Eshe Nelson

For the past two years, there’s has been a behind-the-scenes battle rumbling between New York, London, and Hong Kong to secure the public listing of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. In what promises to be a blockbuster IPO, the company would fetch a valuation as high as $2 trillion. (Apple, which is currently the world’s largest listed company, has a market cap of around $840 billion.) In addition to the prestige that would come from listing the world’s largest public company, Aramco’s IPO would generate a gusher of fees for banks, advisers, and one lucky exchange operator.

Last year, when the price of bitcoin rose 1,000%, you might have regretted not buying in. Now that it has fallen almost 40% so this year, perhaps you don’t have as many regrets. The murky trading and wrenching volatility of cryptocurrencies threaten their place as a fundamental plank of the future financial system, as proponents are pushing. Now, a group of famed economists and financial innovators have a plan to address those challenges by creating “the first non-anonymous blockchain-based digital currency,” called Saga (SGA).

The reckoning for Facebook has been swift. In just two days, Facebook’s market value plunged by $50 billion after public revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy and data analytics firm, skirted the social network’s rules and mined tens of millions of Facebook profiles to influence voter decisions, namely the 2016 US presidential election.

For decades, an increasingly loud chorus has claimed that economic inequality is primarily driven by class, with other possible reasons for disparities, such as race, playing a lesser role. They say that it is counterproductive to focus on inequality between races—instead, it is better to consider the inequality between all of America’s poor and its increasingly rich elite. A new study (pdf) by economists at Stanford, Harvard, and the US Census Bureau seems to refute that idea.

So far, the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union has been a messy process of bluffs, rumors, red lines, and awkward dinners. Today, there was finally news of real import: After the UK formally leaves the bloc in March 2019, a transition period will kick in that will essentially keep things the same until the end of 2020. This transition period will give businesses and investors more time for prepare for life outside the bloc. (Here’s the 129-page, color-coded draft agreement.)

HSBC, the UK’s largest bank, said today that it also has the largest gender pay gap among large banks. Women are paid a staggering 59% less than men, on average, according to the difference in hourly pay in 2017.

To the Dutch, it looked excessive. The board of ING, the biggest bank in the Netherlands, said last week that it planned to increase the pay of CEO Ralph Hamers by 50% this year. The CEO’s pay was “significantly” below the median for other European CEOs, the board said. But after a forceful political backlash, today the company scrapped the plan.

With one year to go until the UK formally leaves the European Union, the British government is trying to keep a spring in its step. The latest economic and fiscal forecasts from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility released today (pdf) forecast that the economy to grow at 1.5% this year, slightly more than was expected in November.

Most of the latest US jobs report was undoubtedly good. US employers added 313,000 jobs in February, the biggest monthly increase since July 2016, according to the latest data from businesses and government agencies collected by the Labor Department. The report published today (March 9) also revised up the figure for January to 239,000. This year is far outpacing 2017, when the monthly average was 171,000.

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Copenhagen, Denmark

In the past few years, the politics of continental Europe’s largest economies have been upended. The center-left, made up of social democratic and socialist parties, is reeling as it loses support to right-wing, populist, and right-wing populist parties. The Italian general election yesterday—which resulted in a messy hung parliament—was the latest example of the hollowing out of the mainstream left.

O Canada!

On March 4, Italians go to the polls in a national election (paywall). The governing center-left party is expected to suffer at the hands of populist parties, as economic stagnation encourages citizens—millions of whom have been pushed into poverty—to shake things up.

2017 was a big year for Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, already the largest in the world. After surpassing $1 trillion in assets, the fund announced today that it made an annual return of 1,028 billion kroner ($131 billion), the largest amount in the fund’s 20-year history.

Free trade agreements are a fundamental part of the economic policy that sustains the global liberal order. They are proliferating, both for bilateral deals and regional agreements, and considered a crucial factor in boosting economic growth. But as these agreements become more ubiquitous, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik suggests we should take a closer look at what’s really in them.

“Brexit can be grounds for much more hope than fear.”

A year and a half after Vancouver imposed a 15% tax on foreign home buyers, the regional government is once again raising the barriers for out-of-town investors as property prices accelerate.

In a little over a year, the UK will officially leave the European Union. It will exit the world’s largest single market, the EU customs union, and a four decades-old union to forge its own trade agreements with the rest of the world. Yesterday, British foreign secretary Boris Johnson tried to pitch this as an exciting opportunity. “Brexit can be grounds for much more hope than fear,” he said in a speech in London.

Europe’s southern economies are steadily shaking off their sickly image. Take Portugal, which today reported that its economy is growing at the fastest rate since 2000. Real GDP increased by 2.7% last year, compared with 1.5% in 2016.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, simply talking about the treatment of women and fretting about gender inequality are no longer enough. A demand for tangible action to make gender equality a reality is sweeping across many industries. In finance, one of the steps in this direction has been the recent creation of gender equality exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These give investors the chance to actively invest in companies that champion equality. Last month, Swiss banking giant UBS became the latest firm to offer one of these funds.

Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda will shrink the US trade deficit and overturn “decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies,” the president promised at last week’s State of the Union address.

US stock markets have just had their worst week in six years. A spike in volatility wiped out a few exchange-traded funds and sparked a global stock market rout. One of the factors behind the market’s stumble this week was a rapid rise in government bond yields. Higher interest rates indicated that inflation will increase, which raised the prospect that the US economy could overheat. If that happened, the Federal Reserve would need to tighten monetary policy faster to counteract it.

In late 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that automation and other new technology could mean that 375 million people around the world will need to change occupations to avoid being completely put out of work by machines. Many more millions of people will in some way be displaced by automation.