The pandemic revives ultra-safe European bonds
Jul 11th 2020THE EURO ZONE has not been a hospitable place for investors seeking safety in recent years. The currency area’s pool of super-safe, AAA-rated sovereign securities shrank by 40% between 2007 and 2018. Rating agencies downgraded some of its members during the debt crisis of 2010-12. Two of its remaining top-rated issuers—Germany and the…
Some economies are bouncing back. But recoveries can easily go wrong
ORFORD NESS, on Britain’s east coast, was a site for military tests in the 20th century. Large pagodas on the shoreline, still standing today, were designed to prevent blasts from doing damage to the surrounding wetlands. On July 4th the area braced itself for another sort of explosion. “Super Saturday” marked the opening of pubs…
Democracy activists fleeing Hong Kong present a dilemma for Taiwan
LAM WING-KEE runs a tiny bookshop on the tenth floor of an unremarkable building in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. He is also the country’s most famous exile from Hong Kong. His shop is a replica of his former business in Hong Kong, Causeway Bay Books, which until 2015 sold material the Chinese government considered subversive. That…
South Korea is rethinking its efforts to spread the wealth
THE ROAD from Jinju’s high-speed train station towards the outskirts of town winds past row after row of brand-new high-rise apartment blocks decorated in dark grey and ochre. The buildings are surrounded by half-finished strip malls with mock-European brick facades. Construction is frantic, though large posters advertise steep discounts on flats in the finished complexes.The…
More corporate defaults seem to be on the way
Jul 11th 2020IT WAS A company revered by business-school gurus and investors alike. British consumers cherished it for its value-for-money clothing. Its own-brand biscuits were unrivalled. But the glory days of Marks & Spencer are long gone. As if to underscore this, it recently became a “fallen angel”: its bonds were demoted to speculative-grade (or…
Europeans quibble about long trading hours: the finance edition
IN THE POPULAR imagination, Americans toil endlessly in the office while their European counterparts arrive late, lunch at leisure and depart punctually. If that were ever true equity traders were never let in on the scheme. Opening hours on stockmarkets in Europe are some of the longest in the world, keeping financiers at their Bloomberg…
The Philippines’ fierce lockdown drags on, despite uncertain benefits
Jul 11th 2020“I’M CONSTANTLY AFRAID that we will get infected,” frets Diverson Bloso, “We don’t have money to bring us to the hospital, in case that happened.” A messenger at a printing press in Quezon City, part of Manila’s sprawl, he prays he keeps his job. His boss told workers that the business might have…
Why has the pandemic spared the Buddhist parts of South-East Asia?
Jul 11th 2020Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hubONE OF THE bigger riddles of the global pandemic lies in South-East Asia. Despite being close to the source of covid-19, in China, and to one…
Jihadists in the Sahel threaten west Africa’s coastal states
Jul 11th 2020OUAGADOUGOU AND PARIS“YOU MAY think you’re safe,” says a 57-year-old resident of Doropo in northern Ivory Coast. “But jihadists are like ants, they can come in without being noticed.” On June 11th, just three weeks after Ivory Coast’s army reassuringly declared that its northern frontier with war-torn Burkina Faso was “under control”, a…