The Economist - 14 December 2024

Год выпуска: December 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

WHAT NOW?

• Amid all the uncertainty, celebrate the fall of a tyrant and prepare for what could yet go right: leader, page 11.
• The Middle East’s most brutal dictator has gone, but it is not clear how benign or stable the new leadership will be, page 16.
• The Assad regime’s fall voids many of the Middle East’s old certainties, page 18.

Which economy did best in 2024?

• Our annual rankings provide an answer, page 59.
• Spain shows that there is nothing inevitable about Europe’s decline: leader, page 12.

The next big thing in Al

• Get ready for systems that are autonomous and adaptable, page 56.

How to improve cows

• What has four stomachs and could change the world? Page 50.

In praise of odd book titles

• Britain’s least-coveted literary prize, page 48.

The world this week Politics

• After 13 years of civil war and a long period of stalemate, Syrian rebels swept into Damascus, bringing an end to the Assad regime that has ruled Syria for 53 years. Bashar al-Assad, who had been president since 2000, fled to Moscow. Social media depicted scenes of jubilation in the capital. The rebels were led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group. One of its leaders, Muhammad al-Bashir, is to head a caretaker government until March. The fall of the Assad regime is a huge blow to Iran, which is also contending with the dismantling of Hizbullah, its proxy in Lebanon, by Israel. And also to Russia. Its main military force in the Mediterranean is based at Syrian ports.
• Israel took advantage of the situation in Syria to advance its defences. The Israeli airforce launched strikes throughout Syria and destroyed storage plants for chemical weapons, which the Assad regime has used on its own people. Israeli tanks rolled into a buffer zone in the Golan Heights. And Israeli warships bombed naval ships in Syria’s ports of Al-Bayda and Latakia. The government said its aim was to “destroy strategic capabilities” that could threaten Israel.
• The fall of the Assad regime threw the future of Syrian refugees in Europe into doubt. Several countries, including Germany, announced that they would not process any more applications from Syrians until the situation became clearer. Germany has taken in im Syrians. Austria’s interior minister said asylum applications would be reviewed and his depart ment would “prepare an orderly return and deportation programme”. Turkey, where 3m Syrians live, said it would work towards their “safe and voluntary return home”.

Having his day in court

• Binyamin Netanyahu testified for the first time at his trial for corruption. The Israeli prime minister said the charges against him were “absurd” and the result of a witch-hunt conducted by Israel’s left-wing media.
• John Mahama won a presidential election in Ghana, making it one of several African countries this year to boot out an incumbent. He promised to “reset Ghana”, which is reeling from its worst economic crisis in a generation. Some supporters of the presidentelect were arrested for attacking state offices and ransacking buildings, in an attempt to oust officials working under the current government.
• As he struggled to announce a new prime minister, Emmanuel Macron was able to take his mind off the political turmoil in France by hosting an event to mark the ceremonial reopening of Notre Dame in Paris. The cathedral’s renovation is a triumph, completed just five years after a fire caused extensive damage to the building. Around 50 world leaders attended the ceremony, including Donald Trump.
• In Paris Mr Trump met Volodymyr Zelensky, and later called for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Ukraine to end the “madness”. The next day the Ukrainian president said that a diplomatic resolution made sense, and that he had discussed freezing the current lines of control with Mr Trump.
• America’s Treasury Department transferred $20bn to a fund at the World Bank that Ukraine can use for non-military spending. The money comes from frozen Russian assets and forms part of the G7’s $50bn aid package announced in June. The Treasury said the aim is to make Russia “increasingly bear the costs of its illegal war”.
• Amid allegations of Russian interference in the country’s presidential election, Romania’s highest court annulled the process shortly before the run-off was due to be held. The winner of the first round, Calin Georgescu, hails from the pro-Russian hard right and was a rank outsider before the vote. The court ruled that the whole process must start again. A new election will take place in 2025.
• Hundreds of farmers from across Britain took their tractors on a slow drive through London to protest against the government’s plans to end an exemption on inheritance tax on farms with assets over £1m ($1.3m). The tractors started off from Whitehall, causing gridlock in central London.
• South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was placed under formal investigation for his brief imposition of martial law. MPs fell short of the votes needed to impeach Mr Yoon but his party delegated his authority to the prime minister, leading to confusion about who was leading the country. Mr Yoon has apologised for his actions, but has vowed to “fight until the end”. The justice ministry has told him to remain in South Korea.
• China sent dozens of naval and coastguard vessels into waters stretching from Japan to the South China Sea. It was the country’s largest maritime operation since 1996, said Taiwan, which China claims. The drills appeared to be an expression of anger over visits by Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, to Hawaii and the American territory of Guam.
• India’s opposition parties submitted a motion to impeach the vice-president, the first-ever attempt to remove someone from the country’s second-highest office. The opposition claims that Jagdeep Dhankhar has been “extremely biased” as chairman of the upper house of parliament and acted like a spokesman for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. There are not enough votes to remove him, but the motion will worsen the already fraught relationship between the government and opposing parties.
• President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil underwent an emergency brain operation to drain internal bleeding. The hematoma is linked to a minor haemorrhage that was caused by the president slipping in a bathroom in October and hitting his head. After the operation Mr da Silva had another medical procedure to prevent further bleeding in his brain. He is still expected to return to work soon.
• At least 180 Haitians were murdered in Port-au-Prince by a gang whose leader believed they had used witchcraft to make his son sick. The victims were mostly elderly people. The UN says at least 5,000 people have been killed in Haiti this year. An international police force is ill-equipped to quell the violence.

The crypto-country

• In what would be a boost for Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, the government was reported to be inching closer to agreeing a deal with the IMF for a $1.3bn loan programme. The Central American country will allay the IMF’s concerns about bitcoin, the sticking point for a deal, by making it voluntary instead of compulsory legal tender for local businesses.

The world this week Business

• Donald Trump appointed Andrew Ferguson as the next chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which will bring an end to Lina Khan’s controversial tenure in the job. Mr Ferguson is an FTC commissioner. After his promotion he said the regulator would “end big tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech”. Mr Trump also nominated Mark Meador, an antitrust lawyer, as a commissioner, which will give the Republicans a majority on the FTC.

At the checkout

• Meanwhile, a judge imposed an injunction against the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and eight states. A judge in Washington state also issued an injunction in a separate trial. With the supermarket chains’ hopes of combining in ruins, Albertsons sued Kroger for failing to secure the merger.
• An American appeals court rejected TikTok’s attempt to overturn the Biden administration’s order to ban it. The government fears the Chinese government uses the app to collect data. The court said the order was constitutional; Tik-Tok had claimed that it violated free speech. Mr Trump, who tried to ban TikTok in his first administration, has said he will now try to save it.
• In another blow to the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) movement, an appeals court struck down Nasdaq’s rules for setting racial and gender targets for the boardrooms of companies that list on the exchange. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which approved the rules, had “intruded into territory far outside” its domain, the court said.
• Rupert Murdoch lost his legal attempt to change the terms of the Murdoch family trust so that his eldest son, Lachlan, would control his media empire when he dies. The court reportedly found that Mr Mur doch had acted in “bad faith” in trying to amend the trust. Three of his other children, including his estranged son, James, stood to lose their influence. The siblings apparently started discussing the matter in 2023 following an episode of “Succession”, in which the head of a family business dies.
• Police charged Luigi Mangione, a software engineer with an Ivy League education, with the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Mr Mangione was caught carrying a document expressing “ill will” towards corporations, describing health-insurance companies as parasites.
• General Motors overhauled its Cruise autonomous-driving project and scrapped its development work in robotaxis “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business”. It will instead focus on selfdriving systems for personal vehicles, which GM says it is “fully committed to”.
• Following the success of its first fully electric sedan car, Xiaomi, a Chinese tech company better known for its smart phones, announced that it would launch its first sportutility vehicle next June or July. The YU7 will run on batteries supplied by CATL, a Chinese manufacturer that has just signed a deal to build a $4-3bn battery plant in Spain in a joint venture with Stellantis.
• Google unveiled a new quantum-computing chip that can hold a stable state for up to an hour, an important milestone in building a useful quantum computer, though that remains some way off yet.
• America’s annual rate of inflation rose slightly in November to 2.7%. The core inflation rate, stripping out energy and food prices, held for the third month in a row at 3.3%.
• Nippon Life, a Japanese insurance company, struck a deal to acquire Resolution Life, a privately held global insurer, for $10.6bn. And Aviva is to take over Direct Line in a £3.6bn ($4.6bn) transaction. The combined company will hold a fifth of Britain’s motor-and home-insurance market.
• Omnicom agreed to buy Interpublic, in a $13bn deal that creates the world’s biggest advertising agency by revenue. Omnicom said the combined company would accelerate “significant opportunities created by new technologies”, namely artificial intelligence, and give it better leverage to counter the power of the tech giants in digital advertising.

Wildest dreams

• Taylor Swift’s 18-month Eras tour came to end. Selling 10m tickets for 149 shows the tour’s revenues of $2.1bn are by far the most for a concert series. Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres concerts (there have been 177 so far) are the next most lucrative, taking in over $1bn, followed by Elton John’s farewell tour, which raked in $939m. The Rocket Man’s final tour is the subject of a new documentary film from Disney titled “Never Too Late”, or Never Too Old, as some call it.

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