The Economist - 11 May 2024

Год выпуска: May 2024

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

The new economic order

• The old economic order is coming apart: leaden page 7.
• Critics will miss it when it is gone: briefing, page 13.
• The financial system is more global than ever, yet it is at risk. A special report, after page 38.
• Human-rights lawyers are battling to save laws designed to tame rulers’ most violent impulses, page 49.

“Judge-mandering” and howto cure it

• Partisan judges are eroding Americans’ trust in the law: leader, page 8, and analysis, page 17.

Singapore under new management

• An improbable success story must evolve: leader, page 8, and analysis, page 28.
• An interview with Lawrence Wong, the incoming prime minister, page 27.
• In Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, Gaza is a very local problem: Banyan, page 30.

China Shock II

• What Xi Jinping gets wrong about his country's economy, page 58.
• Visiting Europe for the first time in five years, China’s president reminds the West of an old grievance, page 32.

Gangs of Latin America

• Iron-fist tactics don't work against organised crime. And they lead to authoritarianism: leader, page 10.
• The worlds most violent region needs a new approach, page 23.

The world this week Politics

• For the first time in five years, Xi Jinping visited Europe. China’s leader was welcomed by his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, who pressed him to help end the war in Ukraine and to establish a more balanced trade relationship. Mr Xi gave little ground. He then moved on to Serbia, where he commemorated the 25th anniversary of America’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. “This we should never forget,” he wrote in a piece fora Serbian newspaper. Mr Xi wrapped up his tour in Hungary, a member of the EU and NATO that is also a staunch supporter of China. Mr Xi praised its “independent” foreign policy.
• Israel carried out airstrikes on Rafah in southern Gaza and told 100,000 civilians to leave because it was planning to “operate” there. It took control of part of the Philadelphi corridor, a strip of land next to Egypt, as well as the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt. Joe Biden said he would not supply Israel with the weapons that would be used in an attack on Rafah. Meanwhile, Israel temporarily closed Kerem Shalom, a commercial crossing into Gaza through which most humanitarian aid enters the strip, after four soldiers were killed in a rocket attack by Hamas.
• Hamas announced that it would accept the terms of a ceasefire and hostage release. However, Israeli officials said the proposed deal was different from the earlier text that they had agreed to. Israel sent a delegation to Cairo for further negotiations.
• Turkey announced that it would suspend trade with Israel, worth almost $7bn a year, until there was a ceasefire and the free flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
• Voting took place in Chad’s presidential election, which is almost certain to be won by Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno. Mr Deby took power unconstitutionally in 2021 after the death of his father, who had ruled since 1990. Russian troops have reportedly arrived in Chad to protect the president, while America said it would withdraw its forces, which had been helping Chad and the wider region fight jihadists.
• Security forces in Libya rescued at least 107 people who had been held captive and tortured while trying to make their way to Europe. Earlier this yearthe International Organisation for Migration reported that it had found a mass grave in Libya holding the bodies of at least 65 migrants.
• Pakistan said that a suicidebomb attack on a dam in March that killed five Chinese engineers had been carried out by an Afghan bomber, a claim denied by the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which wants to establish closer ties with China. Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have risen in recent months. Shortly before the dam attack Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan targeting what it said was a militant group.

Every vote counts

• Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, cast his vote in the third stage of the country’s general election, which concludes on June 4th when the ballots will be tallied. Turnout so far has been slightly lower than in the election of 2019, which may be explained by a searing heatwave that has seen temperatures top 45°C (113°F).
• In Canada three men were arrested and charged in connection with the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist, near Vancouver last June. India had described Singh as a terrorist. The three suspects are Indian nationals who were living in Edmonton. India’sgovernmentdeniesany involvement in the killing.
• Panama’s presidential election was won by Jose Raiil Mulino. Mr iMulino was drafted in as the candidate of the right to replace Ricardo Martinelli, a former president, who was barred from running again because of an u-year prison sentence for money-laundering. He is holed up in the Nicaraguan embassy, where he has claimed asylum. One of Mr iMulino’s biggest tasks will be tackling corruption.
• At least 100 people died in the worst flooding to hit the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul in 80 years. More than 400,000 people lost electricity and nearly a third of the state’s 11m people were without water.
• Joe Biden condemned antisemitism in a speech commemorating the Holocaust. The American president said that “too many people” are “denying, downplaying, rationalising, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th” and “already forgetting... that it was Hamas that brutalised Israelis”. He also mentioned Jewish students at American colleges being “blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class”.
• Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, easily survived an attempt by party rebels led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a radical right-winger, to oust him from his job. Democrats joined the bulk of Republicans to defeat the motion 359 to 43.
• Britain’s ruling Conservative Party suffered heavy defeats in local elections. The opposition Labour Party was victorious in a parliamentary by-election held on the same day, with an impressive 26% swing from the Tories. A Conservative MP defected to Labour, the second to do so in two weeks. It is all grim news for Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, ahead of an election expected this autumn.
• The Scottish National Party is also flailing. John Swinney assumed the party’s leadership unopposed, and thus became Scotland’s first minister, following the resignation of Hum-za Yousaf. Mr Swinney, a veteran politician, is seen as a safe pair of hands; he is the SNP’s third leader in just over a year.

In the reign of the tsar

• Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a fifth term as Russia’s president, telling dignitaries at the ceremony that the recent election had “confirmed the correctness of the country’s course”. The day before the inauguration Mr Putin ordered the army to train for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in a military drill.
• Ukraine’s domestic-intelligence service claimed to have uncovered another plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president. It said two colonels in the State Protection Service, which provides security for the president, had been recruited by Russia and tasked with finding people to kill Mr Zelensky.
• An American soldier was arrested in Russia, allegedly for stealing money from a woman he was having a relationship with. The soldier was on an unauthorised visit to Vladivostok, in Russia’s far east. A growing number of Americans have been detained in Russia over the past few years.

The world this week Business

• Disney reported that its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services had made a combined operating profit of $47111 in the three months ending March 30th, a huge improvement on the $587m loss in the same quarter last year. The overall loss from streaming, including ESPN, in the recent quarter narrowed to just $i8m. To boost business Disney announced a new streaming bundle in America that will include programming from Warner Bros Discovery. But the lack of profitability at the streaming division remains a source of investor discontent. After the company dampened expectations for growth in the current quarter, its share price tumbled by nearly 10%.
• By contrast, the stock of UBS leapt by 10% after it reported a quarterly net profit of $1.8bn, well above market forecasts. The Swiss bank gained from soaring revenues at its wealthmanagement business and investment banking. It also lowered the estimate of losses it expects to incur from the toxic parts of the business it inherited from Credit Suisse.
• Sweden’s central bank cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to 3.75%, the first reduction in eight years. Central banks in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Switzerland have also been lowering rates and the European Central Bank is expected to follow suit on June 6th, as Europe’s monetary policy diverges from America’s.
• American stockmarkets rallied after figures showed that employers had created 175,000 jobs in April, which was below forecasts, suggesting that the labour market is cooling. The data provide more support for those investors betting on interest-rate cuts.
• AstraZeneca withdrew its covid-19 vaccine, one of the first to be rolled out during the pandemic, because it would be no longer commercially viable as updated jabs hit the market.

The new neural engine

• Apple launched new iPads powered by its next-generation M4 chip, for artificial intelligence. Apple says the M4 is capable of up to 38trn operations per second, faster than the neural-processing unit of any PC with specific Al capabilities. Meanwhile, Apple reported revenue of $90.8bn for the first three months of the year, down by 4% from the same quarter in 2023. Sales of the iPhone fell by 10%, to $46bn.
• Tesla’s sales of cars it made in China dropped again, by 18% in April compared with April 2023, according to the China Passenger Car Association. That is despite a big rise in electric-vehicle sales in the same month. BYD sold the most pure-batterycars.
• A weak yen helped boost Toyota’s 12-month operating profit to ¥5.3trn ($34bn). But the Japanese carmaker warned that it expects profit to fall by 20% this year as it steps up its spending on electric cars and artificial intelligence.
• Attacks by Houthi rebels off the coast of Yemen are expanding farther offshore, warned A.P. Moller-Maersk, which forecast a 15-20% loss of capacity across the shipping industry on routes between the Far East and northern Europe and the Mediterranean this quarter. Vessels have been forced to make the long journey around South Africa rather than through the Suez Canal because of the risk. Last month the Houthis attacked a ship 600km (375 miles) out to sea.
• TikTok filed its appeal against legislation that would ban its app in America unless it divests from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, by January next year. TikTok says the ban is unlawful, and that it would be impossible to create a standalone app in the United States. On another front of the tech wars, America has reportedly rescinded the licences that allow Intel and Qualcomm to export chips to Huawei, a Chinese maker of network equipment.
• The launch of Boeing’s first manned Starliner spacecraft was postponed because of a faulty oxygen relief valve on the rocket. The Starliner is contracted to NASA to ferry crew to the International Space Station. A new launch date has been rescheduled for May 17th at the earliest. In a less than stellar week for Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration opened another investigation into the production of its passenger jets, this time the Dreamliner 787.

BS jobs

• A leading venture-capital investor in Silicon Valley said that half of Google’s whitecollar employees do no “real work*. David Ulevitch reckons that many could “probably be let go tomorrow” and the company wouldn’t notice. He also bemoaned the “growing professional managerial class” in America as a “weakness, not a strength”. Mr Ulevitch thinks the problem of “fake work” is widespread, and believes his comments were “one of the least controversial things I’ve ever said”.

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