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Indian banks: Lenders of the last resort
BANKING in India is a vast problem and a huge opportunity. Only 35% of adults have formal accounts. A grim reminder of the risks for the 600m-odd unbanked folk came in April. A multi-billion-dollar, barely regulated, “chit fund” in Kolkata collapsed, destroying the savings of hundreds of thousands of poor people. Up...
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Remittances: Channelling cash
THE world economy may be struggling, but foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant workers will send home $500 billion this year-up from $410 billion in 2012, according to a new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an agency of the United Nations. More than half ends...
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Awards
Zanny Minton Beddoes, our economics editor, is the Harold Wincott journalist of the year for 2012. Alexandra Suich, our media editor, is the Harold Wincott young journalist of the year.
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Free exchange: Making pay work
OF ALL a firm’s inputs, its workers’ effort is perhaps the oddest. It is as vital as land, factories or machines, but much harder to control. It is often impossible even to measure. A manager can gauge the firm’s output, but not the effort people put in, beyond crude gauges such as the time they spend on the job....
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Buttonwood: Apocalypse, not yet
IS THERE a bond bubble and is it going to burst soon? The Spectator, a British political weekly, ran a cover story citing the existence of a bubble back in September 2011. Yields are even lower now than they were then.Calling the top of an asset bubble is extremely hard, as sceptics of the dotcom boom in the late...
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Greek banks redux: System reboot
FOR the past three years, foreign money has been flooding out of Greece. But the tide may be turning. This week senior managers from Alpha, the country’s third-largest bank, were in London and New York to raise private capital for a rights issue. Their roadshow is part of a much grander enterprise: the...
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Chasing debtors: Cash-strapped Khashoggi?
Belt tightening REMEMBER Adnan Khashoggi, who amassed a fortune in the 1970s and 1980s brokering arms sales to his fellow Saudis? He was never quite the world’s richest man but he may have been its biggest spender, splashing out $250,000 a day to maintain his lifestyle. At one point his many residences included 16...
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JPMorgan Chase: Unbreakable Dimon
ON THE face of it, the question seemed a simple one of corporate governance: should JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, split the roles of chief executive and chairman? But the stakes were much higher, which explains why, after weeks of noisy debate, two-thirds of shareholders rejected a motion to that effect at...
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Activist investors: Let’s do it my way
EVEN those in charge of listed corporations have bosses, however much they dislike thinking of their shareholders that way. So most chief executives hope to avoid the attention of “activist” investors-mostly hedge funds that specialise in shaking up listed companies in the hope of a share-price jolt. Sadly for those...
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Syria’s war: How about diplomacy?
Do they have ways of making Assad talk? “WE’RE back where we were a year ago,” says a Western diplomat of the latest international push to bring Syria’s warring parties to the negotiating table. Since the American secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, announced on May 7th their...
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Strife in Iraq: Worse and worse
A WIDENING arc of violence across Iraq is raising fears that the country could fracture under the weight of sectarian and political strife. Attacks in the past week stretched from north of Baghdad, the capital, to the normally calm southern city of Basra, killing more than 200 people. The targets included Sunni...
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Nigeria’s northern insurgency: A city under siege
Just your friendly neighbourhood cops SOLDIERS sit sweltering in bunkers made from sandbags on the streets of Maiduguri, a town in north-eastern Nigeria at the centre of a four-year Islamist revolt. Around them, young boys on clanking bicycles carve through sand blown in from the Sahara, which has been slowly...
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Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda: Pipeline poker
IN MARCH last year the heads of state of Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan met among mangroves in Lamu, a Kenyan town on the Indian Ocean, to launch the construction of a port and oil pipeline together costing $16 billion that would serve all their countries and vastly enrich them. Taxpayers were billed $350,000 for...
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The Gulf of Guinea: Another Somalia?
THE MV City of Xiamen, a container ship flagged in Antigua and Barbuda, was about 160km (100 miles) off the Nigerian coast in the evening of April 25th when 14 pirates, armed to the teeth, boarded her and broke into the ship’s safe room. They made off with an undisclosed sum of cash and five crew members, who were...
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Microbiomics: A virus shield
THE story of the microbiome-the community of tiny organisms that coexist symbiotically with people and other animals-gets weirder every day. Until now that story, which has emerged over the past few years, has seemed one of friendly collaboration. In exchange for a place to live, bacteria aid digestion and help...
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Cryptography: The solace of quantum
CRYPTOGRAPHY is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to communicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead-just. But Eve is catching up. Alice and Bob are...
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Personality, social media and marketing: No hiding place
I detect a laid-back personality IN AMERICA alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”-junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties-last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up...
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Invasive species: Thorny questions
Taking out the enemy CONSERVATIONISTS, being by definition conservative, usually view the introduction of new species into an environment with horror. If such a species is successful, it is described as “invasive”-a rather pejorative word. But how much change such species actually cause (or how much damage they do,...
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Canada’s political scandals: Widening cracks
AS FAMILIES fired up their barbecues to celebrate the Victoria Day long weekend from May 18th-20th, a double helping of juicy political scandal was served along with the burgers and steaks. First came an extraordinary story in Toronto, where Rob Ford, the mayor, faced unproven allegations that he had been caught on...
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Mexico’s economy: Reality bites
Sailing out of the tourism top ten INVESTORS who were starry eyed about Mexico’s economic potential at the start of the year are now having misgivings. From a record high then, the stockmarket fell to an eight-month low on May 21st. Just to rub it in, stocks in Brazil, which Mexico views as its main regional rival,...
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Business in Cuba: A new course
The comandante emerges from his bunker AFTER the 1959 revolution Fidel Castro declared that golf was a “bourgeois” hobby, unsuitable for communists. Most of the island’s courses were built on, and no new ones have been developed since. But the government has just given the go-ahead to a new golf resort, in what it...
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The Caribbean: Treasure islands in trouble
LAST month McKeeva Bush, the ousted premier of the Cayman Islands, appeared in court to contest a string of charges, some stemming from alleged use of his government credit card in American casinos. His next date with the judge is in June. But in a general election on May 22nd voters delivered their own verdict:...
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America and South Asia: Infernal triangle
A friendly wave from Mr Sharif Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back. By Bruce Riedel. Brookings Institution Press; 230 pages; $27.95 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHE recent election of a new government in Pakistan led by Nawaz Sharif seems to bode well for an easing...
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The Blue Rider group: Eye music
Colour was their language “MUNICH was radiant,” wrote Thomas Mann, a Nobel prize-winning novelist, in 1902. “Art swayed the destinies of the town.” The German city, which rivalled Paris as a magnet for artists in the early 20th century, also swayed the destinies of the artists drawn there from as far away as Russia...
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British political history: What a Burke
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative. By Jesse Norman. Basic Books; 325 pages; $27.99. HarperPress; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHE first conservative was a Burke. In many ways this is true, says Jesse Norman, a Tory MP who has penned a succinct history of Edmund Burke’s life and thought. The 18th-century...
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The future of physics: Beyond the numbers
The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos. By Neil Turok. House of Anansi Press; 292 pages; C$19.95. Faber and Faber; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukFarewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. By Jim Baggott. Pegasus; 352 pages; $26.95. Constable; £12.99. Buy...
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The Volkswagen camper van: A bug’s life
Off to do the hippy-hippy shake The VW Camper Van: A Biography. By Mike Harding. Aurum Press; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America in August; $24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWHEN a biographer of the Volkswagen camper van begins with the lyrics from a Fairport Convention song about the old bus-“In...
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Understanding Europe: After the darkest hour
The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union. By Luuk van Middelaar. Translated by Liz Waters. Yale University Press; 352 pages; $40 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukThe Lost Continent. By Gavin Hewitt. Hodder & Stoughton; 368 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.ukTHE euro crisis grinds on. But,...
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Banyan: Backs to the sea
HIS pudgy, mustachioed face is all over Karachi. Altaf Hussain lives in London, having fled his hometown two decades ago after an attempt on his life. But the fanatical followers in the party he heads, the Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz (MQM), or United National Movement, plastered buildings, flyovers and buses with his...
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India and China: Parsnips unbuttered
“A FEW clouds in the sky cannot shut out the brilliant rays of our friendship”: on his first foreign trip as China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang was determined to make his visit to Delhi, India’s capital, a success. On May 21st, bouncing with energy and quick to flash a smile, Mr Li enthused over his “candid and...
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