The Economist - November 22 2025

Год выпуска: November 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

Anything Goes America

• Where the loosening of rules and tolerance of corruption in America will lead: leader, page 9.
• In Donald Trump’s Washington, everything appears to be for sale, page 21.
• The returns to access to power and privileged information are soaring, page 55.
• When and how to suck up, shut up and stand up to the president, page 57.

Zelensky’s big mess

• A corruption scandal provokes justified outrage. But the West should still help Ukraine defend itself: leader, page 11.
• The graft scandal and a dubious ceasefire plan plunge Ukraine into its biggest crisis since the invasion, page 44.

Will China crush Europe’s industry?

• Either Europe grabs hold of its own destiny, or China and America will force change upon it: leader, page 10.
• Chinese regulations and competition are panicking European manufacturers: briefing, page 18.

New thinking on minimum wages

• Why governments should stop raising them: leader, page 11.
• Economists fret about ever higher pay floors, page 64.

Our books of the year

• Gladiators and dictators, wolves and Beatles feature in our list, page 76.

The world this week Politics

• Donald Trump signed legislation instructing the Justice Department to release all files relating to Jeffrey Epstein, a deceased sex offender and politically connected financier, after Congress voted almost unanimously for it to do so. Republicans supported the bill amid intense pressure from their maga base to make the files public. For months Mr Trump had tried to stop the vote from happening, as speculation swirled about whether he knew about Epstein’s crimes before falling out with him around 2004 (Epstein was first convicted in 2008).

Summers over

• Meanwhile, Larry Summers, a treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and a former president of Harvard, said he would step back from public life after it emerged that he had asked Epstein for advice about having an extramarital affair. He has stepped down from the board of OpenAl. Mr Summers used the codename “peril” in his messages to Epstein.
• A court in El Paso issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Republicans’ map of congressional districts for Texas from coming into force, finding it had been “racially gerrymandered”. State Republicans have redrawn the boundaries in the hope it will give the party five more seats in Congress in next year’s midterms. Texas immediately lodged an appeal with the federal Supreme Court.
• Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, visited the White House, his first trip to Washington in seven years. Mr Trump said that America would sell F-35 fighter jets to the Saudis and announced that Saudi Arabia would be formally designated as a major non-NATO ally. The president also insisted that Prince Muhammad “knew nothing” about the murder in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist. In 2021 an American intelligence report said that the prince authorised the killing. He has always denied this.
• The UN Security Council voted in favour of Mr Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which includes establishing an international stabilisation force there. Hamas rejected the resolution. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called for Hamas to be expelled from Gaza, which would go beyond Mr Trump’s plan. Meanwhile, Germany resumed arms exports to Israel, saying the ceasefire had stabilised the situation in Gaza. Germany, the second-largest exporter of weapons to Israel, suspended its shipments in August.
• The UN registered more than 260 attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank that led to Palestinian casualties or damage to property in October, the highest monthly count since its records began in 2006.
• At least 13 people were killed in an Israeli strike near a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry. Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas. Hamas denied it had any “military installations” in the area.
• Delegates arrived in South Africa ahead of the first-ever G20 summit to be held in an African country. Donald Trump is not attending the gathering in Johannesburg; he accuses South Africa of killing white Afrikaners and stealing their land (there is no such policy). Mr Trump said the country shouldn’t be in the G20. America has reportedly warned South Africa not to issue a formal statement at the end of the summit.
• Reports emerged that America and Russia have drawn up a 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine. Firm details of the plan were scant, but it appears to include many of Russia’s longstanding demands.
• Ukraine has yet to comment on it. Earlier, Volodymyr Zelensky met Emmanuel Macron in Paris and signed a letter of intent to buy up to 100 French-made Rafale fighter jets over the next decade. There was no let-up in Russia’s barrage of drone and missile attacks. At least 26 people were killed when blocks of flats were struck in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine.
• Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said that two Ukrainians working for Russian intelligence had carried out acts of sabotage on the Warsaw-Lublin railway line. Both suspects had crossed into Poland from Belarus and had returned there, Mr Tusk said. Their goal had been to cause a “rail catastrophe”.

They’ve Kast their vote

• The first round of Chile’s presidential election saw Jeannette Jara, a Communist Party member of the governing coalition, take 27% of the vote, just ahead of José Antonio Kast, an ultraconservative former congressman, who took 24%. Mr Kast is widely expected to win the run-off on December 14th. Crime and immigration have shot to the front of the electorate’s concerns in this election, a far cry from the progressive wave that carried Gabriel Boric, the youthful current president, to power in 2021 (Chilean presidents cannot run for two consecutive terms).
• At least 100 police officers and 20 civilians were injured in Mexico City during protests against President Claudia Sheinbaum’s handling of crime and corruption. Demonstrations took place across Mexico and were organised by Generation Z Mexico, the latest in a series of self-styled Gen Z protests that have occurred across the world in countries that are as divergent as Madagascar, Nepal and Peru.
• Bangladesh’s war-crimes court found Sheikh Hasina, the country’s former autocratic prime minister, guilty of ordering the security forces to crack down on student protests that ultimately forced her from office last year. Around 1,400 people were killed during the crackdown. The court sentenced her to death. Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India after she was ousted from power, described the court as “rigged”. Bangladesh has asked India for her extradition.
• Relations between China and Japan sank to their lowest point in years following recent remarks by Takaichi Sanae, the new Japanese prime minister, that any attack on Taiwan would also be a threat to Japan. The Chinese government has called on Ms Takaichi to retract the comments and state media have published angry articles denouncing her. Amid the heightened tensions China told its citizens not to travel to Japan. Japan warned its citizens in China to be vigilant when out in public.
• Britain’s Labour government announced a significant toughening of immigration policy. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, said the surge in migration had “destabilised communities” and left taxpayers “footing the bill” for a failed system. Illegal immigration has been a thorny subject in British politics for years, giving rise to the populist-right Reform UK. Its leader, Nigel Farage, said Ms Mahmood sounded like a Reform supporter.

The world this week Business

• Nvidia’s latest quarterly earnings provided some relief for investors amid the recent drop in tech stocks. The maker of artificial-intelligence chips reported a 62% rise in revenue, year on year, to $57bn, and net profit of $31.9bn, up by 65%. Its share price surged initially in response; the stock has registered tepid growth over the past month. Nvidia’s market capitalisation is around $4.5trn, down from $5trn at the end of October.
• Stockmarkets have struggled amid worries about share prices being overvalued for companies that are riding the Ai boom. Oracle has shed about 30% of its value since September, which was when it reported a surge in contracts for its cloud services and announced a big deal to supply OpenAi with data-centre capacity. The stocks of tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Palantir have all fallen since the start of November.
• Cryptocurrencies have also been plunging amid a sell-off in speculative assets. The price of bitcoin reached a record $126,000 in October but was trading around $92,000 this week. Around $1.2trn has been knocked off the value of crypto assets over six weeks.
• Investors were also nervously assessing earnings from America’s big retailers. Home Depot reduced its forecast of annual profit for the year, blaming economic uncertainty among consumers that is dampening demand for home-improvement supplies. Target also lowered its guidance, as sales at the troubled retailer stagnated.
• A federal judge in Washington ruled that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not contravene antitrust law, a blow to the Federal Trade Commission, which launched the case five years ago. The judge found that whether or not Meta enjoyed a monopoly in the past, the government had failed to prove that it did so today. During the trial earlier this year Meta had called witnesses from other social-media companies, including TikTok, to describe the fierce competition in the industry.

Xiaomi the money

• The rising cost of memory chips will push up the prices that consumers pay for smartphones, warned Xiaomi. Memory-chip costs are increasing in part because of the huge demand for their use in AI servers. The Chinese tech company reported a 22% year-on-year jump in revenue for the latest quarter, and a 150% surge in operating profit. Sales at its electric-vehicle business were up by 198%.
• Japan’s economy shrank by 1.8% on an annualised basis in the third quarter, the first contraction since early 2024. A drop in exports, notably car parts that have been hit by America’s tariffs, dragged down growth, but household consumption remains weak amid rising prices.
• The Trump administration reached a framework trade agreement with Switzerland that will reduce tariffs on Swiss imports from 39% to 15%. Swiss companies are to invest $200bn in America, including $5obn from Roche and $23bn from Novartis. Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said the deal would help America reduce its “deficit in pharmaceuticals and other key sectors”. Guy Parmelin, the Swiss economy minister, rejected criticism at home about the deal. “We haven’t sold our soul to the devil”, he insisted.
• ВНР said it would appeal against a ruling from the High Court in London that found it liable for the failure of a dam in Brazil in 2015 that killed 19 people and affected hundreds of thousands of others whose communities were destroyed or contaminated by the cascading sludge. The ruling means hearings can begin into what compensation the mining firm might pay. BHP points out that it has already entered a remediation and compensation agreement in Brazil along with Vale, its joint partner in the Fundào dam, and that the action taken in the English courts duplicates that effort.
• Britain’s annual inflation rate fell to 3.6% in October from the 3.8% it had held steady at for the previous three months. Services inflation, of which the Bank of England takes particular note in its deliberations on interest rates, dropped to 4.5% from 4.7% in September. Although inflation remains well above the bank’s 2% target, markets now expect it to cut rates in December.

Not OK computer

• The British government said it would outlaw the resale of tickets for live events at prices that have been massively inflated over their face value. The stock of StubHub, a website for resellers in America, branded as Viagogo elsewhere, slumped. Trading in such tickets for acts like Oasis has caused a furore, as touts use bots to snap them up for resale. No surprise that tickets for this week’s Radiohead concert in London, priced at £85 ($112), were reselling at £682.

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