America’s notorious tax-compliance law faces another challenge
Oct 3rd 2019WHEN THE Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was passed by America’s Congress in 2010, it was overshadowed by the jobs bill into which it had been shoehorned as a revenue-raising provision. But of the two, FATCA packed the stronger punch. The law, designed to stop Americans stashing money abroad to evade tax,…
Wealth taxes have moved up the political agenda
Oct 3rd 2019FIVE YEARS ago Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a weighty analysis of rising inequality, flew off shelves and ignited fiery debate. Fans and detractors alike tended to agree on one thing, at least: its proposal to fix inequality—a tax on wealth—was a dud. A half-decade later the mood has shifted. Several…
Can Germany cool its monetary-policy debate?
Oct 3rd 2019BERLINNOTHING INSPIRES German newspaper illustrators like the European Central Bank’s monetary policies. Bond-buying is represented as a tsunami of cash. An uptick in inflation becomes a euro-gulping great white shark. After Mario Draghi, the ECB’s outgoing president, pushed deposit-rate cuts and a promise to restart quantitative easing (QE) through its governing council last…
Can Kyriakos Mitsotakis ensure the Greek economy starts growing again?
Oct 3rd 2019ATHENSTHE AIRPORT at Hellinikon, a few miles south of Athens, closed in 2001. Planes belonging to Greece’s now-defunct national carrier still litter the runway. Nearby a stadium built for the Olympics in 2004 gently crumbles. In the distance, a marina borders the glistening Aegean. In 2011, when Greece was in the throes of…
Japanese spies, once renowned, have fallen on hard times
Sep 12th 2019IT IS RARE for James Bond to pass up a martini. But on a visit to Japan in 1967, in “You Only Live Twice”, he opts for sake—served at 98.4°F (36.9°C). “For a European, you are exceptionally cultivated,” enthuses Tiger Tanaka, a Japanese spymaster. Mr Tanaka is a suave, Suntory-sipping spook who runs…
India’s government is pouring money into dung
Sep 12th 2019DELHION SEPTEMBER 7TH mission control in Bengaluru lost contact with an Indian-designed and -built lunar probe mere seconds before it was supposed to land. Some Indians were consoled by the fact that their country had nearly pulled off an extraordinarily complex mission on a shoestring budget. But others asked why the budget was…
Donald Trump pulls out of Afghan peace talks with the Taliban
A secret meeting at the presidential retreat is aborted at the last minuteSep 8th 2019IN THREE SHORT messages sent as Kabul slept, President Donald Trump has upended more than a year of painstaking American negotiation with the insurgents of the Taliban, who have been fighting to overthrow the American-backed government in Afghanistan for 18 years.…
An election campaign in Sri Lanka stirs old ghosts
Sep 5th 2019THE FRONT-RUNNER in Sri Lanka’s presidential election in November has a boring message. It is designed to be wonderfully soothing to those alarmed by the political chaos of the past couple of years, as the president and prime minister have feuded—and indeed to those for whom the brutal civil war that ended only…
Tunisia’s election features fed-up voters and bizarre candidates
Sep 12th 2019TUNISIT WAS THE first true presidential debate in the Arab world, yet the front-runner was nowhere to be seen. Nabil Karoui was not entirely to blame for his absence from the stage, though. The businessman and media mogul is campaigning to be president of Tunisia from jail.On September 15th Tunisians will choose a…
Robert Mugabe leaves a bitter legacy
African governments are shamed by their tolerance of his disastrous ruleSep 7th 2019ROBERT MUGABE’S career can be divided into three main parts. First, as an extraordinarily skillful leader who managed to dominate a fractious nationalist movement opposed to the white-supremacist rule of Rhodesia’s Ian Smith. Second, as a legitimate if increasingly flawed ruler from independence…