Rio Tinto Isn't Tesla; It Should Hold Fire On a Lithium Bet

Lithium-battery and electric-vehicle plays are enjoying a futuristic ride into the stratosphere. Rio Tinto shouldn’t follow—at least not yet.

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It's Not the Leverage, It's the Illiquidity That Will Hurt

Too much short-term debt backing long-term assets fueled the last credit bubble a decade ago. This time round, investors are hunting for yield in hard-to-trade, often private assets.

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Fed Stumped on Inflation While Europe Plays It Cool

A global puzzle is proving increasingly hard to solve: growth is good but inflation is weirdly low. How policy makers on opposite sides of the Atlantic view this conundrum is starting to drive a wedge in markets.

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Brexit explodes the ambiguity that underpins Northern Ireland

CROSSING the border between Northern Ireland and his home in the south always left the young Gabriel D’Arcy sweating. But that is because he was invariably overdressed. In the 1960s the D’Arcy family made regular sorties to the north to buy cheap clothes; on the way home the children would layer on their purchases and sit bulging in the back seats as grinning Irish customs officials pretended to check the car for contraband. Today, as the CEO of LacPatrick, an Irish dairy firm with complex supply chains that zigzag across the border, Mr D’Arcy worries that Brexit will revive dangers that people on both sides thought had been consigned to the past.

The adamantine certainties of the Brexiteeers are an ill fit for the ambiguities of Northern Ireland. Talk to any Irish official and one assertion soon surfaces: Her Majesty’s Government has not thought this through. After nearly 18 months of rumination, it is clear that there is no way to reconcile Britain’s aims of yanking the...Continue reading

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With the break-up of coalition talks, Germany enters new territory

THE clock was nearing midnight on November 19th when Christian Lindner walked out. Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), Mr Lindner’s Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens were close to reaching a deal after weeks of preliminary coalition talks—or so observers thought. In a brief statement, the FDP’s leader shattered their expectations. The talks had failed to yield a “common vision” for the future of the country, he said. Entering a coalition would require his party to give up its principles: “It is better not to govern at all than to govern wrongly.”

Mr Lindner’s walkout has put Germany in an unprecedented situation. With the option of a so-called Jamaica coalition (the parties’ colours are the same as those of the Jamaican flag) all but off the table, coalition talks have failed to produce a government for the first time since the federal republic was founded in 1949. For Angela Merkel, already weakened by poor election...Continue reading

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New sanctions are about to bite, and Russia’s elite are spooked

Trump’s hands are tied

LAST January, shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as America’s president, telephones started to ring in several Senate offices. The White House, staffers learned, was drafting an executive order to lift some of the sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its war against Ukraine in 2014. “We were horrified. Everyone was calling each other and we soon realised that all heard the same thing,” one recalls.

The staffers promptly leaked the rumour, and began work on a bill to turn the sanctions, imposed by executive order under Barack Obama, into law. The idea was to stop Mr Trump from lifting them unilaterally. Although the earlier sanctions were related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was evidence of Russia’s meddling in America’s elections, not to mention Mr Trump’s worryingly consistent praise of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, that propelled Congress into action. The result was the Counter America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA, which...Continue reading

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EU plans to move closer to the Swedish model for parental leave

More time with the toddlers

WHEN Johan Braven had his first child he took nine months of leave. For the second he took ten months, the same amount as his wife. “I was afraid of not having the bond if I didn’t spend time at home with the children too,” says Mr Braven. The first country in the world to allow couples to split parental leave (in 1974), Sweden offers each couple 480 days between them for each child. During the first 390 of those days, they are paid at close to 80% of their previous salary—by taxpayers. Ninety of those 480 days are reserved for each parent. The time can be taken up until the child is eight.

Parents in the rest of Europe are far less generously treated. In most countries parental leave, other than time taken by either parent as maternity or paternity leave immediately before (in the case of women) and after the birth of a child, is unpaid, and there is a lot less of it; currently 18 weeks per parent in Britain, for...Continue reading

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Netherlands fishmongers accuse herring-tasters of erring

In a pickle

HERRING (genus Clupea, with four species found in the Baltic and North Seas) have been vital to northern Europe’s economy since the Middle Ages, when fishermen worked out how to preserve them in brine. Every north European country maintains that there is a right way to eat the fish, but they differ as to what it is. In Sweden Baltic surströmming are fermented until slightly rancid. In Denmark the sill are pickled, or cooked and eaten in long strips. In the Netherlands haring must be lightly salted for preservation but otherwise raw, dipped in minced onion and accompanied with a pickle. No food is more loved.

So the Dutch were shocked when accusations surfaced in November that there was something rotten about the national herring test. The test, sponsored by the Algemeen Dagblad, a newspaper, is carried out by two expert...Continue reading

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Juan Orlando Hernández looks headed for re-election in Honduras

JUAN ORLANDO HERNÁNDEZ is the first presidential candidate in Honduras’s recent history to run for re-election as an incumbent. He is making the most of it. Last month he took a sledgehammer to the masonry of a notoriously permissive prison due for demolition. A brand-new landing craft, commissioned to repel drug-traffickers from the northern coast, is distributing food to the poor. The media gave both events flattering coverage.

With days to go before elections on November 26th, he is the firm favourite to win the presidency (congressional elections also take place on that day). The latest poll puts him 15 percentage points ahead of his main rival, Salvador Nasralla, a sports broadcaster. Mr Hernández’s approval rating is 56%. He is reaping the benefit of a tough-on-crime policy, which helped reduce Honduras’s murder rate (it had been the world’s highest when he became president in 2014). But he has also been tough on institutions like the judiciary and congress, which are supposed to be independent of the presidency. His...Continue reading

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Cuba’s Communists bar “alternative” candidates from local elections

IF CUBA were a democracy, the municipal elections that start on November 26th would open a season of participatory politics, culminating in the choosing of a new president next February. This year more than 200 people, a record number, put themselves forward as “alternative” candidates for local office, contesting the hegemony of the Communist Party. The government put a quick stop to that.

Local elections, held every two years, are Cuba’s most democratic. All Cubans older than 16, except felons and the mentally ill, can run for 12,515 council seats. The job of those who are elected is to coax local governments to fix potholes, supply water and the like. Nominees, chosen in meetings of their neighbours, appear on paper ballots; citizens decide among them in secret voting. Membership of the Communist Party is not a requirement.

Shutting up about political pluralism apparently is. The government found “wildly creative and sometimes even comical” ways to keep alternative candidates off the ballot, says Manuel...Continue reading

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Wanting to ban the veil, Quebec bans sunglasses, too

IN QUEBEC, Canada’s French-speaking province, it is illegal to talk to a librarian while wearing sunglasses. So is using a bus pass while shrouded in a scarf, no matter how bitter the weather. These prohibitions are the consequence of a law enacted in October whose real purpose is to ban Muslim women from wearing niqabs, or face veils, when they provide or receive public services. By widening the ban to all sorts of face covering it seeks to deflect the charge that it is based on religious animus. It does the job as well as a see-through burqa.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Council of Canadian Muslims challenged the law in Quebec’s superior court on November 7th, saying it violates rights to sexual equality and religious freedom. The court is expected to rule soon on whether to suspend the prohibition on face coverings while it deliberates.

Quebec’s Liberal government, led by Philippe Couillard, is not the first to try to strip people of...Continue reading

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Why Latin America has no serious separatist movements

LATIN AMERICA is linked to Spain and Portugal by language, culture and ancestry as well as by investment and the shared project of democracy. So it is not surprising that Latin Americans have been gripped by the conflict over Catalonia’s future. Se rompe España? (Is Spain breaking up?), asked the cover of Semana, Colombia’s leading news magazine.

For most Latin Americans it goes without saying that Catalonia is part of Spain. While the Spanish empire was at first a Castilian venture, Catalonia, too, provided viceroys and the forebears of presidents. In recent decades many Latin American writers have made Barcelona, with its literary agents and publishing houses, a temporary or permanent home. Having lived in Barcelona for 12 years until 2012, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, one of Colombia’s leading novelists, wrote last month in El País, a Spanish newspaper, of his “astonishment and melancholy” at the drive for...Continue reading

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Lebanon’s prime minister decides not to resign after all

FOR a man who less than three weeks ago said his enemies were out to kill him, Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri (pictured right), looked remarkably relaxed. During his first public appearance on home soil since his shock resignation on November 4th, Mr Hariri even shared a smile and a joke with the president, Michel Aoun (pictured left), as soldiers paraded before the two men during independence day celebrations in Beirut on November 22nd.

For now, the pair have every reason to smile. Hours after the parade, Mr Hariri said he had decided “temporarily” to suspend his resignation, averting a political crisis that looked as if it might bring down the government and raise communal tension. Standing outside his Beirut residence in front of thousands of cheering supporters later in the day, Mr Hariri vowed to stay in Lebanon to defend the country’s stability.

Mr Hariri’s triumphant homecoming marks the end of a mysterious odyssey. It began on November 3rd when he flew to Riyadh. That was not unusual: Mr Hariri is...Continue reading

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American taxes are unusually progressive. Government spending is not

AMERICANS are not known for their love of income redistribution. Asked to rank, on a scale of one to ten, how important it is for democracies to reduce inequality, they say only six; Europeans say eight. Yet the country is hardly indifferent to who gets which slice of the economic pie. Three in five Americans say that income and wealth should be spread around more. The most potent charge laid against the unpopular Republican tax plan making its way through Congress is that it is a giveaway to the rich and to corporations—groups that voters, by large margins, think should pay more tax, not less.

This strange amalgam of views manifests itself in fiscal policy. The federal government has no qualms about making the rich pay the country’s bills; it has perhaps the most progressive tax system in the rich world, according to one study from 2009. But it pulls off only half of Robin Hood’s trick, because it funnels very little of the money it raises towards the poor. In combination, its...Continue reading

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Measuring the effects of partisanship on pie-eating

THANKSGIVING is supposed to be a time for families to gather together, forget their differences and feast on turkey and pumpkin pie. The Automobile Association expects 51m people to travel at least 50 miles to do so. With this in mind The Economist has created a pumpkin-pie pilgrimage index, a measure of how far people are prepared to go to celebrate Thanksgiving. Our index uses numbers provided by Teralytics, a Zurich-based startup that tracks people’s movements anonymously, sifting through data collected by mobile-phone masts. Using county-level data for a seven-day period over Thanksgiving 2016, we calculated distance travelled, journey time and the duration of stay.

The average American who celebrated Thanksgiving outside their home county left home at 3:40pm on Wednesday, travelled for 300 miles, arrived six hours later at their destination and then stayed for nearly three days. Unsurprisingly, people from counties whose residents travel the farthest tend to...Continue reading

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Investors Have Gotten Too Complacent on China Debt

China is right that industrial capacity cuts are helping steel and coal firms to reduce debt and banking-sector risks. Investors are wrong to conclude the battle is won.

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The partisan divide in America is widening

AS MILLIONS of Americans travelled home for Thanksgiving this week advice columns were filled with the perennial—but increasingly fraught—question of what to talk about at the dinner table. ("When your liberal aunt shows up at Thanksgiving in Trump country" ran one headline in the Washington Post). In recent years generational and partisan attitudes towards a range of political issues have diverged, with political-party stalwarts holding increasingly negative views of the followers of the party they oppose. Yet at the same time, there is some hope to be drawn from growing agreement on a range of social issues.

Polls suggest that on a number of measures the partisan divide is wider than ever. Surveys by Pew Research Center, for example, report that in 1994 there was a 20-point disparity in the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who thought government should do more to help the needy; by 2017 that had increased to 47 percentage points. That reflects divergence in views about the fairness of the economic system—with...Continue reading

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A verdict of genocide against the Bosnian Serb commander

RATKO MLADIC, the military leader of Bosnian Serb forces during the war of 1992-95, shouted “lies” at the court. Nevertheless, the UN’s Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague found him guilty on November 22nd of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. There were no surprises in the verdicts and no surprises in the reactions. Mr Mladic has been sent to prison for life; and next month the tribunal will shut up shop for good.

Mr Mladic was a ruddy-faced soldier’s soldier. He did not lead from behind. His troops loved him. He became, and still is, an icon for many Serbs. He saw himself as a defender of the Serbian nation, having taken up the sword as generations before him had done to fight for his people. He said he was innocent of all charges. Like many Serbs he was convinced that the tribunal was an anti-Serb kangaroo court.

Mr Mladic believed in revenge. During the second world war his father, a communist partisan, died fighting Croatian fascist forces. As a Yugoslav army general he helped the...Continue reading

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Good as It Gets for Deere Stock

More strong results for agricultural giant, but stock rally is aging.

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Who Needs a Tax Cut? Companies Are Spending Anyway

Tax cut or no tax cut, companies could be spending a lot more money in the year ahead.

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Who Knew the Paint Industry Could Be This Exciting?

The otherwise quotidian world of paint is turning into a feeding frenzy of merger activity. Money is to be made betting on the prime targets.

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Sexual-harassment scandals imperil Democrats more than Republicans

WHEN asked how he went broke, Mike Campbell, a drunken lout in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”, replies, “Two ways...Gradually and then suddenly.” That is how the ongoing spate of sexual-misconduct scandals feels: the sudden breaking of a dam held too long in place. It went six weeks ago, after the New York Times and New Yorker reported multiple, decades-long allegations of sexual assault, harassment and rape against Harvey Weinstein, a film producer. The waters remain roiled. In the past week a second woman has accused Al Franken, a senator from Minnesota, of groping her; BuzzFeed has reported allegations of sexual harassment against John Conyers, a Democrat who has represented Detroit in Congress since 1965 (he denies them). Glenn Thrush, a reporter, and Charlie Rose, a talk-show host, were suspended and fired respectively after sexual-harassment allegations. More cases are doubtless coming.

In the past, sexual misconduct in politics tended to be ignored, disbelieved or...Continue reading

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Meg Whitman's Latest Turn Signal

Hewlett Packard shareholders should be used to the fact by now that Meg Whitman sometimes changes her mind. That doesn’t always work out too badly.

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Electronic Arts Can Come Back From the Dark Side

Loss of “Star Wars Battlefront II” microtransactions is manageable in light of strong digital growth overall.

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China's Online Lending Army Runs Into Beijing

What could go wrong betting on fintech companies catering to China’s increasingly affluent consumers? Quite a lot, it turns out.

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Why Investors Should Be Pleased to See Chinese Interest Rates Rise

There are encouraging signs that Beijing is allowing the cost of credit to be driven more by market forces.

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Bull Market Has Long Memory of Bearish Times

The dark days of the global financial crisis cast a long shadow over a key stock-market measure.

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Hold the Confetti for Biotech Stocks

Strong biotech index performance masks investor disappointment.

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Robert Mugabe, who bragged he would rule until death (and perhaps beyond) has resigned

 

SUDDENLY the dictator was no more. As Zimbabwe’s parliament began impeachment proceedings against Robert Mugabe, who had stubbornly refused to step down despite a country rising against him, a hush came over the joint session of senators and MPs. The speaker rose, in his hand a letter. Mr Mugabe had resigned. The room roared. “We have set ourselves free,” said one dancing man, a member of the central committee of Zanu-PF, the ruling party. “Mugabe is down. It is our time now.”

It was a remarkable fall for a man who bragged he would keep on ruling “until God calls” and whose wife, Grace, until recently a powerful figure in Zanu-PF, had said that if should he die before election schedule for next year, the party would “field him as a corpse”.

As dusk fell, Harare rang with hooting car horns and the shouts and songs of an overjoyed people. Soldiers and tanks stationed throughout the city since taking control a week ago kept guard calmly. Few had expected Mr Mugabe to stand down willingly after 37 years in...Continue reading

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Donald Trump’s new contenders for the Supreme Court

LAST year, while running for president, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming 21 people he said he would consider for the late Antonin Scalia’s chair on the Supreme Court. Less than two weeks after taking office, Mr Trump followed through on that pledge, tapping Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy. Nine months later, the remaining 20 names are still would-be justices, but on November 17th, Don McGahn, the White House counsel, said a “refresh” was in order. Mr McGahn told conservative lawyers at the Federalist Society convention in Washington, DC that five more judges would be tacked on to the list—just in case another Supreme seat opens up. 

Two of the new potential picks are 45-year-old, newly minted appeals-court judges Mr Trump recently appointed to the bench: Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Kevin C. Newsom of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Newsom won Senate confirmation by a vote of 66-31 on August 1st. Judge Barrett had a tougher road: after confronting concerns...Continue reading

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Tencent Still Has a Bit to Learn From Facebook

Chinese tech giant Tencent has surpassed Facebook in market cap, but it needs to earn money like the U.S. social-media behemoth.

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Commodity Bulls Ignoring a Few Large Elephants

Rising prices for growth-sensitive commodities have been one factor assuaging investors’ fears about richly valued stocks. But investors have been ignoring warning signs in metal and energy markets too.

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Wall Street Will See Washington in Court

AT&T’s deal for Time Warner may be going to the courts where deal makers have a decent shot at challenging the Trump administration’s suit against the media deal.

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Don't Sell Your Company's Private Jet Fleet Just Yet

General Electric is cutting back on its executives using private jets, but in fact, judicious use of these symbols of privilege can boost company performance, a study finds.

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Marveling at Marvell Again

Sometimes confused with the comic-book company that bears almost the same name, Marvell Technology has lately been pulling off some superheroic feats of its own.

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An unexpected result moves Chile into uncharted political territory

“WE’RE content,” declared Sebastián Piñera, after the results of the first round of Chile’s national elections were reported on November 19th. Few believe him. Mr Piñera, the presidential candidate of the centre-right Chile Vamos (Let’s Go Chile) coalition came in first, but with just 37% of the vote, well under the 44% or so pollsters had predicted. He faces a run-off on December 17th against Alejandro Guillier, a television journalist who represents the centre-left Force of the Majority coalition; he got 23% of the vote in the first round. Mr Piñera, a billionaire businessman who was president from 2010 to 2014, is still the favourite, but not by much.

The surprise successes in the first round come from the fringes of Chilean politics. The biggest question facing the country is to what extent those extremes will influence the next government.

The third-place finisher, with 20% of the vote, was Beatriz Sánchez, a left-wing journalist who has never held elected office. She wants higher taxes on the rich to...Continue reading

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Africans are getting healthier and wealthier...

IN MANY ways the story of Africa in the 21st century is one of success. Great strides have been made tackling diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. A baby born in Africa today is less likely to die young, and more likely to go to school than one born in 2000. Life expectancy at birth increased by nearly ten years, to 60, between 2000 and 2015. But many Africans also feel less secure than they did a decade ago. Civil wars and social unrest have proliferated, according to an index of how Africa’s leaders are performing.

The Ibrahim Index of Governance, produced by the foundation of Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British telecoms-billionaire-turned-philanthropist, has been trying to quantify how well...Continue reading

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Borrowing Bonanza in Emerging Markets

A decade of loose monetary policy from the Federal Reserve has sent gushers of cash to emerging markets. One big impact has been to reduce funding costs for a host of riskier, first-time borrowers such as Maldives and Tajikistan.

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The Crude but Effective Way to Gauge the Oil Market

The widening discount of WTI to Brent crude seems odd now that the U.S. is an export juggernaut, but it explains a lot about the energy market.

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Robert Mugabe clings to his title, as crowds holler for him to go

ZIMBABWEANS tuned into their turgid state broadcaster on Sunday night expecting the news of a lifetime. But instead of tendering his resignation, Robert Mugabe—still clinging to the presidency after 37 years—prattled on about how peaceful Zimbabweans are and how the country needs to refocus on a “promising agricultural season”. Hearts sank from Bulawayo to Binga. Mr Mugabe’s absurd address followed an overwhelming and unprecedented show of popular disgust with him. On Saturday hundreds of thousands of people jammed the streets of Harare to celebrate Mr Mugabe’s apparent ouster in a military coup, which the army still pretends was not a coup. On Sunday, the central committee of Zanu-PF, his party, sang and danced as they sacked him as their leader. Despite this, Mr Mugabe insists that he will still chair an upcoming party congress. The question remains whether he will voluntarily step down as president of Zimbabwe, as some are still saying he has agreed to do, or be forced out.

Stubborn and wily at 93, Mr Mugabe is...Continue reading

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Fuelled by Middle East tension, the oil market has got ahead of itself

ONLY one thing spooks the oil market as much as hot-headed despots in the Middle East, and that is hot-headed hedge-fund managers. For the second time this year, record speculative bets on rising oil prices in American and European futures have made the market vulnerable to a sell-off. “You don’t want to be the last man standing,” says Ole Hansen of Saxo Bank.

On November 15th, the widely traded Brent crude futures benchmark, which had hit a two-year high of $64 a barrel on November 7th, fell below $62. America’s West Texas Intermediate also fell. The declines coincided with a sharp drop across global metals markets, owing to concern about slowing demand in China, which has clobbered prices of nickel and other metals that had hit multi-year highs. (In a sign of investor nervousness after a sharp rally this year in global stock and bond markets, high-yield corporate bonds also weakened significantly this week.)

The reversal in the oil markets put a swift end to talk of crude shooting above $70 a barrel, which had gained strength after the detention in Saudi Arabia of dozens of princes and other members of the elite, and increasing tension between the Gulf states and Iran over Yemen and Lebanon. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which forecasts supply and demand, said on November 14th that it doubted $60 a barrel had become a new floor for oil....Continue reading

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What is the purpose of tax reform?

IF MAKING America great again is the aim, you could do worse than bring back the economic growth rates of the late 1990s. President Donald Trump’s team reckons that the Republican tax plan making its way through Congress will do just that. “We are creating a model that creates economic growth in this country,” says Gary Cohn, the director of Mr Trump’s National Economic Council. Kevin Hassett, who runs the Council of Economic Advisers, reckons the bill should push growth above 4% per year.

Such heights are not beyond the realm of possibility, but if America reaches them tax reform will have little to do with it. That is not because of the specifics of the plan. Rather, it reflects an underappreciated reality: tax reform can accomplish many things, but raising long-run growth is not generally among them.

Most assessments of the Republican tax proposals, like most analyses of most tax plans, conclude their effects on growth will be small. The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan public-policy initiative,...Continue reading

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Timelier provisions may make banks’ profits and lending choppier

IN THE first quarter of 2018 thousands of banks will look a little less profitable. A new international accounting standard, IFRS 9, will oblige lenders in more than 120 countries, including the European Union’s members, to increase provisions for credit losses. In America, which has its own standard-setter, IFRS 9 will not be applied—but by 2019 banks there will also have to follow a slightly different regime.

The new rule has its roots in the financial crisis of 2007-08, in the wake of which the leaders of the G20 countries declared that accounting standards needed an overhaul. Among their other shortcomings, banks had done too little, too late, to recognise losses on wobbly assets. Under existing standards they make provisions only when losses are incurred, even if they see trouble coming. IFRS 9, which comes into force on January 1st, obliges them to provide for expected losses instead.

Under IFRS 9 bank loans are classified in one of three “stages”. When a loan is made—stage one—banks must make a...Continue reading

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ABP, a Dutch pension giant, is more admired abroad than at home

EUROPE’S largest pension fund, a scheme for Dutch public-sector workers called ABP, is much feted abroad for its efforts in “sustainable” investing. At home, however, where it provides pensions to one in six families and manages nearly one-third of pension wealth, it is suffering a crisis of confidence.

By international standards, Dutch pensions are extremely generous overall, offering 96% of career-averagesalaries (adjusted for inflation), compared with an OECD mean of 63%. And they are solid. Thanks to mandatory, tax-deductible saving, the Dutch have stored up a collective pension pot of nearly €1.4trn ($1.6trn), roughly double GDP. Mercer, a consultancy, marks the country as second only to Denmark in a global ranking of schemes.

Yet Dutch people’s faith in their pensions has sunk as low as their trust in banks and insurers. In March a political party for older voters, 50+, won four seats in the Dutch parliament, largely thanks to its promise to “stop the pension raid”. ABP’s own members mark it at just...Continue reading

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What annual reports say, or do not, about competition

What explains the remarkable strength of corporate profits and the sluggish growth of real wages in recent years? One explanation is that industries are getting less competitive. Work by The Economist found that two-thirds of American industries were more concentrated in the hands of a few firms in 2012 than in 1997.

Research by AXA Investment Managers Rosenberg Equities into the language used in American annual reports points in the same direction. Sherlock Holmes famously talked of the significance of the dog that did not bark in the night. It may be similarly important that companies refer to rivals much less than they did; usage of the word “competition” in annual reports has declined by three-quarters since the turn of the century. Business is less cut-throat than it used to be.

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The rich get richer, and millennials miss out

Early contender for the 2047 list

BUOYANT financial markets meant that global wealth rose by 6.4% in the 12 months to June, the fastest pace since 2012. And the ranks of the rich expanded again, with 2.3m new millionaires added to the total, according to the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s global wealth report.

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

America continues to dominate the ranks of millionaires with 43% of the global total. Both Japan and Britain had fewer dollar millionaires than they did in June 2016, thanks to declines in the yen and sterling. Emerging economies have been catching up in the millionaire stakes; they now have 8.4%...Continue reading

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Internship

Applications are invited for a Marjorie Deane internship in our New York bureau. The award is designed to provide work experience for a promising journalist or would-be journalist, who will spend three to six months at The Economist writing about economics, business and finance. Applicants are asked to write a covering letter and an article of no more than 500 words, suitable for publication in The Economist. Applications should be sent by December 14th to deaneinternny@economist.com.

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Who needs America?

REVIVING the original Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal between 12 countries around the Pacific Rim, is technically impossible. To go into force, members making up at least 85% of their combined GDP had to ratify it. Three days into his presidency, Donald Trump announced that America was out. With 60% of members’ GDP gone, that deal was doomed.

But on November 11th, another began to rise in its place, crowned with a tongue-twisting new name: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Ministers from its 11 members issued a joint statement saying that they had agreed on its core elements, and that it demonstrated their “firm commitment to open markets”. The political symbolism was powerful. As America retreats, others will lead instead.

The CPTPP is still far from finished, however. This inconvenient truth is unsurprising. Resuscitating the deal without its biggest member was always going to be hard. Without America, uncomfortable concessions made in the old TPP...Continue reading

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What five years of Abenomics has and has not achieved

IN TOKYO’S Iidabashi district, north of the Imperial Palace, young salarymen and women gather after work to enjoy grilled chicken and a drink at Torikizoku, a chain of budget restaurants. They tap out their orders on touch-screen terminals, which the company has installed on many tables in an effort to economise on waiters, whose wages are hard to contain. Last month the company was forced to raise its price by over 6%, to ¥298 (about $2.60) plus tax, for two skewers of locally reared chicken yakitori. It was the firm’s first price increase in 28 years.

Chicken skewers are not commonly seen as a macroeconomic indicator. But Torikizoku’s decision exemplifies the underlying logic of “Abenomics”, a campaign to revive Japan’s economy, named after Shinzo Abe, its prime minister. His economic strategy aimed to stimulate spending and investment through vigorous monetary easing. That would create jobs, driving up wages. Higher wages, in turn, would push up prices. Success would be measured by the defeat of deflation, which had...Continue reading

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Life Is Suddenly Looking Up for Toshiba

After its $5.3 billion share sale, the world is suddenly a brighter place for Toshiba. If its deal to sell its memory-chip business fails, it could be brighter still.

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