ONE of the more persistent beliefs about the global economy is that Asians are more frugal than others. Explanations have drawn on culture (the self-discipline of Confucianism), history (memories of privation) and public policy (flimsy social safety-nets forcing people to save). For Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, and other theorists of “Asian […]
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FOR the umpteenth time in the past decade, a great turning-point has been declared in the government-bond market. Bond yields have risen across the world, including in China, where the yield on the ten-year bond has come close to 4% for the first time since 2014. The ten-year Treasury-bond yield, the most important benchmark, has […]
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A FEW years ago, the news about the euro-zone economy was uniformly bad to the point of tedium. These days, it is the humdrum diet of benign data that prompts a yawn. Figures this week show that GDP rose by 0.6% in the three months to the end of September (an annualised rate of 2.4%). […]
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POPULISM is the weapon not just of the downtrodden. As the crisis in Catalonia demonstrates, the rich have economic anxieties of their own. Catalonia has an identity distinct, in important ways, from that of the rest of Spain. But the recent drive for independence has been energised by anger over the flow of fiscal redistribution […]
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SUPERLATIVES surrounded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) when it was signed on October 30th 1947. A press release heralded it as “the most far-reaching negotiation[s] ever undertaken in the history of world trade.” The Economist grumbled it was “one of the longest and most complicated public documents ever issued—and one of the […]
Read moreDuring a series of hearings before House and Senate committees this week, members of Congress trotted out poster boards showing graphic examples of social media advertisements that attempted to influence the 2016 election. With headlines like “Heritage, not hate. The South will rise again!” and “Join us because we care. Black matters!” these ads focused […]
Read moreBond yields fell and the dollar weakened as markets greeted the House tax bill with skepticism and concern about how hefty corporate and individual tax cuts will ultimately get paid for without ballooning the federal deficit. Details of the House plan trickled out with traders watching headline by headline. The plan cuts the corporate tax […]
Read moreComedian Kumail Nanjiani plays the character Dinesh on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” a tongue-in-cheek satire about a scrappy start-up, Pied Piper, taking on a technology giant, Hooli. But Nanjiani’s real-life view of major technology companies is much darker, based on messages he tweeted this week. Nanjiani doesn’t just play an engineer on television: He was a […]
Read moreIf foreign interference on internet platforms isn’t affecting tech’s bottom line, it doesn’t mean executives at Facebook, Twitter and Google aren’t concerned about it. “There’s an extraordinary amount of soul searching inside these companies about what’s happened,” former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday. Revelations of Russian meddling on Facebook, […]
Read moreFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did a “masterful” job discussing the impact of Russia’s election meddling during the company’s post-earnings conference call, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday. During the call Wednesday, the Facebook chief said the company plans to boost spending to police content, adding he is “dead serious” about preventing abuse on its platform. That […]
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