Talking Points
- Thais protested their strongman-in-a-suit and part-time monarch
- China allowed a small group to browse beyond the Great Firewall
- K-pop sensation BTS won big with its management agency IPO
- Nagorno-Karabakh conflict widened as Azerbaijan targeted Armenia
- Crunch Brexit talks hit a (Britain-sized) snag
- Climate change has killed half the coral on the Great Barrier Reef
- Tech platforms stirred conspiracies by blocking an anti-Biden story
- Google instructed its employees to avoid discussing anti-trust
- Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation vote is set for next week
- Farmers seized a dam from soldiers in drought-stricken Mexico
Deep Dive
Europe is facing a second wave of coronavirus which, by all counts, is more rampant than the first. Whereas Southeast Asia has (for the most part) suppressed Covid-19 and gotten on with it. Where did these two regions diverge?
Coronavirus takes a EuroTrip
It was a summer to love in Europe.
Italy, having been laid low by the first wave of coronavirus earlier in the year, had emerged from lockdown – scarred but whole. The wail of ambulances in Barcelona and Madrid was replaced by the joyous hum of outdoor markets and bars. In Greece – which acquitted itself in suppressing the virus – legions of pale tourists returned to splay themselves across the islands (and keep dermatologists in business for the next few decades). There were poignant reminders aplenty, like Bayern Munich saluting to an empty Estádio da Luz, but life had found a familiar tempo. Which is exactly what health authorities were worried about. Whether you put it down to a few too many Campari spritzes, or the base human need for community, it's clear that Europeans let their guard down. And it wasn't just the people either. Several major eurozone nations abruptly dropped their restrictions ( for economic balm of tourist dollars ); moves which communicated little more than "we're out of the woods".
But, as the last several weeks of data has revealed, they are most certainly not out of the woods. Having for months offered itself as the foil to America's disastrous response to Covid-19, Europe is now reporting 100,000 cases per day. In France, Italy, and Spain, the daily number of new cases has far surpassed the peak of the first wave. French President Emmanuel Macron has conceded that the virus is "everywhere". Central European nations that had promptly shuttered their economies and avoided the worst of the virus the first time around are now watching case numbers soar. As the European Commission's Vice-President Margaritis Schinas said, "While the evolution of the pandemic is getting back to March levels, our state of preparedness has not".
Now European lawmakers are facing the agonising choice of whether to lock down their economies once again. Doing so would undeniably exacerbate the damage – generational damage – that the coronavirus has inflicted on living standards. But enacting half-measures could spell disaster for entire national healthcare systems. Macron, who said "our caregivers are exhausted" is hedging his bets with a curfew. Madrid too has locked back down, but still reported 20,000 cases last week. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been wedged by the opposition (and some within his own party) on the need for a "circuit-breaker" lockdown . Even the World Health Organisation is going cold on lockdowns these days.
At least there is one positive change to note – no serious individual is holding up the Swedish model (of eschewing lockdowns completely) as the paragon of balance between economic and healthcare imperatives. Sweden has the worst growth rate of any Nordic country, and its highest fatality rate!
Look East for inspiration
Compare all of this to East and Southeast Asia, which has mostly returned to a state of normality . The beer is flowing from Taipei to Hanoi, but the coronavirus is not hanging over Taiwanese or Vietnamese heads like it did over Europe during the summer of blissful ignorance. Why? Perhaps it's because many Asian nations, having battled the coronavirus early in the year, pursued strategies that suppressed the virus to acceptably low levels and put in place systems to manage future outbreaks. The advantage of having experienced SARS nearly two decades ago is unquantifiable but also undeniable. Many countries in the region learned on their feet as this outbreak worsened. The obvious place to start is China, which despite being the most populous country on Earth reported just 24 coronavirus cases on Thursday.
The global coronavirus pandemic emerged from Wuhan in the dying months of 2019 and pushed the country to the brink of ruin in 2020. Lockdowns that were then considered draconian now seem enlightened – through a massive allocation of state health resources China suppressed the virus to a far greater degree than its Western counterparts. Decision makers were willing to reintroduce targeted lockdowns, as they did over summer in the capital, to stay ahead of the spread. Even today, as an outbreak emerged in Qingdao , authorities shut the entire city down and moved to test the entire population of 9m people within a week. Not all countries have the political steel (let alone sheer human resources) required to do this, but China is not alone in its success. Taiwan sealed itself off from the outside world and is reporting single-digit cases each day. South Korea, which kept its borders open even as the outbreak accelerated, implemented a sweeping testing and tracing regime that allowed it to avoid a full lockdown. It too is faring far better today than Europe.
But other Asian countries with far inferior healthcare systems than either of these have also gotten through largely unscathed. Vietnam poured its resources into targeted testing – focusing on high-risk individuals and apartment blocks with known cases. Cambodia and Thailand responded in a way that far better-resourced countries failed to consider: focusing on community health . Volunteers spread public health messages into communities that state health authorities would have struggled to reach. Simple messaging about transmission risks and avoidance measures, communicated by actual humans within the community, may just be be more effective than all those multimillion dollar outsourced TV ad campaigns!
The common thread through all of these success stories is a rigorous system of contact tracing which complements community health measures. European nations must now swim upstream – reinforcing and scaling up their responses as the virus sweeps through the community. They'd do well to follow Southeast Asia's example.
Worldlywise
Golden dusk
After a mammoth five year trial that has captivated Greece, the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn has been adjudged a criminal organisation, and its leaders have been handed lengthy jail terms. Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the 62-year-old self-styled führer was slapped with a 13-year sentence, while dozens of other former Golden Dawn lawmakers and supporters received sentences ranging from 5- to 12-years for murder, attempted murder, and directing a criminal organisation. It's a righteous blow against a group that would go on to inspire the swell of fascist-lite parties that have shifted European politics over the last decade.
Tens of thousands of Athenians had flocked to the courthouse to celebrate the result. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis tweeted, "This verdict marks the end of a traumatic period in Greece's history" – although that's a bit rich considering his party used Golden Dawn to fend off Syriza during the chaotic days of the debt crisis.
Greece has long tolerated the fascists and fantasists who draw their inspiration from the country's military junta of 1967-74. The severe, future-sapping austerity measures of the Greek debt crisis reified the grievance politics of such people, and created a dangerous disconnect between Brussels (Berlin, really) and Greece. Many fascists rode this wave of discontent , but none so successfully as Golden Dawn, which had been attacking the most visible sign of EU integration – immigrants – for decades. Fascists all over (including today in some of the world's powerful countries) inflame a sense of shame in their zealots, a feeling that is easily channelled into violence. Golden Dawn were violent – notably so.
Their gangs of street-fighters, some in uniform, would raid neighbourhoods with large refugee or migrant populations to crack skulls with baseball bats and poles. On a number of occasions, their victims were stabbed to death, the most prominent of them being the anti-fascist rapper Pavlov Fyssas . All political movements with fascist tendencies use violence against their targets (whether they be racial, ethnic or religious minorities, refugees, or the LGBTQ+ community) but Golden Dawn's leadership did not create a firewall of plausible deniability between their killers and party leadership. And that's what has led to their downfall.
There is nothing new under the Son
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are the flavour of the year in the moneyed circles of the United States. They've raked in $36b in gross proceeds in the first nine months of the year alone – three times more than they did in 2018. So what is the latest pot of gold? SPACs are blank cheque companies – vehicles to deliver private companies unto the public market. They are shell companies set-up with the sole purpose of raising money in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) which is then used to purchase private companies. This is otherwise known as a reverse-listing or backdoor-listing. Given the somewhat murky promise of post-hoc third-party acquisitions, SPACs rely on the names on their boards. Names like Richard Branson, Masayoshi Son, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Reid Hoffman.
There are some who argue that reverse-listings are a simple measure to avoid the costly and time-consuming process of a traditional IPO. Granted, there have been a string of rather deflating IPOs on Wall Street in the last few years. But then there are also some people who argue that they buy Playboy for the quality of the writing. As it happens, Playboy Industries has announced it too intends to go public by merging with a SPAC. A significant benefit to reverse-listings is that they avoid a great deal of scrutiny that would otherwise be required as due diligence in an IPO process. Which is why they were used regularly for fraudulent purposes in the heydays of the 1980s (and a brief renaissance around 2007-08).
There is of course significantly more regulation now on how SPACs can operate, but it stretches the imagination that reverse-listings have returned to the straight and narrow just because a few hefty names have used them. If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck...
The Best of Times
Helios overcomes Hades
Move over coal, the world of electricity generation has a new champion: solar power . Solar photovoltaics are now cheaper than coal-fired plants in most of the world. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but in a majority of countries government targets and policy favour renewable energy. As such, solar will front an upsurge in the use of renewable energy in the coming decades. Now we just need to hope the sun rises tomorrow.
At last, some instructions we comprehend
In a laudable move to tamp down on global waste, Ikea will buy back unwanted furniture from customers in 27 countries around the world. If the items cannot be resold (yes, we've all finished a coffee table or bookshelf with a worrying number of screws spare or an alarming number missing), they will simply be recycled or donated to a local community project. What's Swedish for 'win-win'?
The Worst of Times
How does that George Santayana quote about history go?
A recent appraisal of the fossils has revealed a shocking truth about the meandering evolutionary development that led to you reading this sentence. At least three of our ancient ancestors – Homo erectus , Homo heidelbergensis , and Homo neanderthalensis – went extinct because of climate change . Just some food for thought.
What's a war crime between friends?
The rule of thumb for war criminals over the last 80 or so years has been this: make yourself useful to the United States and you won't serve a single day in prison. It was true during Operation Paperclip after the Second World War, it was true during the Dirty Wars in South America, and it's true today.
Indonesian defence minister Prabowo Subianto may have had his reputation rehabilitated (or ignored) in his own country, but many in the international community have not forgotten the bloodletting his death squads unleashed during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
Prabowo was actually banned from entering the United States. Until this year, when his hard line on China earned him a spot in the tent.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
" We grow up, enter the workforce and suddenly become ‘serious and important people’, trading laughter for ties and pantsuits. "
– The authors of Humour, Seriously — noting that people lose their sense of humour once they enter the workforce. Given this dire news, inkl has implemented a new policy: everyone must laugh at the CEO's jokes, or risk a call from HR.
The numbers
7,348
- In the first twenty years of the century 7,348 natural disasters have occurred globally – a dramatic increase over the prior two decades. 1.23m lives were claimed, 4.2b people were affected, and $2.97t worth of economic damage was caused. If the climate crisis klaxons weren’t already going off, they are now.
70%
- The effective tax burden that some of America's poorest have to pay. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta discovered that the marginal tax rate applied to low-income workers combined with a loss of government benefits can equate to a 70% loss in income.
The headline
" A calculator running 'Doom' can be powered by 100 lb. of rotting potatoes " – Input . You'll have to smell it to believe it.
The special mention
Japanese tourist Jesse Katayama became the first person to tour Machu Picchu following a seven-month wait for the site to reopen. Authorities granted Katayama entry after he submitted a special request citing his dream of being able to enter. He's now the only traveller in modern history who has managed to visit one of the most important historical sites in the world without any other pesky tourists around!
A few choice long-reads
- Anyone who has travelled to India has enjoyed (or at least wanted to enjoy) the thrills of speeding across the country on the back of an iconic Royal Enfield Bullet. Soon you might be able to do that around the block. Businessweek has been let in on Royal Enfield's plan to take on Harley Davidson – and the world.
- For all the political complexity and partisanship in the world, there are a few simple truths that exist even if international law cannot enforce them. For instance, locking up millions of people from an ethnic group to crush their identity is a crime against humanity. The Economist makes that case in Xinjiang.
- And for all the huffing and puffing from successive presidents, none managed to remove Fidel Castro from his perch. Not even the exploding cigar got him. Foreign Affairs ponders whether America is inadvertently keeping its enemies in power.
Tom Wharton