Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Southern Africa’s third largest economy is a textbook example of the increasing debt facing a fast-growing continent
Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, was having a power cut, so the only light in the restaurant was from Fumba Chama’s mobile phone. The rapper, better known as PilAto, had just finished uploading a new track to Twitter. The bitter-sweet lyrics (in Bemba) of Yama Chinese describe the concerns of many Zambians: “They put on smart suits and fly to China to sell our country. The roads belong to China. The hotels are for the Chinese. The chicken farms are Chinese. Even the brickworks are Chinese.”
The mood may be one of despair, but this election is critical to the country’s future. The best hope lies with Labour, despite its flaws
Britain has not faced a more critical election in decades than the one it faces on Thursday. The country’s future direction, its place in the world and even its territorial integrity are all at stake, primarily because this is a decisive election for Brexit. The choice is stark. The next prime minister is going to be either Boris Johnson, who is focused on “getting Brexit done” whatever the consequences, or Jeremy Corbyn, who with a Labour-led government will try to remodel society with a programme of nationalisation and public spending.
President says China has plenty of money amid market jitters about trade talks and Beijing vow to be ‘strong backup’ for Hong Kong police
Donald Trump has called for the World Bank to stop lending money to China, a day after the institution adopted a lending plan to Beijing despite Washington’s objections.
The World Bank on Thursday adopted a plan to aid China with $1bn to $1.5bn in low-interest loans annually until 2025. The plan called for lending to “gradually decline” from the previous five-year average of $1.8bn.
Asian markets plunge after Trump comments about trade deal delay made worse by possible Xinjiang sanctions
Global financial markets have gone into a tailspin amid mounting concern that the US and China are not going to conclude an interim trade agreement before a new set of American tariffs hit Chinese goods on 15 December.
Bank president indicates she will move bank beyond traditional remit of controlling inflation
Christine Lagarde has said the European Central Bank should do more to help tackle the climate emergency, as she came under pressure from MEPs to step up action against global heating.
In a strong hint that as president she would move the ECB beyond its traditional remit of controlling inflation, Lagarde said the bank would incorporate the climate threat into both its economic forecasts and in its capacity as watchdog of the financial system.
It may feel like capitalism isn’t working because western wages should be higher. But really it has an vice-like grip
An avalanche of recent books and articles about the “crisis of capitalism” is predicting its demise or dépassement. For those who remember the 1990s, there is a strange similarity between this and the literature of the time, which argued that the Hegelian “end of history” had arrived. That theory was proved to be wrong. The former, I believe, is also factually wrong and misdiagnoses the problem.
The facts show capitalism to be not in crisis at all. It is stronger than ever, both in terms of its geographical coverage and expansion to areas (such as leisure time, or social media) where it has created entirely new markets and commodified things that were never historically objects of transaction.
The territory’s recession is getting deeper and the US is threatening its special trading status, bringing serious consequences for Beijing
Almost six months after the protest movement that has upended life in Hong Kong began, the region is now facing serious questions about its future as Asia’s leading international business centre.
The most recent violence in the autonomous Chinese region have been the worst disturbances of the six-month long pro-democracy protests. US lawmakers have passed legislation threatening Hong Kong’s special trading status and the territory has slumped into its worst recession for 10 years.
President of the European Central Bank says US/China tariff war should be seen as an opportunity
Christine Lagarde has called for European governments to boost innovation and growth with higher rates of public investment, in her first major speech as president of the European Central Bank.
Speaking to an audience of bankers in Frankfurt, Lagarde said that rising trade barriers triggered by the US/China tariff war should be grasped by European governments as an opportunity to build a stronger internal market.
Prospect of crashing out of EU leaves UK more exposed to global financial risks, thinktank says
The UK’s GDP growth rate will slip to 1% next year even if a no-deal Brexit is avoided, according to the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation.
The OECD said the economy would slow down from growth of 1.2% this year if parliament passes Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal before the 31 January deadline, before returning to 1.2% in 2021.
The country’s traditional powerhouses on the centre-left and the centre-right face a moment of reckoning
Postwar German politics has a reputation for being moderate, consensual and a touch on the dull side. But there have been moments of high drama. In November 1959, for example, the Social Democratic party (SPD) abandoned its historic ambition to replace capitalism with socialism, dropped the Marxist account of class struggle and began to pitch itself as a broad-based Volkspartei (people’s party). History vindicated the decision. For the next 50 years or so, the SPD vied for power with the country’s other great political force, the CDU (and its CSU Bavarian ally), as both parties regularly achieved a vote share of over 40%.
Famed for their practice of big-tent politics, what the CDU and SPD would give for such numbers now. The agonies of Brexit and the rise of rightwing populism have claimed the political limelight around Europe. But those looking for clues to the continent’s future would do well to watch Germany closely over the coming weeks.
Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all. By Rana Foroohar
‘In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.
You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.
Returning infrastructure investment to 1970s levels may be undeliverable, says IFS
Labour and the Conservatives have triggered a public spending bidding war, promising massive programmes of borrowing that will return public investment to levels last seen in the 1970s, according to Britain’s leading experts on the public finances.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said plans unveiled by Sajid Javid, the chancellor, and John McDonnell, his Labour shadow, would represent a decisive break with the past, but warned that a future government might have trouble delivering projects on the scale envisaged.
Mitsotakis government seeks foreign capital from new residents in prosperity drive
Not so long ago the idea of Greece announcing tax relief measures to entice the global rich would have been regarded as a joke. With the EU’s weakest economy, and a leftist government in power, the world’s wealthy were keen to keep their distance.
But in a marked departure of policy, the centre-right administration led by Kyriakos Mitsotakis has offered an array of incentives to attract the rich.
Forced labour in China’s internment camps taints the supply chains of many western companies. We need to take action
Any western company doing business in Xinjiang should consider their supply chains tainted by forced labour drawn from internment camps. Hardly a drop in the ocean of the vast global economy, this involves companies such as Ikea, H&M, Volkswagen and Siemens.
This month, the United States banned the import of products made by a firm in Xinjiang over its use of forced labour. It also blacklisted 28 Chinese entities for their role in the repression of Uighurs and issued visa restrictions on key Chinese officials. Following suit, two major Australian companies have now also announced they are ending partnership with their cotton supplier in Xinjiang.
Credit Suisse survey shows Brexit effect has reduced number of UK millionaires by 27,000
The number of wealthy Chinese people has overtaken the number of rich Americans for the first time, according to a report by Credit Suisse.
The bank’s annual wealth survey found there were 100 million Chinese people among the world’s top 10% of richest people, compared with 99 million in the US.
The world is sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that will have devastating consequences for the democratic market system, according to the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
Lord King, who was in charge at Threadneedle Street during the near-death of the global banking system and deep economic slump a decade ago, said the resistance to new thinking meant a repeat of the chaos of the 2008-09 period was looming.
Jubilee Debt Campaign says the Fund broke its own rules by not ensuring sustainable debt burden
Debt campaigners have accused the International Monetary Fund of encouraging reckless lending by extending $93bn (£75bn) of loans to 18 financially troubled countries without a debt restructuring programme first.
In advance of the IMF’s annual meeting in Washington next week, the Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) said the the Fund was breaking its own rules by providing financial support without ensuring that the debt burden was sustainable.
The only tool he has to placate US consumers is successive interest rate cuts – but the whole world is playing at that game
Donald Trump’s cunning plan to make America great again by launching a trade war with China has officially backfired. Last week, a keenly watched measure of US manufacturing showed firms cutting back on production and jobs at a rate not seen since 2009. Recession warning lights are flashing and the outlook seems a world away from the cheery one presented by the president when he entered the White House in 2017.
It is quite something for a president to impose a trade policy that weighs heavily on parts of a crucial sector for the US economy – and it’s a bizarre tactic given that the votes of manufacturing workers delivered him his first term in office.
The Guardian’s just published a leader on Labour’s universal credit policy, concluding that the “plan makes sense”.
The shocking failings of universal credit are justly blamed on the government having listened to the wrong people when setting it up. The sensible reforms set out by Labour show that the opposition has been listening to the right ones. Never mind that the package of changes announced by Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday was misleadingly described as a plan to “scrap” universal credit. His party’s proposals to end the five-week wait for initial payments, scrap the benefit cap and two-child limit (and heinous “rape clause”) are sound. So are promises to review the sanctions system, ditch the “digital only” approach and hire 5,000 new advisers to help those who struggle with online applications.
The army’s zero-tolerance drugs policy has been scrapped less than a year after it was introduced, the defence secretary has confirmed.
Speaking at a ConservativeHome fringe event at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Ben Wallace told Tory members he had changed the policy because it should be for commanding officers, and not the government, to decide to strip an individual of their job.
I changed it. I took the view that some people are young and irresponsible and it should be up to their commanding officers to decide, whether it’s a young lad or girl who’s made a mistake, whether they should be allowed to remain in the armed forces or not.
And people who have left and want to rejoin, the same should apply to them as well. I think, you know, that doesn’t mean to say you should be able to do drugs in the armed forces.
It should be up to commanding officers to understand their workforce, to understand whether that individual is the problem, or if there’s a medical problem and they think they need help, or whether indeed it was a mistake.
Central bank approves quarter-point interest rate reduction
Trump tweets: ‘Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve fail again!’
Under pressure from Wall Street and the White House, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates on Wednesday for a second straight meeting, but declined to signal if it would continue to drop rates in the future.