Feb 4th 2021

The real revolution on Wall Street

The world this week

Leaders

Global finance

The real revolution on Wall Street

High tech meets high finance

Fiscal stimulus

Why Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus is too big

America’s economy needs targeted relief more than indiscriminate spending

Despots v democrats

The meaning of Myanmar’s coup

Attempts to dress up authoritarian regimes as democracies are always bound to fail

Brexit and the City

Access to the EU financial-services market is not worth the price

Being a rule-taker is too big a cost for “equivalence”

The toll on growth

The pandemic could undercut Africa’s precarious progress

Africans need jabs and loans, sharpish

Letters

On Ethiopia, vaccine passports, space debris, Wikipedia

Letters to the editor

Briefing

Reversal of fortune

Myanmar’s coup turns the clock back a decade

New leader; old problems

United States

Life, liberty

America’s two largest states are fighting covid-19 differently

Vanishing act

Large numbers of pupils are no longer enrolled in America’s schools

Class warfare

The struggle over reopening Chicago’s schools

Stimulating talk

Republicans test the precise meaning of Joe Biden’s talk of unity

Roe-ing back

How religious conservatives learned to love anti-discrimination laws

Lexington

Adam Kinzinger is making a lone stand against Donald Trump

The Americas

The terrible truth

Colombia’s peace tribunal issues a crushing judgment against the FARC

More mice than Mussolinis

Latin America’s year of elections will test the region’s democracies

Bello

Latin America needs a new social contract

Asia

Strengthening the shrimp

South Korea is preparing for a lonelier, scarier future

Home, sweet home

Few young Japanese want to study or work abroad

Prevention is better than cure

India’s government is censoring people before they comment

Here’s my QR code

Business cards are going online in Asia

Banyan

The surprising choice to lead Vietnam’s Communist Party

China

Keyboard Maoists

Anti-capitalist tirades go viral in China

Young at art

Officials in China make pupils take sport seriously—with exams

Chaguan

Because of covid, many in China will miss their biggest holiday

Middle East & Africa

At the end of the line

Africa’s recovery from covid-19 will be slow

Rise of the secularists

Will his alliance with the ultra-Orthodox doom Binyamin Netanyahu?

Broken-down country

What a shortage of cars says about Algeria

Murder, plain and simple

Arab governments are doing too little to end honour killings

Europe

Send for the technocrats, again

Mario Draghi is summoned to form Italy’s government

A Muscovite mockery of justice

Russia’s regime is weakened by putting Alexei Navalny in jail

Running out of gas?

Why Germany won’t kill Nord Stream 2

Solitary cinema

A Swedish film festival has just one attendee

Charlemagne

How Europe dodges responsibility for its vaccine fiasco

Britain

Finance and Brexit

Britain’s financial-services business is divided over “equivalence”

National hero

Remembering Captain Sir Tom Moore

Northern Ireland

A messy Brexit deal threatens to reignite violence in Northern Ireland

The gambler

After a shaky start, Matt Hancock has got the big calls right

Country life

More killings of sheep by dogs shows a delicate rural balance out of kilter

R&D

A new science agency is part of plans to transform research in Britain

The national mood

Even the successful vaccine roll-out is not improving Britons’ moods

Bagehot

How Boris Johnson should spend his political capital

International

Don’t stand so close to me

Even before covid-19, nightclubs were struggling

Business

Life after Jeff

Can Amazon’s next boss fill Jeff Bezos’s supersized boots?

Driving apart

Daimler Truck and Mercedes-Benz part ways

Too close to the sun

What the fate of HNA Group says about China Inc’s foreign ambitions

Cook v Zuck

Apple’s long-awaited privacy policy kicks Facebook where it hurts

Goalless defeat

Why no one wants to broadcast France’s Ligue 1

Bartleby

How to get managers’ incentives right

Schumpeter

Shareholders are pushing ExxonMobil to go green

Finance & economics

Transfer of power

A new epoch for retail investors is just beginning

Pay-per trade

High-frequency traders are in the spotlight

Meme team

How WallStreetBets works

Border crossings

Chinese investors’ access to foreign assets expands—a bit

After months of dithering

Germany’s finance minister promises to overhaul financial regulation

Buttonwood

Why the WallStreetBets crowd are able to profit from predatory trading

Free exchange

How should economists think about biodiversity?

Science & technology

Vaccine manufacture

How vaccines are made, and why it is hard

Viral variants and vaccination

Will variants of SARS-CoV-2 make vaccination harder?

Daughters and divorce

Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons

Marine ecology

Deep-ocean plastic is a haven for life

The origin of land animals

A tiny genetic alteration may have let vertebrates leave the sea

Books & arts

Open secrets

France’s silence over the sexual abuse of minors is breaking

Tales of the city

The volatile history of Karachi

Eco-fiction

A “Moby Dick” for the age of climate change

Who wants to live for ever?

Ageing can be cured—and, in part, it soon will be

The time of their lives

A tag-team reading of “In Search of Lost Time”

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Sweet memes are made of this

What the favourite stocks of r/wallstreetbets have in common

Obituary

At war with the invisible