The Economist - 24 сентября 2022

Год выпуска: сентябрь 2022

Автор: The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group

Жанр: Экономика/Политика

Издательство: «The Economist Newspaper Ltd»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 88

How afraid should Europe be of Giorgia Meloni, who is likely to be Italy’s next prime minister? Leader, page 9. Italy’s prospects, page 20.

Boom time in the Gulf

• High energy prices and fresh alliances are making the region more powerful — and more volatile: leader, page 12.
• Russia’s war reshapes global energy flows: briefing, page 16.
• Dubai prospers amid global upheaval, page 60.
• The Abraham economies, page 30.

Putin doubles down

• Ukraine has a chance to push back Russian forces: leader, page 10.
• Vladmir Putin’s unpopular mobilisation, page 22.
• Joe Biden’s warning to the world, page 35.

China’s slowing economy

• The country’s rulers seem resigned to slow growth: Free exchange, page 66.
• A manufacturing slowdown portends worse to come, page 61.

Technology Quarterly: Fixing the brain

• After fallow decades, neuroscience is experiencing a renaissance: Technology Quarterly, after page 40.
• And about time too: leader, page 11.
• The quest for better painkillers, page 67.

The world this week Politics

• In a televised address, Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “partial” military mobilisation. Though the Kremlin claims that very few Russians have been killed in Ukraine, it nonetheless plans to call up another 300,000 reservists and force them to fight. Anti-war protests erupted in cities all over Russia, and flights out of the country quickly sold out. Hundreds of people were arrested; some officials suggested that protesters be sent to the front line. Analysts said it would take months for the new recruits to be ready for action. Many of the officers who might have trained them are either in Ukraine or dead.

Elections at gunpoint

• Mr Putin also said he would support referendums in occupied parts of Ukraine, where puppet administrations say they want to be formally annexed by Russia. The referendums were to be held at three days’ notice and at gunpoint. Their results are not in doubt. The aim appears to be to give Mr Putin a rhetorical justification for describing Ukraine’s efforts to recapture its own territory as attacks on Russia itself. He made a lightly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons.
• At the un, Joe Biden called Mr Putin’s nuclear threats irresponsible. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, suggested that Mr Putin was panicking and advised everyone to keep calm. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, demanded the return of all Ukrainian land, a tribunal for war crimes and reparations for all the Ukrainians Mr Putin’s men have murdered.
• Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to a ceasefire, following the worst outbreak of fighting between the two countries since 2020. America has been involved in efforts to sue for peace in a conflict taking place in Russia’s backyard. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, held talks with the Armenian and Azeri foreign ministers in New York. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, visited Armenia, the most senior American politician to do so since Armenia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
• Nine people were killed in Iran during the biggest protests against the government in years. They were sparked by the death in custody of a young woman three days after being arrested by the morality police for being improperly dressed. She was wearing a loose head covering.
• Palestinian security forces clashed with militants and protesters, after arresting members of Hamas who are wanted by Israel. About 90 people have been killed this year in the West Bank, mostly by Israeli police and soldiers. Israel has repeatedly raided the area after a wave of terrorist attacks by Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
• Large numbers of Eritrean troops have invaded Tigray, a northern region of Ethiopia that has been battling Ethiopian government forces since late 2020. Eritrea had previously intervened to help Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, but withdrew its forces last year because of international pressure and battlefield setbacks. Separately, un investigators said Ethiopia’s blockade of Tigray was a crime against humanity.
• Unrest in Haiti escalated after protests over the removal of fuel subsidies turned into more generalised anger over poverty and violence. The Caribbean country has endured instability and gang mayhem since the assassination of its president last year. American officials say businessmen abroad may be helping to stir up the unrest, which threatens to topple the current prime minister, Ariel Henry.
• Hurricane Fiona barrelled a destructive path across the Caribbean. The storm caused the power to go out in Puerto Rico, reviving memories of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Although the American territory has restructured its huge debt, the electricity company is still battling its creditors.
• The number of arrests of illegal migrants along America’s border with Mexico has passed 2.1m for the fiscal year starting October 1st 2021, a record. Many of the migrants are now coming from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
• New York state’s attorneygeneral brought a lawsuit against Donald Trump and three of his children, Donald junior, Eric and Ivanka, accusing them of fraud by inflating the value of assets to obtain loans. The suit involves the Trump Organisation. The state also referred the findings to the federal Justice Department as a criminal matter.

Goodbye, your majesty

• Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest in Windsor Castle following a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. At least 26m people watched the service and procession on television in Britain (the figure excludes digital audiences). Before the event London’s transport authority said it expected 1m people to line the streets. A quarter of a million people filed past the queen’s coffin as it lay in state, according to a government minister. The queue’s maximum length was ten miles (16 km).
• Weeks of tension between Hindus and Muslims in the British city of Leicester erupted into violent disorder following an unauthorised protest by hundreds of people. Police struggled to restore calm; officers from other forces had to be drafted in. Rumours and disinformation about the trouble quickly spread on social media.
• A massive typhoon battered Japan, killing at least four people and injuring over 110 others. With wind gusts of up to 234km per hour, it left more than 300,000 households without electricity.
• Kazakhstan announced early presidential elections to be held on November 20th. The country faced violent unrest and an attempted putsch in January, which was suppressed with the help of Russian troops. Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, the president, has since consolidated his power and sidelined his predecessor, the strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev.
• Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan called a ceasefire, after border skirmishes left at least 100 people dead and displaced tens of thousands. A hotchpotch of exclaves in the region have long provoked border disputes, but the latest clashes are the worst to have afflicted any of the post-Soviet Central Asian states since independence.
• In China a bus taking people to a covid-19 quarantine facility crashed, killing 27 passengers. The accident sparked a large online protest against the government’s strict covid controls. Angry netizens also criticised a senior health official for advising locals to avoid touching foreigners after China recorded its first case of monkeypox, found in a person who had arrived from abroad.
• The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by another three-quarters of a percentage point, to a range of between 3% and 3.25%. It was the third consecutive such increase and came after figures showed that inflationary pressures are moving extensively beyond food, energy and goods to services prices, such as rent. The Fed now projects the rate to rise to at least 4.25% by the end of the year. Jerome Powell, the central bank’s chairman, said “We have to get inflation behind us”, and that there was no painless way to do so.
• Other central banks also tightened monetary policy at an aggressive pace to battle inflation. The Swiss National Bank raised its key rate to 0.5% from -0.25%, ending seven years of negative rates.
• Sweden’s Riksbank, a laggard compared with most of its contemporaries, lifted its main policy rate by one percentage point, to 1.75%, the biggest increase in three decades.
• Bucking the trend the Bank of Japan maintained its ultralow rate. That caused the yen to slide further against the dollar, prompting Japan to intervene in foreign-exchange markets to shore up the currency for the first time since 1998. Before the intervention the yen had fallen by 20% against the dollar this year.
• The German government nationalised Uniper, Germany’s biggest gas importer, to prevent it from collapsing. Uniper had been forced to turn to the more expensive spot market when Russia curtailed its gas supplies, leading to huge losses. The German government also took control of three refineries operated by Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, to secure Germany’s energy supply ahead of an eu embargo on Russian oil.
• In Britain the government introduced a scheme that will cut energy bills for businesses by around half over the winter by capping the wholesale price of electricity and gas, an extension of the huge financial support it had earlier promised for households. Many firms risk going bankrupt because of soaring energy costs.

In the driving seat

• Volkswagen announced that shares in Porsche will debut on the Frankfurt stock exchange on September 29th. Only a small portion of the shares being offered by vw, Porsche’s owner, will be available to the public. vw and the Porsche and Piech families, the controlling shareholders in vw, will own most of the stock. Still, the ipo could value Porsche at up to €75bn ($74bn).
• Ahead of a plan to split its auditing and managementconsulting businesses, Ernst & Young revealed that revenues grew by 16.4% in the year to June 30th, the best growth rate in 20 years. Sales from its consulting services grew at a faster pace than those from accounting, although accounting still brought it more money. ey thinks a break-up will allow the consultancy side to thrive, freeing it from conflict-of-interest rules that stop it working with firms that ey also audits. Its 13,000 partners will start voting on the spin-off in November.
• Uber said that Lapsus$, a hacking group thought to operate from Brazil and Britain, was behind an extensive cyber-attack that forced it to shut down some internal systems briefly.
• Adobe’s share price struggled to recover from the hammering it received after it announced that it would take over Figma, an online service used by digital designers to develop apps and websites, for $20bn. Adobe says the deal will spur growth prospects, but investors are not sure about the combination of legacy software tools with a nimble web-based application. Competition authorities, too, may have a problem with Adobe taking over an innovative rival.
• The share price of FedEx also floundered after it issued a profit warning. Considered a bellwether of the interconnected economy, the package-delivery company is facing waning demand and “service challenges in Europe”. It announced cost-cutting measures, such as reducing flights by its planes and temporarily parking some of them.
• tfiand m6, two of the biggest television channels in France, abandoned their proposed merger in the face of antitrust concerns. The channels had hoped that by combining they would be a potent force in streaming. The competition authority was worried that the merger would limit competition in advertising.

Hoovering up your particulars

• America’s Federal Trade Commission is examining Amazon’s proposed takeover of iRobot, which makes the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner. Earlier this month two dozen groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote to the ftc claiming that Amazon’s purchase would endanger competition in the market for smart devices in the home while “leveraging vast troves” of consumer information. The Roomba collects household data as well as dust as it busily trundles around.

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