Gambia’s ruler rejects the election that ejected him

The quickest billion years ever

MOTORCADES are not an unusual feature of African political life. But a hush fell in Serekunda, Gambia’s largest town, as the presidents of Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone sped by in black Rolls-Royces. Gambians hoped the region’s other heads of state would persuade their own erratic president to step down. Yahya Jammeh, who has ruled the tiny West African nation for 22 years (and once said that, if Allah decreed it, he would continue for a billion), decided that, in fact, he wanted to remain in power despite unexpectedly losing an election two weeks ago.

Having gracefully conceded defeat and promised to step down after the votes were counted, he changed his mind and challenged the result, encouraged perhaps by the foolhardy pledges of some of the opposition to arrest him for his many abuses of human rights. The president-elect, Adama Barrow, refuses to say whether his government would prosecute Mr Jammeh.  

The delegation of regional leaders, acting unusually firmly against a despot, nonetheless went home empty-handed. A deal “is not something that will...Continue reading

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Netanyahu moves to appease the settlers

We’re here because we’re here

THE fate of 42 Israeli families, living on a windswept hilltop in the West Bank half an hour’s drive north of Jerusalem, could change the rules of Israel’s 49-year-old occupation of the area. The settlement was built in 1995 on what was in fact privately owned Palestinian land. The settlers claim they were not aware of this—which may be true, as land records in the West Bank are not always clear or complete, dating as many of them do back to Ottoman times. Despite a High Court order to evict them by December 25th, and repeated government offers of alternative housing nearby, the settlers are refusing to budge from what they see as their homes in historically Jewish territory. They have promised not to use violence when the security forces come to remove them, but large signs like “On Amona we will go to war”, and the dozens of young settlers who have already arrived as reinforcements, suggest the opposite.

This puts Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition in a bind. Members of the hard-right Jewish Home party are threatening to leave the coalition if Amona is forcibly cleared,...Continue reading

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Saudi Arabia adopts the Gregorian calendar

THE kingdom presented its shift from the Islamic to the Gregorian calendar as a leap into modernity. In April the dynamic deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, chose to call his transformation plan Vision 2030, not Vision 1451 after the corresponding Islamic year as traditionalists might have preferred. Recently his cabinet declared that the administration is adopting a solar calendar in place of the old lunar one. Henceforth they will run the state according to a reckoning based on Jesus Christ’s birth, not on the Prophet Muhammad’s religious mission.

But puritans in Islam’s birthplace are wincing at their eviction from control first over public space, and now of time. Guardians of the Wahhabi rite, who seek to be guided by Muhammad’s every act, ask whether they are now being required to follow Jesus. A slippery slope, the clergy warn, to forgetting the fasting month of Ramadan altogether; the authorities are rewinding the clock to the jahiliyyah, or pre-Islamic age of ignorance. The judiciary, a clerical bastion, still defiantly insists on sentencing miscreants according to the old calendar.

The clerical unease has...Continue reading

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In California’s forests, removing small trees leaves water for bigger ones and for dwindling reservoirs

IN THE early 1900s, an average forested acre in California supported fewer than 50 or so trees. After a century of efforts to fight wildfires, the average has risen to more than 300 (albeit mostly smaller) trees. Some might reckon such growth wonderful, but it is a problem far more serious than, say, the fact that horses can no longer trot through areas where they once could. The extra fuel turns today’s wildfires into infernos hot enough to devastate the landscape, torching even the big older trees that typically survived fires in the old days. Beyond this, the extra trees are worsening California’s driest ever drought.

“Like too many straws in a drink,” trees suck up groundwater before it can seep into streams that feed reservoirs, says David Edelson of The Nature Conservancy. The project director for the Sierra Nevada range, source of 60% of California’s consumed water, notes that as a warmer climate lengthens the growing season, trees’ thirst will only increase. This has led to a push for large numbers of trees to be cut or burned down. Overgrown forests catch more snow and rain on leaves and needles, where wind and sunlight increase the...Continue reading

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Some small colleges are finding clever ways to stay open

VISITORS stand out at Marlboro College’s bucolic campus in the woods of Vermont, but not because they are special or even unexpected. With 190 matriculated students and just a few dozen faculty and staff, everyone knows everyone. The student-faculty ratio is five to one, about the lowest in the country. The college administration has worked hard to stay small: the student population has rarely topped 350. But in the years since its founding after the second world war, Marlboro has often skirted financial ruin. In 1993 it had only a few payrolls left in the bank. It was rescued by a foundation. Today it is looking for ways to save itself and already seeing some success.

Marlboro is not alone in facing revenue and enrolment pressures. Burlington College (70 students), also in Vermont, shut its doors over the summer. Sweet Briar, a well-regarded women’s college in Virginia, nearly closed to its 245 students last year. A last minute bout of fundraising by alumni saved it, for now. Moody’s, a credit-ratings agency, said in 2015 that the pace of closures and mergers will accelerate and could triple from an average of five per year over the next few...Continue reading

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The election result was not decided in the Kremlin

WHY is it unsettling to see Republicans and Democrats squabbling afresh about Russian meddling in last month’s presidential election? After all, the allegation being debated has been known for months: namely, that in 2015 and again in 2016 at least two groups of hackers with known links to Russian intelligence broke into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, as that party’s national headquarters is known, and into the private e-mail system of such figures as John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, then released a slew of embarrassing e-mails to WikiLeaks. Before the election a joint public statement by the director of national intelligence and secretary of homeland security said that intelligence agencies were “confident” that the Russian government directed the hacking.

All that has changed is that—thanks to reporting by the Washington Post and New York Times—we now know that the CIA briefed senior members of Congress before and after the election that, in the consensus view of intelligence analysts, the Russians’ motive was...Continue reading

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The trial of Dylann Roof

The accused

SCRATCHING his ear, sipping water, sometimes chatting with his defence team, Dylann Roof looks for all the world like an ordinary human being, more sullen adolescent than monster. Yet, almost astonishingly, the slight, pockmarked figure who slouches into his chair in the federal courtroom in Charleston—his face averted from the relatives of his victims—is, by his own admission, the man who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17th last year. Mr Roof’s culpability is not in doubt; the harder question, as often with monsters, is how far he reflects broader pathologies in the society that spawned him.

He has been tried on 33 federal charges because prosecutors rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment. Thus far the proceedings may not have bolstered his chances of avoiding a death sentence. The court has heard how, in a delinquent pattern that echoes the online radicalisation of would-be jihadists, his hateful white supremacism was fuelled by an internet search for “black on White crime”. He seems to have completed his own deranged manifesto,...Continue reading

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Russia has often tried to influence elections, with little success

Laboratory of democracy

IN January 1984, Soviet KGB spooks reaffirmed a priority that was set by the Kremlin after the second world war. “Our chief task is to help to frustrate the aggressive intentions of American imperialism…We must work unweariedly at exposing the adversary’s weak and vulnerable points.” As Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the West with a large number of KGB files, explained, “exposure” in the parlour of the KGB meant disinformation fabricated by service A, the active-measures branch of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. This unit was charged with foreign disinformation, which it spread through a network of officers outside Russia.

At the height of the cold war, service A numbered some 15,000 officers who engaged in psychological warfare and disinformation. Their operations included planting stories about John F. Kennedy being killed in a secret CIA plot, AIDS being a virus developed by the Pentagon and sending fake letters from Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic committees of African countries. “We are opposed by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on...Continue reading

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The Obama way of war

TO AMERICANS who despise Barack Obama—and even to some who admire him—it is jarring to hear the 44th president refer to himself as commander-in-chief. Mr Obama leaves office with critics convinced that he is a passive observer of a chaotic world. That notion is enthusiastically advanced by Donald Trump, who charges that a soft Obama administration has stupidly—and he has even hinted, treasonously—refused to keep the country safe, notably by attacking Islamic State (IS).

Mr Trump promises to end nation-building overseas and start spending money on American roads, bridges and airports. He pledges to be more self-interested, obliging feckless allies to pay for their own security. Above all Mr Trump, a skilful storyteller, has a tale to tell patriotic Americans about why the country they love has been fighting terrorism worldwide for 15 years without winning. His story involves elites (and he includes President George W. Bush in this group) who naively toppled autocrats—“foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” as he puts it—when they should have been hunting down terrorists with pitiless, single-minded...Continue reading

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Global Markets: Wrangling With a Waking Fed

A stronger dollar and higher U.S. bond yields are a double-edged sword for global markets.

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Bank Investors Moving Too Fast on Rate Hopes

European bank stocks have risen with bond yields, but better interest income isn’t yet here

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Turkey’s latest bombing will help its president amass more power

THE first attacker, driving a car packed with up to 400kg (880lb) of explosives, struck near an Istanbul stadium after pulling up next to a riot-police vehicle. The second detonated his suicide vest less than a minute later, after a group of policemen surrounded him in a neighbouring park. The December 10th bombings, the latest in a wave of terror attacks that began in the summer of 2015 (see chart), killed at least 44 people, including civilians heading downtown on a Saturday night. The first blast was so powerful that firefighters were seen collecting body parts from the stadium’s roof. A group called the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, widely considered a front for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), claimed responsibility.

As enraged demonstrators took to the streets, Turkey’s government pledged to destroy the PKK once and for all, something its predecessors have promised but failed to do since 1984, when the...Continue reading

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Incumbents Could Steal Electric Torch from Tesla

It is always tempting to frame competition in the car industry as a race. But making a killer product matters more than crossing the finishing line first.

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Bashar al-Assad’s forces crush the resistance

WHEN members of the Muslim Brotherhood rose up against the Syrian government in 1982, killing hundreds of soldiers in the city of Hama, the regime’s response was swift and brutal. Under orders from President Hafez al-Assad, government warplanes and artillery pounded the city for weeks. By the time the army’s bulldozers had finished flattening entire districts, the regime had killed as many as 25,000 people.

In 2011, almost 30 years after the Hama massacre, Hafez’s son, Bashar, faced his own revolt when peaceful protests against his rule erupted across Syria. Some believed that the soft-spoken ophthalmologist would show more restraint than his blood-drenched father. But after more than five years of war no one thinks that any more. Mr Assad junior has systematically starved, bombed and shot his own people, laying siege to civilians in rebel-held areas while bombing their hospitals, markets and schools. His scorched-earth tactics have killed the vast majority of the war’s 400,000-plus dead and driven millions of Syrians abroad as refugees. The massacre his father oversaw in Hama seems small and local in comparison.

These tactics, along with...Continue reading

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Republican plans to cut corporate taxes may have unpleasant side-effects

SINCE Donald Trump won America’s presidential election investors have salivated over the prospect of lower taxes. Mr Trump has promised to cut corporation tax, a levy on firms’ profits, from 35% to 15%. Republicans remain in charge of both houses of Congress; Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, wants to cut the levy to 20%. The coming reforms, though, are about more than just lower rates. Republicans want to overhaul business taxes completely. Unfortunately, this task is far from straightforward.

America’s corporate-tax rate, which reaches 39.6% once state and local levies are included, is the highest in the rich world. But a panoply of deductions and credits keeps firms’ bills down. These include huge distortions, such as a deduction for debt-interest payments, as well as smaller scratchings of pork like special treatment for NASCAR racetracks. After all the deductions are doled out, corporate-tax revenues are roughly in line with the average in the rest of the G7, according to economists at Goldman Sachs.

Still, a high tax rate and a narrow tax base is a glaringly inefficient combination. Politicians of all...Continue reading

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Road Gets Rougher in World's Largest Auto Market

In China, a scheduled purchase-tax increase and a new clampdown on business practices of foreign car makers threaten the sector’s double-digit sales growth.

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Give Rex a chance

“A DIPLOMAT that happens to be able to drill oil.” That is how Reince Priebus, Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff, described Rex Tillerson, the boss of ExxonMobil, who was nominated this week as America’s next secretary of state. In fact, Mr Tillerson, 64, is an oil driller through and through, has spent 41 years furthering the ambitions of one of the world’s largest companies, and has sometimes sidelined the American government because he felt ExxonMobil was better able to look after world affairs itself.

Yet Mr Tillerson also has a reputation for dependability and small-town Texan values that has enabled him to stand up to, and win respect from, some notoriously slippery world leaders. Making someone with no experience of government service secretary of state is a risk. But unusual is better than incompetent. Depending on what his confirmation hearings reveal about his views on Russia when not serving Exxon’s shareholders, and assuming he severs his financial ties to the company, Mr Tillerson could be one of just two or three members of Mr Trump’s cabinet whom it is possible to see serving in a normal administration.

For a...Continue reading

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Samsung's Bid for Harman Isn't Sweet Enough

Investors are rightly agitated that Samsung’s $8 billion deal for auto tech player Harman is too low.

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Fed Gets Ahead of the Market, and Maybe Donald Trump

There is plenty of uncertainty about President-elect Donald Trump’s tax-cut and spending plans, but the Fed can’t afford to wait and see what form they will take.

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The Fed finally manages to lift rates in 2016

TODAY, finance and economics journalist gathered for a long-awaited Federal Reserve announcement: that the Fed's benchmark interest rate would rise once more, by 25 basis points, to a range between 0.5% and 0.75%. If the scene looked familiar, well, no surprise there. It was December a year ago that the Federal Reserve announced another increase in its benchmark interest rate, of 25 basis points—the first in nearly a decade. It was also December a year ago that Fed projections suggested that rates would soar upward in 2016, to close to 1.5% by year's end. The Fed has repeated that tradition as well; the projections published today repeat last year's heroic call, of a rate near 1.5% one year hence.

Whether the third act of the holiday tradition—an inevitably disappointing performance of inflation and wage growth, which forces the Fed to abandon all but one of its expected rate hikes—will also be repeated remains to be seen. In some...Continue reading

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Financials Are Cheap, Even After the Rally

Financial stocks could have room to rise further are interest rates keep climbing.

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The Key to a More Hawkish Fed: Inflation

The Fed’s outlook on interest rates might not be hawkish enough if inflation continues on its recent trajectory

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Tillerson’s appointment reflects Trump’s view of foreign policy

FIRST reactions to the nomination of Rex Tillerson as Donald Trump’s secretary of state have focused on the specifics of the Texan oilman’s record as head of ExxonMobil, from his closeness to the Russian government to his company’s stance on climate change. Defending his decision, President-elect Trump has pointed to a different, more general side of Mr Tillerson’s record: namely, that he has the brains and negotiating smarts needed to rise to the top of a large and complex multinational corporation. Mr Trump’s pitch is straightforward: he is building a government of world-class deal-makers, who will strike bargains and make America a winner again in tough-minded transactions with foreign friends, rivals and foes.

Mr Trump may well have a point. Some of the criticism of Mr Tillerson seems to misunderstand the role of a corporate chief executive, and to assume that every business leader is the personal incarnation of the company that he leads. As CEO Mr Tillerson is answerable to his shareholders and has a duty to put their interests and those of his firm first. If confirmed as America’s top diplomat, he will be representing Mr Trump and his government. It is surely...Continue reading

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Ohio bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy

WHEN he was running for president earlier this year, John Kasich held great appeal for moderate Republicans. The governor of Ohio is open to immigration reform, backs Common Core, a set of national educational standards, and expanded Medicaid, a health-care programme for the poor, in his state. One exception is his stance on abortion. During his governorship, he signed no fewer than 17 bills containing restrictions on abortions into law. 

On December 13th the governor approved another such bill. Senate bill 127 bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a point at which supporters of the bill say a fetus experiences pain, with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. A dozen states already have such a ban even though it is inconsistent with Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion-rights ruling from 1973, which gives women the right to have an abortion until about 24 weeks of a pregnancy. On the same day he vetoed a so-called heartbeat bill that was tucked in as an amendment into proposed legislation on child abuse. The bill bans abortions from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which tends to be at around the sixth week of a pregnancy (when some...Continue reading

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Deal-Hungry Sanofi Shouldn't Overpay for Actelion

Pharma giant Sanofi risks paying too much for a rare-disease biotech.

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The fall of Sirte

THE ground is shrinking beneath the feet of the jihadists of Islamic State (IS). Iraqi troops are moving closer to the centre of Mosul, the last big city under its control in Iraq, while Kurdish and Arab fighters eye Raqqa, its putative capital in Syria. How will IS react—and, perhaps, adapt—when it loses its remaining territory? To answer that question, look to Libya, where the jihadists have been pushed out of their stronghold in the coastal city of Sirte.

Mired in civil war, Libya has become something of a hub for jihadists in the region. At its height earlier this year, IS controlled over 150 miles (240km) of the country’s coastline, according to the UN. Sirte, the hometown of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s former dictator, was even seen as a fallback capital for the group, should it lose Raqqa. But, after nearly seven months of intense fighting, it has been dislodged from its Libyan base.

The campaign against the jihadists was nominally led by a UN-backed “government of national accord” (GNA) in Tripoli, the capital, though militiamen from Misrata, whose loyalty is decidedly fickle, did most of the actual fighting. They were...Continue reading

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Romania, fighting corruption, elects a party that makes it a lower priority

CORRUPTION is one of the most important issues in Romanian politics. So the centre-left Social Democratic Party (PSD) entered the parliamentary election on December 11th with what, in most countries, would be considered a handicap. Its leader, Liviu Dragnea (pictured), was convicted in 2015 of attempted electoral fraud three years earlier during a referendum to impeach the president at the time. But many see Mr Dragnea’s conviction as politically motivated, and in Romania, where many parties are tainted by corruption, such things are relative.

The PSD placed first in the election by a wide margin, winning 46% of the vote; well ahead of the centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL), which took just 20%. The PSD’s victory has led to worries that Romania’s impressive anti-corruption drive, which has made it a model for the region, may slow down. For the past several years the country’s independent National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) has been prosecuting more than 1,000 people per year on corruption charges, and convicting the vast majority. Mr Dragnea is not the only PSD leader to fall foul of the DNA: a year ago Victor Ponta, then the...Continue reading

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Dow 20,000?

SOME time soon, the Dow Jones Industrial Average seems likely to break through the 20,000 barrier, an event that will be greeted with banner headlines and a sign that capitalism is flourishing again. In fact, the Dow is a flawed measure, which uses the odd approach of weighting its component companies by share price. The biggest stock in the Dow is Goldman Sachs and despite its prominence on the campaign trail (and among Donald Trump's new team), it is hardly the most important company in America; its weight depends its near-$240 share price. Like other financial shares, it has shot up in the wake of Mr Trump's election; boosted both by hopes of bank deregulation and of potentially higher interest rates, which tend to boost bank profits. 

The Dow is up 9% since November 7, well ahead of the more broadly-based S&P 500's 6.6% gain. The S&P uses a weighting by market value - its biggest stock is Apple which, like many other tech stocks, has seen far less of a boost from Mr Trump's election. Apple only has the 11th biggest weight in the Dow.

Still, the US...Continue reading

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Zara Owner Inditex: Cheap Clothes But Expensive Shares

The Spanish giant is an exceptional performer, but an eye-watering valuation looks susceptible to a turn in the interest-rate environment.

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U.K. Economy: Emerging Cracks in Brexit Facade

The pound has been supported by the resilience of the U.K. economy, but that may be changing.

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What Gas Stations in China Offer Investors

A $10 billion IPO of Sinopec’s gas-station business will bring fatter margins for state-owned oil giant Sinopec.

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Tata Drama Bruises Confidence of Once-Loyal Investors

Dissenting shareholder votes show the shine on Tata’s reputation as a careful steward is wearing off.

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Bashar al-Assad’s forces crush the last resistance in Aleppo

 

WHEN members of the Muslim Brotherhood rose up against the Syrian government in 1982, killing hundreds of soldiers in the city of Hama, the regime’s response was swift and brutal. Under orders from President Hafez al-Assad, government warplanes pounded the city for weeks. By the time the army’s bulldozers had finished flattening entire neighbourhoods, the regime had killed as many as 25,000 people.

Almost 30 years after the Hama massacre, Hafez’s son, Bashar, faced his own revolt when peaceful protests against his rule erupted across Syria in 2011. Some believed the softly-spoken ophthalmologist would show more restraint than his authoritarian father. Some even called the young president a reformer, a ruler prepared to offer concessions to those who opposed him. But after more than five years of war this view has proved to be profoundly misguided. Mr Assad junior has systematically starved, bombed and shot his own people, laying siege to civilians in rebel-held areas while bombing their hospitals, markets and schools. His scorched-earth tactics have killed the vast majority of the war’s 400,000-plus dead and driven millions of...Continue reading

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Egypt is hit by terror attacks

SECURITY and order have always been the priority for Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president and self-proclaimed protector. Since toppling a democratically elected but unpopular Islamist government in 2013, Mr Sisi, a former general, has attempted to stabilise the country with draconian laws and a crackdown on dissent. Without his firm hand, Egypt would look like its blood-soaked neighbours, say his supporters.

One problem with this argument is that Egypt itself looks increasingly volatile. On December 9th a bomb targeting a police vehicle in the northern city of Kafr al-Sheikh killed a civilian and injured three policemen. On the same day another bomb killed six policemen on the road to the pyramids in Cairo, breaking months of relative calm in the capital. Two days later, yet another bomb tore through Cairo’s Coptic cathedral during Sunday mass, killing at least 25 worshippers, mostly women and children.

Disgruntled Islamists have been blamed for the violence—and have taken some credit for it. A shadowy group called the Hasm (decisiveness) movement claimed responsibility for the bomb near the pyramids. It has staged...Continue reading

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Donald Trump chooses Rex Tillerson as secretary of state

“A DIPLOMAT that happens to be able to drill oil.” That is how Reince Priebus, Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff, described Rex Tillerson, the boss of ExxonMobil, who was nominated this week as America’s secretary of state. In fact, Mr Tillerson, 64, is an oil driller through and through, has spent 41 years furthering the ambitions of one of the world’s largest private companies, and has often sidelined the American government because he felt ExxonMobil was better able to look after its global affairs itself.

Yet he has a reputation for dependability and small-town Texan values that has enabled him to stand up to, and win respect from, notoriously slippery world leaders such as Vladimir Putin. The question is, will it help him become a good envoy-in-chief for diplomacy’s nemesis, Mr Trump? Or will he also peddle Mr Trump’s “I win, you lose” sense of international relations, with oil interests always in the back of his mind? 

For a leader of the world’s corporate elite, Mr Tillerson has parochial roots. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, he grew up as a Boy Scout, went to the University of Texas, and rides horses in a cowboy hat in his spare...Continue reading

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Did VeriFone Hit Bottom in 2016​?​

Credit-card reader VeriFone was slammed by delays in chip readers and Chinese competition. The worst may be over. ​

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How states, emboldened by Trump, are challenging abortion rights

DONALD TRUMP was once a staunch supporter of abortion rights, declaring in 1999 that he was “pro-choice in every respect”. But Mr Trump campaigned for president as an opponent of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion-rights ruling from 1973. (He had a change of heart when he observed that a child of a friend who “was going to be aborted” was instead brought to term and went on to become a “total superstar, a great, great child”.) In post-election interviews, the president-elect has repeated promises to name pro-life justices to the Supreme Court, starting with a replacement for Antonin Scalia, the justice who died in February. After a couple of nominations, Mr Trump said during a debate in October, Roe will “automatically” be overturned and the question of abortion rights will return to the states.

In recent weeks, several states have signalled how they would handle the matter if the nationwide constitutional standard were to disappear. There is little doubt that many states would quickly criminalise abortion. Fresh from a loss in Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, a ruling from June that struck down the state’s clinic...Continue reading

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Techs & Trump: Nowhere to Go But Up

The market has penalized tech companies since the election, which sets the bar low for a high-profile summit between Trump and the nation’s top tech executives.

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Asahi's European Beer Binge Leaves Bitter Taste

Asahi’s $7.8 billion purchase of Eastern European beer brands looks to be at a high price.

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Investors Can Clean Up With Italy's Biggest Bank

For investors to back UniCredit’s new proposition, they will have to believe that its low returns come with very low risk, especially in a country that is the byword for fears of instability.

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Why Would a Chinese Insurance Giant Want to Own a Gas Pipeline?

China’s promised market reforms are increasingly looking more like spreading risk within the vast network of state-backed enterprises rather than taking it out altogether.

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Mind the Shock as Auto Investing Turns Electric

After many false starts, a new era for the automobile is looming into view.

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The Simple Truth About China's Economy

China’s economy has stabilized, but investors should mind the lag between lending growth and activity.

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As Trump blasts the cost of F-35s, two arrive in Israel

IN MOST contexts, a dignitary calling something new a “game-changer” is the weariest of clichés. But posterity may look back at a speech given at an air base in southern Israel in the evening of December 12th, and conclude that the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, was speaking a simple truth. The game to which Mr Rivlin referred was the balance of power in the Middle East. The change was the arrival of two F-35 Joint Strike Fighters on Israeli soil, marking the first delivery of what will eventually billed as a fleet of 50. 

The arrival of the warplanes would be a big deal for any air force. The F-35 is called the world’s most capable stealth fighter, though to date it has drawn more headlines for its price of close to $100m a plane, cost over-runs and teething problems. Indeed shortly before the pair of fighters was flown to Nevatim air force base from Italy, after a delay of some hours caused by heavy fog, the staggering cost of the F-35 was questioned by President-elect Donald Trump in a tweet, his favoured vehicle for ex cathedra announcements. “The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other)...Continue reading

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The World Has Changed. How Will the Fed Deal With That?

One key question investors haven’t asked in a long time: How aggressive will the Fed get next year?

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Viacom Goes Solo With Limited Options

As talks between Viacom and CBS come to an end, it is Viacom that will struggle to strengthen its stand-alone business.

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A day later, Macedonians still do not know who won their election

 

MACEDONIA has spent almost two years in a political maelstrom brought on by the release of tapes suggesting massive corruption by the government and its security services. The country’s election on December 11th was supposed to resolve the crisis, but may only have deepened it. With more than 99% of votes counted, it is still unclear who won. The vote is close, and both leading parties have claimed victory. “The regime has fallen,” said Zoran Zaev, the leader of the opposition Social Democrats. Nikola Gruevski, the former prime minister and victor in the past four general elections, claimed he had won again. An increasing number of ballots are being challenged, which could force some polling stations to rerun the vote. That might take two more weeks. “Things could get ugly,” said Ana Petruseva, the head of the Macedonian office of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

Europe tends to ignore Macedonia until it lands at the centre of an international crisis, as it has a habit of doing. In 2001, ethnic Albanian guerrillas threatened to spark a new Balkan war. In 2015, the country became a station on the route taken by over a million Middle Eastern and...Continue reading

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Changes but No Clarity at Alexion ​

A rare disease biotech investigation still has unanswered questions for Alexion Pharmaceuticals.

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Time For Italy to Be Clear About Its Troubled Banks

Will Europe let Italy rescue its third-biggest bank and how far will the government try to protect small investors? Those are the key questions now the Italian Treasury has said it stands ready to prop up Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.

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An Oil Curveball for Global Bonds

Bond markets could ignore oil as long as they had faith in central banks. Now investors need to pay attention.

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