Expanding the Legacy
Expanding the Legacy
The withdrawal of banks from the high streets and neighbourhood corners is unsurprising. Today, most banks derive no more than three percent of their turnover from ‘traditional’ business operations such as fees and lending depositors’ cash to companies wishing to expand or families looking to buy a home. In 2022, the total assets of the financial sector in the UK amounted to a truly staggering $16.88 trillion - well over five time the aggregate output of the country’s entire economy. Those assets comprise mostly claims on other banks.
He lapped up life daringly, mastered the art of rebellion, and looked far beyond the horizon to find adventure and clam his restless soul. Just before the implacable woke crowd could ‘cancel’ him, biographer Sue Prideaux snatched Paul Gauguin from its claws. The French postimpressionist painter seemed ripe for the picking: the perfect candidate to be knocked off his pedestal, thrown from his perch, and relegated to the scrapheap of art history. It was not for a lack of trying that the über politically correct posse failed in its pursuit.
To placate its critics, the German government has temporarily reasserted control over the country’s borders. The measure is meant to stem the flow of immigrants entering the country to submit unfounded asylum claims. As of tomorrow, checks will take place on incoming traffic by roving border patrols.
The Republican campaign for the presidency is being shredded by an epic catfight between Trump groupies vying for the love and attention of their idol. Get the popcorn! Also: Kamala Harris Takes Advice from Chinese Sage and American Cheapskates Fail to Pay Up for Defence of Ukraine.
Whichever way US voters decide on election day, it’s the day after that causes most concern. A win by Donald Trump is unlikely to be contested by his opponents but promises to usher in a man who vowed to don the mantle of a dictator on his first day in office. Conversely, it is a foregone conclusion that a loss will be bitterly contested by Mr Trump.
It has all the trappings of a country - a government and parliament, army, courts, elections, passports, and a currency - but it doesn’t feature on any map other than as a terra incognita marked by a speculative broken line. However, this geographic entity has been in existence since 1991, yet the wider world stoically denies its existence. Somaliland seceded from greater Somalia in 1991 after that country’s dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, a major general who seized power in a 1969 coup, responded to local unrest by unleashing his army on the region and dismantling the economic and political power base of the Isaaq clan which had dominated the area since Medieval times.
There are changes afoot in the kingdom. They may well reshape the country to beyond recognition. For the first time in its history, women are invited to play an active role in the nation’s economy. Abuses of power for personal gain are no longer tolerated. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman...
The corona pandemic rapidly engulfing the world has led to a sudden reversal in the plight of the nation state as a concept. Rescued from well-deserved oblivion, even smaller countries that have traditionally embraced multilateralism as the only viable way to further their interests, the nation state resurfaced with an...
Ideology is merely a narrative that seeks to justify and perpetuate privilege and inequality. In his latest book, French economist Thomas Piketty (49) needs well over one thousand pages to substantiate his premise: throughout the course of human history the property-owning classes have propagated seemingly coherent and utterly believable, yet self-serving, stories that rationalise the unequal division of wealth and income – and by extension impose and maintain an orderly social stratification.
Economic growth never dies of old age. Its demise requires a clear trigger: an event or mechanism that causes the onset of a slowdown or contraction. Concerned economists have now identified twin triggers in the disconcerting spread of the corona virus and the sudden collapse of oil prices. The OECD...
Hailed as the portent of a ‘golden decade’ in the flowery language of Xinhua, the China state news agency, the Brasília Declaration promulgated at the close of the last summit of BRICS heads of state or government in Brazil barely received mention in mainstream media. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and...
‘You Are Failing Us’. From Abidjan to Zürich, and Zanzibar to Adelaide, and estimated 7.6 million concerned people took to the street to deliver that unambiguous statement to world leaders gathered in New York City for the UN Climate Action Summit. Between September 20 and 27, well over 6,000 ‘strike actions’ unfolded in 185 countries involving 820 organisations.
The ‘spitzenkandidat’ is dead. Long live the spitzenkandidat? As far as conundrums go, this was a particularly hard one for the European Parliament to consider: vote for and agree with your own demise, vote against and throw a spanner in the works. In the end, a compromise was reached.
Size matters. Two of Europe’s largest new tech firms, Spotify and Zalando, boast a combined market value of some $42 billion – a pittance in today’s world of behemoths. To put things in perspective: China’s Alibaba is worth north of $480 billion whilst the market cap of Facebook hovers around $550 billion. Apple and Amazon are close to the $1 trillion mark.
Mexican Finance minister Carlos Urzúa is not impressed, or indeed intimidated, by the recent surprise change in the outlook of the country’s sovereign credit rating from stable to negative: “This does not constitute a downgrade. The move should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt.”
To reach the millions of Mexicans ignored by the country’s banking system, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in March rolled out a pilot version of a mobile digital payment system that anyone may access free of charge. It facilitates the transfer of funds between users and the payment of bills.