The Economist

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  • Politics this week

    The Economist: The world this week
    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  • Politics this week

    The Economist: The world this week
    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  • Politics this week

    The Economist: The world this week
    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  • Politics this week

    The Economist: The world this week
    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  • President Hollande's first tax refugee sighted in London?

    Bagehot's notebook
    11 May 2012 | 11:53 am
    IT BEING Friday, I hope readers will tolerate a snippet of breaking news from the streets of South Kensington, nerve centre of the French expatriate community in London. Bicycling down the Fulham Road a short while ago, Bagehot was passed by a gleaming Aston Martin, twin exhausts rumbling like a freight train, and French number plates (33 code, so from Bordeaux, at a guess). I was all ready to shout: "Bloody asylum seekers" at the driver, but decided the gag might not work in translation.
 
 
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    Bagehot's notebook

  • President Hollande's first tax refugee sighted in London?

    11 May 2012 | 11:53 am
    IT BEING Friday, I hope readers will tolerate a snippet of breaking news from the streets of South Kensington, nerve centre of the French expatriate community in London. Bicycling down the Fulham Road a short while ago, Bagehot was passed by a gleaming Aston Martin, twin exhausts rumbling like a freight train, and French number plates (33 code, so from Bordeaux, at a guess). I was all ready to shout: "Bloody asylum seekers" at the driver, but decided the gag might not work in translation.

  • The chances of a British referendum on EU membership are growing

    11 May 2012 | 4:54 am
    THE war drums are pounding among those dreaming of a referendum on EU membership.As noted in a post last week, Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, co-inventor of Blairism and ex-European Union trade commissioner, stirred things up with a lecture at Oxford University, suggesting that pro-Europeans (of whom he is one) should support such a vote, if and when euro-zone integration deepens to such an extent that Britain finds itself an associate member of a two-tier club.Lord Mandelson’s democratic analysis was hard to dispute. He noted that 56% of respondents want a referendum…

  • House repairs

    11 May 2012 | 3:43 am
    MY PRINT column this week looks at the politics of House of Lords reform, and suggests that this dry-sounding subject is actually a rather important clash about power and its transmission.SOME years back the BBC enjoyed a surprise hit with a spoof chat-show presented by Mrs Merton, a fictional northern housewife whose trick was skewering guests with mock-naive questions. One noted interview, with a willowy beauty married to a diminutive magician, featured the query: “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” The concept of the “Mrs Merton question” duly entered…

  • Britain says no to elected mayors

    4 May 2012 | 2:56 pm
    A WHILE back, debate gripped David Cameron’s inner circle, on the subject of how to persuade a sceptical British public to embrace elected city mayors. A rather abstruse ambition to outsiders, the creation of elected mayors in towns and cities across Britain has been a gleam in the eye of those close to the prime minister since their days in opposition.Those insiders have had a rough day, with nine out of ten cities that were holding referendums on whether to move to an elected mayor rejecting the idea. Manchester,  Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, Wakefield,…

  • Should Britain's government offer an in-out referendum on EU membership?

    4 May 2012 | 7:56 am
    DESPITE stiff competition from local and mayoral election results involving almost 200 local authorities across England, Wales and Scotland, Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, co-inventor of Blairism and ex-European Union trade commissioner, is set to make headlines this afternoon by calling for Britain to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership.Voices on the Tory right have already reacted with enthusiasm, with ConservativeHome arguing that David Cameron should follow Lord Mandelson's lead and announce an in-out referendum. Con Home explicitly says that the value of such…
 
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    Buttonwood's notebook

  • A numbers game

    11 May 2012 | 10:24 am
    THE recent column on saving has provoked this thoughtful response from a reader. It's got a few too many numbers to run on the letters' page but it's a good way of thinking about the issue, and seems worth a wider readership.Sir - The theory of compound interest and the time value of money cast anunnecessary shroud of mystery over the question of pension funding andsaving for retirement. Actuarial mysteries are, however, often amenable tomore common sense, back-of-the-envelope solutions. A 20 year old, expectingto work until 60 and live until 90 will work 40 years but need support for70…

  • Gloomy messages

    11 May 2012 | 4:05 am
    YESTERDAY'S Bellwether Europe conference was not particularly cheerful. It was opened by a speech from Axel Weber, now executive chairman of UBS and formerly of the Bundesbank and ECB. He argued that there was no alternative to reform policies in order to improve the growth rate of Europe; it was thanks to the reforms of Gerhard Schroder that German unemployment rate is so low while the unemployment rate in other countries is so high. Alternative policies such as expanding the money supply or building up higher debt-to-GDP ratios via fiscal stimulus simply added to the fragility of the system…

  • Spot the difference, part two

    9 May 2012 | 9:29 am
    TAKE two governments. One has increased spending by 31.8% since 2007 (in nominal terms) and the other has increased it by 29.3%. Which one has followed a Keynesian stimulus approach since the financial crisis broke and which one has committed itself to austerity? Well, the former is America and the latter is Britain.There are two sides to the public sector balance sheet, of course. Federal US revenues are still slightly lower in cash terms than they were in 2007 while British revenues are up by 8% (the most recent narrowing of the deficit is the result of a VAT increase).Now this is a very…

  • Following the bellwether

    9 May 2012 | 8:42 am
    TOMORROW your blogger will be chairing a conference in London on the outlook for Europe and I hope to report back from the proceedings. Among the speakers are Axel Weber, once of the ECB and now of UBS, Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, Bill Winters, once of J P Morgan and a member of the Vickers Commission, Alistair Darling (former chancellor), and John Kay (of the Kay review). Listening to that group for a day should make me (and thus, you) much better informed on the  euro zone debt crisis and the system of financial regulation. If any commenters…

  • The latest round

    8 May 2012 | 4:23 am
    THE political turmoil in Greece indicates that we are in the latest round of the historic battle between debtors and creditors. My thesis has been that we have these recurring cycles which revolved around the nature of money, with creditors wanting to limit the supply of money either via an internal fix (the gold standard) or an external one (a fixed exchange rate system). Eventually, after a period of stability (as suggested by Hyman Minsky), the debts grow too large for the borrowers to repay and the whole system collapses. The debtors don't pay the money back and creditors have the choice…
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    Charlemagne's notebook

  • Groping towards Grexit

    14 May 2012 | 7:02 pm
    EVEN in a grouping as fractious as the euro zone, tonight's falling-out was remarkable. Jean-Claude Juncker, who presides over the zone's finance ministers, lashed out at the many figures who have more or less openly threatened Greece with expulsion from the euro if it does not abide by its programme of economic reforms and austerity measures. With Greece in deep political turmoil (some are even talking apocalyptically of civil war) after voters backed an incoherent constellation of anti-austerity parties, European central bankers and finance ministers have been warning it that its departure…

  • Add Hollandaise sauce

    8 May 2012 | 11:40 am
     TEN YEARS ago Romano Prodi, the-then president of the European Commission, created a stink when he declared that the euro zone’s budget rules were “stupid” because they were too rigid. But with the onset of the euro zone’s debt crisis in 2010 the response has been to try to make them even stiffer. At Germany's insistence, the euro zone first gave the commission more powers to monitor and enforce deficit limits, including the threat of “semi-automatic” sanctions for rule-breakers. And second, almost all members of the European Union were dragooned into signing up to the…

  • A winner in France, alarm in Greece

    6 May 2012 | 6:43 pm
    "EUROPE is watching us," declared François Hollande (video here, in French) after being confirmed as winner of the French presidential election. “At the moment when the result was proclaimed, I am sure that in many countries of Europe there was relief and hope: finally austerity is no longer destiny.” But the celebration may not last long. The euro dropped in Asian trading as markets tried to digest not only the long-expected rise of the first Socialist president in France in 17 years (see our briefing), but also the electoral earthquake that took place in Greece on the same night.

  • Germany's blast at Barroso

    21 Mar 2012 | 7:25 pm
    MY previous post on the Commission's flawed proposal on giving itself the power to retaliate against countries that restrict European firms access to public-procurement markets mentions the strong opposition of Germany.It is striking that Germany finds nothing good to say about an idea so assiduously pursued by France, its closest partner. It may be because Germany runs the EU's bigggest trade surplus, so has most to lose from a trade war. Or it may be that it understands that dlocalisation, which so worries France (with its big trade deficit), is precisely what has helped Germany gain…

  • Protect trade, or protect Sarkozy?

    21 Mar 2012 | 7:07 pm
    Funny thing, those hard-fought EU summit statements. Sometimes the most thunderous declarations mean nothing. But sometimes there are those ambiguous little words turn into something big. Such is the case with the preamble of the communique (PDF)of the summit in September 2010: The European Council discussed how to give new momentum to the Union's external relations, taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by the Lisbon Treaty. It agreed on the need for Europe to promote its interests and values more assertively and in a spirit of reciprocity and mutual benefit. “Reciprocity”…
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    Democracy in America

  • Did Eduardo Saverin do anything wrong?

    W.W. | IOWA CITY
    15 May 2012 | 12:59 pm
    [inline|iid=16908]ACCORDING to the internet's hilarious headline writers, Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, dis-"likes" America's tax rules and has "un-friended" the land of the free in order to dodge a potentially monumental tax bill after Facebook goes public. Mr Saverin is Brazilian by birth, but has been an American citizen since 1998. Last fall, he filed the papers to renounce his American citizenship. Considering how well Mr Saverin has done here, is this jake? Farhad Manjoo thinks that not only is Mr Saverin's extreme self-deportation unfair, "It’s ungrateful and…

  • The informed majority

    R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC
    15 May 2012 | 8:32 am
    [inline|iid=16869]IN MOST opinion polls, Americans appear reluctant to cut defence spending. Of course, in most opinion polls Americans appear reluctant to cut everything apart from foreign aid. Despite all of the hand-wringing over the federal budget, the truth is most people don't have a firm grasp of how their money is spent. So the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), in collaboration with the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), tried to educate a group of Americans on one aspect of the budget. Last month they showed a representative sample of Americans the…

  • Julia's world

    W.W. | IOWA CITY
    14 May 2012 | 3:02 pm
    [inline|iid=16890]IT'S a testament to the power of internet remix culture that I saw at least three parodies of "The Life of Julia", an online slideshow from Barack Obama's campaign, before I glimpsed the original. In the official version, we are shown Julia advancing through the stations of life, from girlhood to retirement, and told at each stage just how well she fares under Mr Obama's policies compared to Mr Romney's.Looking at the real deal for the first time just now, and attempting to put out of mind the spoofs and criticisms I've already absorbed, my first impression is that there is…

  • An unnecessary speech

    E.G. | AUSTIN
    14 May 2012 | 9:20 am
    [inline|iid=16882]THOSE who complain that Mitt Romney's privilege has left him insensitive to the workaday problems of the common man fail to consider that the man has apparently struggled for his whole life with the curse of awful timing. There he was Saturday, just days after Barack Obama was garlanded with praise for his surprise endorsement of gay marriage, giving a commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That must have been about the last place a candidate would want to turn up if he was hoping to gently waffle about his views on social issues,…

  • The arc of the universe and its politics

    W.W. | IOWA CITY
    10 May 2012 | 4:15 pm
    THIS may get my blogger license yanked, but I haven't the faintest clue whether Barack Obama's endorsement of Dick Cheney's 2004 position on same-sex marriage hurts or helps his re-election prospects, or hurts or helps the fight for marriage equality. For all I know, Mr Obama has summoned the wrath of Jehovah and a horde of locusts is descending upon the South Lawn even as we speak. What I do know for certain is that Mr Obama's announcement made me a little cranky, and in much the same way it made Radley Balko cranky:Obama’s statement doesn’t change a single policy. He has basically…
 
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    Free exchange

  • Zap

    15 May 2012 | 11:12 am
    POSTED without comment:

  • The no-growth zone

    15 May 2012 | 11:06 am
    IT IS another grim day for European markets. Break-up worries continue to grow. You can read Charlemagne on yesterday's disappointing euro-group meeting. The news has gotten worse today, as Greece's political parties seem to have failed to form a government, meaning that new elections will be held in June. Meanwhile, the tragedy of the performance of the real euro-zone economy was made clear in new GDP figures released today. The euro area managed no growth in the first quarter of 2012. That actually represented a slight improvement from a tumultuous fourth quarter in which the economy…

  • Boom ahead?

    15 May 2012 | 10:04 am
    IT'S been a long time coming, but America's housing market finally seems to be normalising. Construction has been so low since the beginning of the bust that many markets are experiencing increasingly tight conditions. That's supporting rent increases, and that, in turn, is putting a floor under home values and leading to an uptick in construction. The question is: how large an uptick?Builder confidence has risen sharply in recent months and, as Calculated Risk points out, that typically presages a surge in construction:A construction-oriented phase of recovery would be most welcome now given…

  • Link exchange

    14 May 2012 | 2:35 pm
    TODAY'S recommended economics writing:• The great moderation, forecast uncertainty, and the great recession (Liberty Street)• Some thoughts on institutional capacity in South-Eastern Europe (Fistful of Euros)• Global value chains, trade, jobs, and environment (Vox)• Labor force nonparticipants: So what are they doing? (macroblog)

  • Tightening (try overshooting for once, cont.)

    14 May 2012 | 10:08 am
    SELFISHLY, my main worry about the ongoing euro-zone crisis is that it might derail America's kinda-sorta strengthening recovery. Trade, once again, is not the main concern. Previously, financial contagion seemed a big problem, but the European Central Bank has helped insulate America against that, for now at least.Instead, the problem appears to be that euro crisis is generating a passive tightening of monetary policy. This shows up most clearly in the form of falling inflation expectations and a rising dollar. We can also read something about growth expectations in the yields on long-term…
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    Lexington's notebook

  • Peter David

    11 May 2012 | 4:51 pm
    WE ARE very sorry to announce that Peter David, our Washington bureau chief, Lexington columnist and former foreign editor, died in a car accident on Thursday night. He had worked at The Economist since 1984 and was a much-loved colleague and friend. We will pay fuller tribute to him in next week’s issue.

  • Even worse

    26 Apr 2012 | 9:05 am
    THE title and subtitle seem to say it all: "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism" (Basic Books). But the anger that courses through this latest analysis of America's broken politics comes as a surprise. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings are highly respected analysts. Their earlier book on Congress ("The Broken Branch") became something of a classic. Now they seem to be close to despair. Coming from them, the claim that the American system is even worse than it looks…

  • To complement or amplify? That's the question

    19 Apr 2012 | 1:42 pm
    IT IS probably folly, but someone at The Economist had to do it. In my print column this week I join the speculation about Mitt Romney's choice of a running mate. And for what it's worth, I'm betting (metaphorically) on Portman:At a minimum a potential vice-president needs to look capable of taking over as president. This was the test Sarah Palin is deemed to have failed, despite all the knowledge of Russia she gleaned by being able to see it from Alaska. Beyond that, nothing is clear. Should a nominee pick a running-mate to appeal to the sort of voters he finds it hard to reach himself? In…

  • Bring back the good old wars?

    18 Apr 2012 | 1:04 pm
    THE photographs of American soldiers showing off the dismembered body parts of their enemies in Afghanistan are shocking. Andrew Sullivan seems to believe that this is "what empire does":At what point will we recognize that inserting ourselves into places like Afghanistan and Iraq will change us, has changed us, and will change us. Mercifully, this latest inhuman excrescence is not government policy, as at Abu Ghraib. But it exposes even more deeply the inherent failure and moral corruption of occupying Afghanistan and the need to withdraw sooner rather than later.I happen not to think that…

  • Let her dance

    16 Apr 2012 | 7:45 am
    THIS really is unbelievably silly. Hillary Clinton had a dance at a nightclub at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia. Britain's Daily Telegraph gets on its high horse and thinks this is an "embarrassment".The overwhelmingly liberal US media is treating the story as a bit of fun, with the usually austere Mrs Clinton seen as letting her hair down. But I suspect that a lot of US taxpayers will see it differently – as a senior government official having a jolly time on an official overseas junket at taxpayers’ expense. And this was hardly a display of good judgment at a time when nearly 13…
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    The Economist: Letters

  • Letters: On oil trading, manufacturing, American politics, beer consumption, independence, austerity

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comOil trading SIR – It is deeply concerning that you would publish a report that is so lacking foundation and filled with innuendo. The “inference and speculation” you admitted (“Riddles, mysteries and enigmas”, May 5th) are hardly a sound basis for impugning the integrity of a price-assessment process that has well served the oil markets for over 20 years.You have got it wrong. There was no abnormal trading activity within Platts’ Urals Market-on-Close (MOC) price-assessment process, and there is no evidence of such. The…

  • Letters: On North Korea, economics, France, Britain, alternative medicine, publishing, Kenya, abbreviations, airports, budgets, Robert Burns, Buffalo Bill, Stevie Wonder

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.comPriorities in North Korea SIR – It is true that North Korea commits appalling human-rights abuses, which are all too often underplayed in the “Team America”-style parodies of the regime. And you are right to call upon China and humanitarian organisations to help victims of its gulag system to escape (“Never again?”, April 21st). However, I think you crucially overestimate the impact that the United States and South Korea can have on the internal workings of what is probably the most brutal regime on the planet.As such, the focus…

  • Letters: On Scotland, Germany, taxation

    26 Apr 2012 | 10:02 am
    Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.comScotland’s economy SIR – I was interested to see that despite the map on your front cover mocking Scotland’s economic abilities (April 14th) your accompanying article recognised that Scotland performs better than any area of Britain other than the south-east (“The Scottish play”, April 14th). In stark contrast to what is suggested by your cover, Scotland is proving to be the most attractive part of the country for business, outperforming London in the most recent survey by Ernst & Young of inward investment. Edinburgh and…

  • Letters: On Peru, schooling, China, democracy, American Indians, bees, hockey, panflation, words, baseball

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.comEducation in Peru SIR – You focused on the negative part of the Inter-American Development Bank’s report on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project in Peru, and pronounced it a failure (“Error message”, April 7th). OLPC has provided laptops to 2.5m children in 40 countries and we have seen a significant improvement in learning. In Peru the objectives and the operating conditions are particularly challenging.The government deliberately established social inclusion as a priority (for which it should be lauded). It directed the…

  • Letters: On Cuba, Vietnam, the Supreme Court, Syria, copyright, passwords, Hong Kong, Orwellian words, foreign policy

    12 Apr 2012 | 10:07 am
    Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.comCuba still far from paradise SIR – Regarding your special report on Cuba (March 24th), American policy towards the country has been hijacked by a small band of politicos and their wealthy patrons in Florida. The pathetic, five-decade-old American embargo on Cuba has failed and should be lifted, but not only for the reasons you mentioned. Cuba’s substantial oil and gas resources in the deeper waters of the Straits of Florida are of paramount importance, and we need to co-operate if big disasters are to be avoided.Beyond this, those…
 
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    The Economist: Leaders

  • Earth-observation satellites: Something to watch over us

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ON APRIL 8th Envisat, Europe’s largest Earth-observing satellite, unexpectedly stopped talking to its users on the Earth below. Since then those users have been frantically trying to re-establish contact. They rely on Envisat’s radars and other sensors for a wide range of measurements, from the temperature of the oceans to the chemistry of the stratosphere. Scientists have used it to gauge ocean conditions for shipping and to investigate earthquakes; its data have been the basis of thousands of scientific papers.Envisat had, unlike much of Europe, forgone early retirement: designed for…

  • India and Pakistan: Clever steps at the border

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    A STUPENDOUS display of military nonsense erupts each sunset at the Wagah crossing between India and Pakistan. Thousands cheer rival guards in silly hats who strut with mock aggression, lower their flags and slam shut the border gates. The display is choreographed fun. But underlying it are deeper mutual antagonisms generated by a history of border wars, terrorism and the original sin in 1947 of partition itself. Nowhere are the costs of these antagonisms so apparent as in the pathetic levels of trade between these two populous nations.For years direct exchange was all but blocked. Apart from…

  • Israel and Palestine: An opportunity for an opportunist

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ISRAELIS have enjoyed one of their longest spells of relative peace since their army hammered the Gaza Strip more than three years ago. Their hawkish leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, who emerged shortly afterwards as prime minister for the second time, has been riding high. Israel’s economy, though not without the odd tremor, has boomed in comparison with those of its floundering Arab neighbours, where governments have been driven to distraction or overthrown amid the turbulence of the Arab spring. Meanwhile the Palestinians’ quest for a state of their own has been as futile as ever, as the…

  • The Cameron government: Crisis? What crisis?

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    TWO years ago this week David Cameron and Nick Clegg launched their coalition government in a sun-dappled Downing Street garden, at a joint press conference so filled with smiles, jokes and shared glances that it was compared to a gay wedding. On May 8th Britain’s Conservative prime minister and his Liberal Democrat deputy renewed their coalition vows in a tractor factory. There were few jokes. The work of government was “hard”, Mr Cameron told stony-faced workers.Two-thirds of voters now disapprove of Mr Cameron’s performance and three-quarters disdain Mr Clegg’s. In local…

  • The euro crisis: Europe’s Achilles heel

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE respite in the euro crisis lasted a few short months. Now, despite a €130 billion ($169 billion) second bail-out for Greece, a fiscal compact agreed on by the euro-zone leaders in December, and €1 trillion of cheap long-term loans from the European Central Bank, the night terrors are back. How dispiriting that Europe is still so ill-prepared for the ordeal to come.Time is short. In France voters have given their new president, François Hollande, a mandate to alter the “austere” course set by his ousted predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and…
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    The Economist: Special report

  • Collaborative manufacturing: All together now

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    NEW YORK CITY was once the capital of manufacturing in America, with more than 1m people working in the sector in 1950. Today that number has shrunk to a mere 80,000, and they are employed largely by specialist producers in areas such as furnishing, food processing and the cluster that makes up Manhattan’s vibrant garment district. Yet nourished by the city’s entrepreneurial spirit, a new industry is emerging. It might be called social manufacturing.One of the firms involved is Quirky, which is as trendy as its name suggests. Its new design studio in a converted warehouse near the Hudson…

  • A third industrial revolution

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs, stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of the worker using his mind and hands to create the world we live in. That is a familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable ways that will transform the future of manufacturing.One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows machines for making prototypes of…

  • Layer by layer

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    USING A 3D PRINTER is like printing a letter; hit the print button on a computer screen and a digital file is sent to, say, an inkjet printer which deposits a layer of ink on the surface of a piece of paper to create an image in two dimensions. In 3D printing, however, the software takes a series of digital slices through a computer-aided design and sends descriptions of those slices to the 3D printer, which adds successive thin layers until a solid object emerges. The big difference is that the “ink” a 3D printer uses is a material.The layers can come together in a variety of ways. Some…

  • Factories and jobs: Back to making stuff

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    FOR OVER 100 YEARS America was the world’s leading manufacturer, but now it is neck-and-neck with China (see chart 1). In the decade to 2010 the number of manufacturing jobs in America fell by about a third. The rise of outsourcing and offshoring and the growth of sophisticated supply chains has enabled companies the world over to use China, India and other lower-wage countries as workshops. Prompted by the global financial crisis, some Western policymakers now reckon it is about time their countries returned to making stuff in order to create jobs and prevent more manufacturing skills from…

  • Comparative advantage: The boomerang effect

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    THIRTY YEARS AGO Shenzhen was little more than a village, abutting the border of Hong Kong’s New Territories. When China’s first Special Economic Zone was established in the early 1980s, workshops started to grow and glistening skyscrapers began to rise up. Its population is now around 12m, including perhaps 6m migrant workers. They often live in dormitories close to the factories that have helped make this city one of the richest in China.One of those factories is known as Foxconn City. Owned by Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwanese company, it is among the largest manufacturing…
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    The Economist: Britain

  • Two years of the coalition: I never promised you a rose garden

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    TWO years ago Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s set out to prune the state. Defying the long trend in which power was centralised in Westminster, it sought to push it out to cities, towns, schools and doctors. It moved to shake up public services by encouraging firms and non-profit groups to compete for tasks generally done by the state. Schools, local government, policing, health, planning, welfare, justice—almost every arm of the state was to be transformed. All this as the government cut spending more deeply than any since the second world war.The coalition…

  • Libel reform: Tourists go home

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ABUSE of free speech by the powerful arouses public ire—whether the culprits are newspaper proprietors bullying politicians or thin-skinned tycoons silencing their critics with libel writs. The government moved on one front on May 9th, announcing libel-law reform in the Queen’s Speech. That should make cases in England (Scotland has its own legal system) cheaper, simpler and fairer—at least by the dire standards of current arrangements. If the new law starts in the House of Lords it would reach the Commons in the autumn—just in time to include any legal changes arising from Lord…

  • Guernsey and Jersey: The ebbing tide

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE Channel Islands have stood ready to defend themselves against invasion for 800 years. Jersey and Guernsey, the two largest, both boast imposing medieval castles in their quaint, yacht-filled harbours. But these days the islands and their 163,000 inhabitants are being assailed from many directions.Remnants of the ancient duchy of Normandy, Guernsey and Jersey are dependencies of the British crown but make their own laws. Growing in parallel with the City of London, they came to specialise in housing the offshore wealth of Europe’s rich (especially Britain’s non-domiciles) attracting…

  • The labour market: Idle hands

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    So why is he dancing? BRITAIN was hit harder than most rich countries by the global financial crisis, and its recovery from the crash has been one of the least convincing. Indeed, GDP fell for a second successive quarter at the start of 2012, marking a “double-dip” recession. The wonder is that unemployment is not higher. Among biggish rich countries, only Germany can boast that its jobless rate is lower than before the crisis. But Britain’s is little worse than the average OECD country. The latest figures put unemployment at 8.3%, on a par with America’s perkier economy and well…

  • Wonga: Loan ranger

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    In the money IN LONDON’S jumble of young technology companies with funny names, none stands out quite like Wonga. That is not only because the firm sponsors Blackpool, a football team that may soon return to the Premier League, and Heart of Midlothian, a leading Scottish club. Wonga lends money, online, fast and for short periods. Since 2007 it has made 4m loans worth £1 billion ($1.6 billion) to individuals wanting cash in a hurry—and earned a heap of criticism from campaigners against pricey debt. On May 7th Wonga said that it wanted to lend to small businesses too. It also plans to…
 
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    The Economist: Europe

  • Italy’s local elections: Battered all over

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ITALIANS are exasperated. They are cross with politicians, parties, austerity, technocrats who seem out of touch and with a new tax on property that is all but incomprehensible. So when voters in 1,000 municipalities were given the chance to show their discontent on May 6th-7th, they grabbed it.Shaking the political establishment, the clearest winners were protest parties, above all the Movimento 5 Stelle (5-Star Movement), founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian, satirist and tireless blogger. Italians also showed their irritation by staying at home: the turnout was seven points down on…

  • Serbia’s elections: Third-party success

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Dacic, a man who would be prime minister ON THE national stage there was one clear winner in Serbia’s many elections on May 6th. Ivica Dacic, the interior minister in the current government, crowed that, although he did not know who would become the next president, he knew who would be prime minister. Mr Dacic, who was a spokesman for Slobodan Milosevic during the 1990s, is a politician who has resurrected himself.Although voters have made Mr Dacic quite likely to become prime minister, nothing is certain. Serbia held simultaneous local, parliamentary and presidential elections. In the…

  • Vladimir Putin: Back in the Kremlin

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ON MAY 7th, the day of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a third term as Russian president, the centre of Moscow was marked by a sense of overwhelming emptiness. The police had cleared the streets of people—supporters and protesters alike—allowing Mr Putin’s motorcade to glide eerily across the capital and through the gates of the Kremlin.Only the day before, the city had looked very different. An anti-Putin march of as many as 20,000 people turned chaotic and violent. The turnout was surprising; a smaller crowd was expected, since protesters had lost momentum after March’s…

  • Charlemagne: Ode to growth

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    AS CANDIDATE, François Hollande found the doors of Europe’s chancelleries shut in his face. He visited London, but David Cameron refused to meet him. Angela Merkel would not see him in Berlin, and openly supported his opponent. Italy’s Mario Monti did not find time in his diary. How foolish they all seem. And how pleasing for President-elect Hollande that so many now sing to his tune on the need for economic growth.The German chancellor has invited the new French president to Berlin as soon as possible. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, has summoned European Union…

  • Spain’s woes: Those sinking feelings

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    A madrileño’s lament THE sea of troubles just keeps on coming. GDP shrank in the first quarter of 2012, pushing Spain formally into recession for the second time in two years. Another 366,000 people have lost their jobs, bringing the total unemployed to 5.6m, the highest on record. Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency, has downgraded Spain and 11 of its banks. The Madrid stock exchange is back down to 2003 levels as investors pull out. And José Manuel García-Margallo, the foreign minister, has said that the European Union risks becoming like the Titanic, with most classes of…
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    The Economist: United States

  • Florida’s governor: Not just business as usual

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Not so easy AMONG the most enduring American political ideas is the notion that government can and should be run like a business. Candidates who have succeeded in the corporate world, the theory goes, can bring their no-nonsense, job-creating wisdom to politics. Rick Scott, who made an enormous amount of money running hospitals and as a venture capitalist, ran for governor of Florida on just such a boast. In 2010 he spent more than $70m of his own money on his campaign, boasting of his business acumen while deriding his opponents as insiders and “career politicians”.In that strongly…

  • The 9/11 trial: Justice delayed

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants disrupted an arraignment that dragged into the night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court Source: AP Walid bin Attash, a defendant, was tied to a chair and wheeled into the proceedings after he struggled with guards outside the courtroom Source: AP

  • Gay marriage: Punctuated equilibrium

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Obama’s on side SINCE evolution is a gradual process, Barack Obama should perhaps not have felt embarrassed by the fact that, more than three years into his presidency, his exact views on gay marriage were still officially “evolving”. Until this week, that is. In an interview on May 9th Mr Obama finally came to a decision. “At a certain point,” he told ABC, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”Strangely enough, Mr Obama reached his decision within days of Joe…

  • The economy: Unequal pain

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE fates of the American economy and the presidency of Barack Obama are inextricably linked, and both of them hit a bump in April. The economy added 252,000 jobs each month between December and February, but that rate seems to be slowing. Payrolls rose by just 154,000 in March and by only 115,000 in April. Unemployment dropped in April, from 8.2% to 8.1%, but for the wrong reason: an exodus of some 342,000 workers from the labour force, as people gave up looking for work. On May 8th Mr Obama sent Congress a “to-do list”, asking it for tax incentives and mortgage refinancing in the hope…

  • The tea party strikes: Another moderate shown the door

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    UNLIKE colleagues such as Bob Bennett, a senator from Utah unceremoniously dumped by the Republican Party in 2010, Richard Lugar was not caught off guard. He had known for well over a year that he would face a strong, tea-party backed rival in the primary for the Senate seat he has held for the past 35 years. He planned accordingly, voting more conservatively, amassing a $6m war chest and cranking up his get-out-the-vote operation. Nonetheless on May 8th Mr Lugar lost the primary by a whopping 20-point margin to Richard Mourdock, Indiana’s state treasurer and a hero to many…
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    The Economist: The Americas

  • The Andes’ new cash crop: Quinoa selection

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Don’t call it a grain A FEW decades ago Peruvians looked down on quinoa, a fixture of Andean diets for centuries, as food for the poorest of the poor—when it was not being fed to chickens. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, declared 2012 the “year of quinoa” to reverse discrimination against “Indian” foods.Yet this protein-rich chenopod, a member of the spinach family, no longer needs Mr Morales’s help. Thanks to a growing global appetite for organic foods, Bolivia earned $64m from quinoa exports in 2011, 36% more than in 2010. Peru banked $23m, almost twice as…

  • Central America’s gangs: A meeting of the maras

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    An alleged gang member arrested during a raid in Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador. Source: AFP More than 13 members of the "Mara Salvatrucha" gang were arrested on murder charges after a raid in Mejicanos. Source: AFP

  • Argentina’s state-owned firms: So far, not so good

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    JUBILANT Argentines flooded the congressional plaza in Buenos Aires on May 3rd to rattle tambourines, shake banners and fly balloons emblazoned with the logo of YPF, Argentina’s biggest oil company, after Congress had firmly approved its nationalisation. The seizure of YPF was the most drastic step yet in the campaign by Cristina Fernández, the president, to bring “strategic” industries back under government control. The country’s privatisations in the 1990s are now seen as a corrupt fire sale of the state’s crown jewels, and a recent poll found that 62% of Argentines supported the…

  • Education in Quebec: Free lunches, please

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    Sure beats studying IN THE past year students protesting over the cost of university education in business-friendly Chile have captured the world’s attention. In recent months their counterparts in statist Quebec have taken up the cause. Since February about a third of the province’s 450,000 university students have boycotted classes to oppose the tuition-fee increases planned by Jean Charest, the province’s Liberal premier. Some have blocked roads and vandalised government buildings. On April 25th and 26th around 115 people were arrested, following evening protests that turned into…

  • Expropriations in Bolivia: Just when you thought it was safe

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    WHEN Labour Day came and went in Bolivia on May 1st 2011, investors breathed a sigh of relief. Evo Morales, the president, had announced a nationalisation on the holiday every year since he took office in 2006. But last year he chose instead to repeal and symbolically bury a copy of the 1985 decree that began a series of pro-market reforms. Most observers assumed he was done with expropriations.That calm now looks complacent. On May 1st Mr Morales nationalised Transportadora de Electricidad (TDE), Bolivia’s national power-grid company, which was owned by Spain’s Red Eléctrica Española…
 
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    The Economist: Middle East and Africa

  • Rhinos at risk: Poachers prevail

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Keep your chin up, old boy LAST year 438 rhinos, nearly all of them of the white (meaning wide-lipped) species, were known to have been illegally killed in South Africa, their horns often hacked off while they were still alive. That compares with an annual average of just 15 before 2008. This year more than 200 have already been poached, an average of 50 a month, with the year’s final tally expected to top 600. If that trend continues, more rhinos will be being poached than born by 2016, sending the world’s population into a decline that could be irreversible. Around 20,000 of the…

  • Israeli politics: Can Binyamin Netanyahu do a somersault?

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    A POLITICAL shenanigan in the dead of night has changed the face of Israel’s government, could do the same to Israeli society, and might even breathe a bit of life into the long-moribund peace process with the Palestinians (see article).The clandestine climax to a bizarre political drama came in the early hours of May 8th. The morning before, the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu had introduced a bill at cabinet to dissolve parliament and call a general election. After three years of stability, he explained, his ruling coalition was facing turbulence, and he preferred to win a new mandate…

  • Google in Africa: It’s a hit

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ONLINE Africa is developing even faster than the new highways of offline Africa. Undersea cables reaching Africa on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, plus innovative mobile-phone providers, have raised internet speeds and slashed prices. In some African markets you can buy a daily dose of internet on a mobile phone for about the cost of a banana (ie, less than ten American cents). This burgeoning connectivity is making Africa faster, cleverer and more transparent in almost everything that it does.Google can take a lot of the credit. The American search-and-advertising colossus may even be…

  • A revolt over South Africa’s roads: It doesn’t toll for thee

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    The tolls get the blues AT NIGHT the steel scaffolding over the suburban freeways lit up in a striking blue looks rather pretty. But the gantries supporting the new electronic tolls for roads in Gauteng, South Africa’s richest and most populous province, had come to represent the state’s bullying power—and were loathed. Now, in a rare display of people power, the project, due to have begun on April 30th, has been put off indefinitely.The South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) had argued that it needed to impose the tolls, ranging from 58 cents (7.5 American cents) a kilometre for…

  • Algeria’s election: Still waiting for real democracy

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    PARTIES competing in Algeria’s general election on May 10th faced a weary cynicism among voters. So far the Arab spring has passed the country by. Still recovering from the grim legacy of a civil war of the 1990s, in which at least 100,000 Algerians are thought to have died, few people seem tempted to take the revolutionary road. But nor do many see much of a way forward using the ballot box, at least not in the form being presented by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.Since a general election in 1992 was interrupted by the army to prevent a win by the Islamic Salvation Front, Algeria’s…
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    The Economist: Asia

  • Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws: An inconvenient death

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Mourning Uncle SMS HIS only crime, allegedly, was to send four text messages to a government official about Thailand’s royal family. But they were deemed by a court to be offensive to the monarchy, and under the country’s strict and oppressive lèse-majesté laws Ampon Tangnoppakul was sentenced, in November, to 20 years in prison. The whole case, and especially the wildly inappropriate sentence, sparked an outcry, both in Thailand and abroad. Mr Ampon, a hitherto blameless and unrevolutionary 61-year-old, became known as “Uncle SMS”. He denied all charges, claiming that he did not…

  • India-Pakistan relations: Make lolly, not war

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    A DROWSINESS hangs over the vast new customs post at Wagah, India’s main border crossing to Pakistan. A “Jattha shed”, a towering shelter for hundreds of pilgrims, stands empty. The vehicle park has space for 500 lorries, but today just two gaudy Pakistani ones are unloading sacks of chemicals.Built from pink and yellow stone, the 120-acre (50-hectare) site opened a month ago. Tall white letters spell out “trade gate” across a dust-blown arch that marks the exit to Pakistan. The calm, however, is about to end. The chief at Wagah says the warehouses, vehicle-inspection pits and staff…

  • The Philippines: The family plot

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE flag of the United Luisita Workers’ Union flaps in the breeze rolling across Hacienda Luisita, a vast sugar plantation named after a Catalonian marchioness, 100km (60-odd miles) north of the capital, Manila. The flag shows three stalks of cane severed by a tip-heavy machete, known as a bolo. For a decade the union has been trying to sever this land from its powerful owners, who happen to be the family of the Philippines’ president, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino. On April 24th it won a big victory. The Supreme Court upheld a 2011 decision to distribute 4,335 hectares (10,712 acres) of…

  • Banyan: An absence of architecture

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    GOING by past form and the evidence of satellite imagery, North Korea may soon test another nuclear device, its third such experiment. The regime is not yet threatening to do so in so many words. But on May 6th it blustered that it would “persistently safeguard the sovereignty of our nation, based on self-defensive nuclear deterrent”. It is some consolation that the previous tests have been judged at best partial successes, and that North Korea’s efforts to test rockets that might carry bombs across continents have fizzled. Nevertheless, that such a volatile, bellicose and unstable…

  • Australian politics: Another fine mess

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    FACING a fight for re-election next year, Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, was banking on a budget surplus to help rescue her Labor government’s declining political fortunes. When Wayne Swan, the treasurer (pictured, above, with Ms Gillard), announced the budget on May 8th, he seemed to have fulfilled her hopes. Declaring that the “surplus years are here”, he said the current financial year’s deficit of A$44 billion ($44.8 billion) would become a A$1.5 billion surplus in 2012-13, the first since Labor took power five years ago. He projected the surplus would be five times…
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    The Economist: International

  • Sunni-Shia strife: The sword and the word

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    IT SEEMED historic. Muslim scholars, 170 in number and representing nine schools of legal thought (including four main Sunni ones and two Shia), gathered in Amman and declared that, whatever their differences, they accepted the others’ authority over their respective flocks. Implicitly, at least, they were renouncing the idea that their counterparts were heretics. Some called that meeting in Jordan in 2005 the biggest convergence since 969, when a Shia dynasty took over Egypt.Many of the globe-trotting greybeards who met there, and at a similar gathering in Qatar in 2007, remain actively…

  • International terrorism: AQAP tries again

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    INFILTRATING an al-Qaeda affiliate is a huge feat. The CIA and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency have won many plaudits since news emerged on May 8th of how they had foiled a plot to blow up an aircraft flying to America. A double-agent posing as a would-be suicide-bomber penetrated the terrorist group’s Yemen-based franchise, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In 2010 the Saudi spy agency tipped off its Western counterparts about another AQAP plot: to use bombs disguised as printer cartridges to blow up Chicago-bound cargo planes.The nameless Saudi agent’s achievement in…

  • Gunvor’s roots: From Petrograd to petrodollars

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    Timchenko, patriot and petrocrat GUNVOR was created in 1997 by Gennady Timchenko, whose early career had been in the Soviet oil trade in what is now St Petersburg, and Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Swedish oil trader who had worked at BP. It has expanded into various businesses, including oil terminals and coal. Its revenues have grown from $5 billion in 2004 to an expected $80 billion in 2011—even as its share of Russian seaborne exports has fallen. Gunvor group does not report its profits.Gunvor’s break came in 2004. That year the Kremlin broke up Yukos, then Russia’s largest producer, over a…

  • Gunvor: Riddles, mysteries and enigmas

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    FEW people outside Russia have ever heard of Gunvor—and Gunvor would probably prefer it that way. It is the world’s fourth-biggest oil trader, and at its peak handled roughly a third of Russia’s seaborne exports of crude oil. We suspect that Gunvor has been driving down the price of Russian oil. An investigation by The Economist into Gunvor’s trading in Urals crude, a benchmark blend in north-west Europe, suggests that such a strategy could have helped the firm buy oil in Russia cheaply and, in theory, earn inflated profits when it sold the same oil on the international market at full…

  • Digital archiving: History flushed

    26 Apr 2012 | 10:02 am
    IN 1086 William the Conqueror completed a comprehensive survey of England and Wales. “The Domesday Book”, as it came to be called, contained details of 13,418 places and 112 boroughs—and is still available for public inspection at the National Archives in London. Not so the original version of a new survey that was commissioned for the 900th anniversary of “The Domesday Book”. It was recorded on special 12-inch laser discs. Their format is now obsolete.The digital era brought with it the promise of indefinite memory. Increased computing power and disk space combined with decreasing…
 
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    The Economist: Business

  • Japan’s trading houses: Resourceful and energetic

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE fortunes of Japan’s large trading houses have tended to fluctuate with those of the country as a whole, from its opening-up in the 19th century, through the disaster of war in the 1940s, to the highs and lows of the bubble era. But lately the traders have decoupled. While much of Japan is stagnant, the likes of Mitsubishi and Mitsui have become prime movers in the world’s natural-resources boom.This is surprising. In an age of land-grabbing state capitalism, the sogo shosha, as they are collectively known, could easily have been trampled underfoot by Chinese energy giants or…

  • Drugmakers and antibiotics: The path of least resistance

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    A GROWING worry in medicine is bugs’ increasing resistance to antibiotics. At AstraZeneca’s research centre near Boston, scientists toil to find new weapons. Machines screen thousands of drugs each year, robotic arms nimbly handling plates of compounds to test their effect on bacteria. But progress is slow. “It is not our hottest area in terms of commercial return,” admits Martin Mackay, AstraZeneca’s research and development chief.Help is on the way. On May 8th the European Commission and Europe’s pharmaceutical association gave details of a plan to boost antibiotics research by…

  • Valuing Facebook: Zuckerberg’s rocket, ready for lift-off

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    OUTSIDE Facebook’s vast new headquarters in Silicon Valley is a huge sign with an image of a hand on it giving a thumbs-up sign. A tiny digital version of the same hand sits on millions of websites and invites Facebook’s 900m or so users to click on it to share content they have found with their pals. Now Facebook is hoping to get another big thumbs-up when it stages its eagerly awaited initial public offering (IPO) of 12% of its equity on America’s NASDAQ stockmarket on May 18th. Assuming all goes according to plan, the flotation will be the largest yet undertaken by an internet…

  • An intellectual-property exchange: Marketplace of ideas

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    THE technology industry is at war over intellectual property. On May 7th the first round of a three-part fight between Oracle and Google over patent and copyright claims relating to the Java programming language ended in a decision that denied outright victory to either firm. Apple, Samsung and others are fighting over smartphone patents. Facebook and Yahoo! are at loggerheads over internet patents. Accusations abound that innovation is taking a back seat to litigation. Only the lawyers are smiling.All of which makes this a good time to launch a new approach to trading intellectual property,…

  • Mobile gaming in Japan: Gacha? Gotcha!

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    NOT again. Just when another tousle-haired Japanese entrepreneur hoped it was safe to make a billion or two, along come the forces of law and order threatening to throw the rule book at him: in this case, the Act Against Unjustified Premiums and Misleading Representations. That, at least, is how some people viewed news this week that the Consumer Affairs Agency was investigating a feature, popular on Japan’s ubiquitous mobile-phone games, called a “complete gacha”, in which players collect sets of randomly generated tokens to swap for in-game rewards. Such games have made fortunes for…
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    The Economist: Finance and economics

  • Systemic risk: Counterparty controversy

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    IT HAS taken almost two years, but the debate over the restructuring of American finance has at last reached the issue at the heart of the industry’s reregulation: systemic risk. The idea is simple, the execution controversial. Policymakers want to help prevent the ailments of a single institution from infecting the system as a whole by limiting the exposures that firms have to any one counterparty. The implementation, typically of the mind-numbing Dodd-Frank act, is horribly complex.The core provision on “single counter-party exposure limits” comprises only 81 words among the hundreds…

  • Buttonwood: Making no cents

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    FAREWELL to the Canadian penny. The last one-cent coin, in circulation ever since Canada developed its own currency in 1858, was minted on May 4th. The coin had become a nuisance, weighing down consumers’ wallets and costing more to produce than it was worth.The penny is just the latest in a series of coins to disappear after centuries of use. The British farthing was worth just a quarter of an old penny, or one-960th of a pound, but it still lasted almost 700 years before it disappeared from circulation in 1960. Remarkably enough, half-farthings were also issued in the 19th century, and…

  • The London Metal Exchange: Metal cashing

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Ring of ire THE sight of a pack of adults shouting at each other is rarely edifying. Unless, that is, the set-to is in the “ring” of the London Metal Exchange (LME), whose old-fashioned system of open-outcry trading does much to set global prices for industrial metals and which is now itself the subject of a bidding battle. Only Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing had publicly said that it would submit an offer for the world’s leading metals exchange by this week’s deadline of May 7th, but CME Group, InterContinental Exchange and NYSE Euronext are also widely reported to be in the…

  • Bankers’ pay: Furiouser and furiouser

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    SIMMERING anger over bankers’ pay was fuelled afresh on May 9th when a British court ruled that Commerzbank, a serially bailed-out German bank, had to pay bonuses promised to some of its investment bankers in London even though it subsequently posted colossal losses and collapsed into the arms of the state. The court ruled, reasonably enough, that a promise made was one that really ought to be kept. The answer of some policymakers is to restrict what can be pledged in the first place. On May 14th a committee in the European Parliament is due to vote on a proposal to limit bankers’ annual…

  • Noise pollution: Shhhh!

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    QUIET carriages on trains are a nice idea: travellers voluntarily switch phones to silent, turn stereos off and keep chatter to a minimum. In reality, there is usually at least one inane babbler to break the silence.A couple of problems prevent peaceful trips. First, there is a sorting problem: some passengers end up in the quiet carriage by accident and are not aware of the rules. Second, there is a commitment problem: noise is sometimes made by travellers who choose the quiet carriage but find an important call hard to ignore.The train operators are trying to find answers. Trains in…
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    The Economist: Science and technology

  • Carbon capture and storage: A shiny new pipe dream

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    AS Helene Boksle, one of Norway’s favourite singers, hit the high notes at the Mongstad oil refinery on May 7th, the wall behind her slid open. It revealed, to the prime minister and other dignitaries present, an enormous tangle of shiny metal pipes. These are part of the world’s largest and newest experimental facility for capturing carbon dioxide.Such capture is the first part of a three-stage process known as carbon capture and storage (CCS) that many people hope will help deal with the problem of man-made climate change. The other two are piping the captured gas towards a place…

  • Optoelectronics: Graphene shows its colours

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    GRAPHENE, a form of carbon that comes in sheets a single atom thick, has gained a reputation as a wonder material. It is the best conductor yet discovered of heat at room temperature and is 40 times stronger than steel. It is also a semiconductor whose electrical conductivity is 1,000 times better than silicon’s. This means it could be used to make devices far more sensitive than is possible now, leading some to predict that it will one day become the material of choice for computer chips. There was little surprise, therefore, when Andre Geim (pictured above) and Konstantin Novoselov, two…

  • Modern alchemy: Turning a line

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    ONE of the first inklings that chemistry has an underlying pattern was the discovery, early in the 19th century, of lithium, sodium and potassium—known collectively as the alkali metals. Though different from each other they have strangely similar properties. This was one of the observations that led a German chemist called Johann Döbereiner to wonder if all chemical elements came in families.It took decades to tease out the truth of Döbereiner’s conjecture, and thus to construct the periodic table—in which the alkali metals form the first column. And it took decades more to explain…

  • Private space flight: Keep on truckin’

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    SIX years ago, when NASA, America’s space agency, announced it wanted the private sector to take over responsibility for ferrying cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), many scoffed that it was a fantasy. But yesterday’s fantasy has become today’s reality, and private enterprise is busy putting together rocket-propelled delivery vans to do just that—and, eventually, to take astronauts as well. One of the leading firms in the field, SpaceX, has already notched up a string of successful flights (and a few failures, too) with its Falcon rockets, pictured above. This month it…

  • Salt-tolerant rice: Nuclear-powered crops

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    Irradiated food THOSE who turn their noses up at “genetically modified” food seldom seem to consider that all crops are genetically modified. The difference between a wild plant and one that serves some human end is a lot of selective breeding—the picking and combining over the years of mutations that result in bigger seeds, tastier fruit or whatever else is required.Nor, these days, are those mutations there by accident. They are, rather, deliberately induced, usually by exposing seeds to radiation. And that is exactly what Tomoko Abe and her colleagues at the Riken Nishina Centre for…
 
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    The Economist: Books and arts

  • The sea: An ocean of troubles

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. By Callum Roberts. Viking; 390 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIN 1998 a rise in sea temperatures caused by El Niño, a periodic eastward surge of warm Pacific water, caused a mass bleaching of the world’s coral reefs, the permanent or temporary home of perhaps a quarter of all marine species. Up to 90% of the Indian Ocean’s technicoloured reefs turned to skeletal wastes, largely devoid of life. Had this happened to rainforests—coral’s terrestrial equivalent—a sea-change in attitudes to the environment…

  • The DSK scandal: For shame

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance and DSK. By Edward Epstein. Melville House e-book; 50 pages; $4.99. Buy from Amazon.com DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn. By John Solomon. Thomas Dunne Books; 288 pages; $25.99. St Martin’s Press; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukA YEAR ago he was boss of the IMF, a hero of the euro crisis and favourite to be the Socialist candidate for the French presidency—won on May 6th by François Hollande. But then came the notorious incident in the Sofitel in New York on May 14th 2011, after which Dominique Strauss-Kahn was…

  • Aviation in China: Soaring ambition

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    China Airborne. By James Fallows. Pantheon; 268 pages; $25.95. Buy from Amazon.comOVER the next few years, China plans to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars building the aerospace industries of the future. The country hosts more than two-thirds of the airports now under construction around the world. It will be the biggest growth market for Boeing and Airbus, though China is investing heavily in developing home-grown rivals in the hope of dominating the aviation markets of the 21st century.The sheer scale and audacity of China’s ambitions and investments in this field are eye-opening.

  • New American fiction: Narrow roads to the far north

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    Canada. By Richard Ford. Ecco; 432 pages; $27.99. To be published in Britain in June by Bloomsbury; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIN 1986 Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter”, narrated by Frank Bascombe, at once a thoroughly compelling and thoroughly ordinary protagonist. As the title suggests, he is a sportswriter, quietly sleepwalking through his suburban life in the wake of his oldest son’s death. Frank is emotionally ruined but does not realise it, except in post-facto fits and starts. This is life’s common tragedy: understanding always comes late, if it comes at…

  • Danza Contemporánea de Cuba: More than mambo

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    An invigorating import OUT of context, the boxing glove looks peculiar. It lengthens the arm, yet brings it to an abrupt stump. It conveys a threat, but otherwise muffles the expressive powers of the hand. Boxing gloves hardly seem suited to the nuanced art of modern dance. So it is remarkable that “Sombrisa”, choreographed by Itzik Galili for the Danza Contemporánea de Cuba (DCC), works so beautifully. Clad in boxing gloves, 18 male and female dancers move with a fluidity that defies the staccato feint and thrust of the sport. They flow with a sexual charge against the percussive music…
 
 
 
 
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    The Economist: Obituary

  • Amarillo Slim

    10 May 2012 | 10:06 am
    IF YOU found yourself sitting at the poker table opposite Amarillo Slim, you were wisest not to say one word. He might try to get you talking, of course. How are you and how’ve you been, any sort of yakking. Best to keep quiet. He could get a tell from you just by watching the sweat on your upper lip. In fact he could know your whole hand by looking at the pulse in your cheek. If you tried to read him back, you’d find those cool hard eyes hidden in the shadow of his big old Stetson hat. He had a rattlesnake head on the band of it—killed by himself, so he said—and he might tell you…

  • Sydney Wignall

    3 May 2012 | 10:00 am
    FEW things annoyed Sydney Wignall more than the thought that the world’s least accessible places were divided up among the great powers. To go where he wanted among the wilds and snows—to cross that pass undetected, to find lakes unmarked on charts, to see what lay on the other side of the hill—was a fever in him. He longed “to make indelible marks on history, or preferably on the blank areas of maps”. Among the various motives that led him to launch the first Welsh Himalayan Expedition, trundling out of Llandudno in 1955 in two Standard Vanguard estate cars painted brightly in the…

  • Chuck Colson

    26 Apr 2012 | 10:02 am
    THOSE who knew Chuck Colson said he never changed much, to look at, from the age of 18 to the age of 80. The same owlish horn-rimmed glasses; the same liking for blazers and bow ties; and that same quizzical, half-laughing, wide-eyed look, as if another quip was coming.He was a prankster as a boy, letting off stink bombs in cinemas and putting snowballs in hats. In young manhood, campaigning for politicians in Boston, he learned the art of “planting misleading stories…voting tombstones, and spying out the opposition in every possible way”. No surprise then that when he joined Richard…

  • Murray Lender

    19 Apr 2012 | 10:09 am
    WHEN Murray Lender talked about bagels, as he did all the time, he could wax philosophical. A bagel, he said, was a paradox. Shiny-brown and crispy on the outside; chewy and soft on the inside. Boiled, then baked. The personality was complex, since that hole-in-the-roll was never the same shape twice. But the sheer deliciousness was simple. He liked his warmed, though on TV ads he would demolish them toasted, the butter just melting, with an irresistible crunching sound. Close your eyes, munch a Lender’s bagel, and you were as near as you could get to heaven without seeing the Pearly…

  • Fang Lizhi

    12 Apr 2012 | 10:07 am
    IN MID-DECEMBER 1986 the atmosphere crackled with excitement on university campuses in the central Chinese city of Hefei. Students gathered at campus notice- boards to read hand-written posters calling for freedom and democracy. Some of them invoked the rallying cries of America’s political heroes: “Give me liberty or give me death,” read one.Fang Lizhi was the man who had encouraged the students to speak out: the first and, so far, only intellectual in Communist-ruled China whose dissent has spurred the young to challenge party rule. He liked to describe himself as “just a…
 
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