The Economist October 24th 2026

Год выпуска: октябрь 2026

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: 84

THE AGONY OF LIBERAL EUROPE

• Europe’s centrist governments have fallen dangerously short—and are now paying the price: leader, page 7.
• Riots will benefit the political extremes in France, page 41, and in the rest of Europe, page 42.
• Ungovernable at home, France is unstoppable in Brussels: Charlemagne, page 45.

Those AI market jitters

• Either AI debt or government debt could crash markets. But probably not both: leader, page 8.
• The AI industry’s gigantic investments are making investors nervous, page 60.
• AI compute is the new oil, page 66.

MBS v MBZ: spreading destruction

• Saudi Arabia and the UAE should stop fuelling carnage in their backyard: leader, page 8.
• Their rivalry is prolonging and deepening deadly wars in Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere: briefing, page 16.
• The suffering of el-Fasher: 1843, page 53.
• Everything is going wrong for Muhammad bin Salman, page 37.

Republicans have a Texas-size problem

• The old campaign messages aren’t working and the new ones are risky, page 19.

How runners can avoid injuries
Patience goes the extra mile: Well Informed, page 75.

The world this week Politics

• Curfews were imposed in Paris, Lyon and other cities following the worst rioting and looting in France in years. More than 2,000 people were arrested as masked casseurs, or hooligans, targeted shops, businesses and political premises. The roof of the town hall in Limoges, which withstood two world wars, collapsed after it was set on fire. The government admitted the police had lost control of the protests. The French president addressed the nation and said “nothing justifies” the violence. Marine Le Pen, the right-wing frontrunner in next year’s presidential election, warned of a threat to democracy and blamed Mr Macron and the left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing’s candidate, denied he was stirring up trouble by urging support for the protests.

Broken-windows shopping

• Widespread looting accompanied similar protests in Italy. The government announced new security steps that allow the police to detain under-18s for 12 hours, among other measures. To prevent further unrest hundreds of soldiers were deployed to Milan, which has borne the brunt of the trouble and saw luxury-goods shops ransacked.
• In Albania student-led protests over corruption, poor education and a lack of jobs spread from Tirana to other cities and towns. Riot police used tear-gas and rubber bullets against the demonstrators when they reached the Ministry of Education. Edi Rama said he would not resign as prime minister, and warned that the protesters were endangering Albania’s path to membership of the EU.
• Volodymyr Zelensky flew to Oslo for a meeting with Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s envoy, amid a deterioration in relations between Ukraine and the White House. Earlier, Mr Trump took another step towards favouring Russia by waiving sanctions mandated by the Graham Act, which he signed into law last month. Mr Zelensky criticised Mr Trump’s waiver, arguing that the act was “supposed to impose truly effective pressure on Russia”. The Americans described the meeting in Oslo as constructive. Mr Witkoff then flew to St Petersburg for talks with Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said Mr Putin had agreed to restart three-way peace talks.
• Britain said it would deploy fighter jets and a transport aircraft to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom against attacks by the Houthis, Yemeni rebels backed by Iran. The jets will help protect infrastructure and residential areas, but will not conduct offensive strikes against the rebels. In Yemen the Houthis fired missiles at a training camp for government forces, killing at least 73 people. The Yemeni government is allied with the Saudis.
• Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, also pledged to help the Saudis, and asked parliament to approve the deployment of combat forces. The extent of any Egyptian involvement in the conflict is unclear. Turkey’s parliament was also considering a plan to send military personnel to Saudi Arabia.
• More than 80 people were killed in a drone strike near a market in southern Sudan, most of them commuters on their way home from work. The Rapid Support Forces, which controls the area, blamed the strike on the army, which it is fighting in a civil war. Another drone hit a town in a disputed region near the border with South Sudan, killing at least 150 people. Such attacks causing mass civilian casualties have become increasingly common in the three-year conflict.
• A former Rwandan soldier and vocal critic of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, was found beheaded near Kampala, the capital of neighbouring Uganda. Robert Kabera, who fled to Uganda in 2020, had recently posted on social media that he feared for his life. He is not the first exiled Rwandan dissident to turn up dead in gruesome circumstances.
• Nigeria confirmed its first case of Ebola since the Democratic Republic of Congo announced an outbreak of the disease in May. Authorities said the patient had travelled to Nigeria from Uganda. The Ugandan government said there were currently no active cases of the disease in the country.
• America’s State Department reported that 300,000 visas have now been revoked during Donald Trump’s second term, up from the 175,000 that had been tallied up to early August. Announcing the new numbers an official reiterated the administration’s policy: “zero tolerance for foreigners here on visas who break the law”.
• A non-binding referendum in Alberta saw more than 75% of voters back an option to remain a province of Canada, rather than start the process of holding a binding referendum on splitting away. Mark Carney hailed the outcome as a victory for “unity”. “Canada is so much greater than the sum of its parts,” he said. However, Albertans did back other measures in the referendum to give the province more control over immigration.
• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro debated each other ahead of Brazil’s presidential election run-off on October 25th. Polls show the race has narrowed since the first round on October 4th, when Mr Bolsonaro took 47% of the vote to Lula’s 45%.
• Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, met Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, in Mumbai for talks on finalising a trade deal. The pact has been held up for months because of tensions over American tariffs and India’s purchase of Russian oil. But Mr Rubio now says an agreement is “very, very close”.

Unhappy anniversary

• More than 9,500 police officers were deployed in Jakarta to deter student-led protests that were called to mark the second anniversary of Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration as Indonesia’s president. The deterrence worked, as few students gathered to demand Mr Prabowo do more to tackle the cost of living and other grievances. The president’s approval rating has plunged since taking office. MSCI, a global index service, warned that it might remove Indonesia’s emergingmarket status because of its “market dysfunction”. Downgrading Indonesia would force many tracking funds to sell their Indonesian assets.
• Japan’s space agency launched a spacecraft on a five-year mission to collect samples from Phobos, one of two small moons that orbit Mars, the first-ever return journey from the planet’s system. The spacecraft will enter Martian space in August 2027, landing on Phobos at some point in the following years. A rover will use a robotic arm to collect moondust. If all goes well, the spacecraft will depart in 2030 and return to Earth in 2031.

The world this week Business

• Elon Musk floated the possibility of merging SpaceX and Tesla. There is a “lot of merit” in combining the companies, he said, and the boards of both have created independent committees to explore their options (as the boss and largest shareholder in both firms Mr Musk is not on the committees). A merger would bring together Mr Musk’s AI ambitions for data centres, driverless cars and robots. SpaceX, meanwhile, reported quarterly revenue of $14.6bn, up by 161% year on year, $7.6bn of which came from AI (which it calls SI, or super intelligence). Mr Musk has pledged to give every child in America one SpaceX share, currently worth nearly $160, next year.

That’s not in the driving test

• Tesla earlier demonstrated its new Roadster sports car; the demonstration vehicle was modified with SpaceX-derived thrusters and able to flip midair and land safely again. The electric-carmaker reported a surprise positive cashflow in its latest earnings.
• Market jitters resurfaced about the huge investments being made in AI. CoreWeave, which rents out data-centre capacity, saw its bonds and share price plunge amid worries that it will not be able to service its debt. The sell-off spread to other “neocloud” companies. Meanwhile, the share price of Elice, an AI-infrastructure company, fell by 32% on its first day of trading in South Korea.
• Anthropic registered a net loss of more than $80bn in the first half of this year, according to press reports, mostly because of an accounting charge related to bonds that could be eventually converted to shares. The frontier-AI firm is expected to make its stock-market debut in mid-November. Anthropic is to hand over 5% of its shares to a new public-benefit fund it has created to work in AI safety and examine AI’s impact on the jobs market, among other things.
• Stock in Netflix slid again after the streaming giant reported its slowest sales growth in three years. Revenue grew by 11.8% in the third quarter, year on year, to $12.9bn. It expects even lower growth of 11.5% in the fourth quarter. Media reports of the company’s woes as it struggles with slowing subscriptions read like a Hollywood movie plot, with both the head of film and the head of content summarily dismissed from their positions and the announcement of 1,000 job cuts. Despite massively Meta’s third-quarter revenue grew by 26%, year on year, to $64.6bn. The company rolled out its Muse personal AI agent in September. Meanwhile, a court in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25bn to the state after it was found to have misled users about privacy.
• increasing its spending on content, Netflix is no longer producing a string of hits.
• GDP expanded in China by 4.5% during the third quarter, year on year, an improvement on the 4.3% recorded in the second quarter. China’s exports boom is offsetting weak domestic demand.

Liberté, égalité, insolvabilité

• The riots in France helped push the yield on French ten-year government bonds above 5% for the first time since 2002, as investors bet that budgetary reforms would be delayed. Carrefour, abig supermarket chain, cut its annual profit forecast and blamed the violence, which it thinks will deter shoppers. Insurance losses from the weekend’s unrest are expected to reach €1bn ($1.1bn), exceeding the €700m in losses incurred over a week of rioting in 2023.
• The developers of the PHP programming language issued a fix that they urged users to download immediately, after an OpenAI-led consortium discovered two critical vulnerabilities. PHP shores up a large part of the internet, running in the background of websites, hosting platforms and control panels. Some governments, including in Finland and the Netherlands, took some websites offline while they worked on the issue. America’s National Security Agency recommended that systems be taken offline if users couldn’t apply the mitigations. The fix will have alerted criminals to the vulnerability of servers.
• Britain’s annual inflation rate jumped to 3.5% in September. Markets are now all but certain that the Bank of England will raise interest rates at its meeting in November.
• UniCredit, Italy’s second-largest bank, won approval from the European Central Bank to take over Commerzbank, a big German lender. Having secured 48% of Commerzbank’s shares, UniCredit thinks it will take control of the bank by the end of the year.
• The IPO of Jio Platforms, Mukesh Ambani’s telecoms firm, was fully subscribed just two hours after it opened. The flotation is expected to raise $3.2bn, making it India’s big-gest-ever listing. The shares start trading on October 28th.

скачать журнал: The Economist October 24th 2026