W hen is black Friday? The obvious answer is a literal one. It is the day after Thanksgiving, an American holiday when families gather to gorge on turkey and pumpkin pie, which this year falls on November 29th. Yet Black Friday is not simply a date, it is also an idea. The day traditionally marked

Nov 21st 2024 | New York I N THE BARREN, post-apocalyptic setting of the “Mad Max” film series, the outpost of Gas Town plays a vital role. It is swimming in fossil fuels, meaning that holding it confers great power in a world of ultra-violent, road-based conflict. Explore more Donald Trump United States This article

C hina is famous, even infamous, for hard graft. Prodigious amounts of toil and elbow grease helped the country become the workshop of the world. More than 175m migrant workers labour in cities far from home, often leaving their children in the care of relatives. And the sacrifices are not confined to the poor. Even

S pare a thought for the analysts, bankers and fund managers who make a living from European shares. If your salary depends on talking up the stockmarkets of the continent that invented them, you have learned to live with disappointment. For much of the past two decades, you could have pointed out that European stocks

Nov 23rd 2024 | Washington, DC A t last, white smoke has emerged from Mar-a-Lago. Two and a half weeks after the election and more than a week since it first seemed as if an announcement about a choice of treasury secretary was coming, Donald Trump has finally made his decision. On November 22nd the

A merica’s gross national debt is $36trn, or $107,000 per person. It is rising fast and will probably soon be rising even faster. If Donald Trump’s election campaign was anything to go by, his return to the White House heralds a flurry of tax cuts on everything from corporate profits to tips. In the fiscal

Nov 26th 2024 D onald Trump has fired the first shot. Goods arriving in America from Canada and Mexico will meet tariffs of 25% as soon as he returns to the White House, the president-elect announced on November 25th. Mr Trump also said that he would impose additional 10% tariffs on Chinese goods. With two

Nov 21st 2024 | Washington, DC A lmost two years have passed since OpenAI released GPT-3.5 to great fanfare. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, compared the technology’s arrival to his first encounter with the graphical user interface—a breakthrough that reshaped personal computing—in the 1980s. Others predicted that generative artificial intelligence (ai) would rapidly transform economies

Nov 21st 2024 D emocrats spent much of the presidential-election campaign calling Donald Trump a fascist. Mr Trump is hardly known for his conciliatory nature. So few American politicos expect there to be much bipartisanship in his second term. Yet in one place there is already a flicker of cross-aisle agreement: a proposal to cap

T he big mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an