It’s becoming harder and harder to believe that anyone is really in charge of the world’s largest economy. Each day brings a new catalogue of woes, miscues and missteps, each of which should have been foreseen long ago. And at the centre of each fresh foul-up stands one man: Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, ‘Hammerin’ Hank’,
Elliot Wilson explains why international condemnation of Burma’s brutal military leaders is so ineffectual: because many other countries are eager to do deals with them The satirist P.J. O’Rourke once noted that the more references to democracy a country has in its official title, the greater the chance it is run by a grubby totalitarian
Elliot Wilson explores how investors can back ventures that lend to the world’s poorest entrepreneurs Prathminda Kaur is the modern version of the Little Match Girl, only with a twist: instead of perishing in a Victorian winter, she’s making a nice living for herself selling red onions and bell peppers in a Mumbai market. Kaur
Elliot Wilson says Pakistan’s economy is dominated by a ruthless business conglomerate that owns everything from factories and bakeries to farmland and golf courses: the army Sometime in late 2004, Pakistan’s all-powerful army made a curious decision. Under mounting pressure from London and Washington to capture Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Baluchistan,
The Wangdingdi market on the outskirts of this fast-growing port city in north-east China is an extraordinary sight. It might be the world’s largest bicycle market; it’s certainly the loudest. In the roiling heat of a Chinese summer, touts at the market gather in a liquid throng, moving like mercury, urging — sometimes almost rugby-tackling
Hu Bin is your archetypal Chinese real-estate entrepreneur. Built like a bull, with a huge, moon-shaped head, a permanent grin and tiny, nicotine-blackened teeth, he is also the embodiment of Beijing’s sudden determination to use its huge capital reserves to buy the world. Despite an estimated £5 billion fortune, Hu Bin would normally have remained
Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil ‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Biofuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on
Every city needs a David Webb. Hong Kong, a heaving, sweating shrine to capitalism, cronyism and cartels, is lucky it has the real thing. Shareholder rights and corporate governance remain largely alien concepts in this former British colony, which is about to mark the tenth anniversary of its return to China. It sometimes feels that
No official visit to China’s capital is complete these days without paying homage at a large and rather shabby building in the sprawling northern suburb of Haidian. The Beijing Olympic Tower is the nerve-centre of a seven-year, $48 billion project that has the potential to define China’s rapid ascent to economic superpowerdom — or to
Russia may have set the bar pretty high, but Kazakhstan still has to be one of the most extraordinarily business-unfriendly places on the planet. A visit to this vast Central Asian state is like a modern reworking of Malcolm Bradbury’s satire Why Come to Slaka?, which catalogued the dubious attractions of a fictional East European
When China sneezed on 27 February, the whole world caught cold. Within a few hours the Shanghai composite index plunged 8.8 per cent, its biggest one-day fall since February 1997, causing Hong Kong’s markets to shiver. The contagion quickly spread to Japan, Korea, Australia and India. Before the day was out, leading stocks in Europe
Elliot Wilson explains how to navigate India’s rigid investment rules and buy into a dazzling growth story Sweat was pouring off the commodities broker sitting next to me in the sauna of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. ‘India is shining,’ he thundered. ‘You must invest in it — everyone in England must. The economy