The Economist - 7 June 2025

Год выпуска: June 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: 84

Phew, it's a girl!

The stunning decline of boy preference

• The stunning decline of boy preference: leader, page 9.
• Parents in developing countries are losing their bias towards baby boys even as the rich world starts to favour girls: briefing, page 16.

Warfare after Ukraine’s Russian raid

• The story of an attack, page 46.
• Britain’s strategic defence review highlights Europe’s challenge—lots of smart thinking, not enough money: leader, page 10, and analysis, page 49.
• The German exception, page 44.
• Ideology and lavish payments are keeping Russian lines supplied with cannon fodder, page 52.

America taxes foreign investors

• A policy that could do even more harm than tariffs: leader, page 10.
• Who might pay the “revenge tax” on foreigners? Page 65.
• How tariffs have affected American inflation, page 66.
• Do Americans consume too much? Page 63.

Murdoch Inc: feuding, but thriving

• Even as the media’s first family shred each other in court, their empire is doing unexpectedly well, page 55.

The year’s best books so far

• When you recline by the swimming pool this summer, pick up something good to read, page 74.

The world this week Politics

• Ukraine launched a bold attack on airfields deep inside Russia. It launched 117 drones smuggled in containers, including to eastern Siberia, some 4,000km from Ukraine. It claims to have damaged or destroyed at least 41 Russian planes, including strategic bombers, which are difficult to replace. A few days later Ukraine said it had “severely damaged” Kerch bridge, which links Russia with the Crimean peninsula it occupies, with underwater weapons. America’s president, Donald Trump, said that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, vowed on a call to retaliate against the drone strike.
• Meanwhile, Russian forces advanced into Ukraine’s northeastern province of Sumy. Peace talks in Istanbul broke up after one hour. The two sides agreed to a prisoner swap but not a ceasefire.
• Karol Nawrocki, the hard-right candidate of the Law and Justice party, won Poland’s presidential election in the run-off with 50.9% of the vote, beating Rafal Trzaskowski, the government-backed centrist. European populists rejoiced. A hostile president will be a blow for the liberal agenda of Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk. He called a confidence vote for June 11th.
• The Dutch government collapsed after the hard-right leader, Geert Wilders, pulled his Party for Freedom from the ruling coalition after smaller partners refused to sign on to his radical plans to cut migration. New elections are expected in the autumn.
• Dozens of Palestinians were killed around the hubs of a new aid-distribution system in Gaza. Some of them were killed by the Israel Defence Forces. It said they had left designated routes. Many Palestinians have to walk for kilometres to reach the points. The UN said that blocking access to relief may amount to a war crime and called for an independent investigation.
• Indirect ceasefire talks continued. Hamas proposed amendments to America’s plan for a 60-day truce in Gaza. The plan, which was accepted by Israel, includes an exchange of Israeli hostages (both living and dead) for Palestinian prisoners. But the militant group wants Israel to commit to withdrawing permanently from Gaza and ending the war.
• Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected American demands that his country eventually stop enriching uranium. The issue has been a sticking-point over five rounds of negotiations. America hopes to reach a deal that would lift sanctions in exchange for Iran scaling back its nuclear programme.
• More than im people began the hajj. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca will be a testing journey this year as temperatures are expected to rise above 40°C. The Saudi government is planting thousands of trees and setting up more shaded areas after some 1,300 pilgrims died in the heat last year.

Running out of road

• Five UN aid workers were killed when their convoy was attacked on the way to the city of el-Fasherin Sudan’s northern Darfur region. The convoy had travelled some 1,800km from the coast and would have been the first in over a year to reach the famine-stricken city. The number of people who have fled the country since Sudan’s civil war started more than two years ago crossed 4m this week, according to the UN.
• Mr Trump barred citizens of 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran and Sudan, from travelling to America, and restricted entry from seven more. The ban, which goes into effect on June 9th, cites national-security concerns. Days earlier 12 people were injured by incendiary devices at a rally in Boulder, Colorado, in support of hostages in Gaza. The suspected attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was an Egyptian who had overstayed his tourist visa. He faces charges of attempted murder of the first degree.
• Days after leaving Mr Trump’s administration, Elon Musk, a tycoon and nominal ally, called his “big, beautiful” budget bill a “disgusting abomination”. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the sweeping package would increase the federal budget deficit by some $2.4trn over the next decade. The bill faces tough scrutiny in the Senate after narrowly passing the House of Representatives.
• America’s Supreme Court gave Mr Trump the green light to revoke legal protection in America for more than 500,000 migrants who had fled economic and political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Two of the court’s three liberal justices dissented.
• South Koreans turned out heavily to back Lee Jae-myung in a presidential election. The candidate for the liberal Democratic Party won with 49.4% of 35m votes cast. His conservative rival, Kim Moon-soo, took 41.2%. It was a resounding rebuke to the presidency of Yoon Suk Yeol, whose shortlived declaration of martial law and subsequent impeachment triggered the snap poll. Mr Lee promised to restore stability and revive the economy.
• The trial of Sheikh Hasina started in Bangladesh. The country’s former prime minister, who last year fled to India, was formally charged with crimes against humanity by a special court back home. Prosecutors accused her of a “systematic attack” on student-led protests in which nearly 1,400 people were killed between July and August 2024.
• Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, unveiled bold plans to prepare the country for war. The strategic defence review, which took a year to complete, envisages reforms in military procurement and organisation as well as spending billions of pounds on nuclear weapons and up to a dozen new attack submarines. “We are in a new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK defence,” said Sir Keir.

Judging the judges

• President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he would defend Brazil’s Supreme Court from attack by the United States. He was responding to remarks made on May 21st by Marco Rubio, the us secretary of state, who warned of possible American sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, a judge on the court, who is closely involved in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, for allegedly plotting a coup.
• Low turnout in Mexico’s first judicial election raised concerns about its legitimacy. The country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, defended the vote, which she claims will combat corruption and improve the justice system. Yet faced with unfamiliar choices to fill 2,600 posts on all rungs, only 13% of Mexico’s 100m voters took part—a record low in national elections.

The world this week Business

• Donald Trump doubled America’s tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium, taking them to 50%. Speaking to steelworkers in Pennsylvania, America’s president said the levies meant “Nobody’s going to be able to steal your industry.” The earlier levy of 25% will remain in place for steel imports from Britain, which signed a trade agreement with America last month.
• Despite Mr Trump’s metals tariffs, stockmarkets were buoyant. On June 4th the MSCI All-Country World Index, which tracks global equities, reached a new high, beating the record it set in February. The index plunged after Mr Trump announced his punitive “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd. He has since paused most of these levies to negotiate with America’s trading partners.
• The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies agreed to lift oil production by 411,000 barrels a day in July, the third increase in as many months. The cartel has been unwinding its production cuts after they failed to raise oil prices and caused its market share to fall. The oil price is down by 13% since the start of the year.
• Annual inflation in the euro zone fell to 1.9% in May, down from 2.2% in April. That is the first time it has fallen below the European Central Bank’s 2% target since September 2024. Inflation had been above 2% for more than three years.
• Elon Musk began a $5bn debt sale to fund his artificial-intelligence company, xAI. The firm also plans to sell $300m in shares. That would value xAI at $113bn. Mr Musk said he was “super focused” on his businesses after leaving the Trump administration.
• After ten weeks of due-diligence investigations into Thames Water, KKR abandoned a plan to rescue the ailing utility. The American private-equity titan had just days earlier submitted a bid to Ofwat, Britain’s water regulator, to inject £4bn ($5.4bn) into the company. Thames Water’s debt-to-equity ratio is 25 percentage points higher than Ofwat’s recommended level. The government could renationalise the firm if it fails to provide basic services.

Atoms for lease

• The price of shares in American nuclear-power firms briefly leapt by as much as 9% after Meta signed a deal with Constellation Energy. The tech giant will purchase electricity from one of Constellation’s nuclear plants for 20 years. Constellation said the deal was worth “billions of dollars”. Tech companies are interested in nuclear plants to power the energy-hungry data centres needed for training artificial-intelligence systems.
• Shares in Airbus, Europe’s biggest aerospace firm, rose by 3% on reports that China is preparing to order hundreds of the company’s planes. The deal would be a snub to Boeing. The American planemaker is about to resume deliveries, after China paused orders in April.
• The Federal Reserve removed a $1.95trn cap on the assets of Wells Fargo, America’s fourth-largest bank. The Fed imposed the sanction in 2018 after Wells disclosed that it had opened as many as 3.5m unauthorised accounts between 2009 and 2016, during which time it became the world’s most valuable bank. Charlie Scharf, Wells’s boss since 2019, called the cap’s removal a “pivotal milestone” as the bank seeks to put the scandal behind it.
• Rémy Cointreau withdrew its sales targets for 2030, citing tensions between Europe, China and America. The French maker of cognac said trade barriers erected by the two countries could cost it €100m ($114m), nearly half its operating profits in 2024-25, over the next financial year.
• The European Union warned that China’s restrictions on exports of rare-earth metals were creating an “alarming situation” for European industry. The European Association of Automotive Suppliers, a trade body, said that only a quarter of requests for export licences had been granted by China since the country tightened controls in April. It added that some plants had already stopped production because of the curbs.
• Texas removed BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, from a blacklist of businesses that the state accused of boycotting oil and gas companies. Glenn Hegar, the Lone Star State’s comptroller, praised BlackRock for reducing its green commitments. Black-Rock’s place on the blacklist meant that it missed out on billions of dollars from Texan state-run investment funds, which manage $300bn.

Super smash-hit

• Around the world, gamers queued outside shops to get their hands on Nintendo’s latest console. Retailing for $450 in America, the Switch 2 is 50% pricier than its predecessor, which came out in 2017. Nintendo predicts it will sell 15m of the devices by March.

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