Xi Jinping risks setting off another trade war - The Economist (Full Access)   

China’s leaders are obsessed with lithium-ion batteries, electric cars and solar panels. These sorts of technologies will, Xi Jinping has proclaimed, become “pillars of the economy”. His government is spending big to ensure this happens—meaning, in the years to come, that his ambitions will be felt across the world. A manufacturing export boom could very well lead to a trade war.

Mr Xi’s manufacturing obsession is explained by the need to offset China’s property slump, which is dragging on economic growth. Sales by the country’s 100 largest real-estate developers fell by 17% in 2023, and overall investment in residential buildings dropped by 8%. After a decade in which capital spending in property outstripped economic growth, officials now hope that manufacturing can pick up the slack. State-owned banks—corporate China’s main source of financing—are funnelling cash to industrial firms. In return for an extension of pandemic-era tax breaks and carve-outs for green industries, exporters in powerhouse provinces have been told to expand production. During the first 11 months of 2023 capital spending on smelting metals, manufacturing vehicles and making electrical equipment rose by 10%, 18% and 34%, respectively.

Such developments will be prompting flashbacks among veteran Western policymakers. China’s rise was accompanied by an epochal shift in global trade. In the decade that followed the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, its exports rose by more than 460%. China became the number-one target for accusations of dumping—selling goods abroad at lower prices than at home—in industries including chemicals, metals and textiles. Although low-cost goods were great news for consumers, they were less welcome for some rich-world industrial workers. It later became fashionable to blame the “China shock”, which led to lay-offs in affected industrial areas, for contributing to Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

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Heart attacks, strokes, dementia—can Biden and Trump beat the odds? - The Economist (Full Access)   

AGE, THEY say, brings wisdom. But it also brings decrepitude. When the latter begins to outweigh the former, perhaps it is time for even the most ambitious to consider retiring into slippered ease.

If either Joe Biden or Donald Trump has contemplated such retirement, though, they have clearly rejected the idea. Instead, both are proposing themselves as candidates for second stints doing one of the most gruelling jobs on the planet. Mr Trump is now 77 and will be 78 come the general election. Mr Biden is 81, and would be 86 at the end of his term, if he won.

The most popular scientific explanation of ageing, disposable-soma theory, holds that natural selection hones youth at the expense of age, since this best serves the task of passing genes to the next generation. In both candidates’ cases, that has happened. Mr Biden fathered four children and has seven grandchildren; Mr Trump fathered five, and has ten. But the evolutionary flip-side, in the view of many commentators, is becoming apparent in slips, verbal and physical, being made by both, but especially by Mr Biden. Perhaps, some suggest, the slippers should beckon after all.

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Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice sparks outrage at last - The Economist (Full Access)   

“WE’VE JUST got to trust in the British justice system and everything will be alright.” So says a wretched Lee Castleton (whose character is played by Will Mellor) in “Mr Bates v The Post Office”, a new ITV drama about hundreds of British sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted in an accounting scandal between 1999 and 2015. British justice did not make everything all right for Mr Castleton. Far from it.

In 2004, when “Horizon”, a new accounting system operated by Fujitsu, a Japanese technology company, showed a loss of £25,859 ($47,397) at Mr Castleton’s branch in Bridlington, Yorkshire, the Post Office demanded Mr Castleton make up the shortfall. He refused; it later became clear that faulty software had generated errors which he was unable to correct. Mr Castleton took his case to court, where he represented himself. A judge ordered him to pay costs of £321,000, which bankrupted him.

His was one of several hundred cases between 1999 and 2015 in which sub-postmasters were wrongly accused. More than 700 were convicted of crimes including fraud and theft; hundreds more were chased for money in civil litigation. Many were made bankrupt. Four committed suicide. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent body that reviews suspected miscarriages of criminal justice, has described the scandal as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice” it has ever seen and “the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history”.

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As Houthi missiles block the Suez, drought depletes the Panama Canal - The Economist (Full Access)   

IT HAS BEEN an unhappy new year in the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Houthi rebels began attacking vessels passing into the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandab Strait in early December. Trade volumes through the Suez Canal have dropped by 40% as ships are diverted around the Cape of Good Hope. Trade through the Panama Canal, the second-busiest man-made shipping lane, has also declined by 30% since November. But while the Suez’s problems are geopolitical, those in Panama are climatic. The lakes that feed the canal are drying up, thanks to annual droughts which appear to be growing worse as the climate warms. This makes the series of locks connecting the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific via Gatun Lake too shallow to allow the passage of the largest container ships.

Other Latin American governments spy opportunity. In normal times the canal carries some 5% of global maritime trade. And it is lucrative, generating some $2.5bn for the Panamanian treasury in the 2022/23 financial year, about 3% of GDP. Politicians in several other countries with both Pacific and Atlantic coastlines are either building or mulling infrastructure projects that might lure traffic and revenue away from Panama. The most viable alternatives are land-based, with containers unloaded from ships onto trains or trucks at one port and transported cross-country, before being reloaded onto a waiting ship on the other side.

Mexico’s Interoceanic Corridor (CIIT) is the closest to completion. It has been discussed for decades, but is finally being built as part of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s infrastructure agenda. Its central component is the modernisation of a 300‑km (190-mile) railway that runs across southern Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. The ports at either end—Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz—are being revamped to expand capacity and speed up customs checks. Most of the railway construction is complete and passenger services have started. Work on the ports has not been finished, delaying the start of coast-to-coast freight journeys. Mexico’s government plans to launch the CIIT’s second and third rail lines, which will carry freight, later in 2024.

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