Chinese Banks' Sudden Strategy Shift Isn't Risk-Free

China’s sagging Ping An Bank, a subsidiary of the insurance giant of the same name, has made an aggressive foray into retail lending. This may not be the answer to its problems.

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What Facebook's Feed Changes Mean for the News

Publishers would be wise to reduce their dependency on Facebook as it gets ready to tweak its algorithm.

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Raises and Bonuses Are About Economics, Not Politics

The bonuses and wage increases companies have been handing out since the tax plan passed won’t weigh very heavily on profit margins. The environment that engendered them will.

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Why Retailers Don't Mind Bigger Wage Bills

Bigger bonuses and higher wages that companies have been handing out since the new tax law was signed in December are a small fraction of the value of tax cuts.

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America’s federal government shuts down

HOWEVER swiftly and recklessly Congress appeared to be barrelling toward a government shutdown on December 18th and 19th, optimists had one reason to hold out hope. Donald Trump planned to mark the first anniversary of his inauguration with a party at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida. Ticket prices began at $100,000 a pair, which covered dinner and a picture with the president. Mr Trump said he would not leave Washington until a continuing resolution (CR) was passed; to many, that implied a deal would somehow, despite all appearances to the contrary, be struck—Mr Trump loves hosting, and would not want to leave his rich friends in the lurch.

But on the afternoon of January 19th, reports emerged that Mr Trump was cancelling his trip. Apparently the optics of taking a taxpayer-funded flight to rake in millions at a fundraiser while hundreds of thousands of federal workers prepare to be furloughed proved too gruesome to contemplate, even for this White House. On December 18th, the House passed a short-term spending bill to keep the government...Continue reading

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How Hospitals' Woes Are Making Health Lines Blur

Hospitals starting their own generic-drug company is the latest sign that traditional industry barriers are breaking down.

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IBM's Growth Comes at a Cost

For IBM, a bit of growth, as it turns out, isn’t quite enough to assuage concerns about how the company gets there.

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Don't Get Too Comfortable About Consumer Debt

A torrent of good economic news late last year, including falling unemployment and rising wages, seems to have drowned out investors’ worries about consumer debt. So is it time to sound the all-clear? Not quite.

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Three 'Risk-Free' Bonds, Three Very Different Outcomes

Are bonds in a bear market? It depends who you ask, although with 10-year Treasury yields hitting their highest since 2014, the case is building. For bonds issued when yields fell to record lows in 2016, the effect of the rise in yields has been stacking up.

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The Trump administration asks the Supreme Court to intervene over DACA

ON JANUARY 18TH, as promised two days earlier, the Trump administration filed a brief at the Supreme Court asking the justices to let it do away with Deferred Action for Children Arrivals (DACA), an immigration initiative launched in 2012 by Barack Obama. The move comes nine days after William Alsup, a federal judge in California, issued an injunction against the administration’s plans to terminate the programme, which protects around 800,000 people brought as children to America from deportation and authorises them to work.

The new filing—arriving on the steps of the Supreme Court as a partisan battle to avert a government shutdown and find a legislative fix for DACA’s demise roils the Capitol across the street—is a curious document. It is almost unheard-of to ask the justices weigh in on a dispute before the matter has worked its way up to the Supreme Court through ordinary channels. But rather than wait for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to have its say on Judge Alsup’s order, the White House wants the Supreme Court to get...Continue reading

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Military ties between Britain and France will not be shaken by Brexit

IT WAS in his typical, headline-grabbing mode that Boris Johnson pitched the notion of building a bridge across the Channel. At least it served as a diversion from the gritty realities of yesterday’s Anglo-French summit, held at the Sandhurst officer training academy. “Let’s do it,” responded France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. The French are fond of grands projets, but Mr Macron was probably thinking it might be nice if his side of the bridge could start in a muddy field far from Calais: the one that, thanks to the Channel Tunnel, has already become a magnet for undocumented migrants trying to reach Britain.

The most substantive agreement emerging from the summit was an undertaking by Britain to provide £45m ($63m) of funding to shore up security in Calais, which acts as a border post between the two countries, and to accept a few more of the migrants, particularly unaccompanied minors.

Otherwise the summit was dominated by defence and security issues...Continue reading

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The European Union’s budget may soon be weaponised

AH, THE European Union. The finest dispute-resolution mechanism mankind has concocted. The ultimate triumph of bureaucracy over the battlefield. Where else can dozens of governments of varying size, wealth and temper manage their disputes so effectively, quietly grinding out compromises that are greater than the sum of their parts? For that is how it works, is it not?

No, it is not. At least not when the EU’s budget is involved. In a few months the club’s governments will begin formal talks on the next “multiannual financial framework” (MFF), a drab formulation that conceals the diplomatic rancour its negotiation will spawn. The sums are not large: this year the EU will spend €145bn ($177bn), about 1% of its GDP. But the means of the MFF’s construction guarantee that blood will be spilled. Within countries there are prime ministers to mediate spending disputes among squabbling department heads, but the EU has no primus inter pares; the budget must be approved...Continue reading

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The movement that Emmanuel Macron rode to power needs a new role

WHEN Emmanuel Macron was elected French president in May last year, the party he founded felt “orphaned”, says Gilles Le Gendre, deputy leader of its parliamentary group. Those who had worked tirelessly as volunteers for his improbable political adventure were thrilled, to be sure. But they also felt as if they had “lost a father”. En Marche! began life less than two years ago with a forceful leader but no money and no deputies. After Mr Macron stepped into the presidency, it secured those, but lost its boss.

The transformation of a political movement based on grass-roots volunteers into a formal political party has turned into a curiously difficult exercise. En Marche! campaign headquarters used to be a thriving hub. Young people in hoodies huddled over laptops. Empty takeaway boxes were strewn in corners. But the moment Mr Macron was elected, members of his young campaign team disappeared to jobs in government or at the Elysée presidential palace. Julien Denormandie, a co-founder of En...Continue reading

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Why 33 of the 50 most-polluted towns in Europe are in Poland

THE spa town of Rabka-Zdroj, in southern Poland, has been known as a treatment centre for children since the 19th century. These days it also has terrible air. In January 2017 the level of benzo(a)pyrene, a carcinogenic compound, was found to be 28 times normal limits. If this goes on, Rabka-Zdroj could lose its spa-town status, which needs to be renewed every ten years. Air pollution is “our silent enemy”, says Zbigniew Doniec of the town’s Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases.

Rabka-Zdroj is hardly alone; across swathes of Poland, winter means smog. An astonishing 33 of Europe’s 50 most-polluted towns are in Poland, as ranked by the World Health Organisation in 2016. Among them is Katowice, which will host the next UN climate summit in December. Coal heating in houses is largely to blame; to save money, people burn waste coal and slurry. (Defying the law, others simply burn rubbish.) In small towns, dark fumes rise from chimneys, giving the cold air a toasty edge. On bad...Continue reading

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Turkey’s religious authority surrenders to political Islam

Let no man dye his moustache

TURKEY’s directorate of religious affairs, known as the Diyanet, has a knack for odd and outrageous pronouncements. The body had already made it known that celebrating the new year, playing the lottery, feeding dogs at home, and purchasing Bitcoin were incompatible with the principles of Islam; men should not dye their moustaches, nor couples hold hands. (Divorcing one’s spouse by text message, however, is OK.) But when the Diyanet declared, in a glossary entry spotted on its website at the start of this year, that according to Islamic law girls as young as nine were able to marry, the ensuing outcry was bigger than in recent memory. Some critics called for the institution to close. The Diyanet protested that it was only cataloguing, not endorsing, principles laid down by Islamic jurists, and soundly condemned child marriage in a sermon. (The legal age in Turkey is 18.) The offending post was taken down.

To critics of the Diyanet the...Continue reading

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The SPD’s rank and file could block a new German grand coalition

BUNDLED up in woolly jumpers and scarves, the mostly grey-haired crowd filed into the civic centre in Schauenburg, a small central German town, toasted the new year with foaming glasses of beer and exchanged genial gossip. It was hard to believe that they might hold the fate of the world’s most powerful woman in their hands. But they might indeed. Like their comrades across the federal republic, these ordinary members of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have the final say on whether to give Angela Merkel a new majority to govern. And they were sceptical.

Timon Gremmels, the party’s local MP, took to the stage to try to sell the deal. “Clearly, mistakes were made during the campaign,” he conceded; a nod to the party’s record-low 20.5% score at the election in September. He also regretted the meagre substance of a preliminary coalition blueprint agreed on January 12th between SPD leaders, Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Christian Social Union (CSU)...Continue reading

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It's Time for China's Property Developers to Quit Gambling

The likes of China Evergrande have performed well as China’s property market boomed. But their high leverage could haunt them now as prices cool.

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Is Lithium the Next Canary in the Markets Mine?

Suppliers of key battery component lithium are selling off after reports that heavyweight Chilean miner SQM will boost output.

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Whistling Past the Shutdown

The economy would have no problem weathering a temporary government shutdown. That doesn’t mean investors should be complacent about one.

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Amazon's People Power

Tech giant’s huge employee base will need to get even bigger to keep up with expected growth.

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The Trump administration bars Haitians from visas for low-skilled work

ON JANUARY 17th the Trump administration said it was removing Haiti, Belize and Samoa from the list of countries whose residents are eligible for seasonal visas, usually used by farms. This came six days after Donald Trump reportedly complained about the number of immigrants arriving from “shithole” countries (the Department for Homeland Security’s justification for the move was more nuanced).  The suspended programmes are small: just 65 Haitian temporary agricultural workers arrived in 2016. That is partly because farms that use the visas must convince the government that there are no American workers to fill their job openings. But despite the tiny impact of such programmes, for the individuals involved, such policy decisions are utterly life changing. That is because the personal financial benefit of moving from a poor country to a rich one is vast. 

The debate over whether or not low-skilled immigration benefits America’s existing residents is well-rehearsed. Economists sympathetic to immigration say that workers from...Continue reading

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Our Big Mac index shows fundamentals now matter more in currency markets

IT IS usually considered quaint to predict foreign-exchange movements by reference to whether currencies are dear or cheap. Metrics such as The Economist’s Big Mac index, a lighthearted guide to exchange rates, hint at how far currency values are out of whack. But they are often driven further out of kilter by capital flows, by fear and greed, by the interventions of policymakers, and so on.

Since our last look at the index in July, cheap currencies have narrowed the valuation gap against the dollar—almost completely in case of the Canadian dollar (see chart). Fundamentals, such as fair value, seem (at last) to have greater sway in the foreign-exchange market.

The index is based on the idea of purchasing-power parity, which says exchange rates should move towards the level that would make the price of a basket of goods the same in different countries. Our basket contains only one item, but it is found in around 120 countries: a Big Mac hamburger. If the local cost of...Continue reading

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The World Bank’s “ease of doing business” report faces tricky questions

HOW many days does it take to correct a misleading newspaper interview? Four, in the case of Paul Romer, the World Bank’s chief economist. On January 12th a surprising article in the Wall Street Journal alleged that one of the bank’s signature reports—on the ease of doing business around the world—may have been tainted by the political motivations of bank staff. The story was based on an interview with Mr Romer, who pointed out that Chile’s ranking in the yearly report had dropped sharply during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet, a left-leaning politician who took office for the second time in 2014. Chile sank so heavily not because doing business had become harder, but because the bank had repeatedly changed its method of assessment.

That method mostly entails answering measurable questions, such as how many days does it take to start a business, register a property or file taxes. The answers determine a country’s score (known as its “distance to...Continue reading

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The French government experiments with venture capitalism

Don’t be coy, carp about the food

AS A boy, Antoine Hubert used to catch butterflies. These days, the agro-engineer has eyes only for meal worms. In a demonstration factory near Dole in eastern France, he shows how trayfuls of plump, half-grown worms are fed, left to grow in a darkened dormitory, and then—after two months—slaughtered and cleaned with a blast of steam. A machine divides the resulting mush into oil and protein powder.

Around 70% of a worm is protein, making it ideal for animal feed. Demand is soaring, notably at fish and shrimp farms. Mr Hubert predicts aquaculture businesses will need 70m tons of feed annually in ten years’ time, up from 40m now. The global market for animal feed, he reckons, is already worth €500bn ($610bn).

Ynsect, his firm, thus expects to grow once it opens a new factory this year. He dreams of annual output exceeding 1m tonnes, hinting at a hunger for scale often left unsatisfied in a French entrepreneur: local...Continue reading

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Why the oil price is so high

PERHAPS the most vexing thing for those watching the oil industry is not the whipsawing price of a barrel. It is the constant updating of theories to explain what lies behind it. In March 2014, when the price of a barrel of Brent crude was in three figures, the then boss of Chevron, an oil giant, observed that the scarcity of cheap oil meant “$100 per barrel is becoming the new $20”. Two years later, when the oil price slumped below $28, the talk was of a global oil glut caused by the furious efforts of the OPEC cartel to regain market share. Now that oil prices have tested $70, analysts are again scratching their heads.

In “1984”, George Orwell coined the term “doublethink”, the ability to believe two contradictory things. Oil analysis seems to require similar cognitive gymnastics. Three big questions arise. First, why has the oil price more than doubled in the space of two years, against all expectation? Second, why has this surge been met with cheers from global stockmarkets and not...Continue reading

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The threat of tough regulation in Asia sends crypto-currencies into a tailspin

IT HAS been another week of vertiginous swings in the prices of bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. This time, the moves have mostly been downwards, with some days seeing falls of over 20%. Views on this were as divided as they were during the giddy climb: did it mark the definitive bursting of a bubble as rapidly inflated as any in history (see chart)?

Asia provides both an explanation of this week’s sell-off and a glimpse of crypto-currencies’ future. The threat of a ban in bitcoin-trading in South Korea was the proximate cause of the plunge. As to the future, the question is which Asia? At one end of the spectrum...Continue reading

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The hedge-fund delusion that grips pension-fund managers

HEDGE-FUND managers may be feeling quietly smug about their performance in 2017. They returned 6.5% on average, according to Hedge Fund Research, a data provider, their best year since 2013.

But those returns do not really suggest that they are masters of the investing universe. The S&P 500 index, America’s main equity benchmark, returned 21.8%, including dividends, last year. More tellingly, a portfolio split 60-40 between the S&P 500 and a mixture of government and corporate bonds (an oft-used benchmark for institutional portfolios) would have returned 14.8%. Last year was the fifth in a row when hedge funds underperformed the 60/40 split (see chart).

That ought to be a salutary lesson for those institutions who think that backing hedge funds is the answer to their prayers. Despite the highs recorded by stockmarkets, many employers are struggling to fund their final-salary pension promises. In 2016 the average American public-sector plan was just 68%-funded, according to the Centre for...Continue reading

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Why driverless cars may mean jams tomorrow

THE most distractingly unrealistic feature of most science fiction—by some margin—is how the great soaring cities of the future never seem to struggle with traffic. Whatever dystopias lie ahead, futurists seem confident we can sort out congestion. If hope that technology will fix traffic springs eternal, history suggests something different. Transport innovation, from railways to cars, reshaped cities and drove economic advance. But it also brought crowded commutes. Now, as tech firms and carmakers aim to roll out fleets of driverless cars, it is worth asking: might this time be different? Alas, artificial intelligence (AI) is unlikely to succeed where steel rails and internal-combustion engines failed.

More’s the pity. In America alone, traffic congestion brings economic losses estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Such costs will rise unless existing transport systems receive badly needed investment. For example, fixing New York’s beleaguered, overcrowded subway will...Continue reading

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Can a lawyer admit the guilt of a client who claims to be innocent?

ROBERT MCCOY had a plan. Facing murder charges in the deaths of his estranged wife’s mother, stepfather and teenaged son in Louisiana, Mr McCoy claimed he was out of town in Houston, Texas when the three were slain. All the evidence of Mr McCoy’s guilt—a Walmart receipt for bullets; the murder weapon; a 911 call from one of the victims pleading with “Robert”; a white Kia getaway car—had been planted by vindictive police officers, the story went. The police were out for revenge, Mr McCoy explained, because he had accused some members of the department of trafficking drugs. 

This did not persuade Mr McCoy’s public defenders, so he decided, for a time, to go it alone. But soon the defendant thought better of it and hired a family acquaintance to represent him. The new advocate, Larry English (pictured), found the innocence fable no more credible, but Mr McCoy was no less adamant. After repeatedly clashing with his client, Mr English told him his legal strategy would be to save him from execution, not to get him off scot-free....Continue reading

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How to increase your chances of surviving a nuclear blast

Toons you can use

THE alerts mistakenly sent to residents of Hawaii, warning them that a missile was on the way, were a reminder of an era when terror was measured in kilotons. In the 1950s and 1960s public-service broadcasts informed Americans about what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Since then, with nuclear conflict seeming less likely, such knowledge has seemed esoteric, like taking an interest in Brutalism or taxidermy. Here is a reminder of something we hope you will never need to know.

If a nuclear bomb exploded in an airburst, around 90% of people would die instantly near the centre of the blast: a roughly 1.9km (1.2-mile) radius for a 300-kiloton (KT) device—the estimated force of the weapon North Korea tested in September. Within a 15-square-kilometre area, at least half the population would die more slowly, from radiation and burns. Those who make it through the blast or are farther away can take steps to increase their chance of survival.

An...Continue reading

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Donald Trump gives his European allies 120 days to get a better deal with Iran

ON JANUARY 12th President Donald Trump declared that if the “disastrous flaws” in the nuclear deal with Iran are not fixed within 120 days, he will pull America out of it. He renewed the presidential waiver that lifts nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, but signalled that this was a final reprieve rather than a change of heart.

Mr Trump says he wants a new agreement to modify the pact of 2015 that curbed Iran’s nuclear programme, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in return for limited relief on sanctions. Among Mr Trump’s demands are ending the expiry clauses in the agreement that, for example, allow Iran after 15 years to enrich uranium beyond the 3.67% normally required for commercial power production; a ban on ballistic-missile testing; and unconstrained access for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to any military site, regardless of whether there has been any indication of nuclear activity there.

Mr Trump has now twice refused to...Continue reading

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Kansas and Missouri, both alike, indignity

Greitens, contritens

ONE is struggling to stay in his job, the other is scrambling to leave it. Eric Greitens, the Republican governor of Missouri, is fighting for his political life after a television station in St Louis revealed an extramarital affair, as well as allegations of blackmail and violence, less than three hours after he gave his state-of-the-state address on January 10th. Sam Brownback, another Republican, announced six months ago that he was stepping down as governor of Kansas to become President Donald Trump’s ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, but his nomination has not yet been confirmed by the Senate and so he has remained as governor. Both are in an embarrassing limbo.

For Mr Greitens, the uncertainty over his political future is more painful because he was just starting out in politics. The 43-year-old former Navy SEAL, Rhodes scholar and White House fellow, who had never before run for office, was the surprise winner of Missouri’s...Continue reading

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Bob Murray, the coal baron with the president’s ear

Mr Murray in his element

TRADITION dictates that bad children get coal in their Christmas stockings. But the elaborate Christmas display in the headquarters of Murray Energy Corporation, America’s biggest privately owned coal firm, suggests otherwise. At its centre are two cherubic children pulling a wagon loaded with coal, and looking pleased with their haul. The other distinctive feature in the building’s lobby is a plethora of pictures featuring Bob Murray, the company’s founder and boss, with President Donald Trump. Mr Murray was a vocal and generous backer of Mr Trump; today he has the president’s ear. He sent the administration an “Action Plan” with 16 detailed policy requests, many of which the administration is on track to fulfil. Mr Trump nominated Andrew Wheeler, a lobbyist for Murray Energy, to the number-two position at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A few weeks after a meeting with Mr Murray, Rick Perry, the energy secretary, ordered a study...Continue reading

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What Amazon does to wages

WHEN Amazon announced in 2010 that it would build a distribution centre in Lexington County, South Carolina, the decision was hailed as a victory for the Palmetto State. Today the e-commerce giant employs thousands of workers at the centre. Just 3.5% of the local workforce is out of work. Alas, the influx of jobs has not boosted wages for the region’s forklift drivers and order-fillers. In the years since Amazon opened its doors in Lexington County, annual earnings for warehouse workers in the area have fallen from $47,000 to $32,000, a decline of over 30% (see chart 1).

Lexington County is not alone. Since Amazon opened...Continue reading

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Hostility to immigration used to be found in both parties

ONE moonlit night 13 years ago Jennifer crossed into Texas, squeezed into a car footwell. Her mother had made the clandestine journey from their native Guatemala, looking for work to help pay for Jennifer’s leukaemia treatment, five years earlier. Having established herself in Maryland, cleaning houses and caring for children, she wanted her son and two daughters—including Jennifer, by then six and cancer-free—with her. “All I remember is staring at the moon,” Jennifer recalls. “So long as I could see it, I thought we’d be OK.”

Now in her last year of high school in Maryland, Jennifer is the commander of her school’s air cadets and has been offered a place by six colleges. Whether she will be able to join the air force, as she would like, or study for a degree, or even remain in America is unclear, however. She is one of the 700,000 beneficiaries of an Obama-era programme, known by its acronym DACA, that shields illegal immigrants brought to America as children from deportation;...Continue reading

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The safety net in Republican states is about to get skimpier

KENTUCKY, a poor, rural state nostalgic for coal, has never been quite sure of its politics. For three years it was the darling of Obamacare. Governor Steve Beshear, a rare Appalachian Democrat, complied with the reform by creating a statewide health-insurance exchange and expanding Medicaid (government-subsidised coverage for the poor and disabled). Between 2013 and 2015, uninsured rates for poor adults fell from 40% to 9%—the biggest improvement in the country. But now that the state is under new management—the Republican governor, Matt Bevin (pictured above), is a Tea Party favourite—Kentucky may soon be notable in health-policy circles for a new reason: it wants to become the first state in history to require some Medicaid recipients to work.

Other states with Republican governors, including Indiana and Arkansas, hope to follow. Before long, the health-care safety nets in these states may look very different from those in Democratic ones—and indeed from those in other rich countries,...Continue reading

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GE, Victim of a Short-Term Mind-Set

The pressure for action and results that affects U.S. corporations is to blame for the series of poor decisions taken by General Electric’s bosses in recent years.

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Apple's Home Court Disadvantage

For Apple, bringing billions of overseas earnings home is one thing. Keeping it there is quite another.

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A Crowded, Clustered and Potentially Very Disruptive Bet on Central Banks

Clear guidance about future policy has become a powerful tool for the world’s central banks. But that may simply be at the cost of deferring market disruption for another day.

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Ignore China's Silky-Smooth Growth Signal---Watch the Noise

The figures that best capture China’s cyclical turning points—and they don’t include the headline growth data—suggest the 2016 and 2017 rebound was a lot bigger than initially thought. There are two big risks to its continuing in 2018.

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Sri Lanka’s president is struggling to keep his promises of reform

AT THE time, it was seen as an astonishing victory. In retrospect, it was also something of a Pyrrhic one. Few expected Maithripala Sirisena to defeat the incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential election of 2015. After all, Mr Rajapaksa, although increasingly authoritarian, had presided in 2009 over the defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers, ending Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war. Mr Sirisena was merely a rebellious member of the president’s own Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). To win and then to govern, Mr Sirisena relied on the support of the SLFP’s main rival, the United National Party (UNP). As Sri Lankans prepare to vote in local elections on February 10th, that alliance has come to haunt him.

In theory, the alliance between the UNP and Mr Sirisena’s faction of the SLFP ended in December. But this is a polite fiction necessitated by the campaign. In practice, neither group has sufficient numbers in parliament to govern without the other. Mr Rajapaksa, who is backing a...Continue reading

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Time for a New Policy on Chinese Insurance Giants?

China’s insurance sector has emerged relatively unscathed from Beijing’s crackdown on the country’s financial sector. But valuations suggest investors are underestimating the risks.

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Democrats pull off a surprise win in rural Wisconsin

WISCONSIN’S governor Scott Walker seemed a little frantic on the evening of January 16th. He began no fewer than eight tweets with “WAKE UP CALL”, in capital letters, after it became clear that a historically red district in a rural western region of his state had voted for a Democrat in a special election for a state senate seat. According to preliminary election returns, Patty Schachtner, a medical examiner, handily beat Adam Jarchow, a Republican member of the state assembly, by 11 percentage points.

Ms Schachtner’s victory was a surprise. She is far less experienced than Mr Jarchow and had a considerably smaller campaign chest. After her victory, Ms Schachtner explained in an interview that she thought she won because of the negative mailings from groups outside the district backing her opponent. Americans for Prosperity—the group backed by the Koch brothers, two conservative billionaires—paid for ads and mailings expressly backing Mr Jarchow. “It wasn’t nice. It was mean,” she said. “People just said, ‘You know what?...Continue reading

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Goldman's Tax Wobble Is a Buying Opportunity

Goldman’s share buybacks will take a hit from tax reform, but the long-run benefits will be substantial.

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Can Mark Zuckerberg Bend Facebook Without Breaking It?

Mark Zuckerberg’s main challenge now is fixing the social network without breaking it. That dilemma was apparent last week when the 33-year-old chief executive announced changes to the company’s News Feed tool.

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Why Oil Is About to Hit Troubled Waters

Brent crude hit a three-year high last week, and the obvious question was when would the shale drillers turn on the taps. The better question this time around is what will happen to demand and volatility in the oil market.

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Celgene Can't Put Away Its Wallet Yet

Deal for Juno Therapeutics will be expensive and might not rule out need for more spending.

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Strongman Xi Jinping Now a Big Risk for China's Economy

China’s most powerful leader in decades has shown he can tackle economic issues that have plagued weaker predecessors. But that much power in one pair of hands creates its own problems

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The Big New Player Feeding America's Sweet Tooth

Ferrero’s purchase of Nestlé’s U.S. confectionery business marks a hat-trick of deals for the Italian company behind Nutella spread but aggressively expanding in America at a time of rapid market change is a daring strategy.

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Chechnya moves to silence Oyub Titiev, a courageous critic

OYUB TITIEV suspected the day would come. As head of the Chechen branch of Memorial, a Russian human-rights group, his activities often angered the region’s authorities. His predecessor, Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009, a crime for which no one has been punished. Mr Titiev received death threats himself. He warned friends and colleagues that he could be arrested anytime. “They’ll plant drugs,” he told his friend Elena Milashina, an investigative reporter for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Mr Titiev’s fears proved true. On January 9th Chechen police arrested him, claiming to have found some 180 grams of marijuana in a plastic bag inside his car. He was charged with drug possession, and faces up to 10 years in prison. Mr Titiev reported that officers threatened reprisals against his family if he did not plead guilty. The arrest looks like an attempt to force Memorial to cease its work in the region, where it has long documented torture...Continue reading

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