How Putin Turned a Western Boycott Into a Bonanza - The New York Times   

By Paul Sonne and Rebecca R. Ruiz. Produced by Nico Chilla. Dec. 17, 2023

Soon after Russian troops invaded his country, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made a plea to Western companies: “Leave Russia,” he said. “Make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny.”

Hundreds of companies answered the call. Politicians and activists predicted that it would help strangle the Russian economy and undermine the Kremlin’s war effort.

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Hong Kong Bankers’ Uneasy Dance With Property Tycoons - Bloomberg   

Hong Kong dazzles with its soaring skyscrapers and swanky shopping malls, and the city has its bankers to thank. Over the years, landlords routinely relied on banks to finance ambitious projects and expected good relationships to remain. But lenders are getting nervous.

Next year, close to HK$200 billion ($25.6 billion) of bank loans taken out by Hong Kong’s property developers will be due, and only 15% of them have been — or are close to being — refinanced, according to HSBC Holdings Plc estimates.

Whether banks will continue lending to the business elites has become a hot issue, as commercial real estate woes plague the world’s biggest cities. In late August, New World Development Co. halted a brutal slide in its bond prices after saying it had secured HK$30 billion of low-interest bank loans. The selling had been triggered by a little-known blogger who accused the builder of borrowing at 11% to 12% in private markets.

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Why the West needs to stop the global rise of revisionism - The Economist   

IN RECENT WEEKS pessimism about the war in Ukraine has gripped Western media and opinion-makers. The Ukrainian counter-offensive over the summer and autumn yielded disillusionment. Leaks suggest that Western officials have broached the subject of possible peace talks with Russia with Ukrainian counterparts. Trumpian Republicans are blocking American military assistance to Ukraine.

That a stalemate on the battlefield would feed pessimism is not surprising. But the argument for scaling back support for Ukraine is premised on framing the war there as fairly isolated, and its loss of territory as tragic and unfair but neither existential for the West nor unique in modern times. This perspective gives the West an option on when and how to administer its help to Ukraine, and when to scale it back or stop. This logic is wrong and the perspective—convenient as it may be—leaves out a bigger and more disturbing picture.

Far from being an isolated conflict, Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has led to a wave of revisionism in international politics. Azerbaijan’s lightning war against the ethnic-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and Hamas’s attack on Israel may be different in scale, but they have the same cause: the weakening of guarantees and provisions that maintained the balance of power, encouraging previously constrained players to challenge this balance. The logic of revisionism suggests that each failure by the West to establish deterrence and each tactical retreat—in Ukraine, Syria, Azerbaijan or the Middle East—is another step on the way to dismantling its geopolitical dominance.

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Rishi Sunak’s strategic genius - The Economist   

The conservative party has changed Britain profoundly during its 13 years in office. One such change is that it has made the absence of chaos seem like competence and the previously unthinkable seem acceptable. A prime minister should not be a relief because he did not blow up the financial markets within a month, yet Rishi Sunak was just that. Governments with large majorities should not lose votes in the early stages of legislation, yet the fact that the new Rwanda bill passed a second reading this week was greeted as a triumph of Tory party management. It is not normal for a British government to suspend human-rights legislation, ignore international law or set Parliament in opposition to the judiciary, yet moderate Tory MPs cravenly go along with it. Britain needs stability. The Rwanda row underlines that neither Mr Sunak nor the Tories can provide it.

The Rwanda policy itself is both impractical and unprincipled. Boris Johnson’s government struck an agreement to deport to Rwanda asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain on small boats. Their claims would be heard in the African country; if successful, the claimants would be settled in Rwanda, too. That prospect would, the scheme’s backers say, deter people from illegally crossing the English Channel.

Yet no plane has yet taken off; the plan was declared unlawful by Britain’s Supreme Court on November 15th on the basis that Rwanda was not a safe destination to send asylum-seekers. Britain has thus far paid Rwanda £240m ($302m, or 2.3% of Rwandan GDP) without dispatching a single migrant to Kigali. Although illegal immigration is a genuine concern and many other governments like the idea of processing refugees offshore, this scheme is unusually mean. The government’s desire to deport people to a penurious police state that British courts have found to be unsafe is shameful.

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