America’s inflation spike begins
Apr 13th 2021IN THE SPRING of 2020 American consumer prices fell for three consecutive months as the pandemic struck. Rents collapsed, hotel rooms went empty and oil prices turned negative. All sudden spurts of deflation or inflation make the news twice: first when they happen and then a year later, when they distort comparisons that…
Will an attack on Iran derail efforts to revive the nuclear deal?
Apr 12th 2021ON APRIL 10th Iran had two occasions for cheer. One was the resumption of talks, earlier in the week, in Vienna to revive the multinational nuclear deal that Donald Trump, then America’s president, abandoned in 2018. The other was the celebration of National Nuclear Technology Day, which featured performers dressed as nuclear scientists,…
John Williamson, who defined the “Washington consensus”, died on April 11th
Apr 15th 2021IT WAS IN January 1947, with a song thrush, that John Williamson began the list he kept of the birds he had seen, which would go on to number some 4,000 species. His father, a rose-grower in Hereford, England, was an avid birder too, but Mr Williamson brought to the pastime the focused…
The appeal of emerging-market dollar bonds
Apr 15th 2021THE HUNT for bonds that pay more interest to retirees and others requiring a fixed income has taken institutional investors to some exotic places in recent years. Last month they alighted on Ghana, which issued $3bn-worth of Eurobonds, as dollar bonds issued outside America are known. Ghana may be exotic but it is…
Myanmar is on the brink of collapse
IT WOULD BE hours before Hla Hla Win felt any pain, which was just as well. It was the morning of March 27th and more than a thousand people, Ms Hla Hla Win among them, had gathered in Yangon to protest against the army’s coup. When security forces began firing automatic weapons into the crowd,…
Joe Biden calls time on America’s longest-ever war
Apr 13th 2021THE FIRST American forces to enter Afghanistan in 2001 arrived on September 26th, when a CIA team dropped into the Panjshir Valley in the north. At the peak of the war a decade later, America had more than 100,000 troops battling the Taliban.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more…
Arab governments are worried about food security
RAMADAN, WHICH began at sunset on April 12th in much of the world, is a month of both fasting and feasting, as long days of restraint give way to big meals after sunset. Celebrations were curtailed last year because of the covid-19 pandemic. With looser restrictions now in some Arab countries, families are looking towards…
The war in Tigray is taking a frightful human toll
“LIKE FLOUR scattered in the wind” is how Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, describes the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ethnically based party that called the shots in Ethiopia for almost three decades. By this he means it is crushed, never to revive. There is no denying that its power has waned. In 2018…