But an Austrian firm shows that it is possible to make money making steel - even in Europe Lush Forests, cowbells ringing and a fairy-tale castle make the alpine foothills above Linz seem alive with "The Sound of Music". Down in the valley, however, the Austrian city's skyline is dotted with piles of coal, smoke-belching funnels and the blackened silhouettes of blast furnaces, the home of Voesta..
Workholism is a recent development Americans like to work hard whereas Europeans prefer a more leisurely life. That is the widely held perception of the continental divide in business culture. But it has not always been the case; 40 years ago, there was precious little difference between the two. In his new book, "Spending Time" The Most Valuable Resource", Daniel Hamermesh, an economist, examin..
Democrats should drop it Mitch Mcconnell is not known for his views on racial justice. But when asked last week whether he thought African-Americans should receive restitution for slavery and the decades of lawful discrimination that followed it, the Republican Senate leader's response was sound. He was against the idea, he said, in part for practical reasons - for how would the recipients of co..
As New York's incarceration rate falls, the city is casting around for smaller jails to copy On June 7th Layleen Polance, a 27-year-old transgender woman, was found dead in her cell at Rikers Island Jail. She was being held on $500 bail for a misdemeanour prostitution offence and the lowest-level drug charge, and she wa being kept in solitary confinement for fighting. The death was not unusual i..
And there are plenty more misleading words it should ban The European Union gets a lot of flak. All right, it isn't literally blasted with anti-aircraft fire, but you know what we mean. One ongoing battle (OK, nobody died) involves the use of words. Earlier this year, the European Parliament's agriculture committee voted to prohibit the terms "burger", "sausage", "escalope" and "steak" to descri..
After an opposition victory in Istanbul, rumours swirl of a ruling-party split What did he think he was playing at? When Turkey's autocractic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, strong-armed his country's electoral watchdog into annulling the result of a mayoral election his party had lost in March, it looked like an obvious blunder. Surely, many observers thought, the people of Istanbul would furi..
A clutch of states with Democratic governments are having a go Brian Boquist, an Oregon state senator and fugitive of sorts, does not take his pursuers lightly. "Send bachelors and come heavily armed," he warned from his hideout, which is allegedly in Idaho. "I'm not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon," he added. Since June 20th Mr Boquist and the rest of his Republican coll..
An unwanted war is not necessarily an unlikely one The facility 30km (19 miles) north-west of the Iranian city of Natanz look like a humdrum industrial site. Only the anti-aircraft guns hint at what goes on eight metres (26 feet) underground. For over a decade Iranian scientists there have fed uranium hexafluoride into centrifuges that spin at twice the speed of sound so as to sift out uranium-2..
A clutch of Democratic-led states are doing their best to make up for Washington's inaction Is American inaction on climate change going to render bits of the planet uninhabitable by 2100? Or will American grit and ingenuity lower the risks? There is evidence for both views. While the White House was issuing an edict seeking to offer relief to coal-fired power stations last week, New York's stat..
Negotiation, not confrontation, is the way to stop the mullahs from getting the bomb For nearly four years Iran's path to a nuclear weapon was blocked. The deal it signed with America and other powers in 2015 limited its nuclear programme to civilian uses, such as power-generation, and subjected them to the toughest inspection regime in history. The experts agreed that Iran was complying and tha..
The world's biggest international financial centre faces its toughest test The world has a handful of great commercial hubs. Silicon Valley dominates technology. For electronics, head to Shenzhen. The home of luxury is Paris and the capital of outsourcing is Bangalore, in India. One of the mightiest clusters of all is London, which hosts the globe's largest international financial centre. Within..
Economics stress and demographic change are weakening a symbiotic relationship Of late the world's older democracies have begun to look more vulnerable than venerable. America seems destined for a constitutional showdown between the executive and the legislature. Brexit has mired Britain in a constitutional morass of its own. Such troubles could be mistaken for a comeuppance. In recent years pol..
Are branches assets or fossils? By almost any measure, America's biggest banks are behemoths. JPMorgan Chase's balance-sheet weights in at $2.7trn, Bank of America's (BOfA) at $2.4trn. Citigroup tips the scales at almost $2trn and Wells Fargo at $1.9trn. Their combined market value is nearly $1trn. Last year they raked in over $100bn after tax. Yet by one gauge, the titans are curiously tiny. To..
A Nobel prizewinner on when investment horizons matter Finance theorists are, as everybody knows, unworldly people who can scarcely tie their shoelaces, still less change a car type. Robert Merton confounds this stereotype. As he talks amiably at the London office of Dimensional Fund Advisors (he is the firm's resident scientist"), you sense that here is a man who could fix a flat in no time. He..
Though it looked good in trials, social interventions are much harder to make work at scale A year and a half ago The Economist wrote about a promising approach to cutting poverty in Bangladesh ("On their bikes", January 27th 2018). RDRS, a charity, was offering small loans to more than 100,000 poor farmers on the condition that they migrated temporarily to a city for work. Everything seemed to ..