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Rana Foroohar

Rana Foroohar

Global Business Columnist & Associate Editor at Financial Times - Swamp Notes Online

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Rana Foroohar
ft.com

America (still) has no industrial policy - Financial Times

Rumours of industrial policy in America have been greatly exaggerated. This may come as a surprise to some. The Biden administration has, after all, reasserted the role of the state in the US economy in ways we haven’t seen for half a century: supporting re-industrialisation, subsidising strategic industries, boosting unions, rethinking trade relations and rebooting competition policy. Yet those are separate policies, not a fundamentally new operating system. At an intellectual level, it’s quit…
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Shipbuilding: the new battleground in the US-China trade war - Fina...

Shipping has been at the centre of the global economy for over 5,000 years, and it is no less important now than it was for our seafaring ancestors. For all our technological advances, it is still the most effective means of importing and exporting goods and raw materials. It remains crucial to national security, not just for the long-standing role it has played in the defence of nations and of trade but also because today’s port software and logistics platforms hold crucial data about which co…
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Big Tech must be scared - Financial Times

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of outreaches from big companies (particularly in the tech space), their trade groups and public relations teams, as well as the think-tanks they fund. The narrative being pushed is that FTC chair Lina Khan, together with US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, are together somehow going to tank American innovation, and give up the US position on this front to China. The argument is that both of them are pursuing policies that will hamstring Americ…
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To surge or not to surge, the algorithm is the question - Financial...

Surge pricing is something that anyone who takes a ride share on a regular basis has become used to. Try calling an Uber or Lyft on a rainy day during the dinner hour or around the school pick-up or drop-off time and you’ll be paying more than your usual rate — sometimes a lot more. Yet when consumers are confronted with common online business models like “dynamic pricing” in the bricks-and-mortar world, they may revolt. Consider the recent consumer backlash after Wendy’s, the American fast-foo…
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America's most powerful union leaders have a message for capital - ...

There was more strike action in America in the past year than we’ve seen in more than two decades. From auto workers to actors, baristas to healthcare workers, the number of US workers protesting tripled from the preceding year. There was “Hot Labor Summer” and “Striketober”. When Joe Biden walked the picket line with the auto workers’ union last September, he became the first sitting president ever to do so. This year promises more, with major organising action aimed at Starbucks, Delta, Amazon…
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Education as a political battleground - Financial Times

Last week, I spent a couple of days in Washington meeting with two fascinating and politically distinct groups of people. First, I moderated a panel at a conference put on by the non-Maga conservative think-tank American Compass, looking at how thoughtful conservatives are imagining the future of the Republican party. Second, I led a roundtable discussion with four of America’s top union leaders, soon to appear in the FT Weekend edition, looking at the record year for labour in the US and many p…
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The global trade system is in desperate need of an overhaul - Finan...

John Maynard Keynes saw today’s trade troubles coming. Back in 1944 at Bretton Woods, he advocated a global trading system that would target persistent imbalances between surplus and deficit countries, rather than policing one-off trade violations. Too bad that’s not what we got. As the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial meeting starts on Monday, I suspect the conversation around trade will continue to be small and technocratic. This misses the core problem, which is that the long-term…

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Europe must ask: what if Biden wins in November? - Financial Times

Europeans are rightly worried about the possibility of a second Donald Trump presidency. This is a man who has said Russians should do “whatever the hell they want” on the continent, threatened a 10 per cent tax on all imported goods (not just those from China), and offended any number of cultural sensibilities. But while it’s smart to prepare for the possibility of another Trump administration, Europeans should also have a plan for what to do if the Democrats win in the elections this year. I…
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America now has a high-pressure economy - Financial Times

Decades ago, the economist Arthur Okun — chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Lyndon Johnson — advocated what he called a “high-pressure economy”. He meant one in which expansionary policies could create higher than average gross domestic product growth coupled with low unemployment, resulting in not only a strong economy, but also disproportionate job gains for more vulnerable groups. This is exactly the kind of policy that the Biden administration has pursued, so far successfully.…
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The great US-Europe antitrust divide - Financial Times

When it comes to antitrust policy, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. That was my takeaway from a major competition policy conference last week in Brussels, where all the top US and European regulators, as well as those from many other countries, tried — and failed — to develop a shared approach to the massive concentration of power that has built up in several sectors, most particularly platform technology. Bringing the US and Europe together is key to successfully curbing both…
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The financial system needs more capital and less complexity - Finan...

Have we learnt anything from the great financial crisis of 2008? Or any number of banking crises that came before or since, right up to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and others last year? Sometimes I think not. To me, the core lesson is that too much debt and leverage, combined with too little high-quality capital on hand, always ends in tears. And yet, as the massive lobbying by US banks pushing back against the Fed’s attempt to implement Basel III rules shows, we are still arguing about…
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Business is starting to think more about ROI than DEI - Financial T...

Several days ago, over the Martin Luther King Jr holiday weekend in the US, the big four accounting firm PwC announced that it would be dropping some of its diversity targets in the US. Race-based criteria would no longer be used for awarding scholarships or places on an internship programme. It was odd timing for the announcement, perhaps, but it reflected a broader American trend. Since the Supreme Court’s decision last June to reverse affirmative action, many companies are rethinking their D…
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America needs straight talk on trade - Financial Times

Trade policy is where the rubber meets the road between Joe Biden’s two favourite interest groups — American workers and American allies. Consider the recent statement about Japanese giant Nippon Steel’s bid for US Steel by the president’s top economic adviser, Lael Brainard. While Biden welcomes “manufacturers across the world building their futures in America with American jobs and American workers”, she said, “he also believes the purchase of this iconic American-owned company by a foreign e…
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More: A Memoir of Open Marriage — the joy of extramarital sex - Fin...

Americans are weird about sex. We started as Puritans, after all, burning healthily hormonal teenagers as witches and slapping scarlet letters on wayward women. Today, we use flesh to advertise everything from fast food to eyedrops — but make it hard for people to get abortions and even to exercise birth control. We crave freedom and individualism, but we also love the security of rules. All this contradiction is on display in America’s burgeoning fascination with free love, as evidenced by the…
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Content creators fight back against AI - Financial Times

This may be the year that content creators finally fight back against surveillance capitalism. Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple lawsuits filed by news providers large and small, as well as comedians, authors and other creative professionals who allege that their work is being unfairly used to create the artificial intelligence that threatens eventually to put them out of business. One of the highest profile suits was filed by the New York Times, in which the newspaper behemoth…
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America's childcare system is broken - Financial Times

A big part of President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign will be about his administration passing the biggest fiscal stimulus programme since the Eisenhower era, with money flowing to infrastructure, chips and clean technology. But Biden’s Build Back Better agenda always had two prongs — rebuilding America’s industrial economy, and rebuilding its care economy. The latter goal is still in danger, and that has potentially big implications for labour markets and inflation. The share of Americ…
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Year in a word: De-risking - Financial Times

(verb) the act of diversifying supply chains to avoid relying too heavily on one geography In 2023, the G7 nations decided to drop the dreaded word “decoupling,” when referring to their policy approach to China, and pick up another, more benign phrase: “de-risking”. The term “de-risking” is defined on the US state department website as “the phenomenon of financial institutions terminating or restricting business relationships with clients or categories of clients to avoid, rather than manage,…
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Is Bidenomics dead on arrival? - Economy - Financial Times

Swamp Notes readers know that I’m a fan of most of this president’s economic policies. However, there’s little doubt that they haven’t yet resonated politically. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg pointed out last week in the pages of the FT, the cost of living crisis means that the effect of job growth under Biden has been blunted by food and energy prices. Sixty-four per cent of voters say inflation and the cost of living are their top concerns, according to Greenberg’s polling. So, the…
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The economic year ahead will not be binary - Financial Times

We tend to think about the economy in binary terms. Recession: yes or no? Will markets be up or down? Will interest rates rise or fall? The answer to the latter question, at least in the US, appears to be “fall,” as the Federal Reserve held rates steady during its meeting last week while hinting that we could see as many as three rate cuts next year. That has, of course, buoyed stock markets, which have gone long on the soft landing story. But economic reality in 2024 is likely to be far less bi…
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China's failed charm campaign - Financial Times

A few weeks ago, in the run-up to the US-China Apec summit, I warned Swampians not to get too optimistic about any fundamental shift in the relations between the two countries. I take no pleasure in saying I think I’m being proven right. Sure, big business and multinational CEOs would love to pretend that we could time warp back to the 1990s, but it’s not happening, as seen by Wall Street pulling back money from China, and Moody’s telling staff in the country to work from home before lowering t…
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Tax justice is yet to hit the richest 'citizens of the world' - Fin...

“Taxes are what you pay for a civilised society,” said American Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendall Holmes in 1927. The topic, always relevant, became even more so last week as the US Supreme Court heard opening arguments in Moore vs United States, a case that will examine whether the mandatory repatriation tax of 2017, which required corporations to pay a one-off tax on deferred foreign profits, is legal. Readers may remember that the MRT aimed to capture some of the trillions in offshore pro…