Feb 3rd 2022

How high will interest rates go?

The world this week

Leaders

How high will central banks go?

Interest rates may have to rise sharply to fight inflation

But the low-rate era is unlikely to come to a permanent end

Statistically significant

The Economist’s election modelling should cheer Emmanuel Macron

France’s president has a 79% chance of keeping his job

An icy chasm

Beijing’s Winter Olympics symbolise a world divided

The West has rightly concluded that buttering up China will not make it nicer

Free speech’s new frontier

What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair

The content-moderation wars have come to audio

Wrong man, wrong plan

The British government’s white paper on “levelling up” falls short

It fails to devolve enough power and money

Letters

On vaccine protests, the BBC, curling, quadratic voting, tipping

Letters to the editor

Briefing

Turning Japanese

Why the world is saving too much money for its own good

And why the pandemic is unlikely to change that

United States

“Freedom First”

Why Florida is lurching to the right

Preschool education

A new study finds preschool can be detrimental to children

Abortion by mail in America

A safe and simple abortion option becomes more readily available

Drought victim

The loneliness of the desert tortoise

Crypto and the far right

The charm of cryptocurrencies for white supremacists

The US census

America is stagnating—demographically, that is

Lexington

America is uniting against Vladimir Putin

The Americas

Aiding and abetting

Foreign aid has done little to help Haiti

A populist turn

Erin O’Toole is voted out as Canada’s Conservative leader

Bello

Argentina’s Peronists squabble over an agreement with the IMF

Asia

Out of office

South-East Asia’s tourism industry is hobbled by uncertainty

Forest grumps

India’s government and its greens disagree on what counts as forest

A nation of holdouts

Papua New Guinea’s vaccination rate is only 3.3%

New year fireworks

What is behind North Korea’s flurry of missile tests?

Mujin tonic

Japan is searching for the secrets to healthy old age

Banyan

Myanmar’s generals have a dubious role model in Thailand

China

Virtual state of control

Building a metaverse with Chinese characteristics

Not home for the holidays

Chinese New Year is disrupted for a third year

Chaguan

Nixon’s visit to China, 50 years on

Middle East & Africa

Rise and shine

The president of Egypt does a U-turn on economic policy

Grains of wrath

How tensions in Ukraine could rile Egypt

Pushers and putschists

Guinea-Bissau sees off an attempted coup

Pipe dreams

A big Ugandan oil project is progressing at last

A continuing horror

Child rape is far too common in some war-torn African countries

Europe

A four-in-five chance

Emmanuel Macron is highly likely to be re-elected as France’s president

Blood hype

Why Ukraine’s president is talking down the threat from Russia

Who’s next?

As Russia menaces Ukraine, eastern European countries grow nervous

Caucasian thaw

The Turkey-Armenia relationship is thawing

Charlemagne

Southern Europe is reforming itself

Britain

Levelling up

The British government’s “levelling up” plans are oddly old-fashioned

Digging deep

A quixotic plan to roll back EU law

HP v Autonomy

Mike Lynch has lost Britain’s biggest fraud case

To infinity and beyond

The government is promising to tackle the NHS backlog

Scrolling through

The laws are being removed from Parliament

The pandemic generation

Some British children have been changed by covid-19, probably for good

Bagehot

Sue Gray delivers a first report on those Downing Street parties

International

Just keep us alive

Covid-19 has pushed governments to find new ways to help the poor

Business

We’re hiring

How America’s talent wars are reshaping business

Depopulation pressure

How German companies court employees

The hills are alive

China’s ski industry faces an avalanche of risks

Don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Spotify, Joe Rogan and the Wild West of online audio

Bartleby

Body language in the post-pandemic workplace

Schumpeter

How Sony can make a comeback in the console wars

Finance & economics

The urge to splurge

Why the impressive pace of investment growth looks likely to endure

Taking aim

America prepares the “mother of all sanctions” against Russia

A slippery patch

OPEC grapples with a precariously balanced oil market

The bill balloons

The global interest bill is about to jump

The tiger roars

Why India’s stockmarket is roaring

Buttonwood

Why stockmarket jitters have not so far spread to the credit market

Free exchange

China may soon become a high-income country

Science & technology

Faster, higher, stronger

Why space is about to enter its nuclear age

Scientific publishing

Preprints on the coronavirus have been impressively reliable

Trypanophobics rejoice!

A new way to deliver delicate drugs, no jabbing required

Climate change

Targeting methane “ultra-emitters” could cheaply slow climate change

Culture

The megaphone and the muzzle

A history of free expression charts its seesawing progress

The undiscovered country

“This Mortal Coil” is a surprisingly upbeat history of death

The house always wins

Wall Street was the real winner of the GameStop saga

World in a dish

Lucky new-year foods embody a benign view of good fortune

Playground culture

Covid-19 has given children new words and ideas to play with

Back Story

“Taras Bulba” and the tragedy of Russia and Ukraine

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Elysian stakes

How we forecast the French election

Obituary

To sea in a barrel