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SWEDES discuss their incomes with a frankness that would horrify Britons or Americans. They have little reason to be coy; in Sweden you can learn a stranger’s salary simply by ringing the tax authorities and asking. Pay transparency can be a potent weapon against persistent inequities. When hackers published e-mails from executives at Sony Pictures, a film studio, the world learned that some of Hollywood’s most bankable female stars earned less than their male co-stars. The revelation has since helped women in the industry drive harder bargains. Yet outside Nordic countries transparency faces fierce resistance. Donald Trump recently cancelled a rule set by Barack Obama requiring large firms to provide more pay data to anti-discrimination regulators. Even those less temperamentally averse to sunlight than Mr Trump balk at what can seem an intrusion into a private matter. That is a shame. Despite the discomfort that transparency can cause, it would be better to publish more information....

SWEDES discuss their incomes with a frankness that would horrify Britons or Americans. They have little reason to be coy; in Sweden you can learn a stranger’s salary simply by ringing the tax authorities and asking. Pay transparency can be a potent weapon against persistent inequities. When hackers published e-mails from executives at Sony Pictures, a film studio, the world learned that some of Hollywood’s most bankable female stars earned less than their male co-stars. The revelation has since helped women in the industry drive harder bargains. Yet outside Nordic countries transparency faces fierce resistance. Donald Trump recently cancelled a rule set by Barack Obama requiring large firms to provide more pay data to anti-discrimination regulators. Even those less temperamentally averse to sunlight than Mr Trump balk at what can seem an intrusion into a private matter. That is a shame. Despite the discomfort that transparency can cause, it would be better to publish more information....

A TELEVISION advertisement for Monte dei Paschi di Siena begins with a toddler tumbling and a gymnast stumbling. “Falling is the first thing we learn,” declares the voice-over. “The second is getting up again.” Italy’s fourth-biggest bank and the world’s oldest, which was bailed out by the Italian government in July, has had several bruising falls over the years. On October 25th it returned to the stockmarket after a ten-month hiatus—the latest stage of its plan to get back on its feet. The shares closed higher on the day, at €4.55 ($5.37), but still far below the €6.49 the government paid.

Trading was suspended last December, after a failed private-sector attempt to save the bank through a share issue. The government said it would get involved. In July the European Commission approved a €8.1bn “precautionary recapitalisation”. European rules say banks receiving such aid must be solvent, the capital injection must not distort competition and the capital shortfall must be...

Pillars to be reinforced

ONE of the perks of owning a bank is the ability to tap it when you need money. The Indian government, which has majority stakes in 21 lenders, is no exception. As it happens, it needs to finance a bail-out of the banks it owns, most of which are in trouble. So under a cunning plan unveiled on October 24th, the ailing banks will lend the government 1.35trn rupees ($21bn), about a third of their combined market value. The government will reinvest this money in bank shares, thus ensuring they no longer need a bail-out.

Steadying a tottering financial system is never a graceful exercise, as American and European authorities discovered after the financial crisis. India’s lenders withstood the meltdown of 2007-08 well, but then embarked on an ill-advised lending spree, backing lots of infrastructure projects that got snarled in bureaucracy. Bad loans piled up. State-owned lenders, which account for around two-thirds of the sector, now...

ALL men are created equal, but they do not stay that way for long. That is one message of a report this month by the OECD, a club of 35 mostly rich democracies. Many studies show how income gaps have evolved over time or between countries. The OECD’s report looks instead at how inequality evolves with age.

As people build their careers, or don’t, their incomes tend to diverge. This inequality peaks when a generation reaches its late 50s. But it tends to fall thereafter, as people draw redistributive public pensions and quit the rat race, a contest that tends to give more unto every one that hath. Old age, the OECD notes, is a “leveller”.

Will it remain so? Retirement, after all, flattens incomes not by redistributing from rich seniors to poor, but by transferring money to old people from younger, working taxpayers. There will be fewer of them around in the future for every retired person, reducing the role of redistributive public pensions.

One logical response to the diminishing number of workers per pensioner is to raise the retirement age. But that will exacerbate old-age inequality, if mildly. Longer careers will give richer workers more time to compound their advantages. And when retirement eventually arrives, the poor, who die earlier, will have less time to enjoy their pensions.

Today’s youngsters may resent having to provide for...

Nail-biting decisions

EXCHANGE-TRADED funds (ETFs) were supposed to make investing easy. Instead of spending hours researching individual stocks and bonds or paying an expert fund manager, investors could simply buy a few ETFs. But now there are too many to choose from. BlackRock offers 346 in America alone. Some investors need help allocating their money between different funds. Many companies now offer “automated wealth managers” (AWMs) that perform this service.

AWMs have been around for less than ten years, but they have proliferated, offering different services in different countries. Often, they are called “robo-advisers”, but this term can be misleading. Some offer clients detailed advice about how to save. For example, Wealthfront, an American AWM, predicts the cost of sending a student to a given college, taking into account increases in tuition fees and likely financial aid. It then suggests how parents can save in a tax-efficient way. Other...

THE president’s tax promise has always been clear: he will reduce the amount middle-earners, but not rich Americans, must pay. Yet every time Donald Trump releases a plan, analysts say it does almost the opposite. The Tax Policy Centre, a think-tank, recently filled in the blanks in the latest Republican tax proposals and concluded that more than half of its giveaways would go to the top 1% of earners. Their incomes would rise by an average of $130,000; middle-earners would get just $660. The White House maintains that tax reform will deliver a much heftier boost to workers’ pay packets. Who is right?

The disagreement boils down to who benefits when taxes on corporations fall. The Tax Policy Centre says it is mainly rich investors. But in a report released on October 16th, Mr Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) claimed that cutting the corporate-tax rate from 35% to 20%, as Republicans propose, would eventually boost annual wages by a staggering $4,000-9,000 for the average household.

The claim has sparked a debate among economists that is as ill-tempered as it is geeky. Left-leaning economists are incredulous. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Furman, who led the CEA under Barack Obama, pointed out that if the report is right, wage increases would total about three to six times the cost of the tax cut. Larry...

HE IS leaving with the share price rising and the announcement, on October 18th, of earnings that were largely well received. Better still, Kenneth Chenault, American Express’s chief executive for 16 years, accomplished a feat rare in the upper reaches of American finance: to stand down without an obvious helping shove. No grandstanding senators hounded him out (see Wells Fargo). No boardroom coup hastened the end (Citigroup). The financial crisis left him untouched (take your pick). His successor, Stephen Squeri, promoted from within and apparently groomed for the job, takes over in February.

For all that, Mr Chenault’s long tenure has not been an unequivocal triumph. Though generating strong returns on assets and equity, American Express has continued its slide within the fast-changing and competitive payments industry. According to Nilson, an industry bible, in 1974 the amount of money for purchases channelled through American Express was equivalent to 50% of what went through...

DIVORCES are rarely easy. In the 16 months since Britain voted to leave the EU in a referendum, the negotiations have made little progress. One of the trickiest aspects is the amount that Britain should pay to meet its existing spending commitments for EU programmes.

This is not analogous to dividing up the bill in a restaurant, and deciding who had the lobster and who stuck to the mixed green salad. Take the cost of EU officials’ pensions. The tricky bit in calculating it is that pensions are long-term commitments; a bureaucrat who starts work in Brussels today might still be collecting a pension 70 years from now. Working out the cost is fiendishly complicated, requiring estimates of how much wages will rise (if the pension is linked to salary) and how long employees will live. Then the sum of future benefits has to be discounted at some rate to work out the current cost; the higher the discount rate, the lower the presumed expense.

The EU doesn’t pre-fund pensions...

With at least 47 dead and 46 hurt, the authorities were investigating whether the business in Tangerang was illegal.

In a topsy-turvy, homer-filled game, it was only fitting the decisive runs came on a two-run shot by Houston’s George Springer in the 11th inning.

Thursday: Checking in with California’s otters, an update on the Sherri Papini mystery, and Corey Feldman’s campaign against child sexual abuse.

Conservative intellectuals abased themselves for the sake of normalizing Trump.

The pomp and pageantry of Thailand’s monarchy were on display for the cremation of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The disclosure is another blow to the company as it faces scrutiny over how fast it is adding users, its efforts to fight abuse and its role in Russia’s push to meddle in the presidential race.

Here’s what you need to know to start your day.

“Styles is the document of the conflicts between rich and poor, which is why our section makes absolutely everyone unhappy eventually.”

The 6,000-year-old Aitape skull, found in Papua New Guinea in 1929, was excavated from sediments that contain telltale signs of ocean water left behind by a tsunami.

Thursday: Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Wildlife Conservation Film Festival, and lessons from Hurricane Sandy.

With his love of brass, arches and color, Harry Nuriev creates environments that seem tailor-made for the social media aesthetic.