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.
Brazil’s all-powerful economy minister Paulo Guedes (69) looks south for inspiration. He has long mulled a Pinochet-style approach to economic management. Mr Guedes is determined to introduce a set of contemporary monetarist policies similar to those that, he says, saved Chile from bankruptcy some forty-odd years ago after a disastrous flirt with socialism – not quite unlike Brazil’s own dalliance with leftist policies.
In Brazil, spending on pensions absorbs fully one third of federal tax revenue. For close to forty years, successive presidents have promised, and failed, to reform the country’s complex pension system which, it is often noted, combines welfare state generosity with pioneer market funding and represents a resilient leftover from the corporatist development model pursued from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.
Alas, literature it is not. Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is, at times, an awkward read held together by the vacuous phraseology much in vogue with upper-management types. After all, what is ‘linear thinking’ and why should it be avoided? Conversely, why must leaders learn how to navigate ‘exponentially disruptive change’, and will they know how to identify such a dreadful phenomenon? However, and thankfully, this is a rather slim volume running just 288 pages. It is also a rather important tome and packs quite a punch, albeit probably not in the way intended. In a nutshell, the message is: society better be prepared to deal with smart machines, powered by artificial intelligence and other marvels of technology.
It takes the gumption of a hero to identify as a socialist in the United States, and something of a miracle to get elected to public office under a red banner. But that is what 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did when she pulled off a massive upset in the 2018 midterm elections, beating incumbent Joe Crawley in the primaries and thus ejecting the chair of the Democratic Caucus from the House of Representatives.
The current plight of tech giant Huawei is indicative of the troubles large Chinese corporates may experience as they seek to augment their footprint and become global players. The poster boy of China’s technological prowess, Huawei Technologies’ corporate growth mirrored the country’s economic ascendancy: the Shenzhen-based company quintupled its revenue in barely ten years to around $90 billion (2017). Since mid-last year, Huawei churns out more smartphones than Apple. The company is expected to overtake Samsung in the next twelve months, becoming the world’s largest manufacturer of handsets.
Stumbling or sleepwalking towards the exit of the European Union, Great Britain has put its national fate and destiny into the hands of voters who, for over forty years, have been spoon-fed a sheer interminable succession of half truths and outright lies about a body nearly everybody loves to blame for whatever ills the nation is suffering.
He had absolutely no idea that his creation would be hijacked by big business, encourage tunnel vision, and spread misinformation. Vinton Cerf just wanted to build a medium that allowed for the sharing of useful information. To that end, Mr Cerf and his colleague Bob Kahn at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency came up with both the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in the early 1970s: technologies that underpin – and made possible – the internet.
In November, the first high-speed railway line of Africa entered into service, linking Tangier and Casablanca via the country’s capital Rabat. Over the entire 350-kilometre stretch, the ‘Al Boraq’ (named after a mythical winged creature) slashes journey times by more than half to barely two hours between its two termini.
Shaping innovative ways to help implement, and deliver on, the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the Geneva-based SDG Lab seeks to bring together multiple actors to bundle and deploy their expertise, and exploit opportunities that offer shared benefits and add real value. In existence since June 1, 2017, SDG Lab is small and nimble as it engages with multiple stakeholders with a foot- or toehold in what is, arguably, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
Standing on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution which promises to fuse the physical, biological, and virtual (digital) worlds, the capitalism that Karl Marx dissected and analysed seems to be running out of steam – at least in its present form. Though corporate earnings reach into the stratosphere, Adam Smith had already observed in the eighteenth century that the ‘rate of profit is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin’.