China’s bond market is jolted by some surprising defaults
CHINA’S CREDIT-RATING agencies do not disguise their love for the state. Yongcheng Coal and Electricity’s state pedigree was at the top of a list of merits in a recent credit appraisal by CCXI, one such agency, which expressed its confidence in the group on October 10th with a top-notch AAA rating on a 1bn-yuan ($152m)…
A tax-evasion scandal draws in Hamburg’s elites
Nov 19th 2020AT THE VERY last minute, the lawyers of Christian S tried to stop his trial, arguing that the 77-year-old former bigwig with M.M. Warburg, one of Germany’s oldest private banks, was too frail to attend court in a pandemic. But on the evening of November 16th Germany’s constitutional court ruled that the trial…
An Indo-Pacific club builds heft
Nov 19th 2020WHEN AMERICA, Australia, India and Japan met in 2007 for a “quadrilateral dialogue” on security matters, many bet the new grouping would fizzle, despite acquiring the much snappier title of “the Quad”. Once non-aligned India, still suspicious of anything that smacked of an alliance, was non-committal, but in the end it was Australia,…
China plans to bring back the first Moon rocks for 40 years
IN JANUARY 2019, when a Chinese spacecraft called Chang’e 4 visited the Moon, the mission broke new ground, figuratively speaking, by landing on the far side of that orb, which is perpetually invisible from Earth and thus also out of direct radio contact. This meant communications had to be relayed by a satellite which had…
A second vaccine against covid-19 arrives
Nov 19th 2020WAITING FOR a breakthrough in the fight against covid-19 has been a bit like waiting for a bus to arrive. After almost a year of watch-checking and neck-craning, two come along at once. First, on November 9th, Pfizer, an American pharma giant and BioNTech, a German minnow, announced that they had jointly developed…
Why money is changing hands much less frequently
Nov 21st 2020WASHINGTON, DCINFORMING A CUSTOMER “I’m sorry, I can’t give you your money” is the stuff of bankers’ nightmares. But in June the Federal Reserve had to tell commercial banks just that: it was running out of spare change. As parts of the economy shut down, the flow of coins from wallets to deposits…
Who gains from RCEP, Asia’s new trade pact?
Nov 21st 2020IT TOOK EIGHT years of gruelling negotiations to agree on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was signed by 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific on November 15th. The world’s newest and biggest regional trade deal is not the deepest. It eliminates fewer tariffs than normal, and some only after two…
The pandemic is inducing Japanese doctors to go digital
AS COVID-19 SPREAD through Japan this spring, a doctor despaired. What appalled him was not the pace of infection, or a lack of protective equipment, but the archaic systems used to tabulate test results and so track the course of the epidemic. “Even with corona, we’re handwriting and faxing,” he groaned on Twitter.Japan has excellent…
India’s ruling party invents a Muslim plot against Hindu women
THE ORGANISER, an English-language weekly that is a mouthpiece for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the century-old flagship of India’s swelling armada of Hindu nationalist groups, is in no doubt about the dangers of “love jihad”. The luring of good Hindu girls into marriage and conversion is only the first phase of a broader Muslim plot,…
Livestock theft is becoming more common in South Africa
“LIVESTOCK THEFT has been around since Biblical times,” says Herkie Viljoen, a farmer on the outskirts of Bethlehem, a suitably named town in the Free State. But in recent years it has reached ungodly proportions. Standing next to a huge map of the province he points to small red circles with black dots that represent…