Fox Gives Disney Muscle for Next Net Fight

Getting bigger as Disney is doing gives it improved leverage to negotiate favorable distribution terms with cable and wireless companies, which stand to gain by the rollback of net neutrality.

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No Sequel to 'Massacre at the Shopping Mall'

Amazon didn’t stop retailers’ Christmas from coming. Somehow or other, it came just the same.

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How to Tell If Disney Is Getting Fox for a Good Price

Rupert Murdoch is selling out to Disney and getting a fairy-tale ending. Disney shareholders shouldn’t be too worried about overpaying though.

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In the name of democracy, Venezuela bans the opposition

“LET us get ready for 2018,” boomed Nicolás Maduro as he hailed the “third great victory of the Venezuelan people”. The president was gloating over a vote on December 10th, in which his United Socialist Party, which has looted and misgoverned the country into economic ruin, bagged more than 90% of the country’s mayoral contests.

It was a hollow triumph. The three main opposition parties fielded no candidates, having reasonably called the voting a sham. (The other “victories” were equally flawed: the creation in July of a rubber-stamp “constituent assembly” to replace an elected legislature, and a ballot for governors in October.)

Dizzy with these dubious successes, Mr Maduro’s eye is now on a bigger contest, next year’s presidential poll. He has not formally declared, but Tareck El Aissami, the vice-president, says his boss hopes for another six-year term.

With that in mind, the regime is now determined to knock out rivals. Mr Maduro...Continue reading

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Caribbean sugar is close to a sticky end

Why cut cane when you can print passports?

IN ITS 18th-century heyday cane grown in the Caribbean and cut by African slaves provided Britain with nearly all its sugar. The masters of this brutal trade made enormous fortunes. But it has seen 200 years of decline, accelerating after slavery ended in 1838. Now the region is wondering how it will cope after a policy change by the European Union which could finally bring down the curtain.

Today, the English-speaking Caribbean produces under 0.3% of the world’s sugar; Brazil grows nearly a quarter. Many islands have abandoned cane for more profitable activities. Trinidad closed its last sugar factory in 2007, and a gas-related boom took up the slack. St Kitts shut its last factory two years earlier, after the debts of its state-owned managers approached a third of GDP. A railway that trundled cane now carries tourists. St Kitts’s new staple is passports for foreigners, sales of which finance an opaque development...Continue reading

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How young Brazilians hope to clean up politics

WITH his reversed baseball cap and facial fuzz, the style of 29-year-old Daniel José Oliveira (pictured) is hardly typical for a Brazilian politician. Nor is his background: he was one of 11 siblings brought up in a small town by a domestic servant and an office porter. After winning a scholarship to a Catholic school, he studied economics at a fine São Paulo campus. That led to a job at J.P. Morgan, a scholarship to study at Yale University and a job offer from another American investment firm.

But in 2015, with Brazil’s economy crashing and its politics mired in scandals, he instead came home. Inspired by En Marche!, the French liberal party which propelled Emmanuel Macron to the presidency, he hopes to be elected next October as a federal deputy for São Paulo state.

Until recently, politics was a turn-off for his generation. The average age of lower-house deputies elected in 2014 was 50, 19 years above the national mean. Brazil’s old-timers...Continue reading

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Why Juan Rulfo’s fiction of fear is still revered in Latin America

FOR a writer, he was a man of extraordinarily few words. Juan Rulfo produced only one short novel, “Pedro Páramo”, and a collection of short stories, “El Llano en Llamas” (translated as “The Burning Plain”). Together they comprise fewer than 300 pages. And that, apart from a couple of fragments and a few film scripts, was it. Yet not only does Rulfo enjoy a towering reputation in Spanish-language letters. In addition, as has become clear during the commemorations this year marking the centenary of his birth, his work has at least as much relevance for many young Latin American writers as that of successors such as Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa, who are far better known to English-speaking readers.

Rulfo was marked indelibly by his childhood. He was born into a family of landowners in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. They lost their lands in the turmoil of the Mexican revolution (1910-17) and the counter-revolutionary Cristero war of the late 1920s. His...Continue reading

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The markets’ apparent calm over Brexit is deceptive

FOR all the sound and fury of the Brexit negotiations, it has seemed at times as if the financial markets have been barely affected. But as with the swans that glide on the Thames, a serene surface conceals some frantic paddling underneath.

The pound is the most reliable indicator of the Brexit mood. A rule of thumb is that, if the headlines point to a “hard” Brexit (creating trade barriers with the EU), sterling will fall; signs of a “soft” Brexit (something that is close to the current relationship) will cause it to rise.

But some feedback processes are at work. The big fall in the pound in the immediate aftermath of the referendum has led to a gradual rise in imported inflation. The annual inflation rate hit 3.1% in November, requiring Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, to write to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to explain why the target (of 2%) had been missed. The bank has already raised interest rates once. More rises may follow, and expectation of such rises supports the pound.

The need for monetary tightening is not simply a result of higher import costs, which might prove temporary. More worryingly, the Bank thinks that the trend rate of growth of the British economy has fallen (a view it shares with the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s forecasting arm). In part, this is because Britain faces a more...Continue reading

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Oil and gas supply disruptions ripple around the world

The Baumgarten blast

CALL it the hydrocarbon equivalent of the butterfly effect. As oil and gas supplies tighten during the northern winter, disruptions as remote as a hairline fracture on a piece of Scottish pipeline, and an explosion in an Austrian natural-gas plant, have repercussions felt around the world.

Start with the pipeline. After Ineos, a chemicals company, detected a growing crack on a piece of pipe near Aberdeen, on December 11th it said it would shut the main Forties pipeline carrying North Sea oil and gas to Britain for weeks. The suspension of a pipeline carrying 450,000 barrels a day (b/d) of crude, in a global market of almost 98m b/d, would not normally be disruptive. Yet Brent crude, the benchmark for pricing much of the world’s seaborne crude, is itself partly priced on the flow of crude from 80 fields that feed the Forties pipeline, magnifying the impact.

Futures prices for Brent crude delivered in February and...Continue reading

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The WTO remains stuck in its rut

“THERE is life after Buenos Aires,” soothed Susana Malcorra, chair of the 11th ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Multilateralism may not be dead, but it has taken a kicking. Expectations were low as the meeting began in the Argentine capital. They sank even lower as it progressed. Delegates failed to agree on a joint statement, let alone on any new trade deals.

Many arrived with a culprit already in mind. Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, was the face of an administration that is both questioning the benefits of multilateralism and jamming the WTO’s process of settling disputes. As negotiations progressed, some delegates groused that American leadership was lacking. Some even speculated that the Americans might be happy if multilateral talks foundered. What better proof, after all, that the system is broken?

Ms Malcorra, without mentioning the Americans by name, warned against creating scapegoats out of those...Continue reading

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The revised Basel bank-capital standards are complete at last

HOWEVER long a storm lasts, clearing up takes longer. On December 7th Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank and head of the committee that approves global bank-capital standards, declared that revisions to Basel 3, the version drawn up after the financial crisis of 2007-08, were complete. The overhaul of the previous rules, which were blown away in the tempest, began eight years ago. The revised set, informally called Basel 4, will not take full effect until 2027.

That lengthy period of adjustment is one way in which Basel 4 is less demanding than banks, notably in Europe, had feared. Several other tweaks mean that the standards banks must eventually meet will be less exacting than first proposed. Already forced to bolster their balance-sheets with lots more equity—of which the crisis showed them to be woefully short—banks may deny that they have got off lightly. But they probably have.

Basel 4 was supposed to be settled a year ago. It wasn’t, because of a...Continue reading

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China’s leading economists are in high demand and short supply

EVERGRANDE, a Chinese property firm, is a big spender. It was until recently the country’s most indebted developer. It also owns a football club with one of the highest payrolls in China. It has extended its largesse to a new field: economics. Having founded an economic-research institute, Evergrande last month poached Ren Zeping, a star analyst with a big brokerage, to serve as its first chief economist. His annual salary of 15m yuan ($2.3m) is, based on available information, the highest ever for an economist in China. Not bad for a country where forecasting the official growth figures accurately has for years required little more research than reading the official growth targets.

Yet Evergrande is not alone in splashing cash in China, whether in property, football or, lately, economics. Competition for the best—or, rather, best-known—economists is fierce. The past half year alone has resembled a frenzied transfer window for their services. Besides Mr Ren, half a dozen...Continue reading

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Cars, jewels, wine and watches have been good investments

DIAMONDS, they say, are for ever. They can be pricey, too. On December 5th 173 lots of jewels auctioned by Sotheby’s raised $54m. They included several pieces belonging to Sean Connery, known for playing James Bond. The following day a car favoured by Bond, the Aston Martin DB5, was auctioned for $2.7m. It was among 24 classic vehicles that together fetched $45m. The sales in New York last week by the world’s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, also involved fine wines, watches and other luxuries. Between them they sold $200m-worth.

The Economist has compiled price indices for many of these items—diamonds, classic cars, fine wine, art, watches and other curios—and grouped them in a “passion” index. The index is weighted according to the holdings of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI)—defined as people with more than $1m of investable assets—as reported by Barclays. Our passion index has dropped by 2% a year, on average, for the past...Continue reading

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Bitcoin-futures contracts create as many risks as they mitigate

Will America’s economy overheat in 2018?

USUALLY politicians pretend that good economic news on their watch is no surprise. But America’s recent growth figures have been so positive that even the administration of President Donald Trump has allowed itself to marvel. “It’s actually happening faster than we expected,” mused Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget chief, in September, after growth rose to 3.1% in the second quarter. (Mr Trump in fact came to office promising 4% growth, but the goal now seems to be 3%.) Mr Mulvaney warned that hurricanes would soon bring growth back down. Instead, in the third quarter, it rose to 3.3%—a figure celebrated with more conviction. The administration’s initial caution was wise: quarterly growth figures are volatile, and few economists expect growth above 3% to carry on for long. Yet there is no denying that the economy is in rude health.

In part, that reflects the strength of the global economy. But it is also the culmination of a years-long trend. As politics has consumed...Continue reading

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A decade after it hit, what was learnt from the Great Recession?

TEN years ago this month, America entered the “Great Recession”. A decade on, the recession occupies a strange space in public memory. Its toll was clearly large. America suffered a cumulative loss of output estimated at nearly $4trn, and its labour markets have yet to recover fully. But the recession was far less bad than it might have been, thanks to the successful application of lessons from the Depression. Paradoxically, that success spared governments from enacting bolder reforms of the sort that might make the Great Recession the once-a-century event economists thought such calamities should be.

Good crisis response treats its symptoms; the symptoms of a disease, after all, can kill you. On that score today’s policymakers did far better than those of the 1930s. Government budgets have become a much larger share of the economy, thanks partly to the rise of the modern social safety net. Consequently, public borrowing and spending on benefits did far more to stabilise the economy than they did during the Depression. Policymakers stepped in to prevent the extraordinary collapse in prices and incomes experienced in the 1930s. They also kept banking panics from spreading, which would have amplified the pain of the downturn. Though unpopular, the decision to bail out the financial system prevented the implosion of the global economy.

But the success...Continue reading

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Stop Worrying About the Flattening Yield Curve

Economists are generally hopeless at forecasting recessions. By contrast, the U.S. yield curve has a formidable record, so the narrowing gap between two- and 10-year yields grabs attention. It isn’t the only number that matters, though.

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The complicated legacy of Rabbi Shteinman, who has died aged 104

The greatest, according to some

HE WAS exceptional in several ways. Brought up in the shtetls of what is now Belarus, Aharon Yehudah Leib Shteinman was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. He then devoted his life to building the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel. Such was his piety that other religious Jews came to regard him as Gadol Hador—the greatest of his generation. But he remained exceedingly modest, sleeping on the same mattress for six decades. During the day it would serve as a sofa for anyone wanting his guidance. Parents, ministers and tycoons passed through his damp one-bedroom flat.

“Ten people at my funeral would be enough,” wrote Rabbi Shteinman in his will. As it happened, hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men turned out to mourn their leader, who died on December 12th at the age of 104.

Rabbi Shteinman was one of a small group of rabbis who arrived in the new state of...Continue reading

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Disney's Fox Deal Is Bet on the World

Despite a global brand and some glitzy theme parks in Europe and Asia, Disney remains a quintessentially American company. After its deal with 21st Century Fox, Disney will be much more a citizen of the world.

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China Still Fears the Fed

Markets had largely stopped worrying about capital outflows from China. The People’s Bank of China’s rate increase shows that may be a mistake.

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Will Regulators Penalize Fox-Disney Deal Over Sports?

With viewers turning to streaming video, sports has come to dominate traditional TV. That’s one reason behind a potential 21st Century Fox-Disney deal. And it’s one reason why regulators could frown on such an agreement.

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The Fed Gets It Right, for Now

The biggest shock about the Federal Reserve this year is it got its prediction of interest-rate increases right. The danger for investors in 2018 is the Fed will get it wrong and rates will end up higher than expected.

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Why Apple Is Chipping In on Finisar

Apple is awarding $390 million to Finisar, which makes the key components in the types of 3-D sensing arrays that Apple uses in its iPhone X to scan the user’s face.

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Steinhoff's Sleepy Board Needs Clearing Out

More heads need to roll if Steinhoff International is to regain credibility after its accounting scandal. The situation can’t be resolved by the regime that failed to spot it.

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When politicians and executives get caught out

POLITICIANS and executives are held to different standards. That is pretty clear when it comes to issues such as sexual harassment despite the resignation of Al Franken or the rejection by voters of Roy Moore. As others have pointed out, the tweets and remarks of Donald Trump would have seen him forced out of the leadership of a S&P 500 company long ago.

There are also big differences when it comes to the consequences of their regular actions. Politics is about making choices. Should public money be spent on defence of welfare benefits? Should taxes be cut for one type of voter and raised for another? The problem for politicians is that making those choices explicit may not be a vote-winning strategy. The losers will be more resentful than the winners will be grateful. So politicians get round this problem by making their promises very generic - tax cuts will go to hard-working families, public spending will be reduced through cutting waste and the like. 

The executives who run quoted companies face a different sort of...Continue reading

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Bitcoin Mania Comes to the Stock Market

Investors are flinging cash at The Crypto Company because bitcoin is going up. At its peak on Monday, Crypto was worth more than a quarter of the companies in the S&P 500.

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Tired of Pricey FANGs? Try the Shenzhen

“Old economy” stocks are booming this year in China, which has sucked cash out of the tech- and consumer-focused Shenzhen index. Now looks like a good time to get in before this trade reverses.

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Electronic Arts Needs the Force to Awaken Again

Walt Disney isn’t the only company with a lot riding on the new Star Wars movie this week. Electronic Arts could really use a boost from the Force.

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Roy Moore is defeated in Alabama’s Senate election

Why Westfield's Storied Shopping Mall Family Is Selling Out

Europe’s largest property company is making a $25 billion bet that America’s megamalls have a bright future

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The Fed Versus Tax Cuts

The Republican tax plan has been driving the market. The Federal Reserve could be next behind the wheel.

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Bet on UniCredit for Europe's Banking Recovery

The threat of higher capital charges isn’t over for European banks, but UniCredit, Italy’s biggest lender, can take this in its stride.

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Toshiba and Western Digital Should Gain From Burying the Hatchet

Settling a dispute over the planned sale of Toshiba’s memory-chip business will give both companies more firepower to invest as industry competition intensifies.

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Qualcomm Can Dig a Little Deeper for NXP

As Qualcomm waits for its NXP deal to get regulatory approval, activist investor Elliott Management has said the chip maker is worth more.

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The Supreme Court takes up a second gerrymandering case

SUPREME COURT observers scratched their heads on the evening of December 8th when the justices announced they were taking on a second major challenge to gerrymandering this term. The justices have yet to resolve Gill v Whitford, a challenge to a Wisconsin gerrymander they heard in October. Like Gill, the new case, Benisek v Lamone involves a state’s majority party charged with redrawing district boundaries in light of data from the 2010 census. And like Gill, the plaintiffs in Benisek say the legislators in charge acted badly, flexing their muscles to unconstitutionally undermine voters from the minority party. But where Gill concerns a Republican redistricting plan, Benisek involves a challenge to a congressional district in Maryland drawn by Democrats.  

At the October 3rd hearing on Gill, the first major challenge to purely partisan redistricting the court has taken up in 13 years, the justice most likely...Continue reading

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Poland changes its prime minister, but not its real leader

ON DECEMBER 6TH, Beata Szydlo, then Poland’s prime minister, was the special guest on Radio Maryja, an ultraconservative radio station that is close to the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. Her appearance was overshadowed by something everyone had known for weeks: Mrs Szydlo was on her way out. By the following evening, she was thanking Poles for her two years in office. The party offered no explanation for Mrs Szydlo’s departure; indeed, the same morning, it had blocked an opposition motion to unseat her.

Mrs Szydlo’s fate, like her appointment in 2015, was determined by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, PiS’s reclusive party leader. (“I believe in his wisdom,” she told Radio Maryja’s television counterpart, TV Trwam, earlier this week.) In a telling sign of how Poland is now run, Mrs Szydlo first submitted her resignation on December 7th to PiS’s political committee, rather than to the country’s president, Andrzej Duda, who is formally responsible for nominating prime ministers. Only the following day did she ask for Mr Duda’s approval.

Despite earlier speculation, the 68-year-old Mr Kaczynski will not step in himself—as he did in 2006, during PiS’s first stint in power. Mrs Szydlo will be replaced by her deputy, the 49-year-old Mateusz Morawiecki, a former banker who heads the ministries of finance and economic development. In an earlier...Continue reading

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Stop Talking About Bitcoin's Market Cap

Enthusiasts say bitcoin is taking over the world. But comparisons to real companies, currencies and countries are flawed measures for the cryptocurrency.

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Despite Mergers, Hospitals Are in Serious Condition

American hospitals have a target on their backs. The latest merger talk is an attempt to rally their strength, but industry payers’ battle against high health-care costs shows no sign of letting up.

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Europe's Healing Starts and Ends with Greece

Greece, the place where Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis first emerged, finally looks like it could escape its bailout years. Yield-hungry bond investors are smartly going along for the ride.

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Alabama’s Senate race is too close to call

“I DIDN’T even come out of the closet as a Democrat until the primary,” says Molly Clark, a genial retired Presbyterian minister working to get out the vote for Doug Jones (pictured left), the Democrat in Alabama running for a Senate seat on December 12th. She still has not told people in her church. Such fears are not uncommon. One woman Ms Clark meets says she was scared of putting a Doug Jones sign in her yard on a quiet cul-de-sac in Calera, a small but growing exurb of Birmingham. “But people kept whispering, ‘I love your sign.’ They could see I’m just a normal mom, not a scary hippie.”

Alabama, like the rest of the Deep South, is solidly Republican: no Democrat has won a state-wide race in more than a decade. Last year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by 28 points. The Alabama Democratic Party is dysfunctional and deeply riven, its infrastructure almost non-existent. In the Senate race in 2014 Democrats did not even field a candidate; Jeff Sessions, now Mr Trump’s attorney-general, won with 97.3% of...Continue reading

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Another Sign of Frothy Markets: Blank-Check Boom

Would you invest in a company that couldn’t tell you what its business was going to be? Some would, in fact they are doing so in record amounts.

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China's Clean Energy Future Has a $1.2 Trillion Problem

China is pushing hard to dominate new energy industries and clean up terrible air pollution. Too bad about all that coal-power debt.

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Will Media Deal Making Dethrone Netflix?

Big media struggles with streaming but increased competition will make it harder for Netflix to stay ahead.

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Poland changes its prime minister, but not its real leader

ON DECEMBER 6TH, Beata Szydlo, then Poland’s prime minister, was the special guest on Radio Maryja, an ultraconservative radio station that is close to the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. Her appearance was overshadowed by something everyone had known for weeks: Mrs Szydlo was on her way out. By the following evening, she was thanking Poles for her two years in office. The party offered no explanation for Mrs Szydlo’s departure; indeed, the same morning, it had blocked an opposition motion to unseat her.

Mrs Szydlo’s fate, like her appointment in 2015, was determined by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, PiS’s reclusive party leader. (“I believe in his wisdom,” she told Radio Maryja’s television counterpart, TV Trwam, earlier this week.) In a telling sign of how Poland is now run, Mrs Szydlo first submitted her resignation on December 7th to PiS’s political committee, rather than to the country’s president, Andrzej Duda, who is formally responsible for nominating prime ministers. Only the following day did she ask for Mr Duda’s approval.

Despite earlier speculation, the 68-year-old Mr Kaczynski will not step in himself—as he did in 2006, during PiS’s first stint in power. Mrs Szydlo will be replaced by her deputy, the 49-year-old Mateusz Morawiecki, a former banker who heads the ministries of finance and economic development. In an earlier...Continue reading

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How Tight a Job Market Is Too Tight for the Fed?

The labor market is red hot except for wage growth. The Federal Reserve probably won’t have to wait long for more signs that conditions are tight enough to keep raising rates.

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Broadcom's Biggest Challenge With Qualcomm

Broadcom’s solid results also show what a challenge integrating Qualcomm would be.

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Brexit Breakthrough Leaves Thorniest Problems for Later

The U.K. is hailing a Brexit breakthrough. It is more a small step toward confronting even bigger political, financial and economic issues.

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Paint Giants Still Primed for an M&A Wave

One might be forgiven for thinking that some paints just don’t mix. But despite three failed deals this year, the strategic and financial logic for mergers in the paint industry remains strong.

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China's Message to World: Global Growth Still Has Legs

Chinese exports rebounded in November, bucking the weakening regional trend and giving a shot in the arm to hopes for continued strong global growth.

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There Are No Good Reasons to Buy Stocks

Why buy stocks now? If the market is to keep on rising, there will need to be new answers, and the tax cut isn’t one of them.

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