Precautionism; The quest for resilience involves reaching for facts, friends and fortification When covid-19 led to a scramble for face masks, Lloyd Armbrust saw America’s shortage as “a really dumb problem to have”. But after his company’s first face mask came off the production line in Austin, Texas, he faced problems of his own. A...

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A continent learns to hustle. After a long slumber, Europe’s animal spirits are stirring The idea of a Europe hostile to entrepreneurs would once have seemed laughable. At its 17th-century peak the Dutch East India Company’s appetite for capital was so voracious that it demanded the invention of the public stockmarket. Investors then did not...

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The Democrats’ social-spending package cannot repair the American Dream; Social mobility has dropped precipitously In the 1940s Joseph Biden senior fell from early wealth to near-destitution. He moved his young family in with his in-laws as he scrabbled for work in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before re-establishing middle-class ease as a used-car salesman in Delaware. For all the...

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Enter third-wave economics; How the pandemic reshaped the dismal science As part of his plan for socialism in the early 1970s, Salvador Allende created Project Cybersyn. The Chilean president’s idea was to offer bureaucrats unprecedented insight into the country’s economy. Managers would feed information from factories and fields into a central database. In an operations room...

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Supply chains are adapting, not failing Much of the time most people do not think about the complex choreography that makes modern shopping possible. You just click and wait—and not too long, mind—for a package or three to arrive on your doorstep. Over the past few months, however, the world’s supply chains have elbowed their...

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We test three prevailing hypotheses about American business Concerns about the health of American business are many and varied. Chief executives are chastised for their apparent short-termism. Their companies are berated for fetishising shareholders over everyone and everything else. Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, a maker of electric cars, grumbles about a surfeit of business-school...

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Will prolonged disruptions shift the pattern of trade? A giant ship wedged across the Suez canal, record-breaking shipping rates, armadas of vessels waiting outside ports, covid-induced shutdowns: container shipping has rarely been as dramatic as it has in 2021. The average cost of shipping a standard large container (a 40-foot-equivalent unit, or feu) has surpassed $10,000, some...

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Resilience comes not from autarky but from diverse sources of supply For the best part of a week, the Suez canal was blocked by a 200,000-tonne metaphor. The Ever Given is not just one of the world’s biggest container ships, it is also the emblem of a backlash that accuses globalisation of going too far....

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Despite a recent bout of weakness, the dollar still looks strong. Consider the Big Mac index, our lighthearted measure of currency valuation. Of the currencies of the 20 trading partners studied by America’s Treasury, our measure suggests that all have gained relative to the greenback since July, but that all apart from the Swiss franc...

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The revolutionary theory of the nature of light which won Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel prize for physics went on to remake the world. Oliver Morton surveys a century of innovation. Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel prize for physics in 1922. The temporal anomaly embodied in that sentence was not, alas, one of the...

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Save for a few industries such as health care, it is safe to assume that investment in innovation will plummet during the covid-19 pandemic. It usually does in times of crisis. Venture capital (vc) will also dry up as everyone keeps their heads down and tries to preserve cash. In 2007-09, vc funding in America fell by...

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The world has been turned on its head thanks to COVID19 and as with most negative things, such as wars and other pandemics, there is generally a hidden benefit that appears once the crisis is over. The fallout from the Coronavirus is already beginning to demonstrate new ways of working and bringing about changes to...

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It is a do or die decade ahead for big oil companies. With an evermore energy and eco-conscious society things have to change and because oil companies are so large change is often slow and the consequences considerable… Read more

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The Economist writes that back in 1900, only one in three cars on American roads ran on volts. Then oil began gushing out of Texas. Cheaper than batteries, and easier to top up, petrol fuelled the rise of mass-produced automobiles. Cost and worries about limited range have kept electric vehicles (evs) in a niche ever...

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Should the rest of the world look again at America regarding Household debt? Seeing that it has been shrinking relative to the economy ever since it scuppered the financial system… However, since 2012, corporate debt has been doing the opposite. According to the Federal Reserve, the ratio of non-financial business debt to GDP has grown...

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The Economist suggest that if you want to go unicorn spotting, you must not hesitate to take a turn around the brand-new park on top of San Francisco’s Transbay bus terminal. This is not because it is perched on a spectacular, undulating building that itself looks quite like a mythical beast to the likes of...

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The Economist means that as life expectancy increases, it is accompanied by the rise of chronic diseases, and this further pushes up healthcare spending across the world. As result, it has become clear to many policymakers and healthcare providers that a business-as-usual approach to cost containment is no longer sustainable. To continue delivering accessible, high-quality...

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The Economist poses the question: Does it matter that the labour market is so sex-segregated? To formulate an answer, it shares statistics that reveal how  every year, a few women become the first of their sex to hold a particular job – and that that is in fact, currently, no longer the case. This article examines...

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According to the contentions of this article by The Economist, Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it. Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal elites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people. Elsewhere a...

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As a fact, all of the plastic produced since the 1950s, less than 10% has been recycled. The vast majority ends up being dumped, most of it in landfill. Some is left to litter the natural environment, where it can get into rivers and wash out into the sea.The plastic-waste problem will worsen before it...

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As the Economist means, the geopolitics of energy is all about the world’s insatiable thirst for oil. But as this article means, this notion of “scarcity” is now coming to an end, in the midst of major economical change. Furthermore and notwithstanding the other major, inevitable issue: Global warming… Read more

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Fully autonomous vehicles are just around the corner, according to The Economist. But they are not quite ready to operate without human supervision, yet. Uber, as a company that has made ride-hailing commonplace in more than 600 cities in 82 countries, have made rapid progress in recent years, and can now be seen on the roads...

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It is contended that giant internet firms such as Google and Facebook like to view their rapid rise as the product of their founders’ brilliance. Others argue that their success is more a result of lucky timing and network effects – the economic forces that tend to make bigger firms even bigger. But often forgotten,...

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The Economist means that business gurus might do well in copying Martin Luther King’s efforts insofar as changing the face of the Catholic Church. How exactly medieval Christianity and the world of management theory can be correlated with one another, becomes clear in this daring article. In summary of the case made: The church was ripe...

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The Economist reports that a group of elite firms has established a sustained lead – and it’s not a good thing. This article is centered around the “Schumpeterian mechanism”, which states that successful businesses are, as a matter of fact, standing on unsteady ground.  And while it’s true that today’s leader is tomorrow’s failure as per the principle...

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According to the Economist,  the world’s second-biggest technology firm is facing an uphill battle. After the former owner of Samsung had ordered a significant number of smartphones to be destroyed in an attempt to reverse the unfortunate effects of negative reports from unhappy Business partner-customers – Samsung thought that it had managed to save itself...

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The Economist combines psychology and business in a brilliant and thought provoking manner here. This article expounds on Carl Jung’s original 1921 introvert-extrovert theory in the light of the modern day business arena, by showing how the empowerment of introverts can help a company thrive.  A refreshing discussion that remains mostly untouched, is finally addressed...

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As based on a new report by Deloitte coined “Global Human Capital Trends”, the Economist suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached a new high in the business arena. Although the concept of teamwork is as old as civilization itself, the growing emphasis seems to be resultant of a whole new approach on conventional...

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While the days of old-fashioned, autocratic imperial CEOs have long gone, a new and much less exuberant authority figure has emerged within companies: the imperial CFO (Chief Financial Officer). These modern day “co-pilots” – as the only corporate officers other than the boss who are able to monitor every corner of an organisation – now play a growing role...

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As the Economist says, a pair of straight and gleaming teeth makes for a beautiful smile. But how many people who have undergone a little dental maintenance realize that they may have some of the first products of a new industrial revolution inside their mouths? Who would’ve though that if you combine 3D printing and...

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