Which euro-zone economies are bouncing back quickest?
May 27th 2021KNOCKED BACK by several bouts of covid-19, Europe’s economy is now finding its feet. Its vaccination drive is charging ahead, and lockdown restrictions are easing. On May 17th Italy’s curfew moved from 10pm to 11pm, and on May 19th Parisians were allowed to return to their beloved cafés, after six months without. German…
What it means to invest in Chinese offshore assets could be changing
DISSIDENTS, SMUGGLERS and rogue executives have been hiding out on either side of the 40km border between Hong Kong and China for generations. Despite being part of the same country since 1997, the two jurisdictions have separate legal systems with limited interaction. Chinese companies have crossed the border in droves since the 1990s to access…
Australian whales are breeding like rabbits
LOOK OUT from a clifftop in Sydney around this time of year, and you may witness one of nature’s great migrations. Between May and November some 40,000 humpback whales commute along Australia’s eastern coast. It is a highway from their feeding grounds in Antarctica to the Great Barrier Reef, where their calves are born.Listen to…
The pandemic revives interest in a morbid French financial scheme
WHO HAS not dreamed of owning a pied-à-terre in Paris, or perhaps overlooking the Mediterranean? How about betting on the timing of a perfect stranger’s death? In France you can combine the two. In sales of property en viager a buyer pays upfront for a residence while getting the keys only when the current owner…
The boundary between crypto and fiat money is becoming more permeable
May 27th 2021FINANCE HAS its squabbling tribes, much like the rest of society. A contest that attracts a lot of attention just now is the demographic-cum-digital divide between crypto kids and fiat dinosaurs. The crypto kids believe that blockchain-based finance is the future and a haven from the inevitable degradation of fiat money. In the…
Myanmar’s generals struggle to restart its stalled economy
IN MID-JANUARY Thaung Tun, who was then Myanmar’s minister of investment, promised local and foreign business folk a swift recovery from damage wrought by covid-19. Plans for whizzier internet and renewable energy, he said, would bring opportunities they could once “only have dreamed of”. Two weeks later the army launched a coup, bundling Mr Thaung…
Asian investors have doubts about Myanmar’s military regime
May 27th 2021SEOUL, SINGAPORE AND TOKYOWHEN TANKS rumbled into Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, on February 1st, the man who sent them there, Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, tried to offer the public reassurance. Though the civilian leadership had been supplanted by men in fatigues, the coup, he suggested, would be good for…
Tens of thousands flee Goma, fearing lava and, perhaps, deadly gas
A governor orders a big city partially evacuated, in case the nearby Lake Kivu releases a suffocating cloud of carbon dioxideTHEY GRABBED blankets, clothes and mattresses and rushed out of their houses at dawn. In their tens of thousands, they streamed out the city of Goma, in eastern Congo, terrified of what its volcano might…
How the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is failing
BY THE STANDARDS of the peace process, if not international law, Oranit is not a terribly contentious Jewish settlement. The Palestinians previously accepted that this hilly town of low-slung homes in the occupied West Bank would remain part of Israel in a future two-state solution. In one negotiating session their disagreements amounted to an area…