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REVIVING the original Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal between 12 countries around the Pacific Rim, is technically impossible. To go into force, members making up at least 85% of their combined GDP had to ratify it. Three days into his presidency, Donald Trump announced that America was out. With 60% of members’ GDP gone, that deal was doomed.

But on November 11th, another began to rise in its place, crowned with a tongue-twisting new name: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Ministers from its 11 members issued a joint statement saying that they had agreed on its core elements, and that it demonstrated their “firm commitment to open markets”. The political symbolism was powerful. As America retreats, others will lead instead.

The CPTPP is still far from finished, however. This inconvenient truth is unsurprising. Resuscitating the deal without its biggest member was always going to be hard. Without America, uncomfortable concessions made in the old...

ONLY one thing spooks the oil market as much as hot-headed despots in the Middle East, and that is hot-headed hedge-fund managers. For the second time this year, record speculative bets on rising oil prices in American and European futures have made the market vulnerable to a sell-off. “You don’t want to be the last man standing,” says Ole Hansen of Saxo Bank.

On November 15th, the widely traded Brent crude futures benchmark, which had hit a two-year high of $64 a barrel on November 7th, fell below $62. America’s West Texas Intermediate also fell. The declines coincided with a sharp drop across global metals markets, owing to concern about slowing demand in China, which has clobbered prices of nickel and other metals that had hit multi-year highs. (In a sign of investor nervousness after a sharp rally this year in global stock and bond markets, high-yield corporate bonds also weakened significantly this week.)

The reversal in the oil markets put a swift end to talk of crude shooting above $70 a barrel, which had...

Applications are invited for a Marjorie Deane internship in our New York bureau. The award is designed to provide work experience for a promising journalist or would-be journalist, who will spend three to six months at The Economist writing about economics, business and finance. Applicants are asked to write a covering letter and an article of no more than 500 words, suitable for publication in The Economist. Applications should be sent by December 14th to deaneinternny@economist.com.

Early contender for the 2047 list

BUOYANT financial markets meant that global wealth rose by 6.4% in the 12 months to June, the fastest pace since 2012. And the ranks of the rich expanded again, with 2.3m new millionaires added to the total, according to the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s global wealth report.

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

America continues to dominate the ranks of millionaires with 43% of the global total. Both Japan and Britain had fewer dollar millionaires than they did in June 2016, thanks to declines in the yen and sterling. Emerging economies have been catching up in the millionaire stakes; they now have 8.4...

What explains the remarkable strength of corporate profits and the sluggish growth of real wages in recent years? One explanation is that industries are getting less competitive. Work by The Economist found that two-thirds of American industries were more concentrated in the hands of a few firms in 2012 than in 1997.

Research by AXA Investment Managers Rosenberg Equities into the language used in American annual reports points in the same direction. Sherlock Holmes famously talked of the significance of the dog that did not bark in the night. It may be similarly important that companies refer to rivals much less than they did; usage of the word “competition” in annual reports has declined by three-quarters since the turn of the century. Business is less cut-throat than it used to be.

EUROPE’S largest pension fund, a scheme for Dutch public-sector workers called ABP, is much feted abroad for its efforts in “sustainable” investing. At home, however, where it provides pensions to one in six families and manages nearly one-third of pension wealth, it is suffering a crisis of confidence.

By international standards, Dutch pensions are extremely generous overall, offering 96% of career-averagesalaries (adjusted for inflation), compared with an OECD mean of 63%. And they are solid. Thanks to mandatory, tax-deductible saving, the Dutch have stored up a collective pension pot of nearly €1.4trn ($1.6trn), roughly double GDP. Mercer, a consultancy, marks the country as second only to Denmark in a global ranking of schemes.

Yet Dutch people’s faith in their pensions has sunk as low as their trust in banks and insurers. In March a political party for older voters, 50+, won four seats in the Dutch parliament, largely thanks to its promise to “stop the pension raid”. ABP’s own members mark it at just 5.9 out...

IN THE first quarter of 2018 thousands of banks will look a little less profitable. A new international accounting standard, IFRS 9, will oblige lenders in more than 120 countries, including the European Union’s members, to increase provisions for credit losses. In America, which has its own standard-setter, IFRS 9 will not be applied—but by 2019 banks there will also have to follow a slightly different regime.

The new rule has its roots in the financial crisis of 2007-08, in the wake of which the leaders of the G20 countries declared that accounting standards needed an overhaul. Among their other shortcomings, banks had done too little, too late, to recognise losses on wobbly assets. Under existing standards they make provisions only when losses are incurred, even if they see trouble coming. IFRS 9, which comes into force on January 1st, obliges them to provide for expected losses instead.

Under IFRS 9 bank loans are classified in one of three “stages”. When a loan is made—stage one—banks must make a provision...

IF MAKING America great again is the aim, you could do worse than bring back the economic growth rates of the late 1990s. President Donald Trump’s team reckons that the Republican tax plan making its way through Congress will do just that. “We are creating a model that creates economic growth in this country,” says Gary Cohn, the director of Mr Trump’s National Economic Council. Kevin Hassett, who runs the Council of Economic Advisers, reckons the bill should push growth above 4% per year.

Such heights are not beyond the realm of possibility, but if America reaches them tax reform will have little to do with it. That is not because of the specifics of the plan. Rather, it reflects an underappreciated reality: tax reform can accomplish many things, but raising long-run growth is not generally among them.

Most assessments of the Republican tax proposals, like most analyses of most tax plans, conclude their effects on growth will be small. The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan public-policy initiative,...

IN TOKYO’S Iidabashi district, north of the Imperial Palace, young salarymen and women gather after work to enjoy grilled chicken and a drink at Torikizoku, a chain of budget restaurants. They tap out their orders on touch-screen terminals, which the company has installed on many tables in an effort to economise on waiters, whose wages are hard to contain. Last month the company was forced to raise its price by over 6%, to ¥298 (about $2.60) plus tax, for two skewers of locally reared chicken yakitori. It was the firm’s first price increase in 28 years.

Chicken skewers are not commonly seen as a macroeconomic indicator. But Torikizoku’s decision exemplifies the underlying logic of “Abenomics”, a campaign to revive Japan’s economy, named after Shinzo Abe, its prime minister. His economic strategy aimed to stimulate spending and investment through vigorous monetary easing. That would create jobs, driving up wages. Higher wages, in turn, would push up prices. Success would be measured by the defeat of deflation, which had...

The London theater released the findings of an investigation into Mr. Spacey’s behavior before and during his time as artistic director there.

After many public struggles, the actress is the latest to turn to podcasting, and has a painful #MeAt14 story to tell.

Octopuses and giant barrel jellyfish come and go in a town where Wales’s best-known alcoholic drank. The dolphins seem to be staying, so far.

Robert Mugabe has led Zimbabwe since 1980, but he underestimated his nation’s anger over his son’s unrestrained spending and his wife’s political ambitions.

Thursday: The basketball team’s China debacle, the death toll from a Northern California shooting rises, and free zoo admission for the military — forever.

The price was astounding, even more so because some experts criticized a Christie’s marketing campaign that glossed over the painting’s flaws.

Our critic won’t weigh in on the painting’s authenticity, but he will tell you what he saw: a blank-eyed Christ, meek and monotonous.

The ruling, criticized by the U.N. and by rights groups, eliminated the most viable challenger to the country’s authoritarian leader before elections next year.

The biggest European budget airline employs many of its pilots as contract workers — many of whom are pushing back after a recent flight cancellation episode erupted into a clash.

Black Cube, hired to ferret out information on a Weinstein accuser, used an elaborate ruse involving a fake job interview in another case.

Paris is a good place to mourn. I would say this even if my uncle Richard hadn’t lived there, but all the more so that he had.