The Economist - 24 August 2024

Год выпуска: August 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: 80

HOW WOULD SHE GOVERN?

• Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump. But would she make a successful president? Leader, page 9.
• The Democratic nominee is studiously vague about her policy platform: briefing, page 15.
• Joe Bidens last campaign: Lexington, page 24.
• Chinas rulers are surprised by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, page 32.
• Kamala Harris is the latest candidate to embrace self-defeating economics, page 61.

Russia’s mysterious middlemen

• Sanctions on Russia are as watertight as a sieve, page 41.

Indian tourists go global

• How to attract the recreational rupee: leader, page 12.
• The rise of a new tourism superpower, page 50.

Big food’s big upheaval

• A new menu for the food business, page 52.

Complaining about kidults

• Is culture stopping people from growing up? Page 71.

The world this week Politics

• The Democrats held their national convention in Chicago. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s speech accepting the party’s nomination, Joe Biden made what may be his last big appearance as president. During Hillary Clinton’s address the Democrats chanted “lock him up!” in reference to Donald Trump, delighting the party’s candidate in the 2016 election. Far-left and pro-Palestinian activists clashed with police outside the Israeli consulate, but were kept well away from the convention hall.
• America’s intelligence services confirmed that Iran was behind the recent hacking and leaking of certain documents related to Mr Trump’s campaign. The Iranians also tried to hack into email accounts associated with Ms Harris’s team.

The final offer?

• Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, made his ninth visit to the Middle East since the start of the war in Gaza amid negotiations that he said maybe the best and last chance for a ceasefire deal and release of Israeli hostages. Mr Blinken said that Binyamin Netanyahu told him that Israel accepted America’s proposal, though the Israeli prime minister made no such commitment in public. Hamas, the Islamist group that attacked Israel last October, has not yet accepted the deal. Meanwhile, Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages from Gaza.
• Negotiations continued over a ceasefire in Sudan’s civil war. The talks in Geneva are led by America. The United Arab Emirates, which supports the rebel Rapid Support Forces, is also attending. The Sudanese army agreed to open a border crossing with Chad so that aid can get through to Darfur.
• Newspapers in Senegal and some television stations held a 24-hour blackout in protest against tighter media restrictions. The new government has frozen bank accounts belonging to media companies for allegedly owing back taxes. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and his prime minister, Ousmane Son ко, came to power in March amid voter anger about living standards. Mr Sonko has since said the press has “too much impunity”.
• Russia took the town of Niu-York in eastern Ukraine, slowly solidifying its position in Donetsk. Russian forces have not yet been diverted from the region to fight Ukrainian troops who have entered Russia. Ukraine says it has now captured 1,263 square kilometres (488 square miles) of Russian territory and blown up two bridges. It also launched 45 drones against Russian sites, 11 of which targeted Moscow (they were shot down).
• Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill that would bar pro-Russian churches in the country. The bill is aimed at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which in 2022 claimed it had cut its ties to Russian Orthodoxy, though some of its priests aided the Russian invaders. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is a separate body, aligned with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. It issued a statement, along with other religions, supporting the bill.
• X, Elon Musk’s social-media platform, closed its office in Brazil after a judge ordered it to suspend some accounts or have its legal representative arrested. It is the latest twist in a continuing spat between Mr Musk and Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who is leading an investigation into fake news.
• The security forces in Argentina foiled an attack by a group linked to an Islamist terrorist organisation against Jewish targets in Mendoza. Argentina is home to Latin America’s largest Jewish population and has suffered antisemitic atrocities in the past, notably the bombing of a Jewish community centre in 1994 that killed 85 people.
• Nicaragua banned another 1,500 civic groups that are deemed hostile to the authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega. Many are linked to various churches and include football and tennis clubs and veterans’ associations. The government recently dissolved the diocese of Bishop Rolando Alvarez, an exiled critic of the regime.
• Most rail freight came to a halt in Canada amid a dispute between management and workers. The disruption will hurt the Canadian economy by stoppingshipments of goods such as fertilisers, grains, cars and oil. It will also affect the United States and Mexico, which are integrated with the Canadian freight network.
• Rallies were held across Venezuela calling for Nicoläs Maduro to step down as president. The opposition has published data showing that its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won an election on July 28th with two-thirds of the vote.
• Paetongtarn Shinawatra was sworn in as Thailand’s new prime minister. Ms Paetongtarn is the daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, an influential former prime minister and de facto chief of the Pheu Thai
• party, which heads the government. She succeeds Srettha Thavisin, who was dismissed as prime minister by the Constitutional Court, and she has the support of the king.
• A national doctors’strike was held in India to protest against the rape and murder of a female trainee doctor in Kolkata. The woman’s battered and half-naked body was found in herhospital’s lecture hall. The Indian xMedical Association wants the government to provide better security for female doctors.
• India’s chief election commissioner announced that elections will be held in Jammu and Kashmir next month, the first in nearly a decade. Voting in constituencies for the disputed territory’s legislature will begin on September 18th and end on October ist.
• Indonesia marked independence day in its designated new capital, Nusantara, for the first time. The city lies in the province of East Kalimantan, on the eastern side of the island of Borneo. President Joko Widodo has revived plans to move the government out of Jakarta, which is sinking. Prabowo Subianto, who takes over as president in October, said he intends to continue the project, which is due to be completed in 2045.

Religious busybodies

• Afghanistan’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue released its annual report. Over the past year the morality police have destroyed 21,328 musical instruments, sacked 281 men from the security forces for not growing a beard, and arrested over 13,000 people for “immoral acts”. It did not provide figures on how many women it had detained for being improperly dressed or walking without a male guardian. Meanwhile, the Taliban government stopped the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan from entering the country.

The world this week Business

• Mike Lynch was among several people who died or are missing after a luxury yacht sank in bad weather off the coast of Sicily. In June Mr Lynch, the former chief executive of Autonomy, a British software firm, was found not guilty by a jury in San Francisco of defrauding Hewlett-Packard in relation to its takeover of Autonomy in 2011. The long-running legal saga had not finished; a British judge was considering damages Mr Lynch should pay in a separate civil trial. In an eerie coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, Mr Lynch’s co-defen-dant, who was also found not guilty in June, was hit by a car and died shortly before the boating incident.
• Alimentation Couche-Tard, a Canadian operator of convenience stores, including the Circle к brand, made a friendly offer to buy Seven & i, a Japanese holding company that counts the 7-Eleven chain among its assets. It is the largest ever attempted acquisition of a Japanese company.
• A federal judge threw out the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on non-compete agreements, which was due to come into force next month. Non-compete clauses in contracts stop employees joining rival firms. The FTC reckons that such clauses stifle the creation of new businesses and suppress wages, but companies argue they are needed to protect intellectual property. The judge found that the new rules were “arbitrary” and that the FTC didn’t have the power to make them.
• The FTC also found itself on the back foot when Kroger, a giant supermarket chain, sued to stop the regulator from using its in-house administrative tribunal to decide the fate of its $25bn takeover of Albertsons, a rival. Kroger wants the courts to rule on the matter, and argues that the in-house tribunal “violates constitutional protections against federal-government overreach”.
• Advanced Micro Devices intensified its rivalry with Nvidia by agreeing to buy ZT Systems for $4.9bn. ZT builds computing infrastructure for “hyperscalers” in artificial intelligence, including the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The deal will speed up the deployment of AMD’s data-centre chips, which compete with Nvidia’s graphics processingunits.

A Hollywood twist

• A consortium of investors led by Edgar Bronfman submitted a rival bid for the company that owns a controlling stake in Paramount Global. The film-and-TV studio has already agreed to a takeover by Skydance Media. Mr Bronfman is a former chief executive of Warner Music and is currently the chairman of FuboTV, a sports-streaming broadcaster.
• Conservative activists claimed another victory against diversity, equity and inclusion, when Harley-Davidson scrapped some of its DEI targets, such as using suppliers owned by people from diverse backgrounds. It also stressed that it has had no DEI corporate function since April. Meanwhile BlackRock, a pioneer in supporting shareholder environmental and social proposals, said it had backed just 20 out of 493 such proxy votes over the past year.
• Sweden’s central bank cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to 3.5%. After the Swedish economy contracted by 0.8% in the second quarter over the previous quarter, the Riksbank said it would lower the rate two or three more times this year.
• Gold prices continued their rally and hit new' highs. Prices are up by a fifth since the start of the year as investors pile into the precious metal ahead of the Federal Reserve’s expected cuts to interest rates. Gold is seen as a haven against falling asset prices in other markets.
• The World Gold Council estimates that global demand for gold increased by 4% in the second quarter, year on year.
• Ford ditched plans to roll out a large fully electric.UV. The carmaker noted that the EV industry was “rapidly evolving as Chinese competitors leverage advantaged cost structures”, and that car buyers were more cost-conscious than “early adopters” of EVs. Meanwhile, Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone-makerthat has diversified into EVs, said it was “confident” that it could raise its delivery target for its new car by 20% this year. Though available only in China at the moment, Xiaomi has global ambitions for its SU7 model.

Disgruntled staff

• Some 4.4% of American workers expect to lose their job over the next four months, the highest level recorded over the ten years of a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The share of workers expecting to move to a new job was 11.6%. Employees are increasingly dissatisfied. More of them now think that wages, benefits and promotion opportunities have deteriorated.

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