The hardships of doing business in Africa

IT IS a little after 10pm when the world’s oldest serving passenger ship makes her first stop. Rolling on a gentle swell, small wooden boats pull up alongside its riveted hull. Lights from the deck illuminate the packed vessels; ropes are flung up and tied to railings. Women in billowing wraps come on board with their suitcases, legs briefly flailing as they are pulled through the hatch. Men load enormous bags into a net hanging from a crane. In the other direction, boxes of gin, batteries, bags of clothes and, at one point, a sewing machine, are passed down perilously by hand. Miraculously, nothing and nobody falls into the black water.

So goes trade on Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest lake. The ship is the MV Liemba, brought to central Africa as the Graf Goetzen by German colonists in 1913. Originally built in Lower Saxony, she was transported in 5,000 boxes by rail to Kigoma on the north-eastern shore of the lake and reconstructed there. During the first world war she served as a troop transporter and gunboat until 1916. After several skirmishes, fearing capture by either the British or the...Continue reading

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Nigeria’s foreign-currency shortage

DURING Muhammadu Buhari’s stint as military ruler of Nigeria in the 1980s, Fela Kuti, a well-known Afrobeat musician, was locked up for the offence of possessing foreign currency, to the tune of £1,600. More than three decades later Mr Buhari is back in office, elected this time, and the issue of who gets access to foreign currency, and what they can do with it, remains as contentious as ever in Nigeria.

Last November officers of the State Security Service (SSS), the main domestic intelligence agency, arrested money-changers in cities across the country, in what was seen as a response to the tanking value of the naira on Nigeria’s foreign-exchange markets. The central bank has for months tried to keep the naira stable at about 315 to the dollar, after supposedly floating it last June, but a shortage of foreign currency combined with high demand for dollars has caused the naira to lose as much as 38% of its value on the black market since then.

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Jordan plays it safe

IF ONLY he knew which way to turn. Last week King Abdullah of Jordan went to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to discuss how to stabilise Syria under the continued rule of Bashar al-Assad. This week he has been in Washington, DC, anxious to explore how Jordan might help President Donald Trump to implement his idea for carving up Syria into safe zones.

Playing great powers off against one another has long been a Hashemite trademark. King Abdullah’s great-great-grandfather, the Sharif of Mecca, dallied with both the Ottoman and British empires, before going for British gold. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 King Abdullah received envoys from both Saddam Hussein and President George W. Bush, auctioning his backing to the highest bidder. Now, as funding from Saudi Arabia dries up, the king (via the Russians) is in contact with the Saudis’ arch-rival, Iran, whose forces operate on his borders with Syria and Iraq. He once sounded the alarm over a “Shia crescent” extending Iran’s influence to the Mediterranean; now that it is materialising he is coming to terms with it.

Such realism goes against...Continue reading

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Cracking down on African street vendors

You can’t do that here

RUNNING away is part of life, explains Meddy Sserwadda, eyeing the road. Each morning he buys belts from a market in central Kampala, the capital of Uganda, selling them on a downtown street for a small profit. He works without a licence—the city government has stopped issuing them—and flees when enforcement officers approach. “They don’t want us to make the city dirty,” he says, crouched beside some fugitive mango-sellers. Officials have twice confiscated his goods. His cousin, who is also a street vendor, has spent time in prison.

For Mr Sserwadda, and many others in Africa, street vending is a means of survival. But city authorities see it as an eyesore, a nuisance and a threat. Those in Lagos, in Nigeria, try to ban it entirely with a thuggish unit called “Kick Against Indiscipline”, which mostly seems to kick small traders. In Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, they try to wash away vendors with water cannon. In Kampala, which launched a fresh crackdown in October, arrested traders are swiftly churned through a city court. Most cannot afford to hire a lawyer or pay fines of up to 600,000...Continue reading

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India’s biggest state goes to the polls

IF IT were a country, Uttar Pradesh (UP) would rank just ahead of Brazil in population, right next to Britain in land area and close to Lesotho in poverty. Measured by the complexity of its politics, though, India’s most populous state is second to none. With a plethora of faiths, castes and political allegiances, spiced up by garish nepotism, rank criminality and a first-past-the-post voting system prone to wild swings, elections in UP are always raucous and notoriously tricky to predict.

Yet they are important. The state’s 140m voters directly elect a sixth of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament; those MPs include Narendra Modi, the prime minister, as well as Rahul Gandhi, a high-up in India’s main opposition party, Congress. The legislature that sits in the state capital, Lucknow, also appoints a substantial share of members in India’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha.

The landslide capture of 73 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats is what clinched a sweeping majority for Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 general election. But the opposition’s lingering hold on the state assembly, dating from local...Continue reading

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An assassination rattles Myanmar

KO NI was shot in the head at close range in broad daylight. He was waiting for a taxi outside Yangon’s bustling international airport, holding his three-year-old grandson in his arms. A prominent lawyer and adviser to the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party, he had just returned from Indonesia, where he had been part of a delegation studying democracy and conflict resolution.

Mr Ko Ni was also a Muslim and a prominent defender of religious minorities in a country seething with anti-Muslim sentiment. The climate has worsened since attacks on Burmese border guards last October that have been blamed on the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority group. Since then the Burmese army has taken a scorched-earth approach in northern Rakhine state, home to the largest concentration of Rohingya. Human-rights groups and international monitors have accused the army of torching villages and raping and murdering many of their inhabitants. Mr Ko Ni, who was not himself Rohingya, spoke against the law that long ago stripped them of citizenship. That was daring: most people close to the government see the Rohingya as interlopers from Bangladesh, with no right...Continue reading

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How North Korea depicts the political upheaval in the South

“NOTHING can stop the South Korean people’s righteous fight to drive out the darkness of dictatorship and…usher in the dawn of a new democracy.” The phrase could almost be mistaken for the rallying cry of one of the millions of South Koreans who have joined weekly protests to unseat their democratically elected president, Park Geun-hye. But it actually appeared last month in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of a dark dictatorship.

Since an influence-peddling scandal surrounding Ms Park erupted in October, the chance to jeer at her misfortune—North Korea routinely insults her as a “miserable political prostitute”—has been too good for its propagandists to pass up. They have published news and pictures of the demonstrations with impressive speed, and cheered Ms Park’s impeachment in December by South Korea’s National Assembly.

Public protests against the government of the South are “pure gold” for the North’s regime, says Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, a group that works with defectors. Yet denigrating the South is not as easy as you might think. In its latest...Continue reading

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Japan’s government has legalised casinos, but they are not popular

4% of GDP

MOST forms of gambling are banned in Japan, but many Japanese still like to have a flutter. Over ¥23trn ($203bn) is waged annually on pachinko, a noisy variant of pinball. Add in lottery tickets, plus horse, boat and bicycle racing—the only other types of betting allowed—and you have a vast industry. Pachinko players alone spend more than the combined betting revenue of all the casinos in the world’s top gambling resort, Macau.

Japan’s government has struggled to convince citizens that the current strictures should be relaxed. When the Diet legalised casinos in December after years of political wrangling, a poll by NHK, the country’s public broadcaster, put support for the move at just 12%. The leader of Komeito, a party with Buddhist roots that is part of the governing coalition, voted against the bill. Critics said it would exacerbate problem gambling and attract “anti-social forces”, a euphemism for yakuza gangs.

Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, insists casinos will be only one part of family-friendly resorts, with hotels, shops and conference facilities. In an...Continue reading

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How Peter Thiel became a New Zealander

“IT WOULD give me great pride to let it be known that I am a New Zealand citizen,” Peter Thiel wrote in his application to become one in 2011. “I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future”. Yet Mr Thiel, a German-American billionaire, seems to have managed to contain his pride in the five years since the application was approved. His status only became public knowledge last month, after documents detailing a property purchase were dug up by the New Zealand Herald, a newspaper.

The news provoked outrage in certain quarters. Would-be New Zealanders must normally spend the better part of five years living in the country before becoming citizens. Mr Thiel had visited the country only four times when he lodged his application. The government of the day granted him citizenship nonetheless, under a rule that allows the normal requirements to be waived under “exceptional circumstances”.

Mr Thiel’s application, released by New Zealand’s government on February 1st, stressed his contribution to the economy. Mr Thiel had set up a venture-capital fund in Auckland before applying...Continue reading

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Okinawa: tourist paradise and bristling fortress

AT THIS time of year pack ice grinds the beaches of northern Japan, but in the Ryukyu Islands in the south farmers are cutting sugar cane. The Japanese archipelago spans an immense distance: from Cape Soya in northern Hokkaido a smudge on the horizon reveals Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East. From the tiny island of Yonaguni, last in the Ryukyu chain, you can sometimes make out the mountains of eastern Taiwan.

Over lunar new year the Ryukyu Islands, which together make up Okinawa prefecture, were heaving with holidaymakers. Okinawa has a growing reputation as an island paradise for all tastes. Package tours poured families from mainland China into the airport at Naha, the capital, for winter sun, duty-free malls and hearty stir fries—spam is a speciality. Some 400km farther south, a cruise ship nosed between coral reefs into the main port of Ishigaki island and disgorged Taiwanese tourists in search of the local black pearls. A few adventurers even made it to Yonaguni, where they dived among the hammerhead sharks or stood on the quay in Kubura to watch the fishermen bring in their daily haul of swordfish. The island lies in the middle of the life-giving...Continue reading

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The president of the Philippines admits his war on drugs has been dirty

EVEN Rodrigo Duterte, who initiated a bloodthirsty campaign against drug-dealers and drug-users on becoming president of the Philippines last year, and who brooks almost no criticism of his war on drugs, had to admit that the police had gone too far.

Policemen from the national drug squad, including senior officers, falsely accused a South Korean businessman of involvement in narcotics. They hauled him off to the national police headquarters in Manila, demanded ransom from his family, pocketed the money and then strangled him, burning his body and flushing the ashes down a lavatory.

After the National Bureau of Investigation, a separate agency, revealed all this, Mr Duterte ordered a pause in the campaign to give the police time to purge their ranks. He now wants the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, another independent force, to lead the war, which he says will continue until his term ends in 2022. Ronald Dela Rosa, the director-general of the police, said he was disbanding all its drug squads. He also instructed the entire force to observe a day of prayer (pictured).

When running for election last year, Mr Duterte promised to rid the...Continue reading

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What to expect when the presidents of Brazil and Argentina meet

PRICKLY nationalism is trending in the rich world, but in South America’s two biggest countries the talk is of partnering up. On February 7th Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s president (shown on the left), plans to visit his Brazilian counterpart, Michel Temer. They will promise to encourage trade and to improve a relationship that is frostier than it should be. There are grounds for hope, but also for scepticism.

For most of the 20th century Brazil and Argentina were more rivals than partners. In the 1970s they nearly embarked on a nuclear arms race; until the mid-1980s Brazil’s military-strategy textbooks taught that the likeliest war was with its southern neighbour. Brazil’s population and economy dwarf those of Argentina, though Argentines are richer (see chart). That makes it hard to reproduce anything like the Franco-German collaboration that drew Europe together. When Brazil and Argentina agree, it is usually on nationalist ideology rather than on openness. That was the case in the 1950s under the autocrats Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Perón in Argentina; and during the 2000s, when both countries adopted variants of left-wing...Continue reading

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The Odebrecht scandal brings hope of reform

PERCHED on a sandy hill overlooking Lima’s oceanfront is a 37-metre-high statue of Christ, a crude copy of the one that looks majestically down on Rio de Janeiro. It was unveiled in 2011 by Alan García, then Peru’s president. Now Peruvians see it as a monument to corruption. It was built with a donation of $800,000 from Odebrecht, Brazil’s biggest construction company, which has admitted that it paid $29m in bribes to secure contracts in Peru under the three governments that preceded the current one.

In the largest anti-corruption settlement in history, reached in December, Odebrecht revealed to authorities in the United States, Brazil and Switzerland that over 15 years it had paid nearly $800m in bribes related to contracts for more than 100 construction and engineering projects in a dozen countries. In Brazil, Odebrecht was at the centre of a cartel that gouged Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company; its former boss, Marcelo Odebrecht, is serving a 19-year jail sentence. The settlement showed that in nine other Latin American countries the company paid a total of $388m in bribes to government officials and their associates.

To do...Continue reading

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In Cuba, app stores pay rent

CUBANS, like citizens of most countries in the digital age, are familiar with app stores. But theirs have actual doors, windows and counters. Los Doctores del Celular, a mobile-phone repair shop a few blocks from Havana’s Malecón seaside promenade, is one example. Inside, a Super Mario effigy, kitted out with lab coat and stethoscope, keeps vigil while technicians transfer apps to customers’ smartphones via USB cables attached to the shop’s computers. Although the United States’ embargo on Cuba makes it hard to buy apps and other services online, “Cubans are quickly picking up on app culture,” says Jorge-Luis Roque, a technician. A bundle of 60-70 apps costs $5-10. Customers delete the ones they don’t want.

The bricks-and-mortar app store is an ingenious Cuban response to digital deprivation. The island has some 300 public Wi-Fi hotspots, up from none two years ago. But connections are slow and, especially by Cuban standards, expensive; they normally cost $1.50 an hour. Adhering to the American embargo, app publishers like Apple and Google block downloads in Cuba. Music lovers can browse the iTunes store, but cannot buy songs or apps;...Continue reading

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Spiking

MURDER, which grew rarer for 20 years, is on the rise again. But by how much? In 2015, the number of murders increased by 11% nationwide. During 2016, an escalation of gang violence in Chicago left 764 people dead in a city where 485 had been killed a year before. A dispute ensued over whether the Windy City was simply an isolated example or a barometer of a wider problem. National statistics for 2016 will not be released for eight months, but to get an early sense of the answer The Economist has gathered murder statistics for 2016 for the 50 cities with the most murders. These places contain 15% of the country’s population and around 36% of murder victims. Our numbers show that, in 2016, murders increased in 34 of the cities we tracked. Three cities experienced a spike in deaths sharper than the 58% suffered by Chicago. Since cities tend to reflect the country as a whole, this suggests that the murder rate is rising at its fastest pace since the early 1970s.

Today’s violence needs to be set in context. Despite the recent uptick, the murder rate in our 50 cities was lower in 2016 than it was in 2007, and for the...Continue reading

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Farmers and Texans would lose most from barriers to trade with Mexico

MEXICO sells America more goods than America sells Mexico, and it enrages President Donald Trump. In 2015 the difference was $58 billion (0.3% of GDP). That is enough, thinks Mr Trump, to justify rewriting the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which allows goods to flow across the Rio Grande free of tariffs. Yet the trade deficit masks bigger figures: America sends almost $240bn in goods to Mexico every year. Were NAFTA to disappear in a renegotiation-gone-wrong, many Americans would pay a price—and not just as consumers faced with dearer avocados. Which American producers would suffer?

Suppose, optimistically, that each side followed World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. Then, tariffs would revert to so-called “most favoured nation” rates. (That might sound vaguely friendly, but it simply means neither side can offer a different deal from what it gives to any other WTO member.) By matching these tariffs to trade flows for about 5,000 goods, The Economist has estimated which states’ exporters would be worst-affected by the levies.

Farm states face the highest charges....Continue reading

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Neil Gorsuch is a good pick for the Supreme Court

ELEVEN years ago, Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s choice to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, sailed through the Senate by a voice vote when George W. Bush appointed him to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. This time, with the ideological tilt of America’s highest court hanging in the balance and Democrats fuming over their Republican colleagues’ stonewalling of Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s choice to fill the seat, Mr Gorsuch will face a tougher crowd. In contrast to William Pryor, another judge shortlisted for the seat, who once called Roe v Wade “the worst abomination” in the history of constitutional law, Mr Gorsuch is not given to incendiary remarks. Democrats may be hard-pressed to vilify the scholarly jurist, but their sense that he has been tapped for a stolen seat is certain to cloud his confirmation hearings.

On many issues dear to conservatives Mr Gorsuch is a perfect match. He usually sides with companies, provides little relief for condemned prisoners appealing against death sentences, goes out of his way to protect institutions claiming that laws like Obamacare burden their religious liberty and...Continue reading

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India flirts with a UBI

Basic needs

NOVEMBER 8th was not just the day of Donald Trump’s election. It was also when Indians found out most banknotes would lose all value unless promptly exchanged. Ever since, many have expected their patience in enduring the ensuing chaos to be rewarded in some way. Might scrapped cash unredeemed by presumed tax-dodgers be recycled into a lump-sum payment to each and every citizen? Or would the annual budget, presented on February 1st, be full of giveaways ahead of a string of state elections? In the event, the budget was restrained to the point of dullness. But the government’s closely-watched “economic survey”, released the previous day, hinted at a much bigger giveaway in the works: a universal basic income (UBI) payable to every single Indian.

The idea of a cash payment made to citizens irrespective of their wealth is centuries old. It has become newly fashionable in some rich countries, among both left-wing thinkers (who like its redistributive aspects) and their right-wing foes (who think it results in a less meddlesome state). The idea has had its fans in India: a small UBI scheme was launched as a...Continue reading

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As America and Russia talk, Ukraine fights

Tanks for calling

THE timing was ominous. A day after the first, seemingly cordial telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the residents of Avdiivka, a small town on the Ukrainian side of the conflict line with Russian-backed separatists, heard the echoes of heavy artillery fire. The conflict that Russia started in Ukraine in 2014 has been partly frozen over the past two years. But on January 29th it flared up with renewed force.

Three days later, on February 1st, the bodies of seven Ukrainian soldiers killed in the fighting were brought to Kiev. Maidan, the city square that was the site of the country’s 2014 revolution, once again swelled with people. Social media were filled with messages of support for soldiers and calls to collect supplies for victims, along with videos of shelling by Russian Grad rockets. Ukrainian soldiers received text messages seemingly sent by the Russian side: “You are just meat to your commanders”. Since then other Ukrainian positions along the front line have been attacked, and the death toll is rising.

Following the flare-up, international ceasefire...Continue reading

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Daimler Spends Big To Compete With Tesla

Whatever happens to consumer demand for cars this year, growth comes at an ever higher price.

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Deutsche Bank Capital Recovery Looks Short-Lived

Deutsche Bank’s capital ratio and profitability face the threat of heavy new demands from global capital rule changes.

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Shell's Big Bet on Gas Still Up in the Air

The oil giant is looking healthier after large asset sales, but its future earnings are tied to volatile Asian gas prices—and China.

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America’s system of checks and balances might struggle to contain a despot

Dial 911 to speak to your congressman

THE most troubling interpretation of the executive order that Donald Trump signed on January 27th, temporarily banning visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries, is not that the president means to honour his campaign promises. It is that he will find ways to do so even where what he promised—in this case, to keep Muslims out of America—is illegal. “When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban’,” explained Rudy Giuliani, a former would-be Trump attorney-general. “He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally’.”

Even if Mr Trump can resist the urge to lock up Hillary Clinton and reinstitute torture, which he also promised to do on the trail, he is already testing the boundaries of presidential propriety and power. The potential conflicts of interests in his administration is riven is an obvious example: Mr Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon not to sell or place in blind trust his business, including a hotel division that has announced plans to triple its American properties since his inauguration.

All this is...Continue reading

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Donald Trump seeems to see allies as a burden

EUROPEAN publishing saw a sensational hit in the 1840s with “The Mysteries of Russia”, a Frenchman’s take on the supposed brutality of Slavic life. Its most lurid tale described a Russian peasant fleeing wolves on a sled, who—unable to outpace the slavering pack—escaped by hurling her children, one by one, to their deaths. Jump to 2017 and modern-day European leaders fear that President Donald Trump takes a rather similar view of allies, notably those in the 28-member NATO military alliance. European politicians, generals and diplomats have scrutinised Mr Trump’s interviews and speeches and concluded that, by instinct at least, should they ever hold America back, he sees allies as potential burdens fit to be thrown, wailing, into the void.

As part of an America First approach to geopolitics, Mr Trump has made clear that he resents the unconditional nature of Article 5, the treaty clause that treats an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all, committing members to a collective response. As a candidate in 2016, he growled that only those allies keeping a political pledge to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence—“paying their bills” as...Continue reading

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Have We Seen Peak Facebook?

Facebook posted impressive growth in the fourth quarter, but that growth may increasingly struggle to support its valuation.

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Women and the Alt-Right

CECILIA DAVENPORT, an Alt-Right blogger, likes to tweet "fan-girl" photos of Richard Spencer (pictured), the movement’s unofficial leader. In one photo, Mr Spencer, who in November held a conference in Washington, DC to celebrate what he described as a white nationalist “awakening,” is shown talking on the phone: “Heil girl, let’s get daiquiris later and talk about making you queen of the ethnostate…of my heart.” The memes are an ironic take on the popular “Hey girl” meme in which Ryan Gosling, a Hollywood actor, is shown as a feminist boyfriend, saying things like “Hey girl, sure I’ll unload the dishwasher for you. Just let me finish folding and putting away the laundry first.” 

Ms Davenport is one of a small number of women who publicly identify themselves as members of the Alt-Right. Mr Spencer has said he believes women constitute around one-fifth of the movement’s followers. A video from the November conference is revealing: it shows attendees giving Nazi salutes, all of them men. Peter Brimelow, another Alt-Right leader who runs VDARE, an anti-immigration site, says this is because women are not drawn to radical politics. He points to the...Continue reading

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New research suggests that effort at work is correlated with race

Investors Split Bets on Fed and Trump

Stocks are up on expectations of Trump stimulus, but investors’ bets on Fed tightening are less confident.

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Yet Another Reason to Worry About Chipotle

The Trump administration’s proposed 20% import tax on goods from Mexico adds another concern for burrito chain Chipotle.

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T. Rowe Price Shows New Way Active Managers Are Losing Ground

The latest set of quarterly results from fund managers show passive-investment vehicles are continuing to disrupt the industry.

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OPEC Acing a Challenging Oil Market Test So Far

OPEC is cheating on oil quotas much less than is typical, helping crude hang on to late 2016 gains.

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The Quebec City attack exposes Canada’s dangerous right-wing fringe

TERRORIST attacks in Canada are rare. The worst of recent times came from an unexpected quarter. On January 29th Alexandre Bissonnette, a 27-year-old student, allegedly burst into the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City and killed six Muslims at prayer. The victims included a university lecturer, a pharmacist and a halal butcher. More than a dozen other worshippers were wounded.

The attack came amid the hue and cry provoked by Donald Trump’s order to ban citizens of some Muslim countries from the United States. Many people, both there and in Canada, lazily assumed that the perpetrator was a Muslim of some sort. In fact, according to his acquaintances, Mr Bissonnette is an anti-immigration “white supremacist” who supports Mr Trump. Appearing in court the day after the attack, he was charged with six counts of murder and five of attempted murder. He has not so far been charged with terrorism.

The murders have focused attention on Canada’s racist fringe, an uncomfortable topic for a country that prides itself on its tolerance and diversity. Before the attack the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was burnishing Canada’s image by...Continue reading

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As World Economies Expand Together, How Long Can It Last?

Global growth has been unusual lately. It has been surprisingly global—without a major malfunction in a really big economy. This is welcome news for investors, but the balance is also a fragile one.

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A scandal throws France’s presidential race wide open

“WE HAVE nothing to hide...I am afraid of nothing!” With indignant words and a clenched fist, François Fillon put on a muscular display of defiance at a campaign rally in Paris this week. Before a crowd of 15,000 flag-waving, mostly grey-haired supporters, the centre-right presidential candidate promised to make France the “greatest European power” within ten years, to put “liberty” at the heart of his campaign, and to declare a war on both poverty and “radical Islam”. The event pointed to unity as well as force: Alain Juppé, the Republican primary candidate defeated by Mr Fillon, applauded his rival from the front row. But the choreography could not conceal an awkward fact: Mr Fillon’s candidacy is in real trouble.

Just days previously, the former prime minister had been the favourite to win the two-round French presidential election in April and May. But the decision on January 25th by judicial investigators to launch a preliminary inquiry into misuse of public funds by Mr Fillon, after revelations in a newspaper, shocked many of his supporters. His, after all, was the candidacy of probity and honour. One cannot lead France, he...Continue reading

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Looming Financial Crunch of Post-Brexit Britain

The U.K. could lose a chunk of European banking revenues quickly — that could hurt the country as much as its banks.

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Trump's Immigration Stance Stings India's Most Important Industry

India may not export much, but the Trump administration is taking on one of the few things it does: IT services.

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Apple: Betting on Tomorrow's iPhone Today

Hopes for the next ’supercycle’ pose risks, but Apple’s low valuation limits its downside.

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Taking the dollar down, or is it up?

IF THERE was a consensus view at the start of the year, it was that the dollar would rise. Fund managers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch were overweight the currency (even though they worried that it was a crowded trade). The stars seemed aligned in the greenback's favour. The Federal Reserve was set to raise rates, while other major central banks were keeping monetary policy loose; that should boost the dollar's attractiveness in terms of yield. The new Trump administration was set to unveil a fiscal stimulus and boost growth; that should encourage those who wanted to buy American equities or invest in American factories. And tax proposals were designed to persuade American companies to repatriate overseas profits, giving the dollar a further lift.

So why has the dollar retreated to hit a 12-week low? the main reason is the rhetoric of the new administration. Mr Trump told the Wall Street Journal that

Our companies can't compete with them (Chinese companies) now because our currency...Continue reading

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A new boss at the helm of Exxon Mobil

Surviving a Trump Meeting Doesn't Mean All Clear for Drug Industry

A relatively calm meeting with President Trump doesn’t eliminate drug-pricing risks.

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Under Armour's Reckoning

Under Armour shares are slammed after its stunning growth streak ends.

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Schools are reopening in Mosul, after two years of jihadist rule

LIBERATION has proved dangerous for the residents of Tullaban, a farming hamlet on the outskirts of Mosul. Last autumn, as the push began to wrest the city from Islamic State (IS), villagers returned home to find no sign of the jihadists who had seized it back in 2014. Nor, though, could they spot the booby traps and mines the IS fighters had laid as they fled.

Hidden in the doorways of houses and buried in nearby fields, the villagers only learned of their presence the hard way. “When the IS first came this way, we fled because we knew how they were beheading people,” says Ali Jassem, 80, standing among houses flattened by air strikes and pockmarked with machine gunfire. “Then we came back, and four people were killed while going inside their homes.”

Tullaban, which used to be on IS’s front line, is now being cleared of landmines and booby traps by the Mines Advisory Group, a British charity dedicated to making post-conflict zones safe again. But for all that it still resembles a battlefield, both the hinterland of Mosul and eastern parts of the city itself are seeing life to return to normal in areas freed from IS. It is...Continue reading

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CIT Shakes Its OneWest Hangover

Lighter regulation and faster economic growth could help CIT recover from a problematic merger.

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H&M's New Sales Target Won't Revive Growth

H&M has fallen out of investment fashion. For that to change, management needs to make clearer how its online strategy will revive flagging growth and margins in its core stores.

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Europe Beats U.S. Growth, but Politics Loom Just as Large

The eurozone economy looks to be performing strongly. Political risks remain to the fore.

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Deutsche Bank's Russia Settlements Help But Don't Heal

The German lender is paying less than feared to U.S. and U.K. regulators.

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The Coming Squeeze on Profit Margins

Just because companies’ costs are rising doesn’t mean they are going to be able to pass them on to consumers.

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Apple's Secret, but Very Large, Profit Center

Apple’s services unit bears watching in Tuesday’s earnings report as the tech giant looks for new ways to boost margins and maintain growth.

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Why Executives Are Speaking Out on Travel Ban and Why More Might Follow

President Trump’s immigration order has mostly drawn criticism from companies with employees directly affected, but others may join them as they see international reputations threatened.

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Tempur Sealy's Mattress Nightmare Is Real

Tempur Sealy’s refusal to bow to Mattress Firm’s demands will hurt its retail presence when competition from online players is mounting.

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