Новости за 29.11.2018

Passengers will be harmed if the two are allowed to merge

The Norwegian could not secure a victory in the classical format, but dominated the rapid-chess tiebreaker

Humphrey, uncaged

PETER HUMPHREY was a British corporate investigator living in Shanghai when he was convicted in 2014 of violating Chinese laws protecting personal data. He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. The verdict was a shock but not a surprise: the previous year, viewers of Chinese state television had watched a video of Mr Humphrey confessing from jail.

At a press conference in London on November 23rd Mr Humphrey, now released and living in Britain, said... Читать дальше...

“OF COURSE NOT, I’m not an idiot,” says Liu Yongli, a chauffeur in Beijing, when asked whether he has ever paid personal income tax. Despite earning well above the tax-free threshold, Mr Liu (not his real name) breezily explains that he has never faced any consequences for tax-dodging. Cavalier views like his may help explain why personal income tax accounted for only 8% of total tax revenue in China last year, compared with an average of 24% in the OECD, a group of rich countries.

“BEFORE JUMPING feet first from the 16th floor, papa said goodbye to the Argentine working class.” With that irresistible sentence Martín Sivak begins “El Salto de papá” (“Papa’s Leap”), a book that has been a bestseller in Argentina since its publication last year. It is both a moving tribute to his father and an oblique but telling examination of Argentina’s lingering, pathological streak of self-destruction.

The road to indoctrination

ON OCTOBER 28TH, the day Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election, Ana Caroline Campagnolo, an “anti-feminist” history teacher who had recently been elected a legislator in the southern state of Santa Catarina, sent out a message on Facebook. “Attention students!” she wrote. “Many doctrinaire teachers will be disconcerted or revolted” by the election of Mr Bolsonaro, a politician of the right. “Film or record all partisan manifestations that ... offend... Читать дальше...

The start of something big?

“WE’RE NOTblocking the traffic, just filtering it,” declares Loup, a 64-year-old former education assistant, who has a hand in each pocket and a silver ring in each ear. In his high-visibility jacket, from which the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) movement gets its name, he and a dozen others are manning a protest at a roundabout outside Evreux, in rural southern Normandy. On the muddy ground, a fire of wooden crates is blazing, and bags of croissants are piled up on a camping table. Читать дальше...

“WE NEED TO fucking fuck them up, fuck…it seems like the president is controlling all this shit,” a Russian commander tells the captain whose ship rammed a Ukrainian military tug-boat in the Kerch Strait while another used live ammunition against a Ukrainian warship. The intercepted conversation, published on YouTube, provides a flavour of what happened between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea on November 25th. A video shot aboard one of the Russian ships provides the images.

Take your pick

IN THE 1950s West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) reassured wary voters that it would deliver “no experiments”. So it is striking to see the party, languishing in opinion polls and tiring after 13 years in government, suddenly revitalised by an almost unprecedented innovation: a leadership election.

Having mustered three serious candidates to replace Angela Merkel as party chairperson, the CDU has become intoxicated with the possibility of change—even... Читать дальше...

GOLDEN HANDSHAKES? Banned. Payment in stock options? Not allowed. Your company has a pension deficit and no binding plan to fix it? No bonus for you. Britain’s bosses were given a preview of life under a Labour government on November 27th when the party published a report laying out options for its executive-pay policy.

WITH HEATHER and woodland running down to basalt cliffs, Ulva is a picture-perfect Hebridean island. Since 1835 the 5,000-acre (20 square kilometre) estate, perched off the Isle of Mull on the west coast of Scotland, has been privately owned. Yet times—and titles—change. In June Ulva was bought by its residents, a result of sweeping land reform by the Scottish government. “For the first time, the people who live on the island will get to decide what happens to it,” declared Rebecca Munro, an islander. Читать дальше...

ON DECEMBER 17TH 2017 the price of bitcoin on CoinMarketCap, a cryptocurrency exchange, neared $20,000. True believers hoped that was just the beginning. One analyst at a Danish investment bank predicted bitcoin could be worth $100,000 by the end of 2018. The year is not yet over. But as The Economist went to press, bitcoin’s price was $4,223, and trending downwards (see chart). Where bitcoin goes, other cryptocurrencies follow. Ether, the second-most popular cryptocurrency, is down from $1,432 in January to $120 today. Читать дальше...

IF THE WORLD is to tackle global warming, vast amounts of money—$3.5trn annually from now until 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, a forecaster—will have to flow into clean-energy research and generation. Capital will have to shift from carbon-intensive industries into clean ones. That means asset managers will have to offer more green investment products, and regulators will have to set standards that enable investors to make green choices.

Whither ’Spoons?

FOR A COUNTRY whose chief cultural export is its pubs—there are some 7,000 Irish pubs worldwide, and 8,403 on the island itself—Ireland makes it surprisingly difficult to open a drinking establishment. In both Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom, but with many of its own laws) and the Republic, the process is slow, pricey and fraught with uncertainty.

Both use a system familiar to anybody who has ever queued to get into a nightclub: one in, one out.... Читать дальше...

IN THE 1970s the junk-bond market was a dark underworld. It was the home of “fallen angels”, the bonds of investment-grade firms that had gone to seed. Most investors were too genteel to hold them. So they traded at hefty discounts to face value. Then Michael Milken, a junk-bond guru, came along with a new gospel. A portfolio of high-yield junk was a better bet than one of supposedly safer bonds. After all, an A-rated bond can only go in one direction—down.

SINCE BRITONS chose to leave the European Union in June 2016, the clichés have piled up almost as thickly as the votes: “no deal is better than a bad deal”; “Brexit means Brexit”. And you might count yourself rich—even by the City of London’s standards—if you had a fiver for every time you had heard a banker say his firm was “hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst”. Four months before Britain is due to quit the EU, financial firms have long ago given up hoping for the best (for most... Читать дальше...

PAUL VOLCKER’S legend is almost as grand and imposing as his physical personage, all six feet and seven inches of it. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter chose him to run the Federal Reserve and tackle America’s high inflation. Mr Volcker acted with grim determination, tightening monetary policy even as the economy sank into deep recession and beleaguered Americans pleaded for relief. Eventually he not only routed inflation, but also won a hard-earned credibility for the Fed that would help successors keep inflation stable. Читать дальше...

Not so bankable

TWICE IN THE past 30 years, housing finance has taken down America’s economy. As interest rates rise and the housing market stutters (see article), regulators are again pondering the risks from the mortgage market—this time from a shift towards non-bank originators.

These firms, which create mortgages and often sell them on to other institutions, exist outside the bank-regulatory framework. They now account for 44% of lending by the top 25 originators, up from 9% in 2009... Читать дальше...

AS THEY PREPARE for Brexit, many of London’s financial firms have begun to move some staff, or operations, to the continent. But financial contracts, notably derivatives, are difficult to uproot. London’s clearing-houses, which ensure that a contract is honoured even if one side goes bust, are globally important. As fears of an acrimonious Brexit have risen, so too have those of havoc. Now European Union regulators have unveiled contingency plans.

Now yielding a bumper crop

THE DISTRICT of Zernograd, or Grainville, in Russia’s southern Rostov region has many hallmarks of a depressed post-Soviet backwater. Decaying villages dot dusty roads; grey apartment blocks fill sleepy cities. Yet thanks to its namesake crop, times for many here have never been better. Take Yuri and Aleksandr Peretyatko. When the brothers launched their grain farm in the early 1990s, “we didn’t even have bicycles,” says Aleksandr. Now they own 1,500 hectares and cruise around in new white Lexus SUVs. Читать дальше...

THE MODERN company has morphed into a “money monster” enslaved to the doctrine of shareholder value. That is the thesis of a new book* by Colin Mayer, a professor at the Saïd Business School in Oxford. It is the latest challenge to the principle enunciated by Milton Friedman, an economist: namely, that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” An... Читать дальше...

FOR 17 YEARS the state-owned stud farm in Janow Podlaski in eastern Poland has hosted the “Pride of Poland” auction. In its heyday Arabian horses strutted around a grassy track, tempting foreign buyers into eye-popping bids. In 2016 the new government replaced the stud’s long-standing boss with an inexperienced newcomer. In his first two months two horses died, prompting media headlines; the new boss was ousted. Last year the auction brought in only a tenth of what it made before the changes. The next boss was also sacked. Читать дальше...

FROM THE edge of the Kamoto Copper Company’s pit, it is hard even to see the mechanical diggers toiling dozens of tiers below. The 280-metre hole on the southern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo is deeper than Africa’s tallest building is tall. Lorries take the best part of an hour to crawl out from its heart. The greenish ore they lug is given its hue by copper but much of its value by cobalt nestled within. Usually driven to South Africa, then often shipped to China, the cobalt will... Читать дальше...

An example to follow

WHEN JAMES COOK landed in Australia in 1770, Aboriginals had been there for about 60,000 years. Their 500 or so separate nations lacked kingpins or settled agriculture, so colonisers deemed the land terra nullius, free for the taking. Aboriginals were butchered or displaced, and later their children were stolen and placed in foster care under a cultural assimilation programme that lasted for six decades. They got the vote only in 1962. After a referendum five years later, they were included in the census. Читать дальше...

Reeling in reais

DRIVE AN HOUR north-west from Boa Vista, capital of Brazil’s Roraima state, towards the border with Venezuela, and pastures of grazing cattle and rice fields give way to the stunning but unkempt expanses of the São Marcos indigenous reserve. Here, sleepy roadside villages show little sign of life, aside from omnipresent prayer sheds marked with the green signs of Seventh Day Adventists.

Brazil outlaws large-scale agriculture or mining in areas demarcated for its 1m-odd indigenous citizens. Читать дальше...