Pakistan’s army is getting serious about defeating domestic terrorism

A TRIP around Miranshah with an escort of heavily armed soldiers is a surreal experience. The town is the administrative centre of North Waziristan, a lawless region once controlled by jihadists that Barack Obama called “the most dangerous place in the world”. But Pakistan’s army, which fought a 22-month campaign from 2014 to evict militants from North Waziristan, is trying to transform the town from a byword for extremism to a showcase of the stability to which the generals say the country is returning.

The army lost nearly 500 men in the fighting. About 3,400 militants were killed; many more fled across the border to Afghanistan. Signs of the violence are everywhere. But so too are efforts to provide greater prosperity for traumatised civilians (nearly 1m people living in the region were displaced). New roads fan out from the town. Lots of buildings, including shops, clinics and a sports stadium, are going up. A children’s playground has been laid out next to the river that...Continue reading

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Theda Skocpol’s new work on anti-Trump activists

THEDA SKOCPOL produces consistently interesting work that makes many other political scientists (and most journalists, for that matter) look shallow by comparison. In 2011 she co-wrote a book about the Tea Party in which she identified some of the things that would later propel Donald Trump to the Republican nomination. At the time, most people understood the Tea Party to be a libertarian revolt against big government. Employing a radical method, which involved asking a large number of Tea Partiers what they actually thought, Ms Skocpol and her co-author discovered that this was not the case.

The folks who showed up to Tea Party meetings were not acolytes of Ayn Rand or Ron Paul. They were in fact very keen on public spending, so long as it was directed to people they thought had earned it. These Tea Partiers seldom made straightforwardly racist remarks, and probably thought of themselves as without racial prejudice. But their attitudes to government had a racial tinge, because most of the people who they thought deserved government help were...Continue reading

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A dispute over real estate roils Jerusalem

A SMALL wooden ladder stands on a ledge above the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the spot where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected. The ladder serves no purpose, but it has been moved only twice in the past two centuries. That is because all six Christian denominations that have a presence in the church must agree to rearrange things. They rarely do.

On February 25th, however, the church’s main occupants—the Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Armenians—showed rare ecumenical unity. They decided to close in protest against an attempt by city hall to tax commercial property owned by the churches, and a draft law in the Knesset that would allow the government to expropriate land sold by churches to private buyers. Church leaders compared the measures to laws “enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe”.

Two days later Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, stepped in. He said that a committee led by...Continue reading

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Why It's Hard to Make Cold Cash Delivering Hot Food

Companies that specialize in helping you order takeout food online have done a remarkable job delivering returns to shareholders. Now comes a new threat.

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China's Netflix Set to Come With a Pricey Valuation

The Netflix-like service iQiyi, from China, is set to go on show in the U.S. soon. Investors should pay attention to the price of admission.

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Jerome Powell's game of Kerplunk

THERE is an old children's game called Kerplunk. It is similar in concept to Jenga. Marbles are poured into a plastic tube through which sticks have been threaded. The players take it in turns to remove the sticks with the aim of avoiding the fall of marbles. The normal pattern is for a few marbles to drop until the unlucky player removes the strut that keeps up the rest. A noisy crash ensues.

Jerome Powell (pictured), the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, may be that unlucky player. Janet Yellen, his respected predecessor, managed to pull out five sticks (ie, raised rates five times) before she departed, leaving both the economy and the markets in fine shape. Doubtless, Ms Yellen was not happy when President Donald Trump denied her a second term. But it may have been a blessing in disguise. The task of the central banker gets a lot more difficult from here.

Mr Powell's first Congressional testimony as Fed chair yesterday was seen as bullish on the economy...Continue reading

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Nico Colchester journalism fellowships

The Nico Colchester fellowships were established in memory of Nico Colchester, who died in 1996 after an outstanding career at the Financial Times, The Economist and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Nico had a passion for writing about European politics, economics, and society—and his sharp, witty, authoritative analysis would have been especially precious today.

Between the migration crisis, the threat of terrorism, the rise of populism, the euro zone’s economic struggles and the Brexit vote, the very foundations of European integration have been called into question in recent years. But Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French election and the prospect of a new grand coalition in Germany have raised hopes that a new European dawn could be in store. Undoubtedly, Nico would have been able to tell this story like few others in his profession: just consider some of his most famous work, from his creation of a Mars Bar index—“a currency for our time”—to his division of the world, and its politicians, into the “soggy” and the “crunchy”.

So in this momentous year for Europe, here is...Continue reading

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No Magic Number for Qualcomm

Broadcom’s reduced bid still represents substantial premium, but deal risk remains high.

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JPMorgan Needs to Keep Raising the Bar

The bank gave nothing but good news on its investor day. But the bank’s shares did nothing. That is not surprising after a 31% rally over the past year, compared with the 20% rise for the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index.

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The Real Reason Behind the Bidding War for Sky

The world’s media titans are locked in battle over Sky. Comcast, Disney and Fox all believe Europe’s pay-TV leader will give them heft to fight back against Netflix.

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Powell's First Problem: Taming the Job Market

The Federal Reserve says the economy is “near or a little beyond full employment.” Preventing it from getting too tight without causing trouble will be tough.

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How Missed Red Flags Derailed Drug Deal

Akorn's checkered history should have given Fresenius pause before it agreed to buy the generic-drug company.

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Macy's Has a Spring in its Step

After quarters upon quarters of declining sales, Macy’s may be turning a corner. For the first time in three years it reported positive sales growth.

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Lithium Mania Gets a Reality Check

Demand for lithium is expected to soar in the next few years, which is why prices have doubled since 2016. But like other basic materials before it, the market has forgotten there is plenty of lithium in the world.

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With nobody in charge, Ethiopia declares a state of emergency

Cry freedom

THE well-heeled residents of Legetafo are not used to demonstrations. The town on the eastern edge of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is home to politicians and businessfolk. Although nearby towns in the region of Oromia, which surrounds the capital, have been hit by anti-government protests since late 2014, these streets have remained mostly quiet.

Yet this month demonstrations broke out there too, as people joined a strike to force the ruling coalition to release more political prisoners (in addition to the thousands it has already freed since the start of the year). “Almost everyone” took to the streets, says Zenebe, a local restaurant-owner. Things quickly turned ugly. People set up roadblocks and burned tyres. The army responded with tear gas and bullets. Faced with spreading protests and ethnic attacks on Tigrayans (who are about 6% of the population but dominate politics), the government announced a state of emergency, giving itself wide powers to...Continue reading

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Saudi Arabia and the UAE are gobbling up Yemen

BRIGHTLY painted dhows bob on the waves of the Arabian Sea. Fishermen auction the morning’s catch of swordfish, tuna and manta rays. Sardines dry in the sun, fodder for the camels that pad through the street. Life used to be simple in the port of Ghayda, the capital of Mahra governorate, tucked in Yemen’s far east.

The arrival of soldiers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is complicating things. Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, Yemen’s president, invited them into the country to repel Houthi rebels, who pushed him out in 2015. The Houthis control about a fifth of the territory. Saudi and Emirati forces hold much of the rest. But as their grip tightens, Yemen fractures.

Saudi and Emirati officials say their deployments across the country are part of their war effort. But join the dots and Saudi Arabia’s positions match the incense trade route that long ran overland from the Indian Ocean to Arabia. The kingdom appears to be carving a new corridor to the coast....Continue reading

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Islamic State has been stashing millions of dollars in Iraq and abroad

GONE are the days when the black flag fluttered over a third of Iraq and almost half of Syria. Crushed on the battlefield, Islamic State has lost roughly 98% of its self-proclaimed “caliphate”. Some 70,000 of its fighters (who numbered perhaps 100,000 at their peak) are thought to have been killed. But thousands have escaped. Some have remained in Iraq and Syria; others have slipped into Turkey or hooked up with IS affiliates in Egypt, Libya and South-East Asia. Around 10,000 of the group’s foreign fighters are thought to have left the Middle East.

Those intent on continuing to wage jihad will still have the means. IS has quietly stashed millions of dollars across the region. It has invested in businesses in Iraq, bought gold in Turkey and continued to transfer money to its affiliates. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that has gone out of IS’ territory,” says a former weapons-dealer involved in transferring the jihadists’ cash. An Iraqi legislator estimates that IS smuggled...Continue reading

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South Africa’s new president will have to dish out bitter medicine

SOUTH AFRICANS had only a few days to celebrate the resignation of Jacob Zuma and the swearing-in of a new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, before the hangover set in. A new budget hiked taxes, cut public spending and reminded people how big a mess Mr Zuma left behind.

The budget was presented by Malusi Gigaba, a finance minister whose appointment by Mr Zuma almost a year ago sparked protests against what was seen as a hostile takeover of the Treasury, a department that had stayed professional even as corruption and incompetence flourished elsewhere in the government. Embarrassingly, Mr Gigaba’s budget was marred by the release of a high-court ruling that he had lied under oath in his previous job as minister of home affairs (and photos of him playing “Candy Crush” on his iPad in parliament). Mr Ramaphosa kept him on until the budget so as not to unsettle markets. He may not last much longer.

Mr Ramaphosa’s most urgent task is to kick out of his cabinet the cronies and...Continue reading

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A fuss over Freemasons in Africa

IT WAS too much of a coincidence for the members of “No to Freemasonry and Homosexuality”, a coalition of religious groups. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, Rihanna, a pop star, and several hundred African Freemasons were all due to visit Senegal around the same time this month. The group decided that sinister forces must be at work, no doubt plotting against the country.

Every year dozens of Masonic lodges from across Africa come together to discuss the issues of the day. This year, for their 26th shindig, the Freemasons booked a plush hotel in Dakar, Senegal’s capital. On the agenda were worthy topics such as education, freedom, governance and economic development. But the hotel, rattled by the conspiracy-minded protesters and worried about violence, cancelled the event.

Still, the brouhaha has shone a light on how Freemasonry, a secretive movement that originated in 16th-century European guilds, has taken root on a continent where finger snaps and fist bumps are...Continue reading

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The pressure on Binyamin Netanyahu is growing

IT SEEMED that things could not get worse for Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, when on February 13th police recommended that he be indicted for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in two corruption investigations. One involved accusations of gifts for favours; the other alleged back-room dealing with an Israeli newspaper publisher for favourable coverage.

Five days later, however, police brought in eight suspects for questioning in another corruption probe. One of them, Shlomo Filber, had served as Mr Netanyahu’s chief of staff and campaign manager. Another is Shaul Elovitch, a friend of the prime minister and chairman of Bezeq, an Israeli telecoms giant.

The police suspect that Mr Netanyahu, who served as communications minister from 2014 to 2017, made regulatory decisions that favoured Bezeq and enriched Mr Elovitch in return for glowing news coverage by Bezeq’s popular website, Walla!. On February 21st Mr Filber agreed to serve as a witness for the state....Continue reading

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Syria’s war heats up again

More misery in Eastern Ghouta

THE UN Children’s Fund says it no longer has words to describe the suffering in Syria. In an unusual move, the agency released a blank statement to express its outrage at President Bashar al-Assad’s latest onslaught. On February 18th his regime, with Russian support, began pounding Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, with artillery, air strikes and barrel bombs. Hundreds of people have already been killed. The regime appears to be mustering troops ahead of a possible ground assault.

Far from winding down, Syria’s almost seven-year civil war is heating up and growing more complicated. The collapse of Islamic State (IS) has freed local and foreign powers, which were loosely aligned against the jihadists, to pursue other objectives. Some have turned their guns on each other. Observers see echoes of Lebanon’s civil war, which also drew in foreigners and dragged on for 15 years. But the war in Syria has already been far more...Continue reading

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Australia’s prime minister hopes a new deputy will restore stability

MALCOLM TURNBULL, Australia’s prime minister, looked relieved when on February 26th the junior party in his coalition, the Nationals, elected Michael McCormack (picured centre) as its new leader and thus deputy prime minister. For almost three weeks Mr Turnbull had endured a festering embarrassment after the press reported an affair between Barnaby Joyce, the previous Nationals leader, and his former press secretary, who is now pregnant. Mr Joyce had at first refused to resign as party leader, despite being caught flouting his own talk of family values. His long goodbye exposed tensions in the coalition, just as Mr Turnbull was trying to revive its fortunes ahead of an election due next year.

Leaders of the Nationals have mostly been restrained and unobtrusive. Mr Joyce proved an aberration. As a minister three years ago, he rowed publicly with Johnny Depp, an American actor, who had brought two dogs into Australia without the right paperwork. Last year Mr Joyce had to quit parliament...Continue reading

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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will be allowed to reign forever

 

THE decision announced on February 25th to scrap term limits for China’s president, Xi Jinping, pierces the veil of Chinese politics. It reveals that, at a time when the ruling Communist Party is presenting China to the world as a modern, reliable and responsible state, capable of defending globalisation, the internal political system that the party monopolises is premodern, treacherous, inward-looking and brutal. It also shows that Chinese leaders’ own attempts to make the party otherwise have not got far.

Those attempts began in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, then the country’s paramount leader. In order to encourage predictability and institutional stability after the chaos of the last years of Mao Zedong, Deng introduced a series of reforms which stressed rules and norms, instead of strongman decision-making. The reforms included mandatory retirement ages and term limits for high-ranking politicians. The constitution of 1982 says the president “shall serve no more...Continue reading

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Queensland is one of the world’s worst places for deforestation

Like Congo with eucalypts

MOST deforestation takes place in poor countries. In richer places, trees tend to multiply. Australia is an unhappy exception. Land clearance is rampant along its eastern coast, as farmers take advantage of lax laws to make room for cattle to feed Asia. WWF, a charity, now ranks Australia alongside Borneo and the Congo Basin as one of the world’s 11 worst “fronts” for deforestation.

The worst damage occurs in the north-eastern state of Queensland, which has more trees left to fell than places to the south, where agriculture is more established. It has been responsible for over half of Australia’s land clearance since the 1970s. Its bulldozers are at present busier than they have been for a decade. They erased 395,000 hectares of forest, including huge tracts of ancient vegetation, between 2015 and 2016—the equivalent of 1,000 rugby pitches a day. As a share of its forested area, Queensland is mowing down trees twice as fast as...Continue reading

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In South Korea fortune-telling will soon be a $3.7bn business

DESTINY is usually said to lurk in heavy drapes of purple velvet, in the wicked glint of a crystal ball, behind a veil of heady incense or in the tuck of a gold-chiffon turban. Your correspondent went in search of hers among a crush of Korean schoolgirls at the “Broken Heart Tarot Club” in booming Hongdae, a university district in Seoul. The café’s façade is an inviting jumble of pink neon signs and glowing graffiti. At the next table, a hip tarot reader spread a deck face-down for two girlfriends in oversized denim jackets, who took turns picking out cards and sipping on their lattes. He looked as cool as them, more rapper than rune-reader, in dark glasses with a chain around his neck.

Interrogating the decorated cards costs 3,000 won (about $2.75) a question. A tarot reader assesses the character of her clients first. Two flicks of her wrist, and a pair of Queens appears. “You chose the strongest set in the deck,” she says brightly. “Fame is within reach.” Will a move to...Continue reading

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Elections in north-east India highlight the BJP’s political savvy

“PRESERVE our tradition and culture,” reads the sign at the front of the community hall in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya. It is written in the raspy, clacking language of the local Khasi people, which is more closely related to Khmer, Cambodia’s main language, than it is to the most widely spoken languages in India. Yet beneath it, Nalin Kohli, a suave lawyer flown in from Delhi by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs India’s national government, is giving a stump speech in Hindi. The BJP, with its centralising, Hindu nationalist ideology, does not seem a natural fit for Meghalaya, whose 3m inhabitants are mostly Christian and fearful of losing their identity in a country of 1.3bn people. It is testimony to the BJP’s political acumen that it may end up running the state later this month.

In Meghalaya and nearby Nagaland, where an election will be held on February 27th, and in Tripura, a bastion of communism that voted on February 18th, the rest of India is...Continue reading

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To save orangutans, think of them as money swinging from trees

A hairy orange meal ticket

THEY move with ease. In the shade of the jungle, a round-bellied orangutan glides towards the ground. Her long limbs give her a gangly appearance, but the flaming strands of her hair are beautiful. Mina is a notoriously bad-tempered ape, who has scratched and bitten dozens of locals on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. But humans harm orangutans far more than orangutans harm humans.

Estimating the number of orangutans is difficult. Researchers have to extrapolate from the number of nests observed. (The apes build new ones to sleep in each night.) A new study published in Current Biology finds that the number of orangutans on Borneo, an island divided between Indonesia and Malaysia, declined by some 148,000 between 1999 and 2015, leaving fewer than 100,000. Within the next 30 years, another 45,000 could disappear. The decline has been steepest, naturally, in areas where the jungle has been razed to plant palm-oil trees. But...Continue reading

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India’s BJP government looks ever more like the one it replaced

AT A rally in the southern state of Karnataka the prime minister wagged his raised finger, accusing the local government, run by the rival Congress party, of creaming a 10% cut from every state contract. “Do you want a commission government, or do you want a mission government?” he boomed. After four years in power Narendra Modi still relishes nothing more than attacking his opponents as no-good, lazy and corrupt.

In response Karnataka’s chief minister, Siddaramaiah, who faces a state election in two months, posted a cartoon on his Twitter account. It pictured glum citizens queuing outside a bank, a reminder of Mr Modi’s painful “demonetisation” in 2016, which sent hundreds of millions of Indians rushing to exchange abruptly voided banknotes. From the back of the bank, meanwhile, emerged a pair of grinning millionaires carrying big sacks of money. Airily waving them off was a Modi-like figure labelled chowkidar or watchman.

The reference was not subtle....Continue reading

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OPEC mulls a long-term alliance with Russia to keep oil prices stable

OIL bears beware. On February 20th Suhail al-Mazrouei, OPEC’s rotating president and energy minister of the United Arab Emirates, said the 14-member producers’ group is working on a plan for a formal alliance with ten other petrostates, including Russia, aimed at propping up oil prices for the foreseeable future. If it comes to anything, it could be OPEC’s most ambitious venture in decades.

The result will not be, he insists, a “supergroup”. The notion of Saudi Arabia and Russia joining forces as the Traveling Wilburys of the oil world may be a bit jarring. It remains an idea in “draft” form. But whatever its chances, it attempts to shift a belief widely held by participants in oil markets: that non-American oil producers are helpless against the shale revolution.

That belief has strengthened because of a renewed flood of American shale production in the latter part of 2017 after prices of West Texas Intermediate climbed above $50 a barrel. The International Energy Agency...Continue reading

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Economists cannot avoid making value judgments

AMID the name-calling and bluster that mar many fights between economists are a few common tactics. Belligerents may attack the theory used to support a claim, or the data analysis used to quantify an effect. During the debate over President Donald Trump’s tax bill, to take a recent example, economists bickered over which side had more credibly calculated the economic effect. They did not, for the most part, argue about whether it was morally acceptable to pass a regressive tax reform after years of wage stagnation and rising inequality. To do so would strike many economists as entirely un-economist-like. Yet economics has not always been so shy about moral philosophy. As well as “The Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith wrote a “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. Great 20th-century economists like Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow also took questions of values very seriously. Their successors would do well to take several pages from their books.

Modern economists have attempted...Continue reading

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A banking centre seeks to reinvent itself

ON A clear day, sunset over Lake Zug is magnificent. Snow-dusted mountains cut through the orange glow above and are mirrored in the lake below. “Zug is our spiritual home,” says Jeremy Epstein, from Washington, DC, who has just taken 40 foreigners to tour the small Swiss town south of Zurich. They came not for sunsets, though, but to find out how Zug has become known as “crypto-valley”—meaning the home of many firms dealing in crypto-currencies and related activities.

Switzerland’s famous banking secrecy is falling to a global assault on money-laundering and tax evasion. But financial security remains in demand. The country should seek to become the “crypto-nation”, said the economy minister, Johann Schneider-Ammann, last month. Zug aims to be the capital of that nation.

To that end, Switzerland is maintaining loose rules for crypto-businesses, even as other countries are tightening theirs. An industry is developing to store tangible crypto-assets, such as the hard drives...Continue reading

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Snap, chatter and pop goes the share price

KYLIE JENNER, a model and reality TV star best known for being the, er, second most famous Kylie in the world, managed to cause a stir on Wall Street. With this idiosyncratic tweet

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat any more? Or is it just me...ugh this is so sad

she knocked back the share price of Snap, the parent company of the video- and picture-sharing app. Ms Jenner’s influence in the target market is deemed to be huge; she has 24.5m Twitter followers, and her message has (at the time of writing) been retweeted 58,000 times and “liked” by 310,000. 

Snap’s share price fell 6%, reducing the company’s market value by $1.3bn. The decline was not just down to the influence of Ms Jenner, who recently gave birth to a daughter Stormi, named after the weather/porn star/grime artist. Investors were already worried about the impact of a recent app redesign. More than 1.2m people signed a...Continue reading

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Protestantism might be good for the wallet, after all

Spirit and flesh

CAN religion make people wealthier? In 1905 Max Weber, a German sociologist, argued that it had happened in Europe. Protestants did not invent capitalism in the 16th century, he suggested. But, by discarding monastic asceticism and embracing the notion that diligence and self-improvement are pleasing to God, they became particularly good at it.

Weber’s idea is unfashionable these days, partly because so many non-Protestant countries have become rich and partly because of a cause-and-effect problem. Were Protestants truly better at business, or were ambitious, business-minded people drawn to Protestantism? One way of settling that question is through a randomised controlled trial of religion. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released on February 19th reports on an experiment in the Philippines that suggests Weber was onto something.

International Care Ministries (ICM), an evangelical charity, tries to help the...Continue reading

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Changing the guard at HSBC

YOU spend 38 years at a mighty global bank, the last seven as chief executive. As boss you clean up a stinking mess, the legacy of ill-conceived acquisitions and shoddy practice. You shell out billions in fines and legal costs. You shed businesses and cut jobs by a quarter. You build a solid capital base. You maintain dividends. On your last day, you announce decent results, with revenue growing after five years of shrinkage and profits up nicely. The market’s parting gift to you? The share price falls by 3%.

Analysts had expected better from Stuart Gulliver’s final report as boss of Britain’s HSBC, the world’s seventh-biggest bank by assets, on February 20th. They were surprised by charges for impaired loans to two companies, thought to be Carillion, a failed British contractor, and Steinhoff, a troubled South African retailer, and miffed that HSBC put off buying back more shares. That, the bank said, must wait until it has raised $5bn-7bn of “additional tier-1” capital (debt...Continue reading

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Japan’s central bank chooses continuity over tradition

GOVERNORS of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) tend not to linger long in their post. Twenty-two people have headed the institution since 1914, compared with 16 at the Federal Reserve and 12 at the Bank of England. The last time a BoJ governor won a second term was 1961, when Japan’s economy was growing by over 11% and inflation was over 5%. As Richard Werner, the author of “Princes of the Yen”, a history of the central bank’s failures, points out, by tradition the job alternates every five years between a candidate backed by the finance ministry and a “true-born” BoJ insider.

This tradition will be broken by the reappointment of Haruhiko Kuroda, who was nominated for a second term on February 16th. If he completes it, he will become the longest-serving governor in the BoJ’s history.

With luck that might be long enough for him to reach the central bank’s elusive inflation target of 2%, a goal set five years ago which he had hoped to meet by 2015. Although the BoJ has...Continue reading

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Donald Trump mulls restrictions on steel and aluminium imports

TEN months ago the Trump administration took aim at steel and aluminium imports, giving itself a year to decide whether they threatened national security and, if so, what to do about it. On February 16th it concluded that America is indeed under threat. The president has until mid-April to choose whether to respond.

The reports handed to Donald Trump by the Department of Commerce, which led the investigations, describe America as effectively under siege. Its steel industry might struggle to respond to a crisis similar to the second world war, they fret, as foreigners are filling a third of American demand for steel, even as 28% of national capacity lies idle. The share of primary aluminium (the kind smelted from ore, rather than recycled metal) that is imported is 91%, and 61% of local smelting capacity lies cold. Doubters can point out that the Department of Defence requires a tiny slice of American steel supply, and that America’s largest supplier for both metals, Canada, is an ally (see...Continue reading

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The long-term returns from collectibles

BONDS, shares and Treasury bills are all very well, but in the end they are just pieces of paper. They are not assets you can hang on the wall or display to admiring neighbours. Many rich people like to invest their wealth in more tangible form; property, of course, but also collectibles such as art, fine wine and classic cars.

Is that wise? Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School (LBS) have run the numbers for their annual analysis of the financial markets in the Credit Suisse global investment-returns yearbook. Some of these assets have done rather better than others (see chart). Fine wine delivered the best returns; surprising to cynics who might assume that, in the long run, the value of wine vanishes as it turns into vinegar. Really old wine often has historical resonance. A bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild from 1787 was sold for $156,450 in 1985 because it was thought to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

Estimating the returns from these assets, after costs,...Continue reading

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Latvia’s top banking official is accused of demanding bribes

ILMARS RIMSEVICS, for 17 years the governor of Latvia’s central bank, had been due to retire next year. Instead, he is facing calls to resign. On February 17th Latvia’s anti-corruption authority detained him on suspicion of demanding bribes of at least €100,000 ($123,000). That sparked international concern. Mr Rimsevics is a member of the governing council of the European Central Bank (ECB) and privy to the most sensitive monetary-policy decisions.

The prime minister, Maris Kucinskis, says the allegations are so serious that Mr Rimsevics must stand down. But he is staying put. Released on bail on February 19th, the central bank chief says the allegations are a set-up to punish him for cracking down on lax practices. He also says he has received death threats. 

Latvia’s outsized and ill-regulated offshore banking industry has been a headache since the country regained independence in 1991. During the global financial crisis ten years ago, Parex Bank, the largest...Continue reading

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Why low returns are inevitable

WHEN the stockmarket is close to a record high, the chances are that recent returns will have been very strong. The terrible tendency among investors is to assume that those returns will continue. But the higher you go, the harder it is to keep rising at the same pace. 

When I visited America for a story on pensions last autumn, I was struck by how few people failed to grasp this point. Public pensions have return targets of 7-8% for their portfolios. When challenged they tend to cite their 30-year record of achieving those numbers. But that record makes it less likely, not more that they will hit their targets. 

The easiest way to think of this is via the bond market. In 1987 the yield on the ten-year Treasury bond was just under 9%. Since then it has fallen to its current level of just under 3%. So not only did bond investors get a high yield in their early years,...Continue reading

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California Democrats snub Dianne Feinstein

DIANNE FEINSTEIN has served California as a senator for 25 years. She has raised $13m for her 2018 re-election bid; her closest competitor, a state senator named Kevin de León, has rustled up $434,000. So it was humiliating for Ms Feinstein when the California Democratic Party failed to endorse her at its annual convention in San Diego.

Results announced on February 25th revealed that just 37% of delegates voted for Ms Feinstein; 54% chose Mr de León. Candidates need to win 60% of ballots to be awarded the party’s endorsement. Ms Feinstein’s inability to garner that support will make her the first incumbent senator in decades to run in the Golden State’s primary, on June 5th, without official party backing.

The outcome of the convention was not entirely shocking. Viewed as a staunch moderate, Ms Feinstein has never particularly appealed to Democratic activists of the sort who tend to serve as delegates. Much of Ms Feinstein’s ideology is progressive. She has fought zealously for gun control, successfully getting an...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court rebuffs Donald Trump’s call for a quick DACA hearing

WITH a brief order on February 26th, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to Donald Trump’s plans to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The justices, without elaboration or dissent, refused to expedite Mr Trump’s appeal of a lower-court decision stopping him from winding down the programme, which protects some 700,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation and gives them permission to work. The government had asked the Supreme Court to hear its appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal had weighed in—an extraordinary request typically granted only in the midst of national emergency. It seems that Mr Trump’s lawyers overreached: the justices effectively told the administration to stand down and get back in line. They will consider acting only after the case wends its way to them on the prescribed appellate path.  

When Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, announced on September 5th that the programme was illegal and would be ended, a phase-out was established. DACA recipients would have until October 5th...Continue reading

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Duelling Democratic and Republican memos are bugle-toots on a battlefield

Can Eric Greitens hold on to his job?

THE mugshot taken of Eric Greitens after he was taken into custody on February 22nd is not flattering. The usually photogenic Republican governor of Missouri looks drawn, his jaw grimly set. A grand jury in St Louis had just indicted him on a charge of invasion of privacy. If convicted of the felony of which he is accused, the governor will almost certainly lose his job.

The indictment relates to an extramarital affair that Mr Greitens had in 2015 with a hairdresser in St Louis. The married father of two boys admits to the affair, but firmly rejects an allegation that he threatened to blackmail his lover by taking a compromising photograph of her while she was blindfolded in his basement. The indictment states otherwise. “The defendant knowingly photographed [the victim] in a state of full or partial nudity without the knowledge and consent of [the victim] and in a place where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” says the indictment. “The defendant subsequently transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court limits whistleblower protections under Dodd-Frank

WHEN Paul Somers realised that Digital Realty Trust, the real-estate investment company where he was vice-president, was playing fast and loose with securities rules, including hiding $7m in cost overruns, he alerted senior management. Shortly afterwards he was sacked from his $200,000-a-year job. In 2014, Mr Somers sued the company, arguing that he should have been immune from retaliation by whistleblower protections in the Dodd-Frank Act, a 2010 package of Wall Street reforms passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The company countered that Dodd-Frank defines “whistleblower” as someone reporting misdeeds to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), not to internal compliance departments. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saw the law differently, but on February 21st, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the company in Digital Realty Trust v Somers. If Mr Somers wanted his good deed to go unpunished, the nine justices agreed, he would have had to...Continue reading

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Unions are confronted with an existential threat

Labour-saving devices

MARK JANUS could be making history this year. On February 26th the social worker from Illinois will be sitting with his two lawyers in the hallowed setting of the Supreme Court as the justices hear one hour of oral arguments in Janus v American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which asks whether public employees like himself, who choose not to join their designated union, may still be charged a compulsory “agency fee” to support collective bargaining. Mr Janus argues that the fee violates his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, because it forces him to subsidise an organisation whose bargaining position he rejects.

The court’s ruling in the case could determine the future of the labour movement. Though unionism has been in decline for decades, the public sector has remained a stronghold of organised labour. Eighty-four percent of workers today are employed in the private sector; only around 6%...Continue reading

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Life, liberty and the pursuit of parking

This is not a table

AFTER two relatively mild winters, Rahm Emanuel’s ability to manage a snowstorm was put to the test earlier this month when it snowed, with little respite, for nine days. On the worst day of the storm Chicago’s mayor cancelled lessons in public schools to minimise traffic. He deployed more than 280 of the city’s salt-spreaders, asked residents to check on family, friends and neighbours, kept schools open for children who had nowhere to go and asked libraries to double as places to keep warm.

Unlike his predecessor, Richard Daley, Mr Emanuel did not mention “dibs” in his remarks about the snow, though he has in the past conceded that he believes in “sweat equity”. Dibs are a Chicago tradition that divides Chicagoans. If you shovel snow from a parking space and defend it with some old furniture to mark the space, you can claim it for as long as the city is covered in snow. “If someone spends all their time digging their car out, do not...Continue reading

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What happens if Congress fails to make a deal on DACA by March 5th?

NOEMI LUNA was a teenager when she first realised she was not living legally in the United States. “When you’re little you go to school with other kids. You grow up with them and believe you’re the same, that you’re equal,” she muses. But when her peers started getting driver’s licences and travelling out of the country her parents, who brought Ms Luna to America from Mexico when she was two years old, explained such things would not be possible for her. She was undocumented.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy President Barack Obama implemented by executive action in 2012, changed that. The programme allowed undocumented immigrants brought to America as children to study and work in America legally for renewable increments of two years, so long as they had committed no crimes and met certain educational requirements. Now Ms Luna’s future, as well as those of nearly 700,000 other so-called Dreamers, is again uncertain.

In September 2017...Continue reading

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One arm of the Trump administration thinks climate change is a security threat

UNTIL America gets a grand military parade, a drive along the wharf at Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia, is the next-best thing. Destroyers, missile-cruisers, nuclear-powered submarines and, most fearsome of all, two 333-metre (1,092-foot) Nimitz-class aircraft-carriers, are enough to make Americans’ spines tingle and enemies shudder. But the menace that most concerns Captain Dean VanderLey, the chief civil engineer for the navy in the mid-Atlantic region, is one that is undeterred by military might. In the 100 years since the base was first built, the sea level has risen by half a metre. In a major hurricane, he says, while surveying the piers and a road linking them to an airfield, “a lot of this would probably be flooded”.

Captain VanderLey is not alone in fretting about the military consequences of climate change. A report published on January 26th by the Department of Defence (DoD) found that more than half of the 3,500 sites surveyed are already...Continue reading

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Past episodes of presidential wrongdoing have provoked a reaction

PEOPLE who worry about Donald Trump’s presidency worry especially about how he might respond to a national-security crisis. Now they know. American intelligence chiefs have long viewed Russia’s campaign to discredit and influence America’s elections as a security threat. And the 16 indictments unveiled by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the case, imply that the threat is more long-standing, sophisticated and effective than was commonly understood. Such clear evidence of foreign interference would normally constitute a moment for the commander-in-chief to reassure an anxious nation that the attack—in an election year, no less—would be repulsed. But that was not Mr Trump’s response.

The president made no formal comment on the indictments, yet his Twitter feed suggested they stirred in him a range of powerful emotions. He at first rejoiced that Mr Mueller had not accused him of complicity in the Russian sabotage: “The Trump campaign did nothing wrong—no collusion!” Then he...Continue reading

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High-school pupils plan to protest against mad gun laws

Politically motivated

THREE days after Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and shot dead 14 students and three teachers, one of his former schoolmates addressed a gun-control rally. “They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence,” shouted 18-year-old Emma Gonzales, barely pausing to wipe away the tears that were streaming down her face. “We call BS!” Her moving speech, in which that line became a refrain taken up by a chanting crowd, was broadcast around the world.

The school shooting, on February 14th, was America’s deadliest since 2012 when a gunman killed 20 children, six adults and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. But it has been the response of the surviving students, rather than its grim toll, that has kept the tragedy in the news a little longer than usual. The pupils, from Broward County, an affluent area north of Miami, have poured their grief and rage into a new campaign...Continue reading

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Billy Graham’s gentle brand of evangelicalism

BILLY GRAHAM, who died on February 21st at the age of 99, was the most important American evangelical of the past century. He followed in a path that had been walked by a long line of preachers such as George Whitefield, Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday before him. But in some ways he was even more successful. He was close to a long line of American presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. He reached the top ten of Gallup’s annual poll of the most-admired people in the world 60 times, far more than any other American. He preached personally to an estimated 215m people in 185 countries, in giant “crusades” in stadiums, and reached millions more over radio and television. The list of people he touched deeply includes Queen Elizabeth II, who took to inviting him to visit her when he was preaching in Britain, and George W. Bush, who claims that the great turning point in his hitherto dissolute life came when Mr Graham visited his family and “led me on the path and I began...Continue reading

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Canada coddles counterfeiters

“LOUIS VUITTON” handbags for the price of a sandwich. “Rolex” watches that cost as little as a T-shirt. You would not expect to find such obvious fakery at a suburban shopping mall in Canada. But deals of this sort are available at the Pacific Mall in Markham, near Toronto, according to the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). Its latest report on “notorious markets”, published in January, lists the three-floor mall alongside the Silk Market in Beijing, Tank Road in Delhi and El Tepito, an open-air market in Mexico City, as places where people can buy counterfeit goods. It is the first time a Canadian bricks-and-mortar outlet has appeared in the report, which has been published since 2011. “Requests for assistance from local law enforcement have reportedly gone unanswered,” the report complains.

The United States has long alleged that its northern neighbour is soft on piracy, allowing vendors to sell goods and cultural products that infringe trademarks and...Continue reading

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Ricardo Anaya, Mexico’s young hopeful

IT TAKES guts to challenge both Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a messianic, silver-tongued populist, and the residual political machine of Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Ricardo Anaya is as daring as he is ruthlessly ambitious. Having forged a coalition of his own conservative National Action Party (PAN) and two small centre-left outfits, Mr Anaya argues that the presidential election on July 1st is now a two-horse race between himself and AMLO, as Mexicans call Mr López Obrador, the long-standing front-runner. Several opinion polls support that contention. The question that will hang over Mexico during the next four months is whether, in his sharp-elbowed ascent, Mr Anaya has made too many enemies to unite the disparate majority that dislikes AMLO and thus win the presidency.

On the face of things, this is AMLO’s election to lose. Mexicans have rarely been so gloomy or wanted change more. The PRI government of Enrique Peña Nieto is unpopular. Although it achieved...Continue reading

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Refugees tortured in Syria are seeking redress in German courts

Scene of the crimes

SHAPPAL IBRAHIM knew they were coming for him. As soon as the Syrian security forces began repressing anti-government protests he had helped to organise in the spring of 2011, the Kurdish activist went underground. But the goons soon caught up with him. What followed was nearly two years of horror, most of it in Saydnaya, a notorious military prison outside Damascus. “They made me stand naked in my cell for hours, beat me and tortured me with electric shocks,” he says. “There was never enough to eat, and only three or four hours of sleep a night.”

Unlike countless others, Mr Ibrahim made it out: he was released as part of an amnesty in May 2013 and fled to Germany via Iraqi Kurdistan. Along with other Syrians who suffered a similar fate, he has now offered to testify to the office of Germany’s federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, in the hope that his torturers will one day face justice in German courts. Working with the European Centre for...Continue reading

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On the world’s deepest lake, something new: Russian eco-activists

ON AN early winter morning, with temperatures below –20ºC and a fierce wind whipping off the water, Vasily Sutula, the stern, moustachioed director of a nature reserve on the shores of Lake Baikal, happily surveyed a dozen young volunteers. The youngsters declared the day dubak, slang for a freeze deeper than the standard Russian word for cold, kholod, can convey. Yet they had come to work nonetheless. Coats zipped, they set off for the forest to clear dead trees.

The volunteers’ presence is just one small sign of shifting tides in the battle for Baikal, which holds a fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water. Environmentalists won a big victory with the closure in 2013 of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill (BPPM), a belching behemoth that had dirtied the waters for decades. Yet even as the pollution from the mill has waned, tourist flows have waxed, creating new pressures on an ecosystem that UNESCO warns is “under significant...Continue reading

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The European Commission’s odd way of picking its president

WHAT is the best way to enrage a European diplomat? (This is not an attempt at a joke.) You could suggest that his or her government pay more into the European Union budget, or accept a diktat from Brussels to take in more refugees. Urging a speedier cut in national budget deficits rankles in some countries; pressing for more defence spending irritates others. But this week, at least, the most reliable method for inducing puce-faced rage in the Brussels diplomatic corps has been to utter the word Spitzenkandidaten. It falls upon them like a curse.

This frightening-sounding German word translates as “top candidates”, and refers to a method of choosing the president of the European Commission, perhaps the most powerful job in the Brussels firmament. It works like this. Before the election to the European Parliament, the chamber’s political groupings—agglomerations of national parties from across the EU—each nominates a candidate for the commission post. They agree that...Continue reading

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Why 35% of French people cannot name their own prime minister

SEVEN months after their prime minister was appointed in May 2017, fully 35% of the French could not name him accurately in a poll. Next to the hyper-visible President Emmanuel Macron, who hosts global business chiefs at the Palace of Versailles one week and is on the phone every other to Donald Trump, the tall, bearded Edouard Philippe cuts a discreet figure. So much so that he is variously identified in polls as Philippe Edouard, Gérard Philipe (a former actor), or Louis Philippe (a former king). Confusion about Mr Philippe’s name, though, prompts a bigger question: what is the point of him?

France is unusual in having a two-headed executive, devised by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 when the previous parliamentary system had proved unstable. The Fifth Republic’s constitution established a particularly strong executive presidency. But according to precedent the president is meant to stick to big visions and foreign affairs, leaving the prime minister, whom he names, to deal with the grind of daily...Continue reading

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The tiny new party that may hold the key to Italy’s election

Berlusconi’s slender chance

RAFFAELE FITTO is a man in a hurry. The black limousine with darkened windows hurtling through the gathering darkness hits 160kph (100mph) as it rushes him to his next campaign stop. With barely two weeks to go before Italy’s general election, Mr Fitto has just inaugurated his party’s headquarters in Bari, the regional capital of his native Puglia, the “heel” of Italy’s boot, in the deep south. Yet the party he leads, which was founded only in December with the odd name of Noi con l’Italia (NcI, roughly: We’re with Italy), could make a crucial difference to the outcome of the vote on March 4th.

The main pollsters agree that the only electoral alliance with a chance of winning an absolute majority in the next parliament is the one forged on the right by Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister. Vowing to clamp down on illegal immigration and introduce a flat-rate income tax, Mr...Continue reading

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California Democrats snub Dianne Feinstein

DIANNE FEINSTEIN has served California as a senator for 25 years. She has raised $13m for her 2018 re-election bid; her closest competitor, a state senator named Kevin de León, has rustled up $434,000. So it was humiliating for Ms Feinstein when the California Democratic Party failed to endorse her at its annual convention in San Diego.

Results announced on February 25th revealed that just 37% of delegates voted for Ms Feinstein; 54% chose Mr de León. Candidates need to win 60% of ballots to be awarded the party’s endorsement. Ms Feinstein’s inability to garner that support will make her the first incumbent senator in decades to run in the Golden State’s primary, on June 5th, without official party backing.

The outcome of the convention was not entirely shocking. Viewed as a staunch moderate, Ms Feinstein has never particularly appealed to Democratic activists of the sort who tend to serve as delegates. Much of Ms Feinstein’s ideology is progressive. She has fought zealously for gun control, successfully getting an assault...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court rebuffs Donald Trump’s call for a quick DACA hearing

WITH a brief order on February 26th, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to Donald Trump’s plans to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The justices, without elaboration or dissent, refused to expedite Mr Trump’s appeal of a lower-court decision stopping him from winding down the programme, which protects some 700,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation and gives them permission to work. The government had asked the Supreme Court to hear its appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal had weighed in—an extraordinary request typically granted only in the midst of national emergency. It seems that Mr Trump’s lawyers overreached: the justices effectively told the administration to stand down and get back in line. They will consider acting only after the case wends its way to them on the prescribed appellate path.  

When Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, announced on September 5th that the programme was illegal and would be ended, a phase-out was established. DACA recipients would have until October 5th...Continue reading

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