The Economist BITCOIN hits the headlines when the virtual currency’s exchange rate hits new highs (or lows) against real-world monies. And so it did when the rate spiked to $900 from around $400 a week earlier, following some positive noises during a hearing on it…
TEN years ago, as he announced record orders of $19 billion of aircraft from Boeing and Airbus for the Emirates airline at the Paris Air Show, the ruler of Dubai told the world that the aviation industry was about to change. Last weekend’s Dubai Air…
OVER the next few days it will up to one man, Steven Rhodes, a federal bankruptcy judge, to decide the fate of Detroit. In July the city filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. This was challenged by unions, retirees and creditors…
DOES the world need more nuclear power or less? Seared by the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in March 2011, Japan has now taken all its commercial reactors offline. The last was powered down on September 16th. Tokyo Electric Power,…
TESLA MOTORS suddenly seems to have come unstuck. A month ago, investors and customers alike couldn’t get enough of the Californian electric-car start-up. But the brakes have now been firmly applied to the rapid acceleration in its share price, after…
EVERY two years the Tax Justice Network, a campaigning group, publishes a Financial Secrecy Index (FSI), showing which jurisdictions are friendliest towards tax evaders, money launderers and other financial ne’er-do-wells. Countries are ranked according…
FOR a country as wealthy as America, the dilapidated state of its infrastructure sure is a sorry sight. Three weeks of motoring around Spain—an economic basket-case by comparison, with over twice the unemployment and less than two-thirds the per-capita…
Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of Fiat and Chrysler, did a hand-brake U-turn this week when he told reporters on October 30th that Chrysler’s IPO would go ahead, probably by the end of the year. The notion of floating Chrysler, in which Fiat…
INVESTMENT banking’s trading businesses are a bit like the nuclear power plants of finance. When all is running smoothly, they hum along and throw out fantastic amounts of money. Yet if things go wrong, they go spectacularly wrong. And winding them…
A FEW years ago Mark Morris, a Zurich-based tax consultant with a conscience, requested a meeting with the European Commission to explain the many devious ways in which tax evaders were using shell companies and other vehicles to conceal their interest…
“LENDER of last resort” has long been in the job description of central banks, as they rediscovered with a vengeance in recent years. But after heroically lending billions of newly created dollars, euros and pounds to banks to stave off collapse…
Britain, like many other countries, has gone through a period of huge deindustrialisation. Nearly 9m people were employed in British manufacturing in 1966; by 2011 fewer than 3m were. Manufacturing’s share of the economy is around 10% today, half…
SOLAR cells were once a bespoke product, reserved for satellites and military use. In 1977 a watt of solar generating capacity cost $77. That has now come down to about 80 cents, and solar power is beginning to compete with the more expensive sort of…
THE long arm of American justice continues to bludgeon Swiss financiers who stand accused of aiding tax evasion. It emerged this week that Raoul Weil (pictured above), a former head of the wealth-management division of UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank…
A RAFT of new tablets was launched on October 22nd, including Nokia’s first Windows tablet, the Lumia 2520, and Microsoft’s Surface 2, both designed before Microsoft bought Nokia’s mobile-devices business. (Apple was also preparing to wow by unveiling…