The Economist - 1 February 2025

Год выпуска: February 2025

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: 76

The revolt against regulation

• Governments are discovering a zeal for deregulation. How to get it right: leader, page 11.
• It is hard, but brings big rewards: briefing, page 16.

Why the Al crash is good news

• China's hottest Al model has panicked investors. But for the world it is a cause for optimism: leader, page 12.
• How DeepSeek will upend the Al pecking order, page 50.
• Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's mysterious founder, page 51.

A federal-spending freak-out

• Donald Trump is asserting vast powers over the civil service, page 19.
• His aid pause puts lives at risk—including American ones: leader page 12 and analysis, page 20.

Could Trump and Xi divide up the world?

• Hints keep piling up that America's president is tempted by a big, beautiful deal with his Chinese counterpart: The Telegram, page 49.
• Linguistic differences complicate relations between the great powers, page 34.

How covid boosted America’s murder rate

• The spike after George Floyd's killing in 2020 has a new explanation, page 23.

The world this week Politics

• Goma, the largest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, fell to M23, an armed group backed by Rwanda. The capture of Goma marks a stunning escalation of hostilities between Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, and his country’s much larger neighbour. African and Western diplomats have roundly condemned the attack but are unlikely to force Mr Kagame to reverse course. The incursion raises the risk of a wider conflict in the region, which suffered two devastating wars between 1996 and 2003.
• Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger left the Economic Community of West African States, Africa’s main regional bloc, and unveiled a common passport for their Alliance of Sahel States. The trio of military regimes claim they left ECOWAS because it failed to help them fight jihadists. But the more likely reason is their desire to escape pressure to hand power back to civilian governments.
• Israel opened part of the Netzarim corridor into northern Gaza to allow displaced Palestinians to return to what remains of their homes. It opened the route 48 hours later than expected after disputes with Hamas over which hostages would be released as part of the ceasefire. More than 300,000 Palestinians returned to the area, which has been devastated in the war.
• Donald Trump invited Binyamin Netanyahu to visit the White House. The Israeli prime minister is the first foreign leader to be invited during Mr Trump’s second term. Mr Trump also resumed shipments of 2,000lb (907kg) bunker-buster bombs to Israel. Deliveries were suspended under Joe Biden last year.
• A law banning activity by UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinians, on Israeli soil came into effect. The Israeli government says UNRWA is complicit with Hamas and that some of its employees took part in the massacres of October 7th. It is unclear how the ban will affect UNRWA’s activities in Gaza or the West Bank.
• Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s de facto ruler since the ousting of Bashar al-Assad, declared himself the country’s interim president. He also announced the dissolution of Mr Assad’s Baath party and the formation of a legislative council to govern Syria until a new constitution can be agreed.
• An American Airlines flight from Wichita carrying 64 people crashed into the Potomac river by Washington, DC. The plane collided with an army Black Hawk helicopter that had three people on board. Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, described the “unbearable sorrow” of many people dying.
• Confusion reigned in Washington after the White House issued and then retracted a memorandum that aimed to freeze trillions of dollars in federal loans and grants. A judge had suspended the edict. Separately, most federal workers were given the option of resigning with eight months’ pay. The State Department, meanwhile, seemed to back away a little from an earlier announcement to pause nearly all foreign-aid spending.
• The Justice Department fired a dozen lawyers who had worked on the two criminal investigations into Mr Trump during Joe Biden’s presidency. A spokesman said they could not be trusted to implement the new president’s agenda. The head of the department’s public-integrity section decided to step down.
• Robert Menendez, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. After the conviction was read out, Mr Menendez seemed to make an appeal to Mr Trump to pardon him, saying the president could restore “integrity” to the justice system.

Hardball diplomacy

• Mr Trump threatened to impose stiff tariffs on Colombia, after the country’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, said he would not allow American military planes carrying Colombians deported from the United States to land. Mr Petro soon backed down and offered his presidential plane to transport the migrants. Mr Trump lifted the threat of tariffs and the first migrants arrived back in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, on Colombian military aircraft.
• South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was officially charged with insurrection over his order in December that briefly imposed martial law. A former defence minister and several security chiefs have been similarly charged. Mr Yoon’s separate impeachment trial is being heard by the Constitutional Court.
• Dozens of people were killed in a stampede at the Maha Kumbh Mela religious festival in northern India. Hundreds of millions of Hindus attend the six-week event attempting to take a ritual dip in waters that are considered sacred.
• The German parliament passed non-binding measures to restrict migration, including the automatic refusal of entry to illegal migrants. The proposals were put forward by Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union parliamentary bloc, which is on track to win the forthcoming-general election. Mr Merz sparked outrage by turning to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to help pass his measures, breaking a long-standing-convention of snubbing the hard right.
• Estonia and Lithuania promised to increase their spending on defence to more than 5% of GDP, a level that Donald Trump has called on NATO countries to aim for. A NATO summit in June is likely to raise spending targets for its members above the current 2% of GDP.
• Milos Vucevic resigned as prime minister of Serbia, following weeks of protests over the collapse of a railway-station roof in Novi Sad, the country’s second-biggest city, which killed 15 people. The roof collapsed after renovations that were carried out by a Chinese-led consortium. The fall of Mr Vucevic is a blow to Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s president.

Never forset

• The remaining survivors of the Auschwitz death camp commemorated the 80th anniversary of its liberation. The Nazis murdered 1.1m people at the camp, im of whom were Jewish; 6m Jews were killed in the Holocaust overall. Several world leaders attended the commemorative event, including Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelensky, Olaf Scholz and King Charles. None made a speech; that was left for the survivors to do. Surveys in various countries have revealed a lack of awareness about what happened during the Holocaust, especially among younger people.

The world this week Business

• America’s tech companies clawed back some of the losses from the stockmarket rout that accompanied news that Deep-Seek, a Chinese generative artificial-intelligence firm, was seeing the same results as models from Western rivals, but with a fraction of the computing power and thus at a much lower cost. DeepSeek’s chatbot surged to the top of Apple’s iPhone download charts. Its success overturns the idea that companies have to spend huge sums on Al to stay ahead, which has been powering the stockmarket enthusiasm for all things Al-related. American tech companies lost $itrn in value over a single day, led by Nvidia, which shed $589bn of its market capitalisation, or 17% of its share price.

Adjusting profits

• Investors were left disappointed by Microsoft’s earnings, as revenue from its cloud business came in below expectations and it reported a big jump in capital spending. Meta’s results were more pleasing and Mark Zuckerberg promised to spend “hundreds of billions” on AI. Orders for AS Mb’s equipment for making high-end AI chips far exceeded expectations. The Dutch company’s share price rallied and its chief executive described the advent of DeepSeek as “good news” for the chip industry.
• Tesla’s fourth-quarter revenue and profit missed Wall Street estimates. Elon Musk promised that the carmaker’s investments in AI and robotics would bear fruit in 2025. Meanwhile, Tesla filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Justice over the EU’s extra tariffs on imports of electric vehicles from China, which were imposed last October. About a fifth of EVs sold in the EU are made in China.
• Charges related to the writedown of its Chinese joint ventures and a restructuring charge in China dragged down General Motors’ annual net profit, to $6bn. But the carmaker’s adjusted operating-profit rose to $14.9bn, a record for the company.
• Japan’s central bank lifted interest rates for the first time since July and the third time since ending its negative-rate policy last March. The Bank of Japan increased its main rate from 0.25% to 0.5%, the highest it has been since the global financial crisis, and revised up its inflation forecast. The bank’s governor, Ueda Kazuo, suggested that more interest-rate rises were on the way, without saying when.
• The Federal Reserve kept its benchmark interest rate on hold at a range of between 4.25% and 4.5%. America’s annual inflation rate has been steadily rising since September and the jobs market remains strong, factors that make the Fed wary of cutting rates. The path ahead is complicated by the uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s policies: higher tariffs will only add to inflationary pressures. The president has made it clear that he wants interest rates to fall. After the Fed left rates unchanged he turned to social media to tear into its record.
• A little under 4.1m previously owned houses were sold in America last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. With mortgage rates remaining high, it was the lowest number of existing-home sales since 1995. Underlining the increasing lack of accessibility to the property market for many Americans, the median existing-home price rose to a record $407,500 in 2024.
• Boom Supersonic, an American startup that is planning to build a faster-than-sound airliner, flew its one-third-scale demonstrator aircraft at Mach 1.1. It was the first non-military supersonic flight since Concorde was grounded in 2003.
• Boeing’s net loss in 2024 amounted to $n.8bn. The company had a horrendous year, which began with a panel falling off a 737 MAX shortly after take-off. That led to investigations of Boeing’s production process, which curtailed its output. It also endured a six-week labour strike.
• Rachel Reeves, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, outlined plans to boost economic growth, including investing in a research triangle linking London, Oxford and Cambridge. She also backed plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport, though planes won’t land there any time soon. A third runway has been under discussion for decades.

The money programme

• Reports emerged that the British government is considering extending the “licence fee” that funds the BBC to users of streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+. The licence fee is a tax on households that own a television or any other device that broadcasts live programming. Households that view only Netflix and the like have been exempt. But the BBC needs its money. Another proposal is to tax streaming directly, raising the prospect of “Squid Game 2” subsidising “EastEnders”.

скачать журнал: The Economist - 1 February 2025