Sisi takes on Egypt’s judiciary

THOUGH it presented no evidence, the Egyptian government wasted little time in blaming the Muslim Brotherhood for the car bomb that killed Hisham Barakat, the prosecutor general, in June 2015. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president, naturally concurred—he had, after all, booted the Brotherhood from power—but he also had harsh words for the judicial system. “The arm of justice is being chained by the law,” said Mr Sisi at the time. He did not mean this as a compliment. Long appeals delay executions, he grumbled. (Much of the Brotherhood’s leadership sits on death row.) As the president left Mr Barakat’s funeral, he dressed down a crowd of judges, saying: “No courts should work this way.”

Most Egyptian judges come from the country’s elite and are “fundamentally pro-regime and fundamentally conservative”, says Nathan Brown of George Washington University. Some took to issuing mass death sentences to hundreds of Brotherhood members after the group was forcibly removed from power. But the president has nonetheless appeared vexed by the judiciary’s protracted procedures, its semblance of independence and its occasional checks on his power. The Court of...Continue reading

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The sorry state of Arab men

AHMED, who lives in Cairo, allows his wife to work. “At first, I insisted she stay at home, but she was able to raise the kids and care for the house and still have time to go to work,” he says. Still, he doesn’t seem too impressed. “Of course, as a man, I’m the main provider for the family. I believe women just cannot do that.”

Ahmed’s outlook is widely shared throughout the region, where men dominate households, parliaments and offices. Chauvinist attitudes are reflected in laws that treat women as second-class citizens. A new survey by the UN and Promundo, an advocacy group, examines Arab men’s views on male-female relations. (One of the authors, Shereen El Feki, used to write for The Economist.) It finds that around 90% of men in Egypt believe that they should have the final say on household decisions, and that women should do most of the chores.

So far, so predictable. But the survey sheds new light on the struggles of Arab men in the four countries studied (Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine) and how they hinder progress towards equality. At least two-thirds of these men report high levels of fear for the safety...Continue reading

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Why South African politicians campaign at funerals

TO BECOME a leader of South Africa’s ruling party takes a talent for speaking sideways. The African National Congress (ANC) forbids open campaigning for leadership positions, a holdover from more secretive times as an underground resistance movement. Instead, during ANC election years such as this one, politicians turn up at a succession of Sunday church services, memorial lectures and funerals of party stalwarts to give thinly disguised stump speeches. The trick is saying enough, but not too much, since flagrant campaigning can mean disciplinary action.

The outdated rules will be challenged at an ANC policy conference in late June. But for now, ahead of a five-yearly leadership vote in December, where Jacob Zuma will be replaced as party president (though his term as the country’s president lasts until 2019), covert campaigning persists.

The queen of the non-campaign event is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a former head of the African Union who hopes to succeed her ex-husband. She pops up at everything from an “Israeli Apartheid Week” lecture in the mining-belt city of Rustenburg to the opening of a megachurch in Thokoza township. Though jobless at present, Ms...Continue reading

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The journey of an African cotton boll

HUNDREDS of bright blue T-shirts with the slogan “smile” pass down a row of tables where they are inspected, folded, bagged and tagged. From here they will embark on an arduous journey of more than 1,000km (600 miles). A lorry will haul them from Kampala, Uganda’s capital, across Kenya to the port of Mombasa. A week later they will be loaded onto a ship for Hamburg, Germany. There they will be sold for €10 ($11) each by Bonprix, part of a family-owned mail-order firm with sales of $13bn a year.

These shirts began as cotton bolls in fields on the equator in the far west of Uganda, where the red-earth plains turn upwards into the Rwenzori mountains. Their odyssey reveals much about Africa’s manufacturing potential. By following in the footsteps of China and Bangladesh, which began their industrial revolutions with textiles, Africa could in theory create millions of jobs. But as the T-shirts’ travels also illustrate, it will not be easy.

Several African countries have tried in the past to become tailors and cloth-makers to the world. Nigeria’s northern cities of Kaduna and Kano were once home to textile mills that employed 350,000 people. Yet these...Continue reading

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Chief Justice Roberts leans to the left

Wild and unpredictable

ON MAY 1st John Roberts, America’s conservative chief justice, listed left to form a rare majority with the Supreme Court’s four liberal members. Cities may have grounds to sue, the quintet said, when banks make predatory loans to racial minorities. The timing, for some, was suggestive. With Neil Gorsuch now in Antonin Scalia’s old chair and retirement rumours flying about Anthony Kennedy, the 80-year-old perennial swing justice who has spent nearly three decades on the bench, could Chief Justice Roberts be emerging as the court’s new median vote?

The chief, who runs hearings with an amiable professionalism from the middle seat on the bench, may indeed find himself in the ideological centre of the court—perhaps with the left-leaning Stephen Breyer, who wrote the predatory-loans ruling—if Justice Kennedy hangs up his robe. But he has been rehearsing for this part for some time. In 2012 he infuriated the right by voting to save Obamacare from its first legal assault. He came to the health-care law’s rescue again three years later, this time with Justice Kennedy in tow. Also in 2015, he abandoned his conservative...Continue reading

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How much do sanctuary cities stand to lose?

Knock, knock

HOLDING signs saying “Amnistia para Latinos!” and “My dreams are not illegal”, protesters gathered in a park on Chicago’s mostly Latino West Side on May 1st. Chris Kennedy, who is running for governor of Illinois next year, joined the crowd, as did Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator. Seeking to reassure his audience, Mr Durbin noted that a spending bill now in Congress stipulates “not one penny” for a new border wall, no new officers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which pursues illegal immigrants, and “no penalty for sanctuary cities like Chicago”.

Illegal immigrants and their defenders are both fearful and perplexed. In January Donald Trump signed an executive order for “enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States”. This threatens to pull federal funding from cities and counties that fail to help the federal government deport illegal immigrants. For a city like Chicago, which is beyond broke, that could spell disaster. But it is not at all clear how much money is at stake.

Police and mayors in some 300 cities and counties turned to sanctuary policies for pragmatic reasons....Continue reading

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Will Texas go the way of California?

JOE STRAUS, the Speaker of the Texas House, asked his colleagues to show respect for each other, and a sense of civility, while debating a bill that would ban sanctuary cities. Eddie Lucio III, a Democrat, put the point a bit differently. Republicans control the legislature by 95 seats to 55; still, Mr Lucio warned, they should proceed with caution: “We are very emotionally charged. Do not mess with us today.”

So much for that. Early on April 27th, after a fraught debate, the Texas House approved a remarkably stringent bill. SB4 will penalise local officials who fail to co-operate with federal immigration authorities by allowing police to inquire into the legal status of people who are merely detained (even in traffic stops), rather than arrested. Amendments that would have created exemptions for nurseries and women’s shelters were struck down. It is perhaps the most sweeping measure of its kind since 2010, when Arizona passed a measure that came to be known as the “Show Me Your Papers” law. Republicans in Texas may come to regret their achievement.

The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, had made a ban on sanctuary cities one of his priorities for the legislative session that began in January. Polls have found that roughly half of Texans—and a large majority of Republicans—are in favour of the idea. SB4 sailed through the Texas Senate in...Continue reading

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America’s allies are figuring out Donald Trump

ONE question about Donald Trump obsesses foreign governments more than any other: will this president, who campaigned as an “America First” insurgent, continue to trample norms in office? Strikingly often, foes and friends answer this in different ways.

Such hostile or rival powers as China, Russia or Iran increasingly find that Mr Trump’s policies resemble those pursued by his predecessors. Candidate Trump called China a trade cheat, bent on “rape” of the American economy. President Trump now calls that country’s leader, Xi Jinping, a “highly respected” and indispensable partner in efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions—a position not far from that adopted by Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before him. Trump aides no longer talk about a grand bargain with Russia, offering President Vladimir Putin a free hand in Ukraine in exchange for iron-fisted support in the fight against Islamic State: a loud advocate for such a deal, Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, was fired for lying about contacts with Russian envoys. Nor has Mr Trump torn up an Obama-era deal to freeze Iran’s nuclear programme, although he calls it a...Continue reading

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How one American city is coping with a broken state budget

DAN ZIELINSKI, director of the planetarium at Jenks High School in Oklahoma, whizzes through his greatest hits. First he projects onto its dome a 3D image of a human heart; next comes the Sistine Chapel, then the solar system. The planetarium is an impressive asset for a high school, as is its aquatic centre, with an Olympic-size pool and grandstand seating. But there is a hitch, says Bonnie Rogers of Jenks Public Schools: filling the new buildings with teachers is much harder than erecting them.

At once bountiful and hard-pressed, the school district covers a well-heeled suburb of Tulsa and spans the Arkansas river to take in part of the city proper. The financial paradox has a simple explanation. The shiny facilities were paid for by municipal bonds, but teachers are financed by the state, and similar top-ups for their salaries are not allowed. In Oklahoma, state education funding has withered: since the crash of 2008 spending per pupil has been slashed by 27% in real terms, the biggest fall in America. Some districts run only four days of classes a week. Teachers earn much more across the border in Texas. The area is an extreme case of a wider trend, in which cities and their...Continue reading

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Private schools are doing worse in Washington, DC

IMAGINE you are a poor parent in Washington, DC. You assumed you would send your child to a public school. But you have been offered a voucher worth up to $12,000 towards tuition at a private one. Should you use it?

Until recently the evidence suggested that you should. In 2004 Congress created the DC Opportunity Scholarship Programme, the first school-voucher scheme directly subsidised by the federal government (states and charities subsidise many others). Since then up to 2,000 families a year have been handed vouchers to attend private school after winning lotteries. In 2010 a study found that 82% of pupils offered a voucher went on to graduate from high school, compared with 70% of similar peers who attended public schools.

Studies of Milwaukee, which introduced vouchers in 1990, have found similar effects on graduation rates. A 2015 study of a privately funded programme in New York found that blacks who received vouchers had higher rates of college enrolment. In Vermont the value of a house is higher if it is in an area that offers school vouchers, suggesting that parents will pay to become eligible for them.

Yet evidence is piling up on the other side. In...Continue reading

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New York’s railways are in terrible shape

ON MARCH 24th an Amtrak train derailed in New York’s Penn station, hitting a regional commuter-line train. The resulting delay affected 250,000 passengers on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) and New Jersey Transit, commuter lines which share Amtrak’s tunnels and tracks in and around Penn Station. Ten days later another Amtrak train derailed, this time taking out a set of points and eight of Penn station’s 21 tracks. The delays and cancellations lasted a week. Then on April 14th, just as the Easter weekend began, a New Jersey Transit train got stuck for three hours in an approach tunnel. This caused long delays on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) the busiest passenger railway line in the country. On the same day a false report of gunfire at Penn triggered a stampede in which 16 were hurt. New York’s tabloids now call America’s dingy, claustrophobic and busiest railway terminus “Pain Station”.

The station’s 600,000 daily users will soon feel more pain. Amtrak, which owns and operates the station, tracks and tunnels, said last month that it will need to shut down tracks to do repairs. These will take place over 44 days, mainly weekdays, in the summer. The Partnership...Continue reading

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Ivanka Trump and the push for paid parental leave

WHEN Ivanka Trump described her father as a “tremendous champion of supporting families” in Berlin last week, she was jeered. She was referring to Donald Trump’s positions on paid family leave and women in the workplace; her audience had more his misogynistic language in mind. Yet on paid family leave the president should not be dismissed—during last year’s campaign he became the first Republican presidential nominee to tout a national paid maternity leave plan.

Nothing has come of his proposal yet and no mention was made of it in Mr Trump’s first budget. Perhaps that it is a good thing; Mr Trump’s suggested plan needs improvement. It would give women six weeks paid leave after giving birth; it does not mention fathers. That could harm women’s prospects at work, by making employers reluctant to hire women of child-bearing age. There are signs of a possible rethink on this. In his first official speech to Congress in February Mr Trump said his administration wanted “to help ensure new parents have paid family leave”. Ms Trump has since suggested that she wants the leave to be available to men as well as women.

Mr Trump has said the leave will be funded through savings...Continue reading

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Republicans sign up for political pain

THROUGH the troubled seven-year history of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s health-care law, most Americans have agreed on one thing. They like the provision which ensures that people with pre-existing medical conditions can buy health insurance at the same price as everyone else. Even when more than half of Americans disapproved of “Obamacare”, more than four in five supported this bit of it. That simple political fact explains why the latest Republican attempt to rewrite the health-care law, which seemed likely to come to a vote in the House of Representatives soon after The Economist went to press, is probably doomed.

When the Republicans who control the House tried to reform Obamacare in March, their bill did not even make it to a vote. The fatal blow was struck by the Freedom Caucus, a group of deeply conservative legislators, who thought the bill left too much of Obamacare intact. In particular it changed, rather than abolished, subsidies for those buying health insurance for themselves (instead of getting it from an employer, as most Americans do). Obamacare’s subsidies are targeted at low- and middle-earners. The Republican plan, by...Continue reading

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The Curious Case of Converging Yield Curves

What’s the difference between Europe and the U.S.? Not that much, to judge by one bond-market measure.

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Facebook's Social Climbing Has Its Price

Five years ago, Facebook had some trouble convincing investors it was worth $100 billion. The social network is worth more than four times that value now, and hence has an even higher bar to clear.

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HSBC Finds Success, but Not Where It Expected

HSBC’s revenues improve, but not thanks to southern China expansion plan.

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Euro-area GDP growth outpaces America’s

THE appeal of GDP is that it offers, or seems to, a summary statistic of how well an economy is doing. On that basis, the euro-area economy is in fine fettle; indeed, it is improving at a faster rate than America’s. Figures released on May 3rd show that GDP in the currency zone rose by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2017, an annualised rate of around 2%. That is quite a bit faster than the annualised 0.7% rate reported for America’s GDP.

These figures probably overstate the gap between the two economies. In recent years, first-quarter estimates of GDP growth in America have later been revised upwards substantially. Still, the euro-zone economy is clearly picking up speed, even as America’s goes through a soft spot. A jump in car sales in March saw Europe as a whole overtake America as the world’s second-largest market (behind China). Euro-zone manufacturing grew at its fastest pace for six years in April, according to the purchasing managers’ index, a closely watched...Continue reading

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Price-bots can collude against consumers

MARTHA’S VINEYARD, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, is a favourite summer retreat for well-to-do Americans. A few years ago, visitors noticed that petrol prices were considerably higher than in nearby Cape Cod. Even those with deep pockets hate to be ripped off. A price-fixing suit was brought against four of the island’s petrol stations. The judges found no evidence of a conspiracy to raise prices, but they did note that the market was conducive to “tacit collusion” between retailers. In such circumstances, rival firms tend to come to an implicit understanding that boosts profits at the expense of consumers.

No one went to jail. Whereas explicit collusion over prices is illegal, tacit collusion is not—though trustbusters attempt to forestall it by, for instance, blocking mergers that leave markets at the mercy of a handful of suppliers. But what if the conditions that foster such tacit collusion were to become widespread? A recent book* by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, two experts on competition policy, argues this is all too likely. As more and more purchases are made online, sellers rely increasingly on sophisticated algorithms to set prices. And...Continue reading

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Korean Stocks Hit Record Despite Scary Nuclear Rhetoric

South Korean shares reach all-time highs Thursday, brushing aside concerns about a potential military conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

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Iron Buckles Under Tighter Chinese Credit

Tough talk on curbing credit rippled through commodities markets Thursday. But the much more gradual slowdown in actual lending tells a different story.

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Puerto Rico declares bankruptcy at last

THE government of Puerto Rico said in 2015 that the island could not pay its debts. Yet it was only on May 3rd that it kicked off the biggest bankruptcy case in America’s history. Public-sector debts total almost $74bn (around 100% of GNP). The drawn-out fiscal crisis has both imperilled Puerto Rico’s economy and upended the island’s politics.

Something akin to bankruptcy is possible only because of a federal law passed in 2016. Until then, the island’s legal status as a territory afforded it no escape from its debts (were Puerto Rico a state, its public utilities could have declared bankruptcy). The law established a “financial oversight board”, appointed in Washington, with the task of reaching a deal with bondholders. But it also allowed for bankruptcy-like proceedings should negotiations fail.

A two-thirds majority of bondholders would have forced all of them to accept a reduction in the value of their debt. Yet agreement was always unlikely. Puerto Rica’s constitution says payments to holders of so-called “general obligation” bonds have priority over all other expenditure. But another group of creditors have first dibs on revenue from the sales...Continue reading

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Shake Shack's Fat Valuation Isn't Healthy

Shake Shack shares are down 5% so far this year and have fallen 26% since the closing price on the day it began trading in January 2015—among the worst performers of so-called fast-casual dining chains.

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Smoother Sailing as AIGAwaits New Captain

American International Group’s solid quarterly results should help reassure skittish investors that the company is headed in the right direction even as it searches for new leadership.

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Fed Will Fight Even a Slow Economy

The central bank is still on track to raise rates twice this year despite weak economic growth.

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Drug Pricing Gets Worse, a Raid by the Feds Doesn't Help

Price declines appear to be accelerating ahead of earnings for big drug companies.

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Hamas announces a new policy platform

IT WAS a dramatic final act for Khaled Meshal, soon to be the ex-leader of Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip and hopes to run all of biblical Palestine. After months of speculation he unveiled a new policy document meant to amend (though not replace) the militant group’s founding charter of 1988. Most strikingly, it endorses the creation of a Palestinian state in just the West Bank and Gaza. As such, it moves a bit closer to the “two-state solution” that has been the aim of American-led peace talks for more than two decades. Hamas has never accepted it. But now, it says, Palestinian statehood is a “formula of national consensus”, although it still thinks that peace with Israel is anathema.

Its document is also notable for what it does not say. The anti-Semitic language of the charter of 1988 is not repeated. Nor is the declaration that Hamas is a “wing of the Muslim Brotherhood”. The new document makes no mention of the pan-Islamist group, and Mr Meshal made this separation explicit at a press conference on May 1st in Qatar. “We are a part of the intellectual school of the Brotherhood,” he said. “But we are an independent Palestinian...Continue reading

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What Apple Can't Buy

In the case of Apple’s growing cash hoard, there is actually less than meets the eye because most of which resides offshore.

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The Number That Shows Volkswagen's Recovery Is Underway

Volkswagen’s namesake brand, tarnished by fraudulent diesel emissions data and inefficient business practices, is suddenly looking almost as profitable as its peers

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It's Springtime for Investing in Europe

Europe, for all its political threats, is quietly outperforming. A lift to nominal growth should help further.

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Reliability Pays for BNP Paribas Investors

French bank boosted by stronger investment banking recovery than European rivals.

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Apple's Marginal Gains Fail to Please

Apple manages a small gain in gross margins despite rising component prices for its iPhone.

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The China Debt Crisis Is Still Ripening

A regulatory crackdown and rising bond yields are making headlines again in China. But widespread problems aren’t likely until corporate revenue growth starts weakening again as well.

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Instagram Saps Snap and Flatters Facebook

Facebook is now benefiting from sharpened focus on its photo-sharing app Instagram. That has catapulted the social network’s market value north of $440 billion, the fifth highest in the S&P 500.

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High Stakes in Big Pharma's Latest Cancer Race

Merck & Co.’s blockbuster cancer drug faces a big test next week.

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The Supreme Court says cities may sue banks over predatory lending

IN 2012, John Roberts, America’s conservative chief justice, angered conservatives when he formed a majority with his four liberal colleagues to save Obamacare from its first major legal attack. Three years on, in 2015, he did so again to uphold campaign-finance rules for judges. Later that spring, he and Justice Anthony Kennedy teamed up with the liberals to rebuff a second assault on Obamacare. On May 1st, the moderate side of Mr Roberts reappeared when he once again shuffled to the left to stand up to banks that had targeted racial minorities for subprime loans. But if a prediction in Justice Clarence Thomas’s partial dissent proves accurate, caveats in the majority opinion may seriously undermine the ostensible liberal victory.

In Bank of America v City of Miami, the Supreme Court considered whether Miami may attempt to recoup losses...Continue reading

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Matteo Renzi is back in Italian politics, for now

“I CAN’T stay sitting on the sidelines,” sighed Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister of Italy, towards the end of his campaign for re-election as leader of the governing Democratic Party (PD). “I’m not capable of just looking on.”

As of April 30th, he need do so no longer. After the briefest of sojourns in the political wilderness, Mr Renzi won a decisive victory in a public ballot organised by the centre-left PD. Though dubbed a “primary” it was open to any Italian resident prepared to pay the party €2 ($2). Mr Renzi claimed to have taken fractionally more than 70% of the vote, though both his share of the ballot and the reported turnout, of almost 2m people, were contested by his closest rival, the justice minister, Andrea Orlando.

Mr Renzi, who resigned as prime minister in December after losing a constitutional referendum, had quit as the PD’s secretary-general in February to force this vote of confidence in his leadership. After the defeat of...Continue reading

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The Hot-Air Model of Chinese Asset Markets

Chinese regulators are cracking down on stock and bond speculation. Real-estate markets are, however, suddenly doing just fine. This is unlikely to be a coincidence.

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Investors in DryShips Are Not Completely Crazy

There is a method to shareholders’ madness in buying the sinking shares of George Economou’s DryShips.

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Investment Banking's Winners and Losers---In Europe, Mostly Losers

The signs were that a great investment banking rebound was coming. But with the big five U.S. banks and four of Europe’s largest having reported, the revenue recovery doesn’t look as strong as investors might have hoped.

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Macron, Renault and the Future of French Capitalism

The likely next French president has a striking record of interventionism at the country’s largest car maker.

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AMD Chips Away at the Hype

Chip maker AMD anticipates growth for this year, but stock has run too far ahead of itself.

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An Awkward Embrace for AXA and AllianceBernstein

A management shake-up at AllianceBernstein brings it closer to majority shareholder AXA, but it is unclear why.

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Coach Browses the Sale Rack

As Coach’s turnaround takes shape, a buying spree might be next.

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Will Trump's Tax Plan Succeed?Ask Yahoo

Yahoo shares have become a barometer for investor expectations about tax cuts.

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China Looks to Export Auto Overcapacity on Slow-Growth World

China makes too many cars and wants to make even more. Auto makers everywhere should worry about the spillover effects.

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Donald Trump skipped the White House correspondents’ dinner

“He made that up,” said Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times on CNN on the morning of April 30th, adding that “he does that sometimes.” Mr Baquet was referring to President Donald Trump’s claim, made to an adoring crowd at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania the day before, that the New York Times had to apologise for the way it had covered Mr Trump during the presidential campaign. It had not. Mr Baquet said the Times was tough and aggressive in its coverage of the president, but always fair.

Mr Trump’s speech in Harrisburg was remarkable not for the familiar boasting about his achievements, the ritualistic promises to build his wall, his talk about lawless immigrants and his vow to repeal and replace Obamacare, but for the amount of time he spent whacking the media. For almost 15 minutes, at the start of his speech, he talked about the failing Times, which he said could not even sell their valuable real estate in Manhattan lucratively, and had to...Continue reading

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An EU summit shows unity in the face of Brexit

“BRITAIN has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe.” Like many lines delivered by Sir Humphrey, the roguish civil servant in Yes Minister, a British television comedy from the 1980s, this carried the ring of truth. But on April 29th it became clear that the current British government has achieved the opposite. One month after Theresa May, the prime minister, triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, notifying the European Union of Britain’s intention to leave, the club’s 27 other leaders met in Brussels to approve a set of negotiating guidelines for the two-year Brexit talks to come. They rubber-stamped the text within minutes of sitting down, and applauded themselves for doing so. Donald Tusk, who chaired the summit as president of the European Council, said it had been far easier to keep unity among “the 27” (as they have come to be called) than he anticipated. 

The Europeans...Continue reading

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America’s economic growth slows to 0.7%

What's Keeping GM Going Strong Probably Won't Last

Most multinationals performed better outside the U.S. in the first quarter. Not so the Detroit car makers, which barely made any money outside North America. Their home bias will eventually become a problem.

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Put a Kitten in Your Tank: Big Oil Gets Less Bold

Exxon Mobil and Chevron quarterly results show a shifting emphasis that will affect big oil’s results in future commodity cycles.

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