Aurelia Butler

Imagine two countries. The first is proudly Christian, it allowed racial segregation in living memory and racism is mentioned more frequently in its media than anywhere else in the developed world. The second is strictly secular and legally prohibits the collection of data on people’s race, a conscious effort by its leaders to avoid using ethnicity to differentiate or divide.Which do you think would offer people from diverse racial and religious backgrounds the best prospects of success? Of becoming equal participants in society? The answers revealed in the data are surprising. In 2021, US unemployment was 5.5 per cent for those born in the country, and 5.6 per cent for those born overseas. Black and white employment rates are now neck and neck. In France, unemployment is seven per cent among those born in the country, but 12 per cent for immigrants, rising past 17 per cent among those who arrived in the last ten years. Comparisons with Britain, whose demographics and colonial history perhaps make for a fairer benchmark, are similarly damning.

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Following a week of rioting across France, spurred by the death of a teenager of North African descent shot dead by police at a traffic stop, these statistics are worth revisiting. While the number of arrests has declined this week, the need for a serious conversation about how France continues to fail its immigrant communities and their neighbourhoods remains.Just as in France’s 2005 bout of urban violence, or London’s own riots in 2011, fractious relations between police and ethnic minorities provided the spark for unrest fuelled by deprivation and social exclusion. Rioters tend to come disproportionately from disadvantaged neighbourhoods: those who don’t have a stake in society have little to lose in burning it down. Across the west, young black and brown men have grown bitterly used to being disproportionately targeted by police stop and searches, but the magnitude of the disparity in France is shocking. In London, black people are between two and three times as likely to be apprehended as their white counterparts, but in Paris the figure rises to six times, and almost eight times for those of Arab origin.Encounters with French police are more lethal, too, as officers are routinely armed and are allowed to shoot at people who don’t comply with traffic stops if they are deemed to pose a safety risk. There were 26 fatal police shootings in France in 2022, compared to just 2 in the UK, and in the past 18 months French police have shot dead 17 people during traffic stops such as that which sparked the latest riots.Last Friday as the unrest escalated, the two largest police unions released a statement declaring they were “at war” with “vermin” and “savage hordes”. This culture of hostility has grown since Nicolas Sarkozy abandoned neighbourhood policing two decades ago, in favour of more repressive tactics. A future government led by Marine Le Pen’s far-right party would surely only lean into the adversarial approach.And there is little sign of improvement on integration. One in five of France’s foreign-born population believe they are discriminated against, the joint highest with Italy in the developed world. Meanwhile France’s immigrants are almost three times as likely as those born in the country to be in poverty. In the UK, the poverty rates between immigrants and others are the same.This French disparity is compounded by decades of failed urban policy resulting in immigrant communities being concentrated in the banlieues, emphasising their otherness and hampering social mobility. The cheek-by-jowl nature of wealth and poverty in London comes with its own problems, but has been a buttress against the ossification of inequality seen in France. Twenty-eight per cent of recent French immigrants are now in the lowest tenth of earners, compared to just eight per cent of non-immigrants. In the UK, the figure is ten per cent regardless of country of birth.Despite claims that France is race-blind, the data tells a different story. Without reforms in both policing and social exclusion, there is little hope that these violent episodes will cease any time [email protected], @jburnmurdoch More

The writer served in the White House as special assistant to the president and senior director for international economics from 2021 to 2023Fast forward to 2031. The EU exhausted its €250bn Green Deal months ago; the US Inflation Reduction Act is also winding down, and things are not going well. Electric vehicle sales have been stymied by global shortages and price spikes in lithium and other minerals. Without enough minerals to stock assembly lines, workers across America’s ‘Battery Belt’ are furloughed, with similar supply problems plaguing Europe. Talks with the new critical minerals producers’ cartel have been halting, partly because China — having acquired large stakes in the mines of member countries — is directing supply to its own battery manufacturers. It doesn’t need to be this way. Industry analysts are all flashing the same warning lights: achieving the energy transition will demand far more lithium and other minerals by 2030 than the world is on track to produce. Responsibly boosting global production is paramount. Avoiding critical minerals shortages will require some 330 new mines over the next decade, according to Benchmark Minerals, even assuming maximum progress on recycling. This includes 59 new lithium mines; the world currently has a couple of dozen. This is not a problem any country can solve alone. The magnitude of supply needed to fend off looming shortfalls is larger than any one nation could conceivably mine. The US and its partners can and should co-operate to boost overseas production. Neither is it a problem the market can easily manage by itself. There are several reasons to doubt the old saying, “the cure for high prices is high prices”. After all, lithium prices have risen 800 per cent over the past three years — and still, mining companies, wary of price volatility, aren’t investing anywhere near the rates needed.America’s recent critical minerals deals with Japan, and soon Europe, offer a promising opening. But to avoid global shortages, policymakers must go much further. To start with, they’ll need to bring exporters to the table, not just buyers — stitching Washington’s bilateral deals with Japan and the EU into a new critical minerals pact with leading net importing and exporting countries. Absent this sort of expansion, the world could read US agreements with Tokyo and Brussels as an attempted ‘buyers club’, which risks stoking calls from some exporters to form an Opec-like cartel for critical minerals.To make a new minerals club work, buyer countries should offer incentives to responsibly expand production. This starts with treating battery minerals as essential commodities and adapting policy accordingly. Just as with agriculture and oil, tailored measures such as price insurance — essentially a contract giving the seller an option to sell a certain quantity of minerals at a given price and time — will be important for encouraging investment amid high price volatility. The US and other net importers could also offer tariff reductions, concessional financing and access to technology, all contingent on stronger labour and environmental standards. Next, the US and other net importers should couple longer-term purchase agreements with more generous value sharing and royalty models for exporting governments. Mining executives have told me they would oblige so long as mineral-rich governments guarantee existing investments will not be nationalised, which seems reasonable. Third, all sides would agree to diversify their supply chains which is especially important in areas like minerals processing, where China controls roughly 85 per cent of the market. Members would also co-operate on demand-reducing innovation and recycling. The magnitude of the predicted deficits implies a bet on technology. But the most promising technologies — such as batteries that use sodium instead of lithium — still face real hurdles. With these measures, everyone wins: supply is boosted, and net exporters gain investment and more generous terms on new deals. Affected communities win more profits. We make progress decarbonising one of the world’s dirtiest industries (Indonesia, the world’s leading nickel producer, has a carbon footprint up to 6 times the industry average). And the guaranteed supply may even induce climate commitments from other large emitters. Convincing India to ban internal combustion engines becomes a lot easier, for example, if EV battery shortages aren’t an acute risk. The history of essential commodities, especially those pertaining to energy, is heavily arbitrated by governments. The headlines in a decade could be positive ones: a thriving EV manufacturing sector, transatlantic climate goals reached and the fraught geopolitics of oil largely replaced with secure, clean energy. But that depends on Washington and Brussels acting now.  More

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan’s nominal base salary grew at the fastest pace in 28 years in May, government data showed on Friday, adding fuel to the debate over when the central bank will unwind its ultra-loose monetary stimulus.Global financial markets have been closely watching Japan’s wage data, as Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda regards pay growth as a key gauge to consider in deliberations about a shift in policy.Regular wages rose 1.8% in May from a year before, labour ministry data showed, the biggest gain since February 1995. The strong base pay growth boosted worker’s total cash earnings, or nominal wages, by 2.5% in May, after a revised 0.8% increase logged in April.”If inflation stabilises around 2% and nominal wages accelerate to 3% to 3.5%, the condition could be set for the BOJ to dismantle monetary easing framework from the Kuroda era,” said Hisashi Yamada, economist and Hosei University professor.Japan’s largest labour organisation Rengo said on Wednesday that major companies had agreed to average pay hikes of 3.58% this year, the highest since 3.9% in 1993.The result of the spring labour talks, known as “shunto”, will be increasingly seen in government wage statistics over the next few months, a labour ministry official said.Still, real wages contracted 1.2% in May, the 14th consecutive month of year-on-year declines, as relentless consumer inflation outstrips nominal pay growth and squeezes households’ buying power. Analysts say the real wages will remain in contraction for the rest of 2023.Separate data on Friday showed Japanese household spending fell 4.0% in May from a year earlier, down for a third month and more than the median market forecast for a 2.4% decline. Spending on a variety of items from food to clothes to transportation were down, the data showed.On a seasonally adjusted month-on-month basis, household spending was down 1.1%, versus an estimated 0.5% gain to mark a fourth month of decline.”The effects of consumer price inflation are becoming more prevalent in the household spending, offsetting the boon to Japan’s consumption from eased coronavirus restrictions,” said Takumi Tsunoda, senior economist at Shinkin Central Bank Research Institute.In an interview with the Nikkei newspaper published on Friday, BOJ’s Deputy Governor Shinichi Uchida said the central bank must support the economy with easy policy.Taro Saito, executive research fellow at NLI Research Institute, said next year’s spring labour talks are expected to yield wage growth mostly equivalent to this year’s, because of the longer-than-expected price inflation and labour shortage.”But the biggest risk to the scenario is if the economy itself remains robust until next spring, given the wobbly global economic conditions,” he said. More

Tourism minister Daniela Carneiro will be replaced by federal lawmaker Celso Sabino from the Uniao Brasil party, something the fragmented bloc of lawmakers called the ‘Centrao,’ or ‘Big Center’ had demanded in exchange for backing Lula’s initiatives in Congress.The support from Centrao, known more for their horse-trading prowess than ideological commitments, is key to getting passing Lula’s legislative agenda, such as a tax reform bill being voted on Thursday.At least 308 votes are needed in two rounds of voting in the plenary and the support of the Uniao Brasil party, with 59 federal lawmakers, can be decisive for the bill to advance. More

SEOUL (Reuters) -Samsung Electronics Co Ltd reported a likely 96% plunge in second-quarter operating profit on Friday, largely in line with forecasts, as an ongoing chip glut drives large losses in the tech giant’s key business despite a supply cut. The world’s largest memory chip and smartphone maker estimated its operating profit fell to 600 billion won ($459 million) in April to June, from 14.1 trillion won a year earlier in a short preliminary earnings statement. It would be Samsung (KS:005930)’s lowest profit for any quarter since a 590 billion won profit in the first quarter of 2009, according to company data. The profit was largely in line with a 555 billion won Refinitiv SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate. Shares in Samsung fell 1.4% in early morning trade, underperforming a 0.6% drop in the wider market. Samsung is due to release detailed earnings on July 27. In the January-March quarter, the company reported a whopping 4.58 trillion won loss in its chip business as memory chip prices fell further and its inventory values were slashed.But in the second quarter, losses in Samsung’s memory chip business likely shrank due to more sales of DRAM chips, used in PCs, mobile phones and servers, analysts said. “Although memory prices fell, the drop was not as large as feared,” said Park Kang-ho, analyst at Daishin Securities.”When full earnings are announced, investors will be looking for third-quarter signals – how much effect the production cut will have in the third quarter, any demand recovery, and whether higher-end DRAM and high bandwidth memory (HBM) products are set to improve (Samsung’s) profit mix.” BOTTOMING OUTThe memory chip downturn that began last year is expected to hit bottom in the third quarter, analysts said, although the rebound may start small. “DRAM memory prices are expected to rebound in earnest from the fourth quarter, and double-digit quarterly increases are expected from the second half of 2024,” said Greg Roh, head of research at Hyundai Motor Securities. “Unlike its competitors, (Samsung) is expected to maintain its investment in memory chips this year … which will pay off in increased market dominance in 2025.” In the mobile business, Samsung is expected to unveil its latest foldable smartphones later this month in Seoul, weeks earlier than usual – seen by analysts as a bid to dominate the premium phone market for longer before rival Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) releases its next iPhone.However, analyst outlooks for Samsung’s mobile profits in the third quarter were mixed as consumer sentiment in the global smartphone market remained weak, despite some recent recovery in economic indicators. Revenue in April to June likely fell 22% from the same period a year earlier to 60 trillion won, Samsung said in the statement. ($1 = 1,307.6700 won) More

TOKYO (Reuters) -Bank of Japan (BOJ) Deputy Governor Shinichi Uchida said the central bank will maintain its yield curve control policy from the perspective of sustaining ultra-loose monetary conditions, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Friday.”We want to make the decision from the perspective of how to sustain easy monetary conditions, while taking into account (the policy’s) impact on financial intermediation and market function,” Uchida was quoted as saying by Nikkei, when asked about the chance of modifying a cap the BOJ sets on long-term interest rates.With inflation exceeding its 2% target for more than a year, markets are simmering with speculation the BOJ will tweak yield curve control (YCC) – a policy that guides short-term interest rates at -0.1% and caps the 10-year bond yield around 0%.Uchida ruled out the chance of an early end to negative short-term rates, saying any such move would be tantamount to a 0.1% interest rate hike and was inappropriate in light of current economic conditions, according to Nikkei.Introduced in 2016 after years of heavy asset-buying failed to fire up inflation to the BOJ’s 2% target, YCC has drawn criticism from investors for distorting market pricing and eroding financial institutions’ profits with prolonged ultra-low rates.Uchida said the BOJ “strongly acknowledges” the side-effects of YCC such as the impact on market function, according to Nikkei.But the central bank must support the economy amid recent signs of change in corporate wage and price-setting behaviour, Uchida was quoted as saying.”The risk of missing the opportunity to achieve our 2% target with a premature policy shift is bigger than that of being too late in tightening policy and allowing inflation to continue running above 2%,” Uchida told Nikkei. More