Financial Times

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del periódico incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006.

Nota informativa: Financial Times es un periódico de origen británico espcializado en noticias internacionales de negocios y economía. Fue fundado en 1888. Tiene implementado un «muro de pago» por lo que es necesario suscribirse para tener acceso a todos sus contenidos. Más información en Become an FT subscriber.

El futuro del "capitalismo comunista" en China

¿Cuál es el futuro económico de China? Esta pregunta plantea muchas cuestiones concretas, sobre todo los constantes desequilibrios macroeconómicos de China, la amenaza del declive demográfico y el empeoramiento de las relaciones exteriores, sobre todo con un EEUU cada vez más hostil. Pero, detrás de todas, subyace una más profunda: ¿se está desvaneciendo el "capitalismo comunista" con Xi Jinping , ese invento aparentemente contradictorio de Deng Xiaoping? ¿Se osificará el régimen chino y acabará desmoronándose como ocurrió con la Unión Soviética?

El año pasado ya hablé de algunas de estas cuestiones en una serie de artículos. La semana pasada, poco después de regresar de mi primera visita de una semana a Pekín y Shanghái desde 2019, volví a examinar los desafíos macroeconómicos estructurales de China y planteé mi preocupación por la posible reaparición de desequilibrios mundiales desestabilizadores.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israel’s Rafah offensive: a tipping point for US support?

President Joe Biden’s patience with Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip is wearing thin.Only days after describing the conduct of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7 as “over the top”, the US president made a specific and immediate demand on Monday.

The military operation planned for Rafah, a city along the border with Egypt where 1.5mn people — more than half of Gaza’s population — have sought sanctuary after being forced from their homes, “should not proceed”, Biden said, without a “credible plan” to ensure the people there are not in harm’s way. They are “exposed and vulnerable”, the president added.…  Seguir leyendo »

Belgian farmers protest in Brussels © Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images

The highway from the Belgian city of Namur to Brussels suffered a traffic jam like none other last week. Around 700 tractors and 1,500 farmers blocked the road, many staying for 36 hours.It was not an isolated event. Farmers who have been protesting across the EU for several months have dramatically escalated their actions over the past few weeks, obstructing major arteries and city streets in France, Romania, Germany, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Latvia among other EU states.

They have barricaded supermarkets, dumped manure, set hay bales alight, ransacked food distribution lorries and pelted police with eggs.

In France, farmers threatened to “lay siege” to Paris, while in Belgium they blocked the port of Zeebrugge.…  Seguir leyendo »

The surprising resilience of the Russian economy

Addressing a crowd of activists on Friday in Tula, the capital of Russia’s arms industry, Vladimir Putin crowed that the country’s economy had defeated western sanctions imposed after his invasion of Ukraine.“They predicted decline, failure, collapse — that we would stand back, give up, or fall apart. It makes you want to show [them] a well-known gesture, but I won’t do that, there are a lot of ladies here”, Putin said to a round of applause. “They won’t succeed! Our economy is growing, unlike theirs”.Russia’s president gloated that Russia’s economy had not only withstood an onslaught of sanctions from western countries — but was now bigger than all but two of them.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy goes over battle plans (obscured) with his generals at a position near the front line last summer © Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout/Reuters

“I’m going to tell you the truth”, says Vanya, a Ukrainian soldier serving in a reconnaissance unit fighting alongside marines on the east bank of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine. “The situation is deplorable”.

His damning assessment follows months of daring raids into enemy territory by Ukrainian forces last autumn to establish a tenuous bridgehead deep in the southern Kherson region. Under the cover of darkness, troops zipped across the river to inflict damage on Russian units and provide one of few bright spots since Ukraine’s much-vaunted summer counteroffensive ended in failure.

But the unit’s grip on the Dnipro foothold, near the village of Krynky, is slipping.…  Seguir leyendo »

How Ecuador became mired in a ‘state of war’ with drug gangs

The newscast began like any other. Jorge Rendón, a veteran broadcaster at Ecuador’s state-owned TC Televisión in the bustling port city of Guayaquil, was running through the day’s stories with his co-anchor.

Then, with cameras rolling and the feed broadcast live to the nation, masked gunmen burst into the studio, brandishing high-calibre rifles and grenades. Some of the crew were forced to lie prone on the floor, others sat with their hands bound. Elsewhere in the building, audible on-air before the feed went down, shots were fired.

“It was terrifying, a moment of chaos and extreme tension”, Rendón tells the Financial Times.…  Seguir leyendo »

The rising threat to democracy of AI-powered disinformation

Two days before the Slovakian election in September, a mysterious recording went viral on social media. In it, liberal opposition candidate Michal Šimečka could apparently be heard plotting with a journalist to buy votes and rig the result.

“It will be done in a way that nobody can accuse you of taking bribes”, Šimečka purportedly says on the audio, according to a transcript of the conversation that also circulated at the time. “Be careful, there are many people around, don’t use the B word”, the journalist replies.

The most explosive thing about the recording was that it was fake — a sophisticated hoax created by artificial intelligence, said fact-checkers, citing indicators such as unnatural diction and atypical pauses.…  Seguir leyendo »

Can democracy survive 2024?

There will be no fanfare outside the polling booth. Posterity may never know the voter’s name. But early on the morning of January 7, a Bangladeshi will cast the first vote in their country’s fraught national elections and set in motion the most intense and cacophonous 12 months of democracy the world has seen since the idea was minted more than 2,500 years ago.Some 2bn people, about half the adult population of the globe, will have the chance to vote in 2024, far more in one year than ever before. Eight of the 10 most populous countries are among the more than 70 states holding elections — a tribute, it could be argued, to the power of an idea, democracy, and to the spread of political freedom.…  Seguir leyendo »

An aerial view of destroyed buildings in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza early in the conflict © Yahya Hassouna/AFP/Getty Images

Faysal Shawa thought he had seen the best and worst of what life in Gaza had to offer. As a young man three decades ago he was swept up in the giddy optimism as huge crowds packed into Gaza City to welcome the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat back from exile.It was the summer of 1994, 10 months after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation signed the Oslo Accords, a historic breakthrough many hoped would lead to a sustainable settlement of their decades-long conflict. As a teary-eyed Arafat promised “a democratic and free homeland”, Gaza was briefly the base of Palestinian political power.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Félix Tshisekedi greets crowds before the Democratic Republic of Congo’s election this month © Gosette Lubondo/FT

The sultry western province of Kongo Central is loaded with Congolese history. It contains the seaports at the mouth of the Congo river from which Belgian colonisers siphoned off the exploited riches of the country and it was where Joseph Kasavubu, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first president post-independence, was born and died.So it was no surprise when President Félix Tshisekedi, on the campaign trail late last month seeking a second term in office, chose this symbolic place to emphasise his Congolité, or Congoleseness. Do not, he warned, be fooled by the “candidat de l’étranger” — the foreign candidate.It was a thinly veiled attack against his main challenger in the December 20 vote, Moïse Katumbi, whom he claims has links to Congo’s bogeyman, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pro-Catalan demonstrators rally in Barcelona. Catalonia is only asking for what so many other nations that are now member states of the UN have previously asked for © Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

Catalonia is a European nation, open to the world, and committed to addressing global challenges. A nation with a rich historical legacy, diverse and modern, bound by its language, Catalan. A nation with a persistent desire for self-governance dating back centuries. A nation that wants to be free, that wants to be able to democratically and peacefully decide how it governs itself. A nation where a significant number of its citizens, including myself, want to create a new state, independent of Spain, but working together with it within the European framework.

We will only be an independent state if we work intensively in both directions — towards our citizens’ wellbeing and to fulfil their democratic future.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli police patrol Jerusalem © Israel Fuguemann/SOPA/SIPA/Reuters

Shlomo Shalom insists he would “take a bullet” for his Arab friends. But after Hamas’s devastating attack on southern Israel, he suggests “everybody” in the country should be put through a citizenship test so “we know who is with us and who is not”.“It’s changed how I look at Arabs. It’s different. I don’t think everyone is a terrorist, but I don’t know if their brothers or fathers support Hamas, so we are careful”, says Shalom, a butcher in Jerusalem. “We have to be very suspicious”.

In East Jerusalem, Adam, a Palestinian-Israeli taxi driver who didn’t want to give his surname, is smarting over the insulting messages he says he received from Jewish Israelis on the car-hailing app he uses, including: “Fuck off Arab people, I want Jewish drivers”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pedro Sanchez defended his controversial amnesty deal for Catalan separatists in parliament today © Manu Fernandez/AP

On the back of an agreement with Catalan separatists, Pedro Sanchez hopes to be formally reconfirmed as Spain’s prime minister. Much international commentary has praised Sanchez for keeping the extreme right out of power. But the deal breaches fundamental tenets of the rule of law that should be upheld, not undermined, in a mature democracy.

The long-term consequences of this short-term deal could be grave — for Spain and for the defence of democracy elsewhere in Europe. Spain has been a successful democracy since 1978 and our transition is often praised as a model. However, the spectre of the civil war continues to permeate a lot of international reporting about the country — as if Franco could re-emerge from his grave at any moment.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli troops on patrol this week. There are concerns the war will morph into an open-ended guerrilla conflict inside Gaza © Israel Defence Forces/Reuters

When Benjamin Netanyahu sent troops into Gaza last month after Hamas launched a devastating assault on Israel, he pledged that the Jewish state would “eliminate” the Palestinian militant group once and for all.

In the weeks since, Israeli ground forces have encircled Hamas’s political and military stronghold in Gaza City. But even as Israeli troops close in on their first military objective of taking control of northern Gaza, Israel’s longer-term strategy for the enclave remains shrouded in mystery: to most Israelis, to Palestinians and even to its closest allies in the US.

“I think where we are is: a lot of questions and not a lot of answers”, John Kirby, the US National Security Council spokesman, said this week in an interview with CNN.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinian children wounded in an air strike are brought to Shifa hospital in Gaza on Wednesday © Ali Mahmoud/AP

The moment Nadav Peretz began to lose hope was when he finally got through to the emergency helpline.The Hamas militants embarking on what would become the deadliest ever attack on Israeli territory had burst into his kibbutz, or communal village, of Nahal Oz. Peretz and his partner had been hiding in the safe room of their house for hours, desperately trying to call in help from Israel’s security forces.

“I was begging [the woman who answered my call] ‘send the army, send them’”, Peretz recalls. “And she told me: ‘We know, we’ll be there.’ And then she must have thought I had hung up, because I heard her start crying and say to a colleague: ‘I can’t answer any more calls like this.…  Seguir leyendo »

A Ukrainian soldier near Bakhmut this month, against a map of Russian-held territory © FT montage/AP

“Yes, people tend to want [results] immediately. This is understandable”, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a conference in Kyiv last weekend, speaking about Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive. “But this is not like a feature movie, where everything happens in an hour and a half”.The idea that Ukrainian forces, lacking any air cover, would storm through Russian lines was always going to be more of a Hollywood plotline than reality. But three months into the counteroffensive, Zelenskyy and his government are dealing with the reality that it has not achieved the desired decisive breakthrough — and are girding themselves for a drawn-out war.

Ukraine’s armed forces have made slow but significant gains in the south of the country in recent weeks, including a first puncture in Russia’s formidable defensive line.…  Seguir leyendo »

A worker at a Chilean lithium mine takes a sample from a brine pool. Chile is one of the countries which will profit from the battery metals boom © FT montage/Bloomberg

The red-brown landscape of Tenke-Fungurume, one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is covered by tens of thousands of dusty sacks.

The bags stacked up by the roadside and piled next to buildings contain a stash of cobalt hydroxide powder equivalent to almost a tenth of the world’s annual consumption — and worth about half a billion dollars.

The haphazard stockpiles of this bright green powder, a key ingredient in electric car batteries, point to how the DRC, the world’s largest producer of cobalt, is starting to flex its muscles when it comes to the metals needed for the energy transition.…  Seguir leyendo »

Cottbus is the base of the coal miner Leag, whose plans to expand renewables in eastern Germany won it praise © Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

There is a saying in the swath of eastern Germany known as the Lausitz that captures both the beauty of the region and the curse of its geology. “God created the Lausitz”, goes the expression. “But Satan put coal underneath”.

Local people did a deal with the devil over the past 100 years: they let mining machines carve chunks from the lush green forests, destroyed centuries-old villages to dig up millions of tonnes of the dirty lignite that lies under them and polluted the planet in the process. In exchange came thousands of jobs and the pride found in powering the German economic juggernaut.…  Seguir leyendo »

The ex-Eta terrorist bringing down Pedro Sánchez in Spain

Pedro Sánchez’s struggling campaign to win another term as Spanish prime minister is being hurt by one person more than anything else: Arnaldo Otegi, a convicted member of the disbanded Eta terrorist group.

Otegi, who has served 14 years in prison, is the leader of EH Bildu, a leftwing Basque separatist party with a key role in national politics. Its parliamentary votes have helped Sánchez pass his signature reforms to labour law, pensions and housing.

But outside the Basque country Otegi, convicted for crimes including kidnapping and belonging to an armed group, has been vilified as a man of violence. He has never condemned Eta’s bloodshed and the taint of terror has made his party repulsive to many.…  Seguir leyendo »

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez, left, and opposition Popular party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo before their TV election debate © AFP via Getty Images

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez and his electoral rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused each other of failing to protect women, making pacts with disreputable allies and lying about the economy in an ill-tempered televised debate on Monday evening.

The two rivals interrupted, spoke over and aimed slights at each other in a series of testy exchanges, with the Socialist prime minister appearing more irritable on a night that was one of his final chances to rein in the poll lead of Feijóo’s conservative People’s party.

Sánchez called a snap general election after suffering an emphatic defeat in regional and local elections at the end of May.…  Seguir leyendo »