cost airlines do help. To judge by the tumbleweed blowing through the offices and halls of Brussels this week, the wallahs of the European Union have not found fleeing town too much of a wrench.

Recent summers have been marred by crises perfectly timed to ruin officials’ holiday plans. In despair at the turn Europe seemed to be taking, some turned to gloomy tomes by Joseph Roth or Stefan Zweig to explain the atavistic nationalism they feared was taking hold. This year’s vacationers leave town in brighter spirits. Relieved from concerns over the EU’s imminent collapse, many will indulge in chick lit or crime novels, to be devoured and discarded as swiftly as the latest Greek economic forecast. But for those looking to understand the current European moment, Charlemagne offers an alternative reading guide.

Two...Continue reading

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What can the EU do to punish Poland?

IN THE mid-1990s, as the European Union began expanding eastwards, its politicians faced a tricky question. To join the bloc, countries had to commit to democratic standards, human rights and the rule of law. The EU had a lot of leverage over aspiring members. But what if a country turned its back on those values once it got in?

Article 7 was the EU’s answer. A version of it first appeared in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999. Governments that violated the union’s fundamental values would be threatened with sanctions, including the suspension of voting rights. Austria had been one of the most vocal advocates for introducing Article 7. But in 2000, when Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party was included in a coalition government, it found itself threatened with the measure it had helped draft. The EU did not suspend Austria’s voting rights, but it did impose some (mostly symbolic) sanctions. They didn’t work, and Mr Haider remained popular.

After the Haider...Continue reading

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The Bull Market's Growth Problem

Under the hood of the stock market rally, signs the 8-year bull market may be nearing its end.

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Donald Trump’s ill-considered ban on transgender soldiers

TRANSGENDER people are no longer welcome in America’s military, Donald Trump announced abruptly on July 26th. The news seemed to catch everyone by surprise, including Pentagon officials, and was delivered via Mr Trump’s favourite medium, Twitter. “After consultation with my Generals and military experts”, Mr Trump wrote, apparently disingenuously, “please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military”. Why the personnel change, which affects soldiers as well as cooks, chaplains and cartographers? “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail”. He added, in a flourish of politesse, “Thank you”.

The American military employs more transgender people than any other organisation in the world: around 15,500, according to a 2014 study, more than 6,000 of whom are on active duty. So a...Continue reading

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Why the president wants to ban trans people from serving

FOR a man late to politics, President Donald Trump has a master’s feel for divisive “wedge issues”—as gay and transgender Americans are learning to their chagrin. In 2016 Mr Trump delighted gay Republicans by hailing “LGBTQ citizens” at his nominating convention. In part this reflected a Manhattanite’s relaxed worldview. It was also a bid to divide gays from his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, accused by Mr Trump of planning to open borders to homophobic followers of radical Islam.

This year, on July 26th, Mr Trump unexpectedly tweeted that after consulting “my Generals” he will ban transgender individuals from military service, reversing an Obama-era decision from 2016. Mr Trump cited the “tremendous medical costs and disruption” of allowing such troops to serve.

His intervention was timely. With public opinion growing ever more tolerant towards gay Americans, partisans on right and left are making the once-obscure field of transgender...Continue reading

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Jeff Sessions is in peril; so is America

PERHAPS the only reason to doubt Donald Trump is contemplating sacking his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, in order to protect himself and his associates from the counter-espionage investigation being run by Robert Mueller, is that the president has been so astonishingly upfront about it. On July 25th he tweeted that the attorney-general, one of his earliest and most influential supporters, was “VERY weak”. Asked whether he intended to sack him, he replied: “Time will tell.” Yet Mr Trump’s history of rule-breaking suggested he was indeed weighing a measure that would pitch his scandal-plagued presidency into its biggest crisis yet.

Mr Trump said he was angry with Mr Sessions because he had recused himself from an FBI investigation into Russia’s efforts to fix the election in Mr Trump’s favour, with possible assistance from members of the Trump campaign team. Mr Sessions announced that decision in March, after it was revealed that he had withheld details of meetings with a...Continue reading

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If America is overrun by low-skilled migrants...

NEAR the massive packing warehouse at the headquarters of Limoneira, one of America’s largest lemon producers, sits a row of small white clapboard houses with neat front lawns and American flags flapping over their doorways. The homes are rented to farm workers at 55% below the market rate in Santa Paula, California, a fertile farming area not far from the seaside homes of Malibu. From their front doors, workers can stroll to a bocce court, a credit union and a park where family reunions and birthdays are celebrated. These perks, along with competitive pay, used to be enough to keep Limoneira’s fields of lemons and avocados full of workers. Not any more, says Alex Teague, the company’s senior vice-president. Though labour has long been tight, “I have never seen it this bad,” Mr Teague sighs from a chair in his office whose walls are covered in company memorabilia, including Limoneira’s first cheque from 1893.

Across America, farms are experiencing...Continue reading

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Why everybody liked Norman Rockwell

WILL a truce ever be declared in America’s culture wars? One way to tackle that puzzle involves considering all-American icons of the past—figures who bridged social and political divides—and asking how they did it. That mission led Lexington to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the Norman Rockwell Museum. Modelled on a New England town hall, it is a handsome shrine to an artist whose work has hung in the Oval Offices of the past four presidents (though a Rockwell painting of the Statue of Liberty’s torch seems to have vanished from Donald Trump’s).

Rockwell lived from 1894 to 1978 and enjoyed popular acclaim for 60 of those years. He honed an image as an apolitical advocate of Yankee civic virtues, at one remove from the sordid business of party politics, even as he painted every major presidential candidate from Eisenhower to Nixon. His biographer, Laura Claridge, records his belief that the best way to reach a large audience was “to let people hope he voted their...Continue reading

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Naming New York’s neighbourhoods

HARLEM’S Apollo Theatre, where Ella Fitzgerald first sang, and the Hotel Theresa, which counted among its guests Josephine Baker, Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro, are landmarks. Malcolm X, who called Harlem “Seventh Heaven”, preached on the corner of 116th Street. Stretching further back, in the 1920s and 1930s the Harlem Renaissance gave rise to an outpouring of literature, art and music. Harlemites are proud of this history, and proportionately upset that estate agents are trying to rebrand the southern part and call it SoHa.

Such rebranding is nothing new: New York was once called Nieuw Amsterdam and before that Mannahatta. Pigtown, in central Brooklyn, is now called Wingate. Gas House District is now Stuyvesant Town. Yellow Hook became Bay Ridge after a yellow-fever outbreak. Bloomingdale became the Upper West Side. Neighbourhoods can be fluid, with vague borders. Some have disappeared. Shapes change: in Brooklyn, Park Slope keeps getting bigger and Flatbush keeps...Continue reading

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To pass health-care reform, Republicans may strip it down

It’s grim in New York

IT HAS become a fool’s errand to try to predict when the Republicans may give up trying to reform health care. On July 25th Vice-President Mike Pence broke a tie in the Senate to pass a motion to start debate on a health bill, only a week after it had looked dead (and not for the first time). To win the vote Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate, had to water down its significance, portraying it as merely a procedural step that had no bearing on what might subsequently pass. (“Everybody will get a vote on everything they want to vote on,” said Senator John Cornyn, Mr McConnell’s number two). Even then, the motion passed only because Senator John McCain, just out of surgery for brain cancer, rushed back to Washington to vote yes.

The result is a mad rush to rewrite the bill on the Senate floor. The starting point is the version passed by the House in May. After voting to start debate, nine Republicans rebelled to defeat an...Continue reading

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How the riots of 50 years ago changed Detroit

FIFTY years ago, Detroit lived through one of the worst riots in American history. So painful were the memories of the five days of killing, looting and arson that during previous anniversaries of the uprising, which started on July 23rd 1967 when police busted a “blind pig”, an unlicensed gambling and drinking joint, Detroiters largely avoided talking about it.

Many believe the riots marked the beginning of the city’s decline, culminating in its bankruptcy in 2013. This anniversary is different. Around 100 institutions, including the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Institute of Art, are reflecting on 1967 with books and booklets, exhibitions, documentary films, lectures and concerts. The effort has its own fancy logo and slogan (“Looking back to move forward”).

On July 25th Hollywood descended on Detroit for the red-carpet premiere of “Detroit”. The film dramatises one particularly violent incident during the riots, at the...Continue reading

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Congress does not trust the president

It’s out of my hands, Vlad

MEMBERS of Congress do not agree on much, but on July 25th, after a bipartisan deal, the House of Representatives voted by 419 votes to three for a bill that toughens sanctions on Russia. This is punishment both for Russia’s meddling in the election that brought President Donald Trump to power, and for its continuing aggression in Ukraine. (The bill also includes new sanctions against Iran and North Korea.) As The Economist went to press, the Senate was expected to follow suit: senators endorsed a similar bill 98-2 in June. The aim is to get the legislation passed before the summer recess and sent to the president for his signature.

The implications are momentous. Mr Trump had hoped to lift the existing package of sanctions on Russia at some point. Now he has been stripped of his presidential authority to do so. Since the vote was almost unanimous, he may have no option but to accept it with as much good...Continue reading

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Foreign investors snap up London's iconic buildings

Tech stocks have regained their dotcom-era highs

CAST your mind back to when Bill Clinton was president, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin were fresh-faced new leaders and tweeting was strictly for the birds. That was when technology stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 tech index, last traded at their current levels.

The horrendous decline in share prices that followed the peak in 2000 was the first financial calamity of this millennium. The dotcom crash had much less impact on the broader economy than the mortgage and banking crisis of 2007-08. Nevertheless, the tech revival has caused some twitchiness among investors. Might history be repeating itself?

In the intervening years the world, and the tech industry, have changed a lot. In the late 1990s enthusiasm for tech shares was so great that the sector’s market value rose far faster than its earnings. The gap is nothing like as great today (see chart). Back then, leading firms like Microsoft and Oracle were valued at more than 20 times their annual revenues, let alone earnings....Continue reading

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Making Bitcoin work better

IN DIFFERENT circumstances the two people could be good friends. Each is rather shy and very smart. And each is passionate about bitcoin, a digital currency. One invented hashcash, which foreshadowed components of the crypto-currency; the other is the author of the first Chinese translation of the white paper in which Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of bitcoin, first described its inner workings.

Adam Back is the chief executive of Blockstream, a British startup, which employs some of the main developers of the software that defines bitcoin’s inner workings. Jihan Wu is the boss of Bitmain, a Chinese firm, which makes about 80% of the chips that power “miners”, specialised computers that keep the bitcoin network secure, confirm payments and mint new digital coins. But far from being fellow-travellers, each represents one of the two main camps in what has come to be called a “bitcoin civil war”, fought over how, if at all, the system should grow.

The worst seems...Continue reading

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The closing of American bank branches

The link between poor harvests and violence

The very dark ages

LAST year over 102,000 people died in nearly 50 armed conflicts across the world, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a think-tank. Much of this violence is caused by tensions between ethnic groups—two-thirds of civil wars have been fought along ethnic lines since 1946. Yet historians differ over whether cultural differences or economic pressures best explain how tensions explode into violence.

A new study* by Robert Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama suggests that, historically, economic shocks were more strongly associated with outbreaks of violence directed against Jews than scholars had previously thought. The authors collected data for 1,366 anti-Semitic events involving forced emigration or murderous pogroms in 936 European cities between 1100 and 1800. This was then compared with historical temperature data from a variety of sources, including tree rings, Arctic ice cores and contemporary descriptions of...Continue reading

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Pandemic bonds, a new idea

Better coverage needed

WHEN the Ebola virus hit west Africa in 2014, it took months to get together the money needed to combat the outbreak. Donors ended up committing more than $7bn. But the money came too late and too inefficiently, says Tim Evans, who directs the World Bank’s global health practice. Lives that could have been saved were lost. The bank estimates that GDP in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone was reduced by $2.8bn.

Such outbreaks are likely to become more common: they have increased in frequency and diversity over the past 30 years, in step with the increased mobility of people, products and food. The World Bank says the probability of another pandemic in the next 10 to 15 years is high. That is why it has issued $425m in pandemic bonds to support its new Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which is intended to channel funding to countries facing a deadly disease.

The bonds cover six viruses likely to spark outbreaks: new...Continue reading

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America’s uncompetitive markets harm its economy

“THE best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life,” wrote Sir John Hicks, a British economist. Without competitors breathing down their necks, monopolists find it easy to make large profits: just ask the 46m American households served by only one fast-broadband provider, who pay high prices for poor service. As a result, trustbusting is one of those rare causes that can unite raging populists with sober academics. So the wonks may well have agreed with the sentiment, if not the fine detail, when Senate Democrats unveiled a fresh pledge on July 24th to make America competitive again as part of their economic agenda. “This economy is rigged,” insisted Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. It is not quite that bad. But more than three-quarters of industries are more concentrated than they were two decades ago, and the economy is also seeing less turnover of firms (see charts).

It is easy enough for consumers to see the consequences when monopolists entrench themselves in one...Continue reading

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A Himalayan spat between China and India evokes memories of war

FOR nearly six weeks, armed contingents of two of the biggest military forces in the world have faced off in a high-altitude game of chicken in the Himalayas. Roughly 300-400 Indian soldiers and an equal number of Chinese border guards are stuck glowering at one another over a scrubby patch of land at a “tri-junction”, where the two countries and the tiny kingdom of Bhutan all meet. Analysts cannot see how either side might easily stand down. Memories of a bloody border war fought between China and India in 1962 are all too easily evoked.

That war, which saw India humiliated, began after the Chinese built a road across disputed territory in the far west of the two countries’ 4,000km-long, disputed border. The latest problems began when Chinese border guards were spotted moving road-making equipment onto the Dolam plateau, a flat spot in the slightly larger region known as Doklam (or Donglang in Mandarin) which all three sides patrol. On June 18th Indian troops moved onto the plateau...Continue reading

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AstraZeneca Shocker Reminds Investors Miracle Drugs Are No Remedy for Risk

Chasing exciting new developments in medicine can be a very expensive endeavor. Such is the takeaway from AstraZeneca’s announcement that a hotly anticipated clinical trial didn’t meet expectations.

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Nestlé's Slow Growth Plays Into Dan Loeb's Hands

The activist investor is agitating for higher margins at the world’s largest food company. Disappointing growth lends weight to his arguments.

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Noble's Shriveled Asian Roots Won't Catch Much Rain

Noble’s share price fell nearly 50% after it warned of another big loss and said it planned to sell of most of its global oil-and-gas assets. What’s left may have trouble surviving on its own.

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Toshiba Bankruptcy a Nice Idea, But Hard to Execute

The nuclear option of bankruptcy could give Toshiba a fresh start. It’s a nice idea, but the embattled Japanese giant is more likely to choose to muddle through.

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Deutsche Bank No Longer Reeling, but Recovery Out of Sight

Deutsche Bank is finding firmer ground, but first-half revenues disappointed and there was little to suggest investors have anything other than a long wait for better returns.

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Texas Republicans revive their “bathroom bill”

“FLUSH the bill!” chanted protesters gathered outside Texas’s state capitol building, in Austin, on July 21st. They had gathered, bearing placards decorated with pictures of toilets, seat up, to urge lawmakers to ditch legislation that would prevent transgender people from using the lavatory of their choice.

Undeterred, the Senate voted in favour of two bills on July 25th that would reserve certain toilets, showers and changing rooms, in schools and public places, for the use of “persons of the same sex as stated on a person's birth certificate." But whether the bill will ever become law is another matter.

This is the second time this year that conservatives in Texas have tried to regulate the toilet habits of transgender people. In March, a similar bill succeeded in the state Senate but fell in the House of Representatives, thanks to opposition from pro-business Republicans. They were concerned such a law would deter investors from outside the state, as happened in North Carolina last year after its Congress...Continue reading

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U.S. Shale Threatens Chemical Element of Aramco's IPO

An expected surge in U.S. petrochemicals output challenges one of the main pillars of the energy giant’s plans to list.

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Loan Investors Give Companies a Break at Their Own Expense

It has proved startlingly easy for companies to cut the rates on their leveraged loans. Loan investors have little choice but to go along.

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GM and PSA Geared Up for Auto Industry Tougher Times

The car makers’ unwavering focus on costs and margins will offer protection in the coming downturn.

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The euro’s obituaries were premature

FIVE years ago, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, pledged to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. At the time, many people were predicting that the euro zone would break up. But Mr Draghi pulled off the trick; no countries have left the single currency. Borrowing costs have come down and even Greece has been able to tap the markets.

Keeping the euro together may have been the aim of the game, but was it worth it? As M&G, the fund management group, points out, the record has been mixed. Economic growth has rebounded to a respectable 1.5% year-on-year. This is not stellar but it is hard for the euro zone to grow rapidly when its population is ageing; the IMF suggests a greater proportion of older workers may weigh on productivity growth.  

Of course, the euro zone could get more of the current...Continue reading

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AMD's New Chips Are Stacking Up

Strong results from the heavily shorted chip maker should calm some nerves.

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Citigroup Sets High Bar for Itself

Citigroup shares have been on a tear. Did executives get too giddy on their future prospects?

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Can Donald Trump pardon himself?

MIXED messages are a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. So it is no surprise that in the wake of a Washington Post story on July 20th depicting Mr Trump as curious about the extent of his pardon power, contradictory spins emerged from different corners of the White House. Jay Sekulow, Mr Trump’s lawyer, flatly denied the report that, under investigation for suspicious ties to Russia, the president is looking into ways to shield his aides and himself. “We have not and I continue to not have conversations with the president of the United States about pardons”, Mr Sekulow said on July 23rd. But a day earlier, the president tweeted his belief that “all agree the US president has the complete power to pardon”.

Mr Trump, no authority on the constitution, may have come to that conclusion all on his own. If he or his team had looked into the range of expert views on the subject, a more nuanced take would have emerged. Article II, section 2 of America’s constitution says presidents “shall have power to grant...Continue reading

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The Coming Squeeze for Shale Oil Drillers

Oil field services firms such as Halliburton and Schlumberger see more improvement in the U.S. shale patch, but their rising margins may come at the expense of oil and gas producers’ profits.

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Venezuelans sell sex in Colombia to survive

ON SATURDAY night in Parque Poblado in Medellín, young people gather to drink, smoke and chat. Barbara and her cousin Sophia have more serious business: they hope to make enough money from selling sex to live decently after fleeing Venezuela, where survival is a struggle.

Barbara, who is 27, prefers her former occupation as the owner of a nail and hair business in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. But polish and shampoo are as hard to find as food and medicine, and so she has come to Medellín. In an hour a sex worker can make the equivalent of a month’s minimum wage in Venezuela. Colombian pesos “are worth something”, unlike Venezuela’s debauched currency, the bolívar, Barbara says. “At least here one can eat breakfast and lunch.”

Some 4,500 Venezuelan prostitutes are thought to be working in Colombia; the trade is legal in both countries. But until recently they were often rounded up by police and deported back to Venezuela by the busload. That...Continue reading

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Challenging the cult of Che Guevara

Hard to erase

CHE GUEVARA was born in Rosario, then Argentina’s second-largest city, in 1928 but did not stay long. Less than a year later his family moved away. Yet his birthplace has not forgotten the left’s warrior-saint. A red banner marks the posh apartment block where he was born. A four-metre-high (13-foot) bronze statue stands in Che Guevara Square. The city council finances CELChe, a centre devoted to the study of his life, and celebrates “Che week” around his birthday in June. CELChe will stage a concert to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death on October 9th.

Not everyone in Rosario thinks the bereted revolutionary, who was captured by soldiers in Bolivia and killed on the orders of the country’s pro-American dictator, deserves such reverence. Fundación Bases, a liberal think-tank based in the city, has launched a petition to persuade the city council to remove the monuments. The martyr was himself a killer, says Franco Martín...Continue reading

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The outlines of NAFTA 2 emerge

FOR months President Donald Trump has veered between threatening to terminate the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and merely proposing to bring it “up to date”. On July 17th, in a letter to Congress, the United States trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, made the administration’s intentions clearer. They are closer to revision than destruction, which is a relief for Mexico and Canada, the United States’ NAFTA partners. But alongside conventional-sounding negotiating objectives are flashes of Trumpian aggression and hints that the United States will demand painful changes to the deal.

The stakes are high. A quarter of American trade in goods and services is with Mexico and Canada. The three economies tend to grow or shrink together and have integrated supply chains. Fears that the United States would abandon NAFTA have caused volatility in the markets for the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar, and talk of possible recessions.

Mr Lighthizer’s letter,...Continue reading

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Latin America’s disappointing economic growth

SCAN the Latin American newspapers and it is hard to find much sign of a convincing economic recovery. True, Brazil’s industrial production is perking up after a two-year slump. Mexico’s energy reform is starting to pay off, at last, with a big new oil discovery by an international consortium. And Peruvian restaurateurs celebrated “National Char-roasted Chicken” day on July 16th, hoping to dispatch a million birds, up from last year’s 720,000.

Otherwise, animal spirits are in short supply. After five years of deceleration and one of recession, Latin America should register modest economic growth of 1-1.5% this year, according to forecasters. The picture varies from country to country. The return to aggregate growth is largely thanks to Brazil and Argentina, which are coming out of recessions. Venezuela’s economy is collapsing. Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru are expanding at a sluggish rate of 2-3%. Only in Central America, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia is growth a respectable...Continue reading

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Violence and diplomatic upheaval over the al-Aqsa mosque

ON July 14th a gun battle took place outside the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Three Israeli-Arab citizens opened fire on police. Two Israeli police officers were killed, along with the three attackers. The shootout has led to a diplomatic crisis between Israel, the Palestinians and Jordan.

After it, the Israeli government ordered a 48-hour closure of the Haram al-Sharif compound, known to Israelis as the Temple Mount. Israeli police put up metal-detectors near the entrances. The Israeli government says these measures are necessary to keep people safe. However, to the Palestinians, who contest Israel’s control of East Jerusalem, the extra security is a symbol of oppression. They have refused to enter the mosques through the detectors. In clashes with Israeli forces in Jerusalem, four Palestinian demonstrators have been killed. On July 21st a Palestinian entered a home on a West Bank settlement and stabbed to death three Israelis during their sabbath meal. On his...Continue reading

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Akzo Nobel's Poor Results Increase Chances of a Deal

The paint giant’s shares look like a one-way bet. Weak growth makes a fresh takeover bid from U.S. peer PPG ever more probable.

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Who Owns HNA? We Still Don't Know

China’s acquisitive HNA Group has disclosed more than ever about its owners. That won’t stop the questions.

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SoftBank Tries to Grab the Ride-Hailing Market

The Japanese tech giant is spreading its bets on the market. Its returns may depend on big changes in consumer behavior.

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Traffic Costs Jam Up Google

Google’s sharp jump in paid clicks came at a high cost. Traffic acquisition spending outpaced revenue growth for the first time in five years.

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How Blockbuster Drugs Fight Off Cheaper Competition

A lower-priced version of blockbuster Remicade hasn’t sold well, will an even cheaper drug upend the obscure pricing of the drug industry?

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Chaldean Catholics and Iraqi Kurds face deportation

AT MIDNIGHT on July 24th a two-week stay of deportation for more than 1,400 Iraqis—around 300 Christians and dozens of Kurds among them—will expire. Mark Goldsmith, a district judge in Michigan, had prolonged the stay twice to allow time to consider a class-action suit representing 114 of them who argue they face persecution and torture, or worse, on their return. Civil-rights advocates are doing what they can to prevent the deportations. Family and friends have protested against them almost daily. 

One of the Iraqis in danger of imminent deportation is Usama Jamil Hamama, known as Sam, a 54-year old Iraqi Christian who came to America lawfully as a refugee in 1974 when he was four. Mr Hamama, who lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where he is a partner at a local supermarket, is married and has four children, all American citizens, between the ages of 11 and 17. He is a regular churchgoer and a pillar of his community. On June 11th, just as he was getting ready to go to church with his family, Mr Hamama was arrested by...Continue reading

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Car Industry's Diesel Woes Just Won't Die

This was supposed to be the year Volkswagen drew a line under its diesel-emissions scandal. Instead the scandal seems to be spreading to the other German car giants.

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Bringing In Wealth Beats Trading It for Julius Baer

Managing money for the rich looks like a better business than trading and investment banking: That is the upshot of half-year results for Swiss bank Julius Baer and the theme of last week’s U.S. bank results.

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Good News: China Is Making Less Useless Stuff

After years of overinvestment, which helped to sink global prices for steel, aluminum and other products, some of the worst-offending sectors in China are looking a bit better.

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How Markets Could Come Out of the Shadows

The European Central Bank has reached the same spot the Federal Reserve reached four years ago. For financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic, it is an event that comes with consequences.

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Cloud Wars at the Right Price

The cloud computing business is growing, and revenue is building even without the draw of price cuts.

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Donald Trump’s spokesman quits

DONALD TRUMP seems to enjoy publicly humiliating people, especially those in his power. There was the Venezuelan beauty queen, Alicia Machado, he nicknamed “Miss Piggy” and made to work out in front of a pack of male journalists. There is Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, one of the first senior Republicans to endorse Mr Trump, who the president repaid by cracking fat jokes at his expense and passing over him for cabinet appointment. But no Trump hireling has been more ridiculed, by the president and at times, it has seemed, half of America, than the chief White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, who, despairing of his treatment, abruptly resigned on July 21st.

However many millions of dollars Mr Spicer is about to make off the back of his six-month spell as Mr Trump's official mouthpiece, it may not be enough. After just six months in Mr Trump’s service, Mr Spicer’s reputation is in pieces. Formerly a respected press chief at the Republican National Committee, he was dispatched by the president, on his debut...Continue reading

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Blackstone and CVC Ready to Bet on Risky Side of Payments

Private equity groups Blackstone and CVC are looking to join the payments party with a preliminary near-$4 billion offer for U.K.-listed Paysafe, the company revealed Friday. It looks like a gamble Paysafe shareholders should welcome.

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GE's New Boss Should Embrace Negativity

Quarterly earnings show that General Electric’s new chief will have a tough time meeting lofty expectations for 2018

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Turkey’s growing repression leads to a showdown with Germany

AFTER months of diplomatic tiptoeing, Germany’s patience has run out. On July 18th a Turkish court ordered that one Swede, one German and five Turkish activists who had been detained during a training workshop with Amnesty International, a human-rights group, should be officially arrested. Two days later Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, cut loose.

He warned his country’s nationals against travelling to Turkey, proposed rolling back European Union economic assistance and suggested his government might stop providing export credit guarantees to companies doing business in Turkey. “We cannot advise anyone to invest in a country where there is no longer legal certainty and even companies are being accused of supporting terrorists,” he said.

The Turkish government’s repression of opponents and civil-society groups has grown steadily worse since an attempted coup last summer. Over 50,000 people have been jailed on charges of association with the...Continue reading

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Emmanuel Macron is revitalising the European Union—and dividing it

LIFE comes at you fast in the European Union. Barely a year ago, with the wounds from the refugee crisis still gaping, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, could be heard warning that a British vote to quit the EU threatened to bring about the collapse of western civilisation. In half the countries on the continent, snarling populists eager for European disintegration were terrifying the pro-EU establishment.

Yet over the past few months, gloom has turned to sunshine. In June Mr Tusk declared that he had never felt so optimistic about the EU. Much of the credit goes to Emmanuel Macron. France’s newly minted president has lifted pro-Europeans’ spirits not only by winning election wrapped in the EU flag but by doing so in revolutionary fashion, emerging from nowhere to humble France’s old parties (as well as Marine Le Pen, the nationalist who stalked Eurocrats’ nightmares for months). Rarely do members of the European establishment get to feel like...Continue reading

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The cost overruns on Russia’s World Cup stadiums are staggering

FROM a boat cruising past the south bank of the Neva in St Petersburg, passing the baroque facades of the Winter Palace and the gilded dome of St Isaac’s cathedral, it can seem as if the 19th century never ended in Russia. But turn to the river’s north side and you will see something much more futuristic: Krestovsky stadium, a Japanese-designed football arena nicknamed “the spaceship”. In June and July the newly opened stadium hosted several matches of the Confederations Cup, a second-tier tournament, meant to serve as a dress rehearsal for Russia’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup next year (and, unavoidably, won by Germany’s B team). Russians are hoping the competition itself works out better than the preparations. Krestovsky stadium was completed eight years behind schedule and 540% over budget.

The scandals that have plagued the project since construction started in 2007 have made it a symbol of the corruption in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A former vice-governor of...Continue reading

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France’s top general quits, in a test for Emmanuel Macron

FOR a president usually eager to get the drama of politics right, Emmanuel Macron’s provocation of an open confrontation with his armed forces this month was a notable stumble. On July 14th he celebrated Bastille Day, riding in an open-top military jeep on the Champs-Elysées alongside Pierre de Villiers, the chief of the armed forces, before reviewing a parade with his guest of honour, Donald Trump. Five days later the furious general quit, saying he could no longer “guarantee” the means to protect France and sustain its ambition.

The affair has become Mr Macron’s first serious leadership test. He is likely to extricate himself, says François Heisbourg, a French security analyst, but the spat was “avoidable, at least in terms of theatre”.

The root of the dispute was money. General de Villiers, in office since 2014, was reappointed for another year on June 30th. He expected the military budget of €33bn ($38bn) to be maintained, and was reassured by...Continue reading

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Italy is facing a surge of migration across the Mediterranean

THE encampment has no name, no water, no electricity and no right to be where it is: an abandoned bus park in a desolate stretch of scrub, east of the Tiburtina railway station in Rome. Most of the Africans dotted across the asphalt in tents or sprawled on mattresses in the enervating heat of a Roman summer have no permission to be there either. Many come straight off the boat, says Andrea Costa, head of Baobab Experience, the NGO running the camp: “For them, this is just the latest stage in a journey that may already have taken two years.”

So far this year, the number of migrants arriving in Italy by sea is up by 17% over the same period in 2016, to 93,335. Unlike the Syrians who poured across the Aegean in 2015, most of them are fleeing not from war or persecution, but for economic reasons. They do not qualify for humanitarian protection, and in most cases do not want to remain in Italy, but to move on to countries with better grey-market jobs.

Under the European...Continue reading

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The Euro May Be Rising, But Money Is Still Easy

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said Thursday that the euro’s gains had “received some attention” on the ECB Governing Council, but the currency isn’t the only factor that counts for financial conditions.

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Don't Trust Capital One's Math

Capital One sees default rates declining after a worrying jump, but investors should stay skeptical.

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To escape repression, critics are leaving the Gulf

FOR two years Ghanem al Masarir al-Dosari, a Saudi satirist, has fronted an online comic look at the news in a show called “Fadfada” (Natter), which pokes fun at his kingdom’s royal highnesses. He portrays the young crown prince and de facto ruler, Muhammad bin Salman, in nappies, and calls him “al-dub al-dasher”, loosely translated as “fat crumpet”. His YouTube channel attracts millions of followers, most of them Saudi. “Back home, I’d have lost my head,” he says. But Mr Dosari broadcasts from the safety of a north London suburb, he hopes out of reach of the royal sword.

Ever since the leading pan-Arab newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, launched in Britain in 1978, London has served as an Arab media hub. Fleeing the censors at home, journalists found freedom in exile. Fresh crackdowns, censorship and war are again rejuvenating their ranks.

As part of its campaign against Qatar, Saudi Arabia has demanded the closure...Continue reading

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Would-be successors to the ailing Nigerian president are circling

Osinbajo the loyal

POLITICS is the survival of the fittest, and Nigeria is no exception. “The Hyenas and the Jackals will soon be sent out of the kingdom,” the first lady, Aisha Buhari, wrote on Facebook on July 10th, in response to a senator who had described her husband as “the absent Lion King”. Muhammadu Buhari has been in London being treated for a mysterious illness since May 7th, after spending a seven-week stint there earlier this year. His only recent communication has been a few written statements mourning deceased politicians.

Despite many rumours, Mr Buhari is probably not dead himself. The vice-president (and acting president), Yemi Osinbajo, rushed to London for a few hours last week. On his return he said his boss was recovering fast and would be back “very shortly”. But the beasts are circling, in the expectation that it will be one of them who gets to contest the next presidential election, due in February 2019.

Mr...Continue reading

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China goes to Africa

IN CRISP white uniforms and standing to attention beneath a fluttering red flag with five golden stars, the sailors on board the People’s Liberation Army ships setting sail for Djibouti on July 11th represent a significant step for China. When they arrive they will open the Middle Kingdom’s first military base abroad since the Korean war.

It is a canny first foray. China has prepared the ground with low-key deployments of blue-helmeted troops to UN operations in places such as South Sudan. And it has placed the base in a country that is likely to cause the least offence.

America already has a large airfield and naval station in Djibouti. From there it conducts counter-terrorism operations, and watches the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, both much used by smugglers trafficking drugs, weapons and people. And China’s main regional rival, India, cannot argue that the installation represents a significant projection of power into an ocean it regards as its own. The base will...Continue reading

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Geely's Rally Is Running Out of Road

One of China’s most prominent auto makers has been the gift that kept on giving for investors, but not for long.

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BHP Sees a Hungry Planet, Elliott Sees Another Shale Disaster

BHP has written off billions in U.S. shale investments, but it is poised to plow a substantial amount of funds into potassium fertilizer, or potash. Activist shareholder Elliott is kicking up a fuss.

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Gas Everywhere but No Way to Ship It

Natural gas pipeline delays in the Marcellus and Utica shale producing regions have caused a sharp discount for gas sold in the region.

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Reform of China’s ailing state-owned firms is emboldening them

ACCORDING to company lore, Yunnan Baiyao, a musty-smelling medical powder, played a vital role during the Long March. As China’s Communist troops fled from attacks in the 1930s, trekking thousands of miles to a new base, they spread its yellow granules on their wounds to stanch bleeding. To this day, instructions on the Yunnan Baiyao bottle recommend application after being shot or stabbed. Many Chinese households keep some in stock to deal with more run-of-the-mill cuts. But the government has recently put its maker into service to treat a different kind of ailment: the financial weakness of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Yunnan Baiyao has emerged as a poster-child of China’s new round of SOE reform. The company, previously owned by the south-western province of Yunnan, sold a 50% stake to a private investor earlier this year. The same firm had tried to buy a slice of Yunnan Baiyao in 2009 but was blocked. Its success this time has been held up in the official press as proof that a...Continue reading

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Could bond funds break the market?

GOOD generals know that the next war will be fought with different weapons and tactics from the last. Similarly, financial regulators are right to worry that the next crisis may not resemble the credit crunch of 2007-08.

The last crisis arose from the interaction between the market for mortgage-backed securities and the banking system. As investors became unsure of the banks’ exposure to bad debts, they cut back on their lending to the sector, causing a liquidity squeeze. Since then, central banks have insisted that commercial banks improve their capital ratios to ensure they are less vulnerable.

Might the next crisis originate not in the banking system, but in the bond market? That is the subject of a new paper* from the Bank of England. The worry centres on the “liquidity mismatch” between mutual funds, which offer instant redemption to their clients, and the corporate-bond market, where many securities may be hard to trade in a crisis. The danger is that forced...Continue reading

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