Just how bad is it in Gaza? - The Economist | Is Harvard Business School too woke? - The Economist | An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West - The Economist | Has Team Transitory really won America’s inflation debate?

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Just how bad is it in Gaza? - The Economist (Full Access)    BEFORE THE war, Gaza was something of a paradox. It was one of the most aid-dependent places in the world: repeated wars and an Israeli-Egyptian blockade crushed the private sector. Yet the sprawling humanitarian operation that cared for 80% of 2.2m Gazans relied on the private sector. If a charity needed flour, it rang up a trader in Gaza, who called a mill in Israel or the West Bank. Aid workers might handle the last-mile delivery to bakeries and families—but businesses took care of the rest. It may sound absurd to talk about supply chains in the context of a war that has, in just three months, killed 1% of Gaza’s population and damaged around one-fifth of its buildings. South Africa has accused Israel of genocide. This is a highly contentious claim. Nonetheless the deepening humanitarian crisis is among the worst of the 21st century. Aid agencies say that, if nothing changes, more Palestinians in Gaza will die this year from hunger and disease than from Israeli bombardment. But logistics are part of the problem—and the solution. Israel expects the un to oversee aid efforts. So does Hamas, the militant group that has operated a ruinous and cynical regime in Gaza since 2007. That is unrealistic. Averting a famine will require Israel to facilitate the flow of commercial goods and, perhaps, to provide supplies directly. “Aid alone will not be enough,” says Philippe Lazzarini, head of the un Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which helps Palestinian refugees. “We need the private sector.” Getting private businesses working could ease the distribution bottlenecks and allow for the import of more aid. unrWa says it could then shift to providing cash assistance rather than just handing out meagre rations. People could use that money to buy food. Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Is Harvard Business School too woke? - The Economist (Full Access)    It has been an inhospitable winter in Boston. Following the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University on January 2nd, her interim replacement said he could not recall “a period of comparable tension” at the institution. Ms Gay was ousted after a plagiarism scandal erupted over her academic work. But her position had been precarious for months; some donors were upset that she seemed to tolerate students’ antisemitic outbursts. For conservatives, Ms Gay, who was Harvard’s first black and second female president, was also a symbol of liberal elites’ fixation on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The ostensibly hard-headed sorts who attend Harvard’s management school, and that school’s ties to harder-headed corporate America, might be expected to insulate it from wider campus convulsions. Not quite. Businesses too are facing a DEI reckoning. As a consequence, Harvard Business School (HBS) is facing pressure on two fronts. Students at HBS are the holders of the winning tickets in the lottery of American capitalism. On average, they arrive with five years of work experience, nearly half of them from prestigious consulting or financial firms. Two years studying for the 115-year-old institution’s MBA degree all but guarantees a comfortable professional perch. Some do much better still. The fortunes of HBS alumni have helped build its reputation and, thanks to their generous donations, stock its coffers (combined with annual income from MBA tuition fees, executive education, a publishing business and online courses, in 2022 the school made $966m in revenue). Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West - The Economist (Full Access)    IS china about to unleash another wave of deindustrialisation on the rich world? About 1m American manufacturing workers lost their jobs to Chinese competition in 1997-2011, as the country integrated into the global trading system and began shipping cheap goods overseas. This “China shock” has since been blamed for everything from rising deaths among working-class Americans to the election of Donald Trump. The rejection of liberal attitudes to trade also explains why politicians embrace industrial policy today. Now China’s carmakers are enjoying an astonishing rise. That stokes fears of another ruinous shock. In fact, the successes of Chinese cars should be celebrated, not feared. Just five years ago China shipped only a quarter as many cars as Japan, then the world’s biggest exporter. This week the Chinese industry claimed to have exported over 5m cars in 2023, exceeding the Japanese total. China’s biggest carmaker, BYD, sold 0.5m electric vehicles (EVs) in the fourth quarter, leaving Tesla in the dust. Chinese EVs are so snazzy, whizzy and—most important—cheap that the constraint on their export today is the scarcity of vessels for shipping them. As the world decarbonises, demand will rise further. By 2030 China could double its share of the global market, to a third, ending the dominance of the West’s national champions, especially in Europe. This time it will be even easier for politicians to pin the blame for any Western job losses on Chinese foul play. A frosty geopolitical climate will feed the sentiment that subsidised production unfairly puts Western workers on the scrapheap. And there have certainly been subsidies. Since the launch of its “Made in China” agenda in 2014, China has brazenly disregarded global trading rules, showering handouts on its carmakers. It is hard to be precise about the value of the underpriced loans, equity injections, purchase subsidies and government contracts Chinese firms enjoy. But by one estimate, total public spending on the industry was in the region of a third of EV sales at the end of the 2010s. These subsidies come on top of the ransacking of technology from joint ventures with Western carmakers and Western and South Korean battery-makers. Continued here � � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Has Team Transitory really won America's inflation debate? - The Economist (Full Access)    In late 2021 Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, called for the retirement of “transitory” as a description for the inflation afflicting America. The word had become a bugbear, having been taken by many to mean that the inflation which had bubbled up early in the year would fade away as supply shortages improved. As the months went by, not only were price increases accelerating, they were broadening out—from used cars to air fares, clothing, home furnishing and more. The economists who had warned that excessive stimulus and overheating demand, rather than production snarls, would make inflation a more serious problem seemed prescient. In the shorthand of the day, it looked as if “Team Persistent” had defeated “Team Transitory”. Fast-forward to the present, and something strange has happened. The Fed, along with most other major central banks, has acted as if Team Persistent was right. It jacked up short-term interest rates from a floor of 0% to more than 5% in the space of 14 months. Sure enough, inflation has slowed sharply. But here is the odd thing: the opposite side of the debate is now celebrating. “We in Team Transitory can rightly claim victory,” declared Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, in a recent essay. What is going on? For starters, the term “transitory” was long misunderstood. The narrowest definition, and the one that investors and politicians latched onto, was a temporal one—namely, that inflation would recede as swiftly as it had emerged. Yet another way of thinking about it was that inflation would come to heel as the post-pandemic economy got back to normal, a process that has played out over the course of years, not months. Continued here

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