Around the world, members of the climate-change activist group Extinction Rebellion have relished in theatrical protests. In the UK, where the movement began in 2018, demonstrators have climbed on top of subway trains at rush hour to disrupt commutes; once they closed down five main bridges across the River Thames and tried to turn them into gardens.
Globotics. Telemigrants. White-collar robots. To describe the future of work, Richard Baldwin is developing a new lexicon.
Mariana Mazzucato was once called “the world’s scariest economist.” She eventually came to terms with it. “People should be scared,” she later told the BBC. “The economy is scary.”
In just under a week, the contest to become the next leader of the UK Conservative party—and by extension, the country’s next prime minister—will come to a close. Traders aren’t waiting to find out who wins: they’ve already decided it’s bad news. Both candidates, current foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson, who previously held the same position, have pushed the UK on a path to a destabilizing “no-deal Brexit” at the deadline of Oct. 31.
Alan Turing, the British mathematician who developed ground-breaking theory for modern computers and set the foundations for artificial intelligence, will feature on the UK’s new £50 banknote.
After four and a half years, Greeks returned power to the New Democracy party in national elections on Sunday (July 7). The center-right party lost control of parliament in 2015 to Syriza, a left-wing populist party led by Alexis Tspiras.
Here’s a good reason to extend the July 4 celebrations for another day: The US recorded an unexpectedly strong month of jobs gains in June, with employers adding 224,000 jobs, comfortably beating expectations for about 160,000 jobs. The labor market rebounded from a weak May, when only 72,000 jobs were added, Labor Department data showed today.
Welcome to the longest US economic expansion on record!
It’s easy to feel hopeless in the face of grim environmental news. After all, an international body of scientists recently said there are only a dozen years left to avoid a climate change crisis. At this week’s G20 summit, nations agreed to implement the 2015 Paris agreement, but the US, the world’s largest economy, refused to do so. Last week, EU leaders failed to reach an agreement to strengthen the bloc’s climate targets to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and currently the continent is in a heatwave that’s registering record high temperatures.
Sometimes in financial markets good news looks like bad news. The outcome of the meeting between US president Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Japan could be one of those times. The two sides have agreed to a truce in their trade war, with the Trump saying he won’t introduce any more tariffs on Chinese goods for now and US companies can once again do business with the Chinese tech giant Huawei.
For motor heads, one of life’s most satisfying sounds is the roar of a powerful engine. But unlike traditional cars, electric vehicles are practically silent. To fill the void, BMW has enlisted Hollywood film composer Hans Zimmer to create the sounds for its future electric cars.
The European Union says that the region needs an additional €175-290 billion in private investment a year (pdf) to become a “climate-neutral” economy by 2050. (That’s $199-330 billion.) That may sound like a lot, but it barely puts a dent in the $5-7 trillion that the UN thinks is needed every year to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, which target the environment in addition to a host of other issues.
If reading financial markets is usually as inscrutable as reading tea leaves, bond investors have decided now is the time to send a message in big, bold letters.
Globotics. Telemigrants. White-collar robots. To describe the future of work, Richard Baldwin is developing a new lexicon.
The UK Conservative party, which has been running the government since 2010, seems ready to reverse one of the defining traits of its tenure, fiscal austerity, and adopt a policy at the opposite extreme.
At 38, less than two years after completing a PhD in economics, Carolina Alves is taking a big risk with her career.
This week Venezuela’s central bank unexpectedly published data (link in Spanish) on economic growth and inflation. It’s the first time in years that official figures on the economy have been released. Regular updates stopped in 2015 as president Nicolás Maduro’s government plunged the country into severe economic crisis.
Last week, British prime minister Theresa May announced her resignation. With just five months to go until the UK is scheduled to leave the European Union, the nation is now preoccupied by a Conservative Party leadership contest, and Brexit talks have stalled. The sense that the country is heading toward a no-deal Brexit, with no transition agreements, has always frightened the financial sector, which heavily relies (paywall) on frictionless trade links with the EU and free movement of people to attract the best talent.
Financial traders had plenty to fret about in May. There were warnings about the weakness of the global economy; the US-China trade war escalated; a new front opened in US president Donald Trump’s trade fights, this time with Mexico; the UK’s prime minister resigned as the Brexit clock kept ticking; and Turkey announced it was rerunning a crucial election in Istanbul, which was seen as another threat to democracy there. Accordingly, the VIX, a volatility index considered Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” jumped to its highest level since January earlier in May, and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 7% over the month, the first monthly decline this year.
Donald Trump unexpectedly announced yesterday that he would impose a 5% tariff on all goods imported into the US from Mexico, and keep increasing the rate until, as he tweeted, “the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied.” As the US president opened up yet another front in his trade war, financial markets reacted with alarm.
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern said she wanted to prove that it’s possible to govern in a new way, one centered on kindness and empathy. As part of this approach the South Pacific nation has just published the world’s first ever “wellbeing budget.“
After less than three years of trying—and failing—to make Brexit happen, British prime minister Theresa May announced her resignation. She will step down as Conservative party leader on June 7, and prime minister when a replacement is chosen by party members.
How’s Brexit going, you ask? Well, the pound is on its longest losing streak against the euro in history. Yesterday marked the 13th consecutive trading day with a decline against the common European currency, with the pound losing 3.5% over that period.
More than 40% of Americans say socialism would be a good thing for the country, according to a Gallup survey published earlier this week. Capitalists sense the threat.
