| | | | Fareed: China's Grand Parades Might Mask Its Weakness | | China's 70th-anniversary military parade may have impressed President Trump, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, but it didn't tell the full story of China's political moment.
"Americans tend to see China as a monolith, an image encouraged by the Communist Party and its grand parades," Fareed writes. "In fact, it is a vast, complex society, going through great transformation." President Xi Jinping has broken with China's recent past, Fareed writes, turning away from liberalization and reinstating Mao-style controls—which may reflect more weakness than strength, in the long run. | | Lessons in Foreign Meddling | | US efforts to meddle in Ukraine have been disastrous, Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky writes. That's been true since the Obama administration, he argues, when Vice President Joe Biden sought the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor (whose replacement was no better) and US diplomat Victoria Nuland was caught discussing Ukrainian political machinations.
As far as American diplomats are concerned, it's "none of their business who gets appointed to what job in Kyiv and it's not for them to decide what a Ukrainian president should say (even if it would look great in a campaign ad)," Bershidsky writes.
Meanwhile, analysts have voiced confusion at Trump's request that China investigate the Bidens. In a satirical New York Times column, Alex Kingsbury makes a nonetheless serious point: that Trump, through these invitations, risks setting a global democratic precedent of cross-border campaigning. | | Since China effectively stopped importing foreign plastic and paper trash last year, Kate O'Neill writes in the latest issue of Chatham House's The World Today, the effect has been felt in global recycling and scrap markets. Scrap prices "collapsed"; Southeast Asian countries were "quickly swamped with mountains of plastic they didn't have the capacity to deal with"; and countries like the US, UK, and Australia are finding it harder to offshore their trash problems (as Helena Varkkey accused rich countries of doing in a CNN op-ed this summer).
As a result, local recycling policies are changing (some kinds of plastic are no longer being collected in cities, for instance), and ambitious plans to reduce net waste are proving difficult—all of which points to the need for international cooperation on how to deal with trash, O'Neill suggests. | | With the rise of computerized trading, machines now exert more control over the economy than ever, The Economist writes. "Funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans account for 35% of America's stock market, 60% of institutional equity assets and 60% of trading activity," the magazine writes. "New artificial-intelligence programs are also writing their own investing rules, in ways their human masters only partly understand." As of last month, exchange-traded funds (or ETFs—index-tracking funds that can themselves be traded) run by computers had $4.3 trillion invested in US stocks, the magazine writes, "exceeding the sums actively run by humans for the first time."
Market fluctuations—in prices for ETFs, the pound, and debt—may have resulted from the trend, The Economist suggests. Historically, most big changes in finance entail a bumpy road, with bubbles and disruptions along the way, the magazine writes; computerized trading may be no different. | | Can Island Nations Insure Themselves Against Climate Change? | | Maybe, Vijaya Ramachandran and Junaid Sadiq Masood write at the Lowy Institute's Interpreter blog. As the planet gets hotter, small island nations in the Pacific are among the most vulnerable to storms—in some cases, damages have far exceeded GDP—and private insurance (in large policies, bought by governments) might be able to supplement development aid, they propose.
For that to work, countries will need to more accurately account for the value of their infrastructure, windspeeds and water levels may need to be recorded with more equipment, premiums may need to be subsidized by donor countries, and premium prices may need to be tied to investments in climate-resilient infrastructure, Ramachandran and Masood write. | | | | | | |
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