cn3: June 2018

Friday 29 June 2018

After months of preparation, a damp squib on euro-zone reform

YOU would hunt hard for a better illustration of the maxim that the European Union is capable of reforming itself only in times of crisis. The euro summit on June 29th was supposed to be the first proper chance in years for leaders to take tough decisions on boosting the resilience of their common currency. Instead, it turned out to be a stale dessert after the meaty migration debate that had occupied the previous night. The statement issued by the leaders after the summit contained just 220 words.

It was a disappointment for Emmanuel Macron, France's president, who has argued passionately for deep reforms to put the currency on to a more stable footing. Last week he and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, had issued a joint initiative on euro-zone reform that was more ambitious than some French observers had dared hope. Crucially for Mr Macron, the agreement did call for the establishment of a euro-zone investment budget. If the proposal fell well short of the full macroeconomic...Continue reading

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The EU argues till dawn on migration, and achieves little

THERE is a pattern to European Union summits about subjects on which governments cannot agree. First, leaders stay up all night to signal their commitment. Second, they issue a statement sufficiently vague and contradictory to allow everyone to declare victory. Third, officials charged with implementing the agreement argue endlessly over how to interpret it. This sequence, described in a tweet by a former EU official, Shahin Vallée, perfectly describes the EU summit on illegal migration on June 28th-29th. The leaders battled into the pre-dawn hours on June 29th, but the tortuous phrasing of their conclusions—one sentence contained 12 commas—betrayed their inability to find meaningful compromises on the issues that continue to bedevil them.

As ever, the trickiest discussion was on how to share responsibility among governments for migrants who arrive in Europe. The leaders agreed, eventually, to establish...Continue reading

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The EU argues till dawn on migration, and achieves little

The EU argues till dawn on migration, and achieves little

The Trans-Atlantic Catch-Up Trade Has Gone Awry

This was supposed to be the year global markets moved in sync, Europe following the U.S. with higher bond yields and stock prices. But at halftime things don’t look so simple.

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How Amazon Made Pharmacies Ill

Amazon’s purchase of online pharmacy PillPack sparked a sharp selloff in drug supply chain stocks, as the deal shows the retailing behemoth is serious about entering the pharmacy business.

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Investors Can't Get Enough of Wall Street's Sucker's Bets

Funds that have lost money consistently keep attracting inflows. Is it investing or gambling?

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South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world

IN THE cherry-tree-studded hills a couple of hours south-east of Seoul sits a bungalow-style school building made of dark bricks. Its wooden floors are lovingly polished. The brightly coloured walls are lined with books and toys. The only thing it is missing is children. Forty years ago, in the region’s heyday as a mining area, Bobal primary school had more than 300 pupils. Today it has three: one girl and two boys, looking forlorn among the empty chairs. The school is only being kept open because a handful of villagers mounted a campaign to resist the education ministry’s plan to merge it with the one in the next town, ten kilometres away. “Keeping the school is important for the community,” says Kim Jung-hoon, whose daughter is one of the three pupils left. “How will we ever persuade families to stay if there is nowhere to go for their children?”

But the education ministry’s plan, which Mr Kim and his fellow activists see as an assault on their village, is a symptom of a...Continue reading

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Victims of rape in South Asia face further violation from the courts

WHEN a judge in the high court of the Indian state of Rajasthan recently acquitted a man of rape, he noted of the accuser, “Her hymen was ruptured and vagina admitted two fingers easily. The medical opinion is that the prosecutrix may be accustomed to sexual intercourse.” The implication was that only a virgin can really be raped.

The so-called “two-finger test”, in which a doctor examines the vagina to decide if a woman is sexually active, was banned in India in 2014, after the Supreme Court ruled that it was an invasion of privacy (as well as irrelevant). In 2016 Pakistan prohibited the test from being used in rape trials. This year Bangladesh followed suit. Yet in all three countries the test is still widely used.

Last year Human Rights Watch, an international pressure group, found that the test is still routine in Rajasthani hospitals. And this year an Indian human-rights organisation, Jan Sahas, looked at the records of 200 group-rape trials and concluded that the...Continue reading

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Asia is at last waking up to the threat of a trade war

IT IS hard to argue that the United States and China are not on the brink of a trade war. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose higher tariffs on $450bn of imports from China, with the first tranche, on $34bn of Chinese goods, due to take effect on July 6th. Mr Trump expects China to blink. But what if it doesn’t? Other countries in Asia are only now starting to ask that as they realise how much is at stake.

Nowhere would a rupture of global supply-chains have more impact than in East and South-East Asia, which sit at the heart of them. Intermediate goods account for more than half of Asian countries’ exports, on average, and more than three-fifths of their imports. The region is deeply integrated, in often underappreciated ways, argues Deborah Elms of the Asian Trade Centre, which advises governments and business. South Korean screens and Taiwanese chips famously head to China for assembly into iPhones for American end-users; there are countless similar examples. Many Asian companies,...Continue reading

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Local elections in Indonesia prefigure next year’s presidential poll

174,999,999 to go

IN A shady shop porch in central Medan, the biggest city in the province of North Sumatra, votes are being counted. A young man tirelessly unfolds each ballot, holds it up and announces the candidates marked to a handful of onlookers. Behind him, a woman wearing a floral hijab tallies the votes on a large piece of paper that is taped to the shop’s bright blue wall. Polling monitors from assorted political parties count along too. The main race on the ballot, for governor, pits Djarot Saiful Hidayat, the candidate of a coalition led by the president’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, against Edy Rahmayadi, who is backed by an alliance of Islamist and nationalist parties. Early estimates suggest Mr Edy will win easily.

In all, provinces accounting for 175m of Indonesia’s 260m people went to the polls on June 27th, including the four most populous: West, East and Central Java, and North Sumatra. The president, Joko Widodo, known as...Continue reading

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The president of the Philippines wants to change the constitution

NEVER one to stick to a script, Rodrigo Duterte regales audiences with tirades, profanities and anecdotes. A politician forged in town-hall frays, he knows how to capture hearts and headlines. This week he decided to take on God, calling him “stupid” and a “son of a whore”, to predictable uproar. Mr Duterte clearly relishes the spotlight—which has caused some Filipinos to wonder whether he will ever willingly leave it.

Mr Duterte became president two years ago, after winning 39% of the vote in a four-way race. He immediately implemented a series of controversial policies, most notably a bloody anti-drugs campaign. He also imposed martial law on the troubled southern island of Mindanao, a bold step given that a former president, Ferdinand Marcos, used martial law to turn himself into a dictator. Indeed, he allowed Marcos’s embalmed body, previously preserved in a ghoulish shrine in his home province, to be interred in Heroes’ Cemetery in Manila, the capital.

Most voters are...Continue reading

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Iran’s anaemic economy is pushing people over the edge

SIX months after the last round of protests over their country’s anaemic economy, Iranians are at it again. But unlike the demonstrations in December, which began in the provinces, the latest unrest erupted in Tehran’s bazaar on June 25th and spread from there. Anger is growing over rising prices, the plunging value of the Iranian rial (see chart) and the cost of foreign adventurism.

The regime looks worried. Security forces fired tear gas to disperse crowds that gathered at parliament’s gates. Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, the conservative head of the judicial system, threatened those “who disturb the Islamic economy” with execution.

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Senegal’s democracy is being tested by its president

Macky Sall stares down the opposition

TO THE casual observer, all seems well in Senegal. Visitors to Dakar, the capital, fly into a new world-class airport. The economy grew by 6.8% last year and the discovery of natural gas heralds an even brighter economic future. To boot, the national team has performed well at the football World Cup.

But the political graffiti scrawled across Dakar’s walls tell a different story. The messages demand freedom for the political opponents of President Macky Sall, several of whom have been imprisoned. With a presidential election just eight months away, fears are growing that democracy in Senegal, long an example for west Africa, is being subverted.

The political system has been tested before. Unlike most west African countries, Senegal has never had a military coup, but in 2012 the previous president, Abdoulaye Wade, did run for a third term, which the constitution proscribes. Mr Sall, riding a wave of popular anger, defeated...Continue reading

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A new approach to Somali pirates frees more hostages

Off to file his expenses

NO ONE seized by pirates can be considered lucky. But many of the seamen taken hostage by Somali pirates have at least been set free fast, once fat ransoms have been paid. At the height of the piracy scourge off the coast of Somalia almost a decade ago, the average ransom to free a crew and vessel was, by one tally, $3.5m.

Some seamen, however, have languished in captivity for months or even years because their companies balked at coughing up—often because their ship was uninsured, or had run aground, or had been disabled by fire, or had sunk. Crew taken from them were sometimes tortured. “Hard as it may sound, these guys, they don’t have any value,” says John Steed, a former UN man in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

Pirates are still loth to cut their losses by freeing such hostages without payment. Of the few Somali pirates who have given up in this way, most were soon killed, Mr Steed notes, since they could not repay the...Continue reading

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Can foreign observers keep Zimbabwe’s election clean?

Hoping for victory, praying for peace

ZIMBABWEANS shuddered when a bomb went off on June 23rd in Bulawayo, the country’s second city, a few yards from President Emmerson Mnangagwa as he left the podium at the end of an election rally. Would the explosion, which killed two security men, herald a wave of violence against the opposition, as it might well have done if the vengeful Robert Mugabe had still been president?

In the event, Mr Mnangagwa (pictured), who displaced Mr Mugabe in a coup last November, called for calm rather than retribution. He implied that friends of Mr Mugabe’s ambitious wife, Grace, who had wanted the top job, were the likeliest culprits. The main opposition leader, Nelson Chamisa, called for calm, too. With parliamentary and presidential elections set for July 30th, Zimbabweans of all parties are praying for a peaceful poll.

But will it be fair? That is harder to tell. Elections since 2002 have been both violent and rigged. Among the...Continue reading

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How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria

A NEW Syria is emerging from the rubble of war. In Homs, which Syrians once dubbed the “capital of the revolution” against President Bashar al-Assad, the Muslim quarter and commercial district still lie in ruins, but the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street. “Groom of Heaven”, proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. In their sermons, Orthodox patriarchs praise Mr Assad for saving one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria’s victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities. Sunni civilians, once a large majority, followed. More than half of the country’s population of 22m has been...Continue reading

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Tough times for Embrapa, a jewel of Brazilian innovation

AN HOUR’S drive from Brasília, Brazil’s capital, humped zebu cattle take refuge from the heat of the cerrado (tropical savannah) under neat rows of eucalyptus trees. The grove and the cattle belong to the cerrados branch of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Planaltina. Their purpose is to help researchers test how best to alternate crops and livestock in order to turn degraded pastures into productive fields. Besides providing shade (and, eventually, timber), the trees put nutrients into the soil and offset the effects of methane, a greenhouse gas belched by the ruminants. In 2005 such “integrated systems” covered less than 2m hectares (5m acres). Today they occupy 15m hectares, 5% of Brazil’s farmland.

Maurício Lopes, Embrapa’s chief since 2012, believes such know-how will be as valuable as the technology Embrapa invented in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped make Brazil an agricultural superpower....Continue reading

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Doug Ford disrupts Canada’s climate policy

DOUG FORD, who is due to be sworn in as Ontario’s premier on June 29th, will not dally. The “very first item” on his agenda will be to “cancel the Liberal cap-and-trade carbon tax”, he promised after leading his Progressive Conservative Party to victory in an election on June 7th. Motorists are being “gouged at the pumps”, he claimed. “The cap-and-trade, the carbon tax, they’re gone, they’re done,” Mr Ford vowed in the Trumpian cadences that he has brought to Canadian politics.

This will please suburban drivers, who provided many of the votes that gave the Progressive Conservatives 76 of the 124 seats in Ontario’s legislature, ending nearly 15 years of Liberal rule. Ontario’s cap-and-trade scheme, which it shares with the province of Quebec and the American state of California, added about 3% to the price of petrol last year. Canada’s Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, will be less pleased. Mr Ford is taking direct aim at his plan to set a national price on carbon in...Continue reading

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Cuba’s funerals: cheap and especially uncheerful

The chintzy coffins of communism

CUBANS had nine days to mourn Fidel Castro, who died in November 2016. After a state funeral, soldiers escorted his ashes from Havana to Santiago, retracing the route taken by the revolutionary army he led. When someone less important dies, undertakers have to hurry up. Just two funeral homes have refrigeration, and that is reserved for foreigners and VIPs. Because of Cuba’s searing heat, most folk have to be in the ground within 24 hours. Cuba’s nine crematoriums handle a tenth of the 99,000 people who die each year.

Funerals, like education and health care, are free in the socialist state (though cremation costs money). Cubans pay in other ways. Coffins, made by the state-owned forestry company, are flimsy. Pallbearers must carry them with extreme care, lest they fall apart. Government workers get better coffins; children are buried in white ones. With flowers in short supply, mourners make wreaths from twigs and leaves. That horrifies...Continue reading

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Bank Stress Tests Don't Instill Confidence

Setbacks are minor for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, but gaps with the Fed’s view raise concerns.

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Thursday 28 June 2018

China starts easing monetary policy. Or does it?

CHINESE investors often refer in jest to the central bank as “central mama”. The idea is that it can be counted on to provide tender love—that is, policy easing—when market conditions are rough. But during the past couple of years it has been more of a disciplinarian, taking cash away from reckless investors. Its latest move, a cut of banks’ required reserves, has triggered a debate about which school of parenting it subscribes to these days. Is central mama turning soft again, or is she still cracking the whip?

On June 24th the People’s Bank of China said it would reduce the portion of cash that most banks must hold in reserve by 50 basis points. This was equivalent to deploying 700bn yuan ($106bn) in the financial system, or nearly 1% of GDP, which might sound like a healthy dose of liquidity to shore up growth. But the central bank insisted that it was not easing policy.

Many analysts take the central bank at its word. In the past, when it focused on the quantity of money in the economy, reducing required reserves could be seen as a form of loosening. But in recent years it has placed more emphasis on interest rates. Its most important target is banks’ short-term cost of borrowing from each other. That remained stable over the past week at about 2.8% in annual terms, proof that the announcement had little discernible...Continue reading

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The changing world of work

“MONEY often costs too much,” quipped Ralph Waldo Emerson. But a new study suggests that since 1950, the price of buying it with labour in America has fallen. Greg Kaplan of the University of Chicago and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago have linked measures of how Americans today feel about various jobs to changes in employment.

Both men and women are less likely to be farmers, for example, now than in 1950, and more likely to be in management. Women are less likely to be secretaries, and men more likely to be in service-sector jobs. Assuming that people in 1950 felt the same way about particular jobs as people do now, workers today are less sad, less tired and in less pain.

But changes in other measures of well-being, and a separate analysis of men and women, are less uniformly positive (see chart). The economists find that modern employment patterns probably mean that today’s workers are more stressed. And although the jobs women have moved into are ones they...Continue reading

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Italy’s resilient savers are driving consolidation in asset management

THE rumour mill is grinding again. In early 2017 reports swirled of a possible merger between Generali, Italy’s biggest insurer, and Intesa Sanpaolo, the country’s second-biggest bank. That deal came to nothing. But Intesa is still looking for a partner. Now it is said to be in talks with BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, about a stake in Eurizon, the bank’s asset-management unit. Deal or no deal, two things are clear. Italy’s asset-management industry is consolidating. And though investors fret over a populist government and towering public debt, its pool of private savings will keep them keen.

Last year Amundi, a French asset manager, bought Pioneer, the fund-management arm of UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank. Over half of assets under management are owned by 10% of Italians, which makes the wealthier end of the business especially appealing. Mediobanca, an investment bank, last year opened a private bank and bought 69% of RAM Active Investments, a Swiss investment manager. And in May Indosuez, the wealth-management arm of Crédit Agricole, a French bank, acquired Leonardo, a private bank.

There is lots to fight for. Although Italy’s savings rate has fallen by more than half since the 1990s, at 10% of personal income it still beats Britain’s or Spain’s. The financial crisis a decade ago saw assets under management contract by...Continue reading

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Why foreigners are keen buyers of Chinese government bonds

Fighting the resource curse through online gaming

ALAIN LILLE is not pleased. His wildcat oil firm spent a fortune looking for oil in Petronia, a former colony known for cashmere wool, long before anyone else was willing to take the risk. After sealing a deal with the long-ruling government, he was poised to reap the rewards. But in last year’s election, a new president came to power, promising a better deal for the people. Mr Lille fears she will reopen negotiations, further delaying any profits for the company or revenues for the country. She has invited four foreign “experts”, who have never set foot in the country before, to advise her. As he shares these concerns at a drinks reception at Hôtel Capitale, Mr Lille notices one of these foreign advisers sidling up to listen in.

Mr Lille does not exist. Neither does the country, Petronia. They appear instead in a new online game created by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), a think-tank based in New York and London that seeks to improve the management of oil, gas and mineral wealth in developing countries. As a player, you take on the role of that pesky foreign adviser eavesdropping on Mr Lille. As well as the drinks reception, your adventures will take you to the presidential palace, the capital city’s cafés and markets, and the coastal district of Neftala, where the oil was discovered.

In its training courses NRGI has long...Continue reading

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The Trump administration plans to crack down on Chinese investment

PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s view of investment depends on who is doing it. On June 22nd he railed against Europeans exporting cars to America, demanding that they “build them here!” On June 26th he tweeted that all Harley-Davidson motorcycles should be made in America (see article). But when it comes to Chinese investors buying American technology, Mr Trump would prefer a frostier approach.

Investors have feared a clampdown since March, when the administration concluded that China’s unfair actions against American companies merited retaliatory restrictions on Chinese investments in “industries or technologies deemed important to the United States”. Mr Trump directed Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, to come up with options. On June 24th it appeared policy might tighten dramatically, with reports of plans to limit investment in America in the...Continue reading

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The rich world needs higher real wage growth

Harley-Davidson shifts some production out of America

On their bikes

AMERICAN companies “will react and they will put pressure on the American administration to say, ‘Hey, hold on a minute. This is not good for the American economy.’” So said Cecilia Malmström, the European Union’s trade commissioner, on news that Harley-Davidson plans to move some production out of America to avoid tariffs imposed by the EU on motorcycles imported from America. Those tariffs had themselves been introduced in retaliation for American duties on steel and aluminium imports.

President Donald Trump showed no signs of absorbing this salutary lesson. In one of many splenetic tweets about Harley, he said: “If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end.” Other American firms are no doubt watching. Will any follow?

Harley is unusually vulnerable to Mr Trump’s escalating trade war. Not only have its inputs, namely metals, risen in price, but it makes a fair chunk of its sales, 16%, in Europe. It puts the cost of...Continue reading

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Carrot, a Silicon Valley startup, takes a novel approach to funding IVF

Injecting some innovation

IN 2016, 71,000 babies were born in America after in vitro fertilisation (IVF), triple the number two decades earlier and 1.8% of all births. The share of births that are by IVF varies around the world, rising as high as 4% in Denmark, Israel and Spain. One consistent trend, however, is growth. Fertility technology is steadily improving and women are choosing to delay child-bearing, meaning more couples need medical help to conceive.

For many would-be parents the main impediment to conception is now not science but finance. Data for 2017 gathered by ICMART, an international non-profit organisation, show vast variation in prices. A single IVF attempt costs around $3,000 in Japan, $4,000 in Cameroon and up to $10,000 in Europe. In America it costs more. The countries with the highest IVF birth rates are those where taxpayers pay for treatment. (There are a few exceptions, such as Croatia, where medical tourism pushes the IVF birth rate...Continue reading

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User-rating systems are cut-rate substitutes for a skilful boss

IT OFTEN arrives as you stroll from the kerb to your front door. An e-mail with a question: how many stars do you want to give your Uber driver? Rating systems like the ride-hailing firm’s are essential infrastructure in the world of digital commerce. Just about anything you might seek to buy online comes with a crowdsourced rating, from a subscription to this newspaper to a broken iPhone on eBay to, increasingly, people providing services. But people are not objects. As ratings are applied to workers it is worth considering the consequences—for rater and rated.

User-rating systems were developed in the 1990s. The web held promise as a grand bazaar, where anyone could buy from or sell to anyone else. But e-commerce platforms had to create trust. Buyers and sellers needed to believe that payment would be forthcoming, and that the product would be as described. E-tailers like Amazon and eBay adopted reputation systems, in which sellers and buyers gave feedback about transactions. Reputation scores...Continue reading

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Russia will raise pension ages that date back to Stalin

WHEN the Soviet Union started paying pensions in the early years of Josef Stalin’s rule, the retirement age was set at 60 for men and 55 for women. It has not been raised since. Experts have urged change for decades, but squeamish politicians have balked. Vladimir Putin declared in 2005 that it would not go up as long as he was president.

So it was with trepidation on June 14th, a month into Mr Putin’s fourth presidential term, that the government revealed plans to raise the retirement age to 65 for men and 63 for women. They announced the move along with an increase in value-added tax from 18% to 20%, hoping to bury the bad news under the opening of the World Cup that day.

Yet Russians have taken notice. Some 2.5m have signed an online petition opposing the change; according to a government pollster, Mr Putin’s approval ratings dropped to “only” 72% on June 17th, levels not seen since before the annexation of Crimea. “They want to solve the government’s money problems at...Continue reading

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Women-only clubs get a makeover

MOST Finns celebrate the summer solstice with a long night of sweaty sauna sessions and binge-drinking. But this year, on an island off the coast of Raseborg, an hour-and-a-half’s drive from the capital Helsinki, a group of women from around the world gathered for the opening of a private island resort to cleanse their bodies and minds of toxins—including, it seems, the patriarchy. “SuperShe Island” is a place for ambitious women to network while experiencing a “vacation on steroids”, says Kristina Roth, the resort’s German-American founder. Men are strictly banned.

The island resort is just one of a crop of new women-only spaces hoping to bring a sea-change in the way women network. The Allbright, a new club in London, focuses on creating business networks for working women. An American firm called The Wing is an all-female co-working space, and plans to open a London branch later this year. Her Global Network, originally from Sweden, helps women find business contacts in 14 cities...Continue reading

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The obstacles on Macedonia’s road to the EU

SOLZA GRCEVA’s face curdles into a sneer as she traces the betrayal of her nation. Over coffee in Skopje, the capital of the country that may soon no longer officially be known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Ms Grceva outlines her grievances. The government’s “illegal” agreement with Greece last month to rebrand the country North Macedonia, she says, was a “gesture of weakness and capitulation”. What Macedonians call themselves will now be judged in Athens, forging an “Orwellian” state. Ms Grceva, a former MP now running a new centrist party, is far from alone in her anger. When your columnist asks for the bill, it turns out to have been settled by a sympathetic eavesdropper.

The name issue is one of the sillier disputes in a region hardly lacking them. The Greeks believe that plain “Macedonia” implies a claim on their northern regions of the same name; a suggestion the (ex-Yugoslav) Macedonians consider offensive and absurd. To say that passions run deep on this is...Continue reading

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Erdogan inaugurates a new political era in Turkey

AMID a frenzy of honking, a young woman leant out of the window of a car, one of the hundreds that besieged the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in Ankara, making an Islamist salute with her left hand and an ultranationalist one with her right. Outside the building, thousands of cheering, singing AK supporters awaited their leader, fresh from his big victory at the polls. “This is Turkey’s new liberation,” yelled a man hoisting a flag emblazoned with the image of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the coat of arms of the Ottoman empire, his voice barely audible over the din. “The West will not boss us around,” said another man, a schoolteacher. It was the evening of June 24th, day one of what Mr Erdogan calls the New Turkey, a synthesis of Islamic nationalism and Ottoman nostalgia, and possibly the last day of the old republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.

Hours earlier, despite predictions of a much closer race, Mr Erdogan and his party, plus their ultranationalist...Continue reading

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Confusion over immigration and crime is roiling European politics

AS MAYOR of the small Swedish town of Haparanda, Peter Waara has had his share of problems with refugees and with crime. The first refugees arrived in September 2015 (“the middle of moose-hunting season,” Mr Waara recalls), when Haparanda, which sits on the Finnish border, was deluged by busloads of Syrians and Iraqis who thought Finland would welcome them. They were met by the Soldiers of Odin, a far-right group, who demonstrated to stop them at the border. Police had to be called in to protect the migrants. Today a few hundred refugees remain in Haparanda. The town’s crime problem, however, mainly involves European drug-traffickers operating from Sweden.

Haparanda is typical: Europe’s immigration problems and its crime problems are mostly unrelated. But they are inseparable in politics. In Sweden, where an election is due in September, the far-right Sweden Democrats blame immigrants for a recent spate of shootings. The party’s leader, Jimmie Akesson, claims immigration has made Sweden a place where women are “gang-raped, mutilated and married off against their will”. Polls show them in a virtual tie for second place with the centre-right Moderates, and only a few points behind the ruling Social Democrats.

Similar fears of immigrant crime have helped create a political crisis in Germany. The interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has threatened...Continue reading

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Why Hot Money Is a Problem for Britain at Just the Wrong Time

Britain seems to be developing a hot-money problem just as its economic future is becoming more uncertain. That’s a big risk for local business and foreign investors alike.

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The Good Times Are Over for China's Property Stocks

The yuan’s decline is the latest blow for the sector’s heavily indebted companies, which have loaded up on dollar debt.

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Justice Kennedy is retiring. What happens now?

LAST June, progressives breathed a sigh of relief when Anthony Kennedy (pictured) stuck around to serve a 30th term on the Supreme Court. But a year later, with Justice Kennedy announcing he is ending his tenure on July 31st 2018 and handing another high-court vacancy to President Donald Trump, the left is gasping for air. Abortion, environmental protections, gay and lesbian rights, racial equality and voting rights are all newly vulnerable.

As the court’s median justice for more than a decade, the 81-year-old Reagan appointee has sided with the liberals in certain key cases. He stood up for abortion rights and protected affirmative action at universities. He helped to save the anti-discrimination protections at the heart of the Fair Housing Act in 2015. Most famously, he wrote four gay-rights rulings, culminating in a 2015 decision opening marriage laws to gays and lesbians. Yet Justice Kennedy closed his third decade on the court in a decidedly rightward pose. This term the court issued 63...Continue reading

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A Frozen Foods Deal to Melt the Competition

Conagra Brands and Pinnacle Foods, two leaders in the fast-growing frozen food category, are finally merging after months of speculation.

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Wednesday 27 June 2018

Emmanuel Macron leads a new effort on European defence

WHEN Emmanuel Macron, the French president, gave his first big policy speech on Europe at the Sorbonne last September, it was so packed with ideas that many have long since been forgotten. On June 25th, however, one of them—a “European intervention initiative” (EI2)—was signed into being by nine European Union countries at a meeting of defence ministers in Luxembourg. The idea is both to prepare a coalition of willing countries for joint European action in crises, and to tie post-Brexit Britain into the continent’s future military co-operation.

Mr Macron’s idea was born out of French impatience with the EU’s efforts at defence co-operation, known inelegantly as Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO). Fully 25 countries signed up last December to this arrangement, which commits members to developing joint defence capabilities. Germany has been keen on this mechanism, which keeps efforts at joint European defence within existing EU structures. Its critics, though, regard...Continue reading

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Old Economy Could Trump the New in Chinese IPOs

While the size of handset maker Xiaomi’s IPO has withered under intense scrutiny, an old-fashioned Chinese infrastructure stock’s float could prove a better bet.

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Tariff Talk Has Slammed the IPO Window Shut for Car Makers

Luxury car makers are in the eye of the trade storm unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump. One consequence: Hoped-for IPOs of Aston Martin, Volvo Cars and possibly Jaguar Land Rover are looking unlikely, even though most brands are reporting record sales.

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Memory Unlikely to Fade Fast for Chips

Consolidation and growing demand for cloud and AI servers have kept chip prices stable—and high.

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Banks Are Playing Chicken With Brexit

Banks are running out of time to prepare for a sudden break in relations between the U.K. and Europe.

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Tuesday 26 June 2018

The justices vote 5-4 to uphold Donald Trump’s travel ban

ON JUNE 26th, after months of legal wrangling over Donald Trump’s executive orders banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the Supreme Court effectively put an end to the battle. Officially, the five-justice majority’s opinion in Trump v Hawaii, which upholds the third version of the travel ban, sends the matter back to lower courts to ask again whether Mr Trump’s policy violates a constitutional bar on religious discrimination. But it is unlikely that further scrutiny will yield a different result. The most recent proclamation, from September 2017, fulfilling the president’s campaign promise to keep Muslims out of America is consistent, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, with both immigration law and the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court traditionally defers to presidents in matters of immigration and national security, and Chief Justice Roberts left no doubt, early in his opinion, that nothing about Donald Trump changes that. The...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court upholds voting maps that had been ruled discriminatory

IT HAS not been a good month for voting rights at the Supreme Court. On June 11th, the justices gave the green-light to states experimenting with new ways of removing voters from the rolls. A week later, the court told America that procedural tangles prevented it from doing anything to curb partisan gerrymandering—at least for now. On June 25th the five conservative justices formed a bare majority to mostly absolve Texas of findings it had discriminated against Latinos when lawmakers redrew congressional and state-legislative maps following the 2010 census.

Abbott v Perez was written by Justice Samuel Alito, author of Husted v Philip Randolph Institute, the voter-purge ruling earlier in the month. In both cases, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strident dissenting...Continue reading

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Has the Big Yuan Short Finally Arrived?

Trade wars are brewing, Chinese stocks are tanking and investors are getting nervous about Chinese growth again.

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Why Visa and Mastercard Should Thank the Supreme Court, Too

A court victory for Amex will help the three big card companies continue charging high fees and hurt upstart payment companies.

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Private Equity: So Hot Even Second-Hand Funds Can Sell at a Premium

The market for unwanted stakes in private-equity funds used to be where investors who desperately needed cash offloaded holdings at steep discounts.

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Chip-Equipment Makers in Crosshairs of Trade War

Semiconductor-equipment firms have reason to worry about latest escalation.

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Monday 25 June 2018

Why Size Alone Won't Help Old Media Beat Netflix

Even if incumbents such as Disney and AT&T bulk up, tech companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple will still have more leeway to spend.

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The Trade War's First Casualties

With their escalating trade feud showing little evidence of hurting their economies, the U.S. and China aren’t close to backing down. Investors may get squeezed between the two giants before one of them cracks.

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An emergency EU summit makes little progress on migration

IT WAS billed as the summit to save Angela Merkel. Instead it simply highlighted the unending difficulty that Europe’s leaders face in managing illegal immigration from outside the continent. At Mrs Merkel’s request, 16 EU leaders convened in Brussels today for an impromptu summit. The chancellor is under siege from a coalition partner that wants to turn away asylum-seekers at Germany’s borders. That, she fears, could trigger a domino effect across the EU, endangering its passport-free Schengen system. Having earned herself ten days breathing space at home, she arranged the meeting to work on what she calls a “European solution”.

But Italy’s new government, a populist coalition with a strong anti-immigrant streak, has other ideas. Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister, brought to Brussels a ten-point “Multi-level Strategy for Migration”. Much of it trod familiar ground. The Italians want “disembarkation” points in North Africa, where migrants, including those saved at sea,...Continue reading

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Sunday 24 June 2018

Why Indonesia is so bad at lawmaking

Parliament needs cleaning up

THIS May, to mark the start of Ramadan, Sharp Indonesia, an offshoot of a Japanese electronics giant, launched the world’s first halal fridge. Not a fridge for halal food; an appliance that is itself supposedly sharia-compliant (though the Koran does not mention fridges). At a press conference the firm’s executives donned batik shirts and huddled around it, giving a cheery thumbs-up.

The stunt was primarily a marketing exercise, but soon Indonesian shoppers will be able to snap up many more improbable, halal-certified goods. For that they can thank a vaguely worded law which comes into effect in October next year. It stipulates that most products must be halal-certified, without precisely defining which products it means. Lawyers argue that it could apply to inedible goods, such as fridges, and even to services like consulting.

That is by no means Indonesia’s only woolly law....Continue reading

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India’s national government and the city of Delhi are feuding

AMONG the world’s megacities, Delhi, India’s capital, has a good claim to several dubious distinctions: foulest air, hottest summer, most precarious water supply. It is currently in the running for a new distinction, too: the world’s most dysfunctional metropolis. As a dust-storm swirled earlier this month, its chief minister and other elected officials held a sit-in and hunger strike at the residence of the lieutenant-governor, who is appointed by the central government. The main opposition leaders held a similar protest at the chief minister’s office. And the city’s top-ranking bureaucrats pursued a work-to-rule boycott of their elected bosses.

Considering the way Delhi’s government is set up, it is a wonder that the city functions at all. Like India’s 29 states, Delhi is run by a government drawn from an elected assembly. In contrast to the states’, however, the powers it exercises are severely restricted. The unelected lieutenant-governor must sign off on nearly any...Continue reading

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In Myanmar, sex education comes from smartphones

MASTURBATION does not exist in Myanmar—not the practice, which is presumably common enough, but the word itself, which is absent from the government-approved dictionary. When it comes to sex, accepted terms are hard to find. Linguists disagree as to whether “vagina” and “penis” have proper equivalents in Burmese. Most people simply point at their body parts or use euphemisms, says Nandar, a local activist who translates feminist literature. Parents tend to speak coyly of “flowers” and “pumps”—if they talk to their children at all about the birds and the bees.

In theory, sex education is offered in schools, but most teachers skip the topic. They are often too embarrassed to talk about sex in the classroom. Most parents do not want them to anyway (it could arouse children’s curiosity, many argue). Last year an MP from the ruling National League for Democracy proposed giving the subject more prominence. The government did not take up her suggestion.

Laws about sex are a...Continue reading

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Pakistan’s army is using every trick to sideline Nawaz Sharif

EARLIER this month a spokesman for Pakistan’s army decided to respond to claims that it was attempting to fix next month’s general election. It would not be the first time. In 1990, for instance, the army-dominated spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, funnelled cash to opponents of the left-wing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), helping to secure its defeat. The military spokesman, General Asif Ghafoor, sternly denied that any such “engineering” was going on this time around. But a pile of evidence to the contrary is poking through the camouflage.

The object of the army’s meddling is Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted as prime minister by the courts last year. Mr Sharif had been the beneficiary of the army’s largesse in 1990, when he began his first stint as prime minister. But they soon fell out.

He resigned under pressure from the army in 1993 and was toppled again by it in a coup in 1999. Mr Sharif returned to power in 2013 eager to assert civilian control of foreign and...Continue reading

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Democracy is foundering in the Maldives

Mr Gayoom’s new milieu

A LOW-SLUNG archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Maldives faces long-term danger from the global rise in sea level. In the shorter term, it risks sinking in a different sense. Ten years after being launched, its experiment with democracy is listing badly, unable to keep afloat.

The 19-month jail sentence handed down on June 13th against an ex-president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, is just the latest of many distress signals. Mr Gayoom, who is 80, ran the Maldives for three decades with an iron fist before being voted out of office in 2008. He was convicted of aiding an alleged coup plot against his own half-brother, Abdulla Yameen, the country’s president since 2013. His imprisonment marks the end of a long feud between the two siblings and also the culmination of a campaign by Mr Yameen to clear the way, ahead of national polls set for September 23rd, for his own re-election.

The campaign got going in February, when Mr Yameen...Continue reading

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China has militarised the South China Sea and got away with it

LESS than three years ago, Xi Jinping stood with Barack Obama in the Rose Garden at the White House and lied through his teeth. In response to mounting concern over China’s massive terraforming efforts in the South China Sea—satellite images showed seven artificial islands sprouting in different spots—the country’s president was all honey and balm. China absolutely did not, Mr Xi purred, “intend to pursue militarisation” on its islands. Its construction activities in the sea were not meant to “target or impact” any country.

As Steven Stashwick points out in the Diplomat, a journal on Asian affairs, these denials were always suspect, given the growing evidence of radar installations and bomber-sized bunkers made of reinforced concrete. Last month came the revelation that China had installed anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles on three islands in the Spratly archipelago west of the Philippines—far, far from its own shores. (Some or all of the Spratlys are...Continue reading

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Latin America searches for redemption on the football pitch

THIS football World Cup is barely a week old, but already Latin America has stolen the limelight. There have been memorable performances on the pitch: Mexico’s humbling of Germany, Peru outplaying Denmark but contriving to lose, flashes of magic from Brazil and three goals for Diego Costa, Spain’s Brazilian-born striker. There have been shocks, too, such as Argentina’s draw with Iceland and a battling ten-man Colombia losing to Japan. But more than the players, it is the fans who have caught the eye.

Multitudes of Latin Americans have packed the stadiums in deepest Russia as if they were attending home games. According to FIFA, the organisers, five of the seven countries that (after Russia itself) snapped up most tickets in advance were Latin American. They were Brazil (73,000), Colombia (65,000), Mexico (60,000), Argentina (54,000) and Peru (44,000). Many of the fans from the United States (89,000), too, are Latinos who may support their countries of origin, and to them should be added Latino...Continue reading

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Friday 22 June 2018

A Supreme Court ruling heralds the end of tax-free online shopping

FOR 50 years, savvy Americans have enjoyed a sales-tax loophole. By ordering a product from an out-of-state company, consumers could often avoid paying the tax their states and cities impose on purchases. Consumers had two Supreme Court decisions to thank for the savings: long-standing rulings that have prohibited states from requiring stores with no physical presence within their borders to collect sales tax on purchases. But on June 21st, the justices voted 5-4 to end this half-century-old gift.

The ruling in South Dakota v Wayfair featured an unusual line-up. Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, who all but invited the lawsuit by noting his displeasure with the precedents in 2015, was joined in his majority opinion by three conservatives (Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas) and one liberal (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). The dissent was penned by the rather conservative chief justice, John Roberts, and signed by three of his liberal-leaning...Continue reading

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Beijing Paddles Hard as a Bear Market Threatens

Chinese stocks are down nearly 20% from their most recent high. Beijing has to balance its desire for market stability with a need to keep up the impression of calm.

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For Investors, Europe is Back to Muddling Through

Confidence can more easily be lost than won. After 2017’s strong growth and political calm brought hopes that Europe was finally turning a post-crisis page, 2018 is back to unfinished business.

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Germany becomes the last big Western power to buy killer robots

TO THE relief of commanders and the dismay of pacifists, Germany’s armed forces have crossed a threshold. On June 13th a Bundestag committee voted to approve the spending of nearly €1bn ($1.1bn) to lease from Israel five drones which can be equipped with deadly weapons. Hitherto Germany has been the only big Western country not to buy “killer robots”. In part this reflects antipathy to America’s use of remotely controlled missiles for “targeted killings” of terrorist suspects (and the people standing next to them) in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

The Israeli order does not instantly change that situation: the machines are described as “weaponisable” but not “weaponised”. A new decision will be needed to endow them with destructive power. However, critics and supporters feel their eventual use in combat is almost certain. In the words of Ulrike Franke, a German expert on unmanned aircraft, “It would be absurd to pay for the use of these expensive drones and then not to arm...Continue reading

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The incredible disappearing French Socialist Party

They ran out of other people’s votes

THE 19th-century mansion on the chic left bank of Paris, with its tiled floors and sweeping stone staircase, was for decades an iconic part of French Socialist history. François Mitterrand arrived there in 1981 to celebrate his victory as the first Socialist president of modern France. Ségolène Royal, the party’s presidential candidate in 2007, waved valiantly to crowds from the building’s balcony after her defeat. Late last year, however, the cash-strapped party had to sell its grand headquarters and find new premises in a modern office in an unfashionable suburb. The episode serves as a cruel metaphor for the ailing party.

Last year, a party that has supplied two Fifth Republic presidents and nine prime ministers was rudely rejected at the ballot box. Its presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, came in a humiliating fifth place with just 6% of the vote. At the legislative elections that followed the party was almost...Continue reading

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How Matteo Salvini is dominating Italian politics

When in Rome, persecute Roma

ANGELA MERKEL is not the only head of a European government with a disruptive interior minister. Since entering the Italian cabinet on June 1st Matteo Salvini has managed for different reasons to annoy the governments of Tunisia, Malta, France and Spain. And he can scarcely have endeared himself to Mrs Merkel by openly making common cause with his German counterpart, Horst Seehofer. On June 18th Mr Salvini even picked a fight with Cambodia. In the latest of several excursions outside his ministerial bailiwick, Mr Salvini, who is also a deputy prime minister and leader of the hard-right Northern League, threatened to ban ships carrying Cambodian rice from docking in Italian ports. He claimed the rice, which is exempt from EU tariffs, was competing unfairly with Italian produce.

With his bull-in-a-china-shop approach Mr Salvini has dominated the political agenda from the start, even though his party is the junior partner in a coalition with the...Continue reading

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The politics of migration in Germany

GERMANY’S centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) can move fast and brutally against a leader whose time is up. In 1999 Angela Merkel knifed Wolfgang Schäuble in a steely newspaper op-ed implicitly linking him to the corruption scandal that had consumed Helmut Kohl, his political mentor. Support for the then-leader dissolved and within weeks she had taken his place.

Ghosts of the past haunt the party. Now it is Mrs Merkel, twelve-and-a-half years into her chancellorship, who is wobbling. The Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s more conservative sister party, faces an election in its home state of Bavaria in October at which it fears the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany will deny it its traditional majority. To dissociate themselves from the chancellor’s decision to keep Germany’s borders open during the refugee crisis, the Bavarians are pushing her to the brink. Whether she goes over it depends on the CDU.

The dispute concerns an immigration plan presented to Mrs...Continue reading

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Europe’s passport-free zone faces a grim future

FIVE junior politicians, chuckling away on a pleasure boat. There is only one known photo of the day, in 1985, when Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to end border controls between their countries. It was a low-key start for what was to become one of the European Union’s signature achievements. The Schengen accord, named after the Luxembourgish village nestled along the river on which it was signed, is the world’s only large passport-free zone. It now covers 26 countries, including four non-EU members.

The village itself, just yards from borders with France and Germany, took a while to cotton on to the potential that history had given it, but now offers tourists a museum, sculptures made from Luxembourgish steel and two slabs of the Berlin Wall. The most emotional reactions come from visitors outside the zone, says Martina Kneip, the museum’s director. In the 2000s eastern Europeans made pilgrimages to the village whose name had become synonymous with the freedom...Continue reading

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Turkey’s President Erdogan may yet be defeated

MUHAMMAD SHEIKHOUNI came to Turkey from Syria in 2006, long before his native country plunged into civil war, and fell in love with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A decade later, after setting up a tourism and construction company in Bursa, the former seat of the Ottoman empire, the businessman joined the president’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. This year, after Mr Erdogan called early elections for June 24th, Mr Sheikhouni decided to run for a seat. In the meantime, he also changed his last name—to Erdogan.

Inside his election tent, pitched on one side of a large square in Bursa, Muhammad Erdogan can hardly peel his eyes from the president’s image, printed on one of the walls, as he delivers his talking points. “There’s no one else like our reis,” he says, using the Turkish word for chief. “He opened his doors to the people of Syria, he helped the Somalis and he stood up for Palestine. He’s not only the leader of Turkey, but of the whole Muslim...Continue reading

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Thursday 21 June 2018

How Sierra Leone is beating tropical diseases

SIXTEEN years ago Hannah Taylor woke up with a fever. Her legs began to swell to four times their normal size. They have been that way since. People shunned her because of their putrid smell. “For six years, I thought my big fut was caused by evil witchcraft,” she said outside her shack in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.

The lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) ailing her was caused by a mosquito-born infection that could have been treated safely with a pill costing no more than $0.50 before it progressed. Instead, microscopic worms infested her body, causing catastrophic and irreversible damage.

Elephantiasis is one of 17 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that affect 1.5bn people, disabling children and keeping multitudes poor. Huge progress has been made against these diseases since an agreement in 2012 by pharmaceutical firms to donate billions of dollars’ worth of drugs. Even so, many African countries struggle to get the necessary...Continue reading

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The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians is running out of cash

YOU may think that after a dozen years of blockade by Israel, three devastating wars and the rule of a harsh Islamist government, life in Gaza could hardly get worse. But the prospect of another war and a dire shortage of cash to pay for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, better known as UNRWA, mean that it can. Last year President Donald Trump’s administration said it would withhold $305m of the $365m that has annually serviced the agency, which has supported most of Gaza’s 2m people for the past seven decades. Now the cash is running out.

Moreover, since the end of March a series of protests near the border fence with Israel has seen at least 120 Gazans shot dead by the Israeli army. Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, has been sending a defiant wave of home-made rockets and mortars into Israel, plus makeshift kites laden with devices to set fire to Israeli farmland. Israel has responded with air raids. Gazans are terrified that Israel may be preparing for another full-blooded war to...Continue reading

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Why Arabs are watching a pirated World Cup feed

ARABS have little to cheer in this year’s World Cup. The four teams from the region lost all seven of their early matches. Russia and Uruguay beat both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Morocco beat itself, scoring an own goal against Iran. Tunisia lost to England. The real competition is off the pitch: in the Middle East, even watching the game is fractious.

A Qatari network, beIN Sports, paid a small fortune for the broadcast rights. It had planned to recoup that by charging fees of up to $150 per subscriber. But last year four Arab countries imposed a blockade on Qatar. The embargo excluded beIN from its largest market, Saudi Arabia, where it had 900,000 customers. And it left Saudis wondering how they would watch their team, which had qualified for the first time since 2006.

The answer came from a mysterious group of hackers. In August someone launched a bootleg version of beIN, cheekily known as “beoutQ”. With a cheap decoder, Saudis (and other Arabs) can watch with only a slight delay....Continue reading

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Boris Becker, African diplomat

His Excellency, Baron von Slam

WHEN people say “diplomatic service”, they seldom mean an envoy who can slam an ace over the net at 130 miles per hour. Yet Boris Becker, a German former tennis star who could once do just that, told a London court on June 14th that he should be excused from proceedings because he has diplomatic immunity.

After Mr Becker was declared bankrupt last year he faced claims to his assets from a private bank. Instead of coughing up, Mr Becker said that he is, in fact, a representative of the Central African Republic (CAR), a failed state wedged between Congo and Chad. This, Mr Becker said, should end the “farce” of his being pursued by creditors.

In fact the farce had only just begun. On June 19th officials in the CAR’s foreign ministry told AFP, a newswire, that the diplomatic passport was a fake, possibly from a batch of passports stolen in 2014. Mr Becker had claimed to be a sports envoy for the country, working out of its...Continue reading

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