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Tyler Kepner takes a look into his crystal ball to see how each series might play out.

The past few weeks of rolling natural disasters are a reminder to homeowners across the country to do what they can to prepare for the unknown.

A visit to the reclusive country reveals the perilous moment we’re in.

How should I tip? What’s the best way to order a drink? How can I get the bartender’s attention without being obnoxious?

Marine archaeologists announced new findings from their most recent excavation of the roughly 2,000-year-old Antikythera wreck.

IN WALKING A middle path, between self-indulgence and self-mortification, Buddhists face great temptations. This struggle for self-control animates many of their paintings, including “Star’s Seed” by the Thai artist Thawan Duchanee. The painting depicts a muscular man with the mandibles of a rhinoceros beetle—beastly appendages that symbolise man’s base cravings. Only by shedding these cravings, Buddhists believe, can man be free from fear.

The painting hangs on a wall in the Bank of Thailand, which faces its own temptations and fears. Like any central bank, it must resist the lure of inflation. And like many of its peers in emerging markets, it lives with a fear of global financial forces beyond its control. When America’s Federal Reserve raises interest rates, when global investors lose their appetite for risk, or when multinational banks shrink their lending, emerging markets worry about the impact on their own currencies, balance-sheets and economies.

The...

BANGLADESH EXPORTS 60% more ready-made garments than India, a country with over eight times its population. On the busy roads of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, white vans nose through the traffic on “Emergency Export Duty”, according to the ambulance-like letters painted on their sides. The success of this quintessentially labour-intensive industry helped make Bangladesh a lower-middle-income country in 2014, according to the World Bank’s classifications.

But some think that Bangladesh’s garment industry now faces a new problem almost as grave as the traffic: the threat of automation. Robots are already common in other kinds of manufacturing, but still rare in clothes-making. Of the 1.63m industrial robots in operation worldwide in 2015 (the latest year for which figures are available), only 1,580 were in textiles, apparel and leather, says the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

Robots find garment-making so hard because its basic materials are so soft. When...

THE LAMP POSTS in Kliptown, South Africa, do not all stand up straight. One lists awkwardly, laden with cables carrying stolen electricity to a squatters’ settlement nearby. Many families in this suburb of Soweto, a formerly black township in greater Johannesburg, are still crammed into makeshift housing. When it is hot outside, the temperature inside is “times two”, says one resident, who shares six rooms with 20 others. And when it turns cold, the chill inside is also “times two”.

On the other side of the railway tracks the government is investing heavily in Walter Sisulu Square, where in 1955 the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies adopted the Freedom Charter, a statement of principles for a post-apartheid nation. The charter’s commitments, written in stone on a monument in the square, include demolishing slums and building well-lit suburbs. They also include transferring ownership of the mineral wealth beneath the soil to the people. The contrast between what the...

WHAT COUNTS AS an emerging market? Broadly speaking, an economy that is not too rich, not too poor and not too closed to foreign capital. The term was coined by Antoine van Agtmael in 1981 when he was working for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a division of the World Bank. He hoped to create what he had named: a set of promising stockmarkets, lifted from obscurity, thereby attracting the investment they needed to thrive.

At the time, it was hard work even to compare the performance of stockmarkets in places like Brazil, India and South Korea. The IFC, having collected data on ten such markets, felt that foreign investors might take to these boondock bourses, but would be put off by the risk of investing in a single company or the trouble of diversifying across many firms and places. The answer, the IFC concluded, was to provide them with a one-stop, broadly representative “Third-World Equity Fund”. When Mr Agtmael pitched the idea to a group of fund managers at an event hosted by Salomon Brothers, some were sceptical, other intrigued. One liked the idea but hated the name. So Mr Agtmael spent the weekend dreaming up the term “emerging markets”, with which he hoped to evoke “progress, uplift and dynamism”. That label proved wildly successful.

The first such fund, pioneered by Capital Group in 1986, included only four countries. The most...

THE SOUND OF an orchestral horn fills the hall as musicians warm up for an evening performance of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. The venue is a dramatic Beaux-Arts building that started life as the central post office of Buenos Aires. It perfectly illustrates Argentina’s pendulum swings between liberalism and populism. In 1946 it doubled as a headquarters for the charitable work of the president’s wife, Eva Perón. In 1997 the postal service was privatised during one of Argentina’s periodic experiments with free markets and hard money. As that came to a grisly end in the default of 2001, bankruptcy also ensnared the post office’s new owner, a conglomerate led by Franco Macri.

The postal service was renationalised early in the presidency of Néstor Kirchner, who led a new wave of “post-neoliberal” populism. In 2005 Mr Kirchner decided to turn the defunct building into a cultural centre. His wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who succeeded him as president, eventually completed the project and named the building after him. Her chosen successor lost the 2015 presidential elections to none other than Mr Macri’s son, Mauricio. His government swiftly tried to reschedule the debts that his father’s company still owed to the state (until a backlash prompted it to reconsider).

The Macri government has been trying to tidy up a lot else, too. Among other things,...

EVEN BEFORE THEY claim their baggage at the airport, visitors to the city of San Luis Potosí in central Mexico see an advertisement for the site where Ford Motors was planning to build a $1.6bn factory. The Planta Ford is still marked on a map in the arrivals hall, albeit only on a Post-it note. Follow the map, and you will see the factory’s white steel skeleton standing out against the brown hills of the Gogorrón National Park.

Ford’s facility, intended to build its small Focus cars, would have created 2,800 jobs directly, and many more indirectly. But in January the company announced it was pulling out and investing $700m in Flat Rock, Michigan, instead. President Donald Trump, who had threatened to impose border taxes on carmakers that shifted production to foreign locations, was delighted. “Thank you to Ford for scrapping a new plant in Mexico and creating 700 new jobs in the US. This is just the beginning,” he tweeted to his many followers. Everybody in San Luis Potosí, by...

THESE ARE NOT your father’s emerging markets, notes Mark Dow, a money manager who used to work for the IMF, on his blog. The phrase alludes to a 1980s car advertisement contrasting a range of flashy new models with the tried-and-trusted versions bought by a previous generation. Today’s emerging markets are also different from earlier models. But unlike the cars, they are less exciting than their predecessors.

In the past, they suffered from a chronic lack of macroeconomic credibility. They could not persuade outsiders to hold their money or their debt through thick and thin, unless they anchored their exchange rates to the dollar and denominated their debt in harder currencies than their own. So they have often struggled to offset downturns by easing either monetary or fiscal policy. They could not cut interest rates for fear of sinking the currency and unleashing inflation, and they could not cut taxes or increase public spending without raising fears of default. They were locked...

EVERY FEW YEARS Foreign Affairs, a magazine about international relations, provokes a fracas in a neighbouring discipline, international economics. In 1994 it published an essay by Paul Krugman, “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, which re-examined the source of the tigers’ success. Then, after the Asian financial crisis, it came up with “The Capital Myth” by Jagdish Bhagwati, which re-examined the case for free capital flows, the source of the tigers’ humiliation. In 2004 it offered “Globalisation’s Missing Middle” by Geoffrey Garrett, then at the University of California, Los Angeles. This essay is cited much less often than the other two, but in a roundabout way it has been equally influential. It argued that middle-ranked countries were in a bind, unable to compete either with the cutting-edge technology of rich nations or the cut-throat prices of poor ones. “Middle-income countries”, it said, “have not done nearly as well under globalised markets as either richer or...

IN 1875 THE Ottoman Empire defaulted on half its foreign debt, a victim of the “first major debt crisis of the developing world”, according to one account of the mess. Its creditors, led by the Imperial Ottoman Bank, forced the empire’s grand vizier to accept a humiliating solution. Rather than wait to be repaid out of tax revenues, they won the right to collect half a dozen taxes themselves, including stamp duty and duties on alcohol. After 15 years of tax farming, the Imperial Ottoman Bank was comfortable enough to build impressive new headquarters in Istanbul, neo-orientalist in style on one side and neoclassical on the other.

Since long before the term was invented, emerging markets have provided a rich source of both peril and profit. That financial crisis in 1875 was followed by many others, including a hatful in Turkey. And like the Imperial Ottoman Bank, investors with strong stomachs have often profited the most from emerging markets at their worst. Hedge funds that bought...

WHEN you are the chief executive of a public company, the temptation to opt for a merger or acquisition is great indeed. Many such bosses may get a call every week or so from an investment banker eager to offer the kind of deal that is sure to boost profits.

Plenty of those calls are proving fruitful. In the first three quarters of 2017, just over $2.5trn-worth of transactions were agreed globally, according to Dealogic, a data provider. The total was virtually unchanged from the same period in 2016, but the number in Europe, the Middle East and Africa was up by 21%.

It is easy to understand why an executive opts for a deal. Buying another business looks like decisive action, and is a lot easier than coming up with a new, best-selling product. Furthermore, being the acquirer is far more appealing than being the prey; better to be the butcher than the cattle. A takeover may keep activist hedge funds off the management’s back for a while longer. And...

SCHOOLS in Pennsylvania ought to be celebrating. The state gave them a $125m budget increase for 2017-18—enough for plenty of extra books and equipment. But John Callahan of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association says all the increase and more will be eaten up by pension costs, which will rise by $164m this year. The same happened in each of the previous five years; cumulatively the shortfall adds up to $586m. The pupil-teacher ratio is higher than in 2010. Nearly 85% of the state’s school boards said pensions were their biggest source of budget pressure.

A similar squeeze is happening all over America. Sarah Anzia, at the University of California, Berkeley, examined 219 cities between 2005 and 2014 and found that the mean increase in their real pension costs was 69%; higher pension costs in those cities were associated with falls in public-sector employment and capital spending.

The problem is likely to get worse. Moody’s, a rating agency, puts the total...

“THE retirement-savings crisis is a women’s crisis,” says Sallie Krawcheck, co-founder of Ellevest, a financial-advice firm for women in America. When it comes to retirement income, women are far worse-off than men. The gender pension-gap may be less well-known than the gender pay-gap, but it is in fact far larger.

Among those retired in the EU, women on average receive 39% less in pension income—from state and workplace pensions—than men do (see chart). This puts women at greater risk of old-age poverty. The European Institute for Gender Equality, a think-tank, warned in a study in 2015 that it also makes them more likely to stay with abusive partners. Reforms to European pensions, tying benefits even closer to individual contributions and thus income, mean the gap may widen further.

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IN RICH countries, people’s diets are getting worse and they are getting fatter. Hence the increasing popularity of a “fat tax”, to make unhealthy food cost more. Since Hungary led the charge in 2011 with a “chip tax” on fatty and sugary foods, other countries have followed. Britain is to join a long list next year.

Since the poor both spend a higher proportion of their income on food and tend to eat less healthily, they are the main targets of such taxes. In France, for instance, adult obesity is seen in over 20% of households with monthly incomes under €1,500 ($1,765) compared with less than 10% of those who earn over €3,000.

Punishing consumers, however, is politically painful. So “thin subsidies” have been gaining ground. But data on the impact of such policies are scarce. A recent study on the distributional impacts of fat taxes and thin subsidies from researchers at the universities of Oklahoma and Grenoble suggests policymakers should be wary. It...

IN APRIL 1956 the world’s first container ship—the Ideal X—set sail from New Jersey. A year later in Seattle the world’s first commercially successful airliner, Boeing’s 707, made its maiden flight. Both developments slashed the cost of moving cargo and people. Boeing still makes half the world’s airliners. But America’s shipping fleet, 17% of the global total in 1960, accounts for just 0.4% today.

Blame a 1920 law known as the Jones Act, which decrees that trade between domestic ports be carried by American-flagged and -built ships, at least 75% owned and crewed by American citizens. After Hurricane Irma, a shortage of Jones-Act ships led President Donald Trump on September 28th to waive the rules for ten days to resupply Puerto Rico. This fuelled calls to repeal the law completely.

Like most forms of protectionism, the Jones Act hits consumers hard. A lack of foreign competition drives up the cost of coastal transport. Building a...

SWITZERLAND, which developed cross-border wealth-management in the 1920s, was once in a league of its own as a tax haven. Since the 1980s, however, tax-dodgers have been spoilt for choice: they can hide assets anywhere from the Bahamas to Hong Kong. The percentage of global wealth held offshore has increased dramatically. But it has been hard to say how much that is, and who owns it.

Few offshore centres used to disclose such data. But in 2016 many authorised the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to make banking statistics publicly available. Using these data, a new study by Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, three economists, concludes that tax havens hoard wealth equivalent to about 10% of global GDP. This average masks big variations. Russian assets worth 50% of GDP are held offshore; countries such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates climb into the 60-70% range. Britain and continental Europe come in at 15%, but...