Strong Euro Can't Wait as Mario Draghi Plays for Time

The European Central Bank is playing for time on extreme monetary policy. But markets know a decision on winding down its bond-purchase program can’t be put off forever.

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Indonesian Islamists open a new front in their war on tolerance

CORNELIS, the 63-year-old governor of West Kalimantan, a province in Indonesian Borneo, is relaxing in jeans and a stained white vest at a table piled withkrupuk crackers and other local snacks. Portraits of the governor and his wife posing with prize-winning vegetables (both are keen gardeners) decorate the walls of the family home in Ngabang, a town in the hills four hours’ drive from Pontianak, the provincial capital. But so do crucifixes and Christian figurines—and it is Mr Cornelis’s religion, more than anything else, that has made him the latest lightning rod for the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an Islamist vigilante group.

Around 90% of Indonesia’s 260m people are Muslim, but beyond the island of Java the population is much more mixed. Minorities watched with dismay as FPI and other Islamist groups turned on Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the Christian and ethnic-Chinese governor of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, over cooked-up claims that he had insulted...Continue reading

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Winning the war with IS in the Philippines, but losing the peace

THE Philippine army has been fighting for two full months to take back control of the southern city of Marawi from a violent and determined coalition of jihadist groups. The battle for Marawi, a mainly Muslim city of 200,000 with a lush lakeside setting and a proud sense of its culture, erupted when the government got word that Isnilon Hapilon was hiding there. Mr Hapilon, a leader of a notorious kidnap-for-ransom gang, Abu Sayyaf, pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS) three years ago. In return, IS declared him the “emir” of the Philippine province of its caliphate. When the armed forces went to arrest him, up to 700 fighters emerged out of nowhere and, in the name of IS, seized the city. Ominously, foreign fighters and even veterans of Mosul are thought to be involved, including militants from Chechnya, Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

The army has fought back hard, claiming to have killed 411 combatants. Its spokesman, Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla, now talks of...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court says grandparents are exempt from the travel ban

OVER the weekend, the Department of Justice and opponents of Donald Trump’s travel ban filed nearly 100 pages of briefs to the Supreme Court regarding the scope of the justices’ ruling of June 26th permitting the president’s executive order to take partial effect. On July 19th, the justices responded with a curt, 64-word order giving something to each side. But they were again tight-lipped as to why, exactly, they had reached that decision. With the restrictions now in place on refugees and on travellers from six Muslim-majority countries, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into the details of Mr Trump’s travel ban without saying a word about its legality—or even explaining why it barred the government from applying the rules to foreigners who have a “bona fide relationship” with people or entities in America.

So what exactly did the justices do on July 19th? Three things. First, they denied Mr Trump’s lawyers’ request for...Continue reading

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Arnold Schwarzenegger lends muscle to the fight against gerrymandering

SHORTLY after winning election as governor of California in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger watched leaders from the state legislature stage a spittle-flecked, chair-toppling fight in his office. “I don’t know if the drama was meant for me because I was new,” he recalls in an interview, miming open-mouthed astonishment. A bigger shock came hours later. Two of the combatants, one a Republican, the other a Democrat, telephoned him from a bar. Sure, we fight about things in the daytime, the pair told the governor, a Republican who won as an action-man outsider in a Democratic state. But with night falling the party bosses wanted Mr Schwarzenegger to know their shared view of his proposal to have electoral districts drawn by an independent panel, rather than by politicians. A “horrible” idea that would cost incumbent members their seats, they growled. “Just kill this,” he remembers hearing.

It took Mr Schwarzenegger and allies several attempts to outwit California’s political...Continue reading

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California pushes on with plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

LA’s trading floor

VOTING to extend California’s cap-and-trade programme an extra decade to 2030 was a tough decision for Devon Mathis, a Republican assemblyman who represents a large swathe of the state’s fertile Central Valley. Though once embraced by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, cap-and-trade schemes have come to be seen by Republicans as exemplifying government overreach. On the other hand, agricultural business owners in Mr Mathis’s district flooded him with letters in support of cap-and-trade, which they thought would be better than the state’s alternative plans for reducing CO{-2} emissions. Mr Mathis was so torn about the choice he sought out his pastor to pray about it. On July 17th when the vote was held, he opted to support the extension.

Cap-and-trade programmes work by setting a limit (or cap) on how much CO{-2} individual companies can emit. Businesses that pollute less than the cap can sell (or trade) their excess...Continue reading

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The voter-fraud commission relies on some really dodgy studies

“SPRECHEN Sie Deutsch?” asks Kris Kobach. Sitting at his office desk surrounded by family photos of his wife and five daughters, the Kansas secretary of state explains (in German) that he picked up the language when conducting research on the influence of referendums on Switzerland’s political system for a thesis at Britain’s Oxford University in the late 1980s. Mr Kobach became interested in electoral law during his Swiss research, an interest which subsequently developed into a fixation with voter fraud. He is also, after successfully lobbying Kansas’s governor to change the rules, the only secretary of state in the land with the power to prosecute people for it.

Mr Kobach’s other favourite topic is illegal immigration, which he became interested in at Yale Law School. An avid debater, he joined a panel on California’s Proposition 187, a ballot initiative passed in 1994 denying government services to illegal immigrants. Mr Kobach fervently defended Prop 187, caring little...Continue reading

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Forty mayors go back to school

“I LITERALLY went home every night for the first three months and said, “Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?’,” Boston’s mayor, Marty Walsh, recently told the Boston Globe. Jorge Elorza, Providence’s mayor, remembers sitting in his office after he was sworn in and wondering “how do we begin?” Many mayors are skilled campaigners, but being in office requires a different set of qualities. Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor and one of the attendees, was in post just 14 days when his city endured a terrorist attack. American companies spend around $15bn a year in leadership development, but there is little, if any, training for public-sector chief executives.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor, hopes to change that. Thanks to a $32m gift his charity, Bloomberg Philanthropies, along with Harvard’s Business and Kennedy Schools, has created a year-long programme designed for serving mayors. The inaugural cohort began...Continue reading

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Presidential lethargy, not Democratic obstinacy, is to blame

IT IS almost as if Republicans did not control both Congress and the White House. President Donald Trump has struggled to carry out one of his basic duties, which is to fill government posts. The president blames supposedly obstinate Senate Democrats, against whom he regularly rages on Twitter. “Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including Ambassadors. They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS! Want approvals”, he fumed on June 5th. “They can’t win so all they do is slow down & obstruct!”, he added on July 11th.

Mr Trump’s administration has yet to get around to nominating many of the officials who run the federal government. Up until July 15th, Mr Trump had put 210 names to the Senate for consideration, according to numbers provided by the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan group that tracks bureaucratic hiring. The data do not count military or judicial appointments. At the same point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had put forward 369 names, George W....Continue reading

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The ideology behind Republicans’ health-care bill

Oath keepers in the Senate

REPUBLICANS presented their efforts to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, which flopped this week, as a necessary response to a failing law. They frequently say the individual market, in which those who do not get health insurance through their employers can buy it for themselves, is collapsing. Premiums rose by an average of 22% in 2017. So many insurers have given up on the market that about a third of counties have only one left; 38 are at risk of having no insurer for 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a think-tank. Yet the Republican bill is not a technocratic fix for these problems. Rather, it is an attempt to enforce conservative thinking on health care. And it is failing partly because of ideological faultlines in the party.

To see this, start with the fact that the bill makes the individual market weaker, not stronger. It abolishes the individual mandate—the requirement that everyone who can afford insurance...Continue reading

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Not repealing Obamacare

GRAPPLING to comprehend Donald Trump’s populist seizure of their party, some Republicans predicted it would re-emerge as a champion of working-class whites. Others expected Mr Trump to drop his proletarian shtick and help deliver the tax cuts they had always dreamed of. Republican senators’ failure to repeal Obamacare, a long-promised part of that tax-cutting hope, suggests the party is no closer to working out who it represents, or what it is for. Republicans are in control of every lever of government in Washington, but so internally divided as to appear incapable of governing.

The attempt to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care regime—which Republican congressmen had for seven years decried as an existential threat to America—reached the Senate after an earlier shambles in the House of Representatives. The House repeal bill was passed in May, at the second attempt, despite having been rejected by 20 Republican congressmen. It would have slashed Medicaid—government-provided...Continue reading

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Poland’s government is putting the courts under its control

The opposition tests its candle power

CHOPIN played in the background and, as night fell, the crowd on the square in front of the Supreme Court in Warsaw sang the Polish national anthem. Someone projected “This is our court” onto the building’s wall. Two weeks earlier, in the same square, Donald Trump had hailed Poland’s role in the defence of Western values. But for the demonstrators who turned out on July 16th to protest against changes to the judicial system by the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party, it was those very values that were under threat.

Since taking power in 2015, PiS has set about dismantling the country’s checks and balances. It has reduced the public broadcaster to a propaganda organ, packed the civil service with loyalists and purged much of the army’s leadership. It has undermined the independence of the judiciary by stacking the Constitutional Tribunal with its cronies. In response, the European Commission warned Poland’s...Continue reading

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How Quants Calm the Stock Market

One factor helping to keep the VIX and realized volatility extremely low is quant funds that are discovering surprises before they can create big stock-market moves.

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The Saga Isn't Over for Dalian Wanda

Dalian Wanda Group may hope a last-minute tweak to a deal to sell nearly $10 billion of hotel and amusement park assets can solve some its near-term problems. Yet Beijing may still not be applauding.

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South Koreans are losing faith in an elitist education system

“IF YOU don’t have the ability then blame your parents,” wrote Jung Yoo-ra on social media in 2014, after being accepted into a prestigious university. Her mother, it turns out, had gone to great lengths to secure a spot for her, inducing Ehwa Women’s University to alter its admissions policy in a manner tailor-made for Ms Jung. Last month a court ruled that the nine people involved in this subterfuge had fundamentally shaken the “values of fairness that prop up our society”. Above all, the “feelings of emptiness and betrayal they caused in hardworking students” could not be excused.

University was once seen as a source of social mobility in South Korea. But so important is the right degree to a student’s prospects in life that rich families began spending heavily on coaching to improve their children’s chances, leaving poorer families behind. By 2007 over three-quarters of students were receiving some form of private tuition, spawning a maxim about the...Continue reading

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Qualcomm: All in the Chips

Surprisingly strong chip sales at Qualcomm has been overshadowed by growing dispute with Apple and uncertainty about the ultimate fate of its NXP acquisition.

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What the unjailing of Leopoldo López means for Venezuela

ON JULY 5th, independence day, a pro-government mob armed with sticks, metal poles and pistols charged into Venezuela’s golden-domed national assembly building and beat up parliamentarians. Some of the victims, dazed and bloodied, staggered around the legislature’s gardens. Two went to hospital; with fractured skulls, it was feared. The thugs were responding to a summons by Tareck el Aissami, the country’s vice-president. The assembly, under opposition control since elections in December 2015, had been hijacked by an “oligarchy”, he declared; “patriots” should defend it. The national guard, responsible for the legislature’s security, made little effort to stop them.

Three days later, Venezuela’s thuggish regime showed its nicer face. In the dead of night Leopoldo López, the country’s most prominent political prisoner, was transferred from the Ramo Verde military prison to his house, where he will remain confined. The supreme court, which obeys the government, ordered...Continue reading

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Morgan Stanley Is the Winner This Earnings Season

Morgan Stanley is on a roll. The investment bank’s trading business put competitors in the shade in the second quarter even as its stodgy wealth management division has become a source of growth.

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Vertex Shares Haven't Hit Their Apex

The ferocious rally in Vertex Pharmaceuticals shares on results in early stage data for its new cystic fibrosis treatment will surely tempt some investors to exit. That may not be wise, though, as the rally is likely to continue.

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One Hundred Days Later, China-U.S. Trade Thorny as Ever

President Donald Trump’s 100-day action plan to cut the trade deficit with China has ended with limited progress. More steel and aluminum import tariffs won’t do the trick.

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Hawaii and the White House exchange angry briefs on the travel ban

IN JUNE, the number of students who sat for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) was up 20% over the same sitting in 2016—a bump the exam’s administrator chalks up, in part, to “our current political climate” spurring “people...to understand again the necessity for the rule of law”. Lawyers have indeed been busy and prominent in the Donald Trump era—and the past few days have been no exception. Late on July 14th, in the wake of a July 13th rebuke from a federal district court in Hawaii, Mr Trump’s Department of Justice (DoJ) asked the Supreme Court to clarify its June 26th ruling permitting the president’s pause on refugee admissions and on travel from six majority-Muslim countries to go into effect only for “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”. On July 18th just before noon, Hawaii responded to this plea with a sharply worded, 38-page brief. Then, about nine hours...Continue reading

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Gaining a Better View of What Lurks in Banks

The last crisis left investors guessing about loan losses, an accounting change will fix that - at a cost.

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Big Food's Next Big Problem: Supermarket Brands

Americans have been late to the game in adopting private-label supermarket products. That’s changing, leaving huge room for traditional brands to suffer.

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Podcast: Goodbye, Benito

Brazil’s rigid labour market regulations were transplanted wholesale from Benito Mussolini’s Italy back in 1943. Now President Michel Temer has approved an overhaul. Will it encourage job creation? Also, an exorcist in Paris fighting “bad spirits”. And why President Trump is playing hardball in renegotiating NAFTA. Hosted by Andrew Palmer.

Britain: back to being the sick man of Europe?

IN THE 1970s, Britain was dubbed "the sick man of Europe", a role previously played by the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century. A poor growth record since the Second World War was combined with terrible industrial relations (29m days lost to strikes in 1979) to make many ask the question "Is Britain governable?".

The reason Britain joined what was then the EEC in 1973 (at the third attempt) was, in large part, a desperate attempt to find a way of forcing the country to become more competitive. Whether Europe was the key factor, or whether it was Margaret Thatcher's reforms, by the mid-1990s, the trick seemed to have worked. In particular, London, which lost a quarter of its population between 1939 and the early 1990s, became a global, self-confident city, attracting expats from all...Continue reading

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De-escalation in Syria

WHEN a group of teenage boys scrawled “down with the regime” on their school wall they lit the powder that ignited Syria’s civil war. Ever since their torture at the hands of state-security agents in March 2011, the boys’ home city of Deraa has become synonymous with the start of the rebellion to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But Deraa may yet turn out to be the place where dreams of overthrowing the regime finally die.

The guns fell silent over the battered city at noon on July 9th as a ceasefire brokered by Russia and America came into force. The truce, announced by Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin after their first meeting, is the latest in a string of failed attempts by the two powers to quell more than six years of violence that has killed perhaps 400,000 people. Its success, if it lasts, may open the door to deeper co-operation between Moscow and Washington. That could lead to a kind of peace, but at the price of what may be a lasting carve-up...Continue reading

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The Last Market Still Betting on Trump

Bonds, the dollar and some stock sectors have given up, but the overall stock market is still hoping for tax cuts and stimulus spending.

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Jaguar-Maker Tata Motors Fights Fires at Home

Tata Motors’ seeming success outside India with Jaguar Land Rover masks the pain at home.

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How the nursing home lobby blocked reforms in Louisiana

FOR A textbook demonstration of how campaign contributions can buy policy, one need look no further than Louisiana’s nursing homes. No interest group showers more money on the Bayou State’s politicians than nursing homes and their owners. Indeed, the last two governors together collected over $1m in donations from nursing homes; Louisiana legislators and other state officials have raked in many millions more.

This is perhaps not surprising. It is rare that a sector’s profitability is so dependent on the decisions of bureaucrats and politicians who make the critical decisions about how to dole out a state’s Medicaid money.

For nursing home owners, the investment in politicians has paid off handsomely. Every year, the fees the state pays them to house elderly and physically disabled people rise at rates that substantially outpace inflation. Meanwhile, their main competitors—home- and community-based health providers, which provide part-time care for the disabled in their own homes—have seen their rates cut...Continue reading

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Why Microsoft's Heads Count

For Microsoft, the trick these days is growing the cloud—without getting itself too puffed up.

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Goldman Needs a Plan to Turn Around Trading

Goldman Sachs is starting to lose its Wall Street halo, and it isn’t clear what the bank intends to do about it.

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What's Next for Investors After the Failure of the Health-Care Bill

Investors were right to ignore the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now that the bill has failed, what comes next could be more unpredictable and disruptive to the industry.

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A new drug of choice in the Gulf

THE traditional way is not always the most successful. Saudi Arabian border guards this month arrested a Sudanese man accused of smuggling more than half a million drug tablets into the kingdom from Jordan on the back of a camel. Just as tastes in food and drink vary from region to region, so do preferences for drugs. The one the Sudanese man was allegedly trafficking, known as Captagon, is the Arabian peninsula’s most popular narcotic. True Captagon (generic name: fenethylline) was produced as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. America banned it in 1981 after its addictive and other pernicious characteristics became clear. Most other countries have followed suit.

The pills flooding into Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states sometimes have a fenethylline base. But many are simply ‘uppers’, or amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), and some of what is sold under the poetic street name of Abu Hilalain (Father of the Two Crescent Moons: an allusion to the...Continue reading

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Hamas marks ten years of misruling Gaza

THE smell hits you from a mile away. On the southern edge of Gaza City the crystalline blue Mediterranean is being transmuted into a vast, bobbing pool of raw sewage, the product of half a million people with nowhere else for their effluent to flow. A three-way row between Gaza, the West Bank and Israel has seen electricity supplies cut to a trickle. One casualty has been the strip’s sewage treatment stations.

It is ten years since Hamas, an Islamist political party with a lethal military wing, took over Gaza. In June 2007 it threw out its rivals from Fatah, the nationalist faction that runs the Palestine Liberation Organisation. A year earlier, it had beaten Fatah in elections held in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. The split left Fatah to rule the West Bank, Hamas to control Gaza, and both sides to conspire in an elaborate fiction that the two still form a single whole. The intervening decade has not been kind to Gaza, its people or even its new masters. Hamas...Continue reading

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Donald Trump ducks a decision on sanctions on Khartoum

FIRST came the Iran nuclear deal; then the Cuban thaw. But less remarked upon at the time was Barack Obama’s rapprochement with another old foe: Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of orchestrating genocide. In January Mr Obama temporarily lifted economic sanctions on Sudan that had first been imposed 20 years ago by Bill Clinton. The move was a reward for “positive actions” by Sudan. The regime has co-operated with America in fighting terrorism, allowed more aid workers to reach civilians hurt in Sudan’s conflict zones and tried to end its wars with rebels in the south. Yet the decision on whether to end sanctions permanently fell to Mr Obama’s successor.

On July 11th Donald Trump ducked the decision for another three months, with an executive order saying he wants to see “sustained progress”. America’s intelligence agencies, and some of its allies such as Saudi Arabia, had pushed hard for an easing...Continue reading

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South-East Asia’s future looks prosperous but illiberal

THE young woman with the microphone cajoles, hectors and wheedles customers with the breathless enthusiasm of a livestock auctioneer at a county fair. She is standing behind a table stacked high with blue jeans; most of the milling crowd is dressed in lungyis, Myanmar’s skirt-like national dress. The fancy mall around them is anchored by a huge department store, dotted with banks and mobile-phone stalls and topped by a cinema and video arcade.

Myanmar has been growing so fast—by an average of 7.5% a year for the past five years—that the boom is reverberating in Mae Sot, just across the border in Thailand. Two years ago, says a longtime resident, the site of the mall was a swamp, and Mae Sot was a poky little border town with two small grocery stores. Today huge supermarkets, car dealers, electronics outlets and farm-equipment showrooms line the wide new road from the border into town, patronised by a steady stream of Burmese shoppers. Skeletons of future...Continue reading

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Why a Weaker Dollar is a Source of Market Strength

The role reversal between the dollar and euro this year is striking and significant.

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China's Visible Hand Starts to Squeeze

Offshore gambling hub Macau looks likely to be another target of China’s efforts to contain leverage and capital outflows.

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How New Rules Could Pinch Health Stocks

The latest Senate bid to overhaul the Affordable Care Act contains a benefit to health insurers. That boon may come at the expense of providers.

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Gameday for Disney to Boost ESPN Growth

Disney’s upcoming round of contract negotiations with pay-TV companies could help improve the outlook for ESPN and revive the media company’s stock.

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Why Earnings Don't Matter at Netflix

Netflix investors can’t seem to quit their favorite metric for measuring success: net subscriber additions. That could help Netflix stock when it reports second-quarter earnings but may not serve investors in the long run.

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Apple Tests the Faithful

Rumors that Apple’s new iPhone will arrive late—and at a much higher price—complicates Wall Street’s hopes for a “supercycle.” Apple’s faithful will likely go along, but will the mass market?

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The Other 496 S&P Stocks

So much of the market’s gain this year have been powered by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook that strategies that don’t contain those stocks have been left behind.

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Who Gets Hit Next in China's Financial Crackdown?

At hand is an ever-growing asset management industry and the deepening nexus of banks, brokers, trusts and insurance companies.

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The Vanishing Reward for Buying High-Yield Bonds

A closer look at high-yield bonds shows the reward on offer isn’t quite what it seems.

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Buffett Could Be Costly Option for Sprint and SoftBank

Softbank’s Masayoshi Son met with Warren Buffett to talk about an investment in Sprint—but that’s not likely to come cheap.

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China's Growth Is Still on Borrowed Time

The Chinese economy is performing better than expected—that gives regulators more time to crack down on leverage. Donald Trump or the Fed could upset the party, however.

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The administration asks the justices for clarity on their travel ban ruling

DONALD TRUMP’S travel ban has taken another turn on its dizzying trip through America’s federal courts. The latest row does not involve the ban itself—a revised executive order Mr Trump issued on March 6th freezing travel from six predominantly Muslim countries and pausing America’s refugee programme. It focuses on the fallout from a compromise Supreme Court ruling regarding Mr Trump’s ban—and suggests that the administration’s decision to keep pressing the fight has more to do with raw power than with protecting America from threats to its national security.

The dispute focuses on what the Supreme Court meant when, on June 26th, it permitted Mr Trump’s order to be implemented only “with respect to foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”. People living abroad “who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”, the justices wrote, could not be categorically excluded from entering the country. In light of...Continue reading

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More Bad News for Retailers

Retail sales were weak last month. The Commerce Department on Friday reported that overall sales in May fell 0.2% on the month after slipping 0.1% in April. Compared with a year earlier, they were up just 2.8%.

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Trumpcare, version three

IS THE Senate’s revised health-care proposal a good bill? And will it pass? Ideally these two questions would be related. But this is sausage-making, so they are not. Let’s take the first one first.

If you want something approaching universal health-care coverage, there are three ways to do it. One is for the government to tax citizens and then use revenue to fund their care (the single-payer model). The second is to subsidise people to buy coverage. This only works if the subsidies are generous enough for the decision to buy insurance to be a no-brainer. The third is to compel people to buy insurance, by law or by a fine.

At the moment America does all three. Veterans, the elderly, the poor and inhabitants of reservations for native Americans all have versions of the single-payer system, via the Veterans Health Administration, Medicare, Medicaid and the Indian Health Service. The care people receive from these programmes is often poor, but that’s another story. Then, since the passage of the Affordable Care Act,...Continue reading

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