Aurelia Butler

Should the US defend Taiwan? This is not an abstract debate. Over the weekend, Beijing simulated bombing raids on the island, while its navy encircled Taiwan. In response to the steady escalation of Chinese military pressure on the island, President Joe Biden has promised — four times — that the US would defend Taiwan from an attack by China. For some in America, Biden’s pledges are little short of madness. Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, a think-tank, complains that “most [American] policymakers are prepared to risk national suicide to protect Taiwan”. Why should war-weary America threaten to fight China, another nuclear-armed power, to defend an island of 24mn people that lies roughly 100 miles off the Chinese coast?Scepticism about defending Taiwan is even more pronounced in parts of Europe. Flying back from a visit to China last week, President Emmanuel Macron implied that France would not lift a finger to protect the island. Discussing Taiwan, he told Politico that the “great risk” for Europe is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours”.In reality, few expect European militaries to get directly involved in a conflict over Taiwan. But the attitudes of European politicians such as Macron matter, since they will affect Chinese calculations of the economic and diplomatic costs of any attack. It would certainly make life easier for Europeans and American leaders if they had no reason to worry about the fate of Taiwan. But the reality is that a forcible Chinese annexation of the island would have profound global consequences that would quickly be felt in Paris, as well as Peoria.There are three main arguments for sticking up for Taiwan. The first is about the future of political freedom in the world. The second is about the global balance of power. The third is about the world economy. Together they amount to a compelling case to keep Taiwan out of Beijing’s clutches.The Chinese Communist party argues that one-party rule is the perfect system for China. The US, it insists, should stop trying to promote liberal, democratic values — which are not working well in the west and which would spell disaster for a communitarian culture such as China’s. But Taiwan, a thriving and prosperous society, is living proof that Chinese culture is completely compatible with democracy. Its existence keeps alive an alternative vision for how China itself might one day be run.Beijing has already crushed aspirations for democracy in Hong Kong. If Xi Jinping were allowed to do the same in Taiwan, autocracy would be entrenched across the Chinese-speaking world. Because China is the emerging superpower of the 21st century, that would have bleak political implications for the world. Those who are cynical about US democracy promotion might enjoy China’s autocracy protection even less.The idea that mainland China will one day embrace political freedom remains a distant prospect. But the Indo-Pacific region as a whole has several thriving democracies including Japan, South Korea and Australia. They all depend to some extent on a security guarantee from the US. If China crushed Taiwan’s autonomy, either by invading or by strongarming the island into an unwilling political union, then US power in the region would suffer a huge blow. Faced with a prospect of a new hegemonic power in the Indo-Pacific, the region’s countries would respond. Most would choose to accommodate Beijing by changing their foreign and domestic policies. The desire to avoid giving offence to the prickly new hegemon would quickly restrict freedom of speech and action for China’s neighbours. The implications of Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific would also be global, since the region accounts for around two-thirds of the world’s population and of gross domestic product. If China dominated the region, it would be well on the way to displacing the US as the world’s most powerful nation. The idea that Europe would not be affected by that shift in global power is absurd. Now, more than ever, Europe is dependent on America’s willingness to face down Russia, China’s despotic ally. Some might argue that abstract notions like “hegemony” matter little to ordinary people. But a quirk of Taiwan’s economic development means that control of the island would quickly have major implications for living standards all over the world. Taiwan produces over 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and about 90 per cent of the most sophisticated ones. The gadgets that make modern life work, from phones to cars and industrial machinery, are run with Taiwanese chips. But the factories that produce them could be destroyed by an invasion.If Taiwan’s chip factories survived but fell under Chinese control, the economic implications would be huge. Control of the world’s most advanced semiconductors would give Beijing a chokehold over the world economy. As the US has already discovered, replicating Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is much harder than it sounds.All these considerations — economic, strategic, political — make a compelling case for the US and its allies to protect Taiwan. No one in their right mind wants a war between America and China. But now, as in the past, it is sometimes necessary to prepare for war — to keep the [email protected] More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Jeffrey Haley, the CEO of American National Bank and Trust Company, saw the crunch coming at the start of 2023.Rising interest rates and a slowing economy to him meant that loan growth would likely fall by half as the Danville, Virginia-based community bank turned its focus to better-quality, higher-yielding credit, worrying little about volume.Then a pair of U.S. regional banks abruptly failed in mid-March. Instinct told him things would tighten further, with loan growth plunging to perhaps a quarter of what it was in 2022, when his bank’s loan book grew by 13% to around $2.1 billion.Coming into 2023 “my rule of thumb was whatever you did last year you will probably do half this year,” Haley said. “Based on current events … I now think it gets cut in half again.”After a year of racing along a virtually unfettered path to higher interest rates, the Federal Reserve is facing its first significant pothole as the decisions made in hundreds of bank executive suites will either add up – or not – to an economy-shaping drop in lending.By raising the benchmark interest rate that banks use in lending money to each other, tighter monetary policy makes consumer and business loans more expensive and harder to get. In theory, that lowers demand for credit-financed goods and services, and in time also lowers inflation.The concern now is how far and fast that unfolds.Household and business bank accounts remain comparatively flush, a buffer against too swift an economic comedown. But overall bank credit has been stalled at about $17.5 trillion since January. Its year-over-year growth has been falling fast, and the Fed’s next interest rate decision in May now hinges on whether policymakers decide that’s just monetary policy running its course or something deeper. Graphic-Loan officers say the crackdown has begun RATTLED CAGE Inflation, as measured by the Fed’s preferred gauge, remains more than double the U.S. central bank’s 2% target, and for now policymakers seem agreed that another rate increase at their May 2-3 meeting is warranted. But the potential for a worse-than-expected credit crunch remains elevated in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank (OTC:SBNY) collapses last month, which raised concerns of a larger financial panic.The worst seems to have been avoided. Emergency steps by the Fed and Treasury Department protected depositors at both banks, helping ease what could have been a destabilizing run from smaller banks to larger ones. Other actions by the Fed helped maintain confidence in the wider banking system.Yet the cage was rattled as a year of rising interest rates had already put smaller banks under pressure, competing for deposits that were leaking into Treasury bonds and money market funds that paid more interest.The response – less lending, tighter credit standards and higher interest on loans – was already taking shape. Officials are now watching for signs that has been kicked into overdrive.Hard data on bank lending and credit will come into play, augmenting topline statistics like unemployment and inflation that the Fed is focused on. As Fed policymakers gauge whether tougher bank lending may let the central bank forego future rate hikes, bank officer surveys will also be mined for clues about sentiment among those driving credit decisions.Updated results for one, the Fed’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices, will be presented at the central bank’s next meeting before being released publicly the following week – among the more-anticipated editions of a poll that gets little attention outside the most intent of Fed watchers and financial industry analysts.”Survey data is going to be very important because it’s going to give us a sense of whether financial institutions are pulling back even more on their credit standards,” Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said last week. “We already saw it happening, which you’d expect to see as interest rates moved up … That was kind of a normal thing.” “Now we’re going to be really assessing, OK, is this even a stronger impact, because that’s going to matter … We’re trying to calibrate our monetary policy, and tightening credit conditions is the mechanism through which that’s going to impact the broader economy.” Graphic-Bank credit growth is slowing alreadyhttps://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/CREDIT/klvygqbgwvg/chart.png SENTIMENT WEAKENING The survey of large and small banks asks high-level questions – Are lending standards tighter or looser? Is loan demand increasing or decreasing? – yet is considered a reliable gauge of how lending will behave.It was already showing the wheels of a slowdown in motion.Results for the last quarter of 2022 showed a net share of around 45% of banks were tightening standards for commercial and industrial loans, the survey question seen as the best barometer for the direction of lending. Up sharply in the last three surveys, that is already near levels associated with recession.Some consumer loan standards were also getting stricter. Other banking survey data has also turned down. A Conference of State Bank Supervisors survey found the lowest sentiment among community bankers since the poll began in 2019. Nearly all of the 330 respondents, some 94%, said a recession had already begun.A Dallas Fed bank conditions survey, conducted in late March after the two bank failures, indicated lending standards in that Fed regional bank’s district have kept tightening, with loan demand falling. What this means for consumption, business investment and inflation “remains difficult to gauge,” wrote Peter Williams, director of global policy strategy at ISI Evercore. “This latest shock will add another, challenging-to-model, layer to the outlook.”Tighter credit is hitting an already-slowing economy, with key sectors showing stress.Small businesses are already reporting tightened profit margins, a recent Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) study found. With their reliance on bank loans, lines of credit and credit cards, tougher financing conditions may land particularly hard on that segment of the economy, a key source of employment.Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist for Deutsche Bank (ETR:DBKGn), recently estimated if the next Fed loan officers survey shows a 10-percentage-point rise in the share of banks tightening credit, it could lop about half a percentage point from U.S. output – enough to turn expected meager growth into a recession. “These scenarios would push lending conditions into a range that has more clearly been associated with recession,” Luzzetti and his team wrote, saying they see potential for “a broader tightening of financial conditions that will meaningfully slow growth at a time when recession risks were already elevated.” Graphic-Community banks turn sourhttps://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-FED/CREDIT/movakykgjva/chart.png More

A surprise drop in unemployment and steady-as-she-goes hiring figures are boosting confidence among believers that the United States economy can get through this year with just relatively minor setbacks.While faster-moving surveys last week seemed to paint a picture of a March slowdown, Good Friday’s non-farm payrolls figures suggested the jobs market remains solid, with unemployment back at more than 50-year lows.It could be a case of laggy data, and to be sure market attention is on whether banks tighten up lending in the wake of last month’s confidence wobbles, and on how and when that would flow through to the real economy of jobs, wages and spending.Earnings for Citi, Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) and JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) & Co later in the week will be in focus for colour on financial conditions. Inflation figures due Wednesday can also help markets to gauge how aggressive the Federal Reserve may need to be.Yet in the meantime a measure of confidence is coalescing around the U.S. interest rate outlook. Friday’s jobs data lifted yields, but didn’t substantially shift a bigger picture view that hikes are all but finished and cuts are coming.Futures pricing implies one more 25 bp hike is likely in May and that it won’t stick – the entire U.S. curve from three months to 30 years is below 5%, the upper reach of the current Fed funds target window.In Asia, markets that were open in holiday-thinned trading nudged higher, shaking off, for now, a round of sabre rattling across the Taiwan Strait.China is running military exercises in the wake of Taiwan’s president visiting the United States, while the U.S. scrambles to find the source of a damaging document leak.Australia, Hong Kong and most markets in Europe were closed for Easter Monday. Graphic-Unemployment rate, https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/UNEMPLOYMENT/gdpzymqoqvw/chart.png Key developments that could influence markets on Monday:BOJ Governor Ueda gives inaugural press conferenceWorld Bank, IMF spring meetings begin More

When Washington introduced expansive controls in October restricting chip and equipment exports to China, it was accused by Beijing of “bullying” its tech sector and “violating the spirit of co-operation”.Such responses, amounting to little more than verbal bluster in response to a slow strangling of semiconductor supplies, reflected Chinese industry’s reliance on foreign chip technology and the need to tread carefully with any retaliatory measures. But Beijing finally went on the offensive earlier this month, with the Cyberspace Administration of China announcing an investigation on national security grounds into Idaho-based memory chip manufacturer Micron Technology. The CAC said it would review imports of Micron’s products to ensure the security of its information infrastructure.Industry insiders say Micron, which generates 11 per cent of its revenue in mainland China and another 5 per cent in Hong Kong, was an obvious first target for Beijing because its tech would be more easily replaced with competitors’ chips if China ultimately decided to ban it. The US group had also been downsizing some of its operations on the mainland while increasing investment in the US.However, industry experts believe any further retaliation will be limited, given Chinese reliance on artificial intelligence chips made by Nvidia and other processors manufactured by the likes of Intel and Qualcomm.Mark Li, senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, said “memory chips are standardised, so it is easy to change suppliers from US to non-US”, adding that South Korean groups Samsung and SK Hynix would mop up most of Micron’s orders in China. Beijing views Micron as having played “an unfriendly role in the country’s semiconductor industry”, said Wang Lifu, a chip analyst at Shanghai-based research group ICwise. He pointed to Micron’s legal action against Chinese competitors for intellectual property theft and its perceived role in “lobbying Washington to impose sanctions against China”.Paul Triolo, an expert on China tech at consultancy Albright Stonebridge, said Micron was seen as “supporting specific controls” that “severely restricted China’s memory leaders YMTC [Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp] and CXMT [ChangXin Memory Technologies] from obtaining semiconductor manufacturing gear to remain competitive in the memory sector”.

Last year, the US put restrictions on the export of technology to manufacture Nand memory chips with 128 layers or more — the level of YMTC’s most advanced chips. Stocks of Chinese memory chipmakers rallied this month following news of the Micron probe, but analysts say domestic rivals will not receive much of a boost from the investigation. “There is no Micron equivalent in China. There are only small memory companies which make lagging and niche products,” said Li. “We are in communication and co-operating fully with the CAC,” said Micron in a statement. “Product shipments, engineering, manufacturing, sales and other functions are operating as normal. Micron is committed to conducting all business with uncompromising integrity and we stand by the security of our products and our commitments to customers.”Carolyn Bigg, head of law firm DLA Piper’s cyber security team in Hong Kong, said that “launching a cyber security investigation into a company in connection with other underlying issues is a well-trodden path for Chinese authorities”.The CAC investigation could culminate in Micron having its operations curtailed in China. Unlike in Europe, where companies are hit with a fine if they breach cyber security rules, in China, they could also “lose their operating licence or have their platforms taken offline”, she said. Analysts say the commercial impact on Micron would be limited if it was cut out of the Chinese market. “Micron can easily redirect elsewhere. Memory chips are standardised, so chips for example reserved for Lenovo could easily be redirected to Dell,” said Li. Last year, Micron shut down a Dram chip design unit in Shanghai, with its engineers reportedly being asked to relocate to the US or India. It also announced a $20bn investment in a new US chip factory, in a significant rebalancing of its global manufacturing that will see its most advanced production move back to the US.However, the company still has a staff of about 3,000 in China, most of them working at an assembly and test facility in the city of Xi’an in central China.In the longer term, industry insiders say this is a clear signal from Beijing for its tech industry to accelerate efforts to de-Americanise its supply chains. “People are talking about a cold war. It is clear that Chinese tech companies have no choice but to find different sources of supply where they can,” said one senior executive at a Chinese artificial intelligence group. More

Ghana hopes to take a big step towards restructuring its $58bn-worth of debt this week, with its bilateral creditors meeting on Tuesday to discuss whether to provide enough relief to unlock a $3bn IMF bailout. Ghana owes $5.5bn to foreign governments and their state banks. Ken Ofori-Atta, finance minister, said he had “hope” those bilateral creditors would consent to enough debt relief to enable the country to tap an IMF loan package agreed last year. “We hope on April 11 the Paris Club will meet with China present to provide financing assurances to the IMF,” he told the Financial Times. “This will be the defining input that [the IMF] will require to then go to their board.” Commitments from bilateral creditors to provide debt relief are often the first step to unlocking an IMF-backed restructuring programme. The French Treasury, which hosts the Paris Club of bilateral creditors, said the group was “doing everything” to reach an agreement on the commitments required. China, which is owed $1.9bn, was expected by Ofori-Atta to agree to a deal, despite not being a member of the Paris Club. Ghana stopped repaying most of its debts in December and reached a preliminary deal with the IMF on a rescue package in the same month.But the IMF’s support is dependent on Ghana meeting a string of conditions, including measures to raise revenues through a rise in the rate of value added tax, tariff increases on public utilities and an end to central bank finance for the government. The fund also asked Ghana to make progress on restructuring its domestic debts.Ofori-Atta said the fund’s conditions had been met. “Those are literally all done, so we are pretty much there,” he said. “We have done what is required.”Its restructuring talks are being closely watched by other low and middle-income countries who are in, or at risk of, default. Zambia defaulted on its debts in 2020 and its debt restructuring — on which a $1.3bn IMF programme depends — has stalled amid disagreement among its creditors. Sri Lanka defaulted last year and finally won the backing of the IMF for a $3bn bailout last month.A breakthrough in Ghana’s debt talks could raise hopes of faster workouts in the restructuring of other countries’ debts in the future.

The IMF and World Bank have warned that a third of developing countries, including 60 per cent of low-income countries, have debts that are unsustainable or in danger of becoming so. The pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine and last year’s surge in global inflation and in the value of the US dollar against other currencies have pushed many countries into economic crisis and to the brink of default.Once bilateral lenders have promised enough relief to make a country’s debt sustainable, it is up to the borrower to seek similar terms from other lenders including bondholders and commercial banks.Data from Ghana’s central bank show that the country had external public debts equal to 44 per cent of gross domestic product in September or about $34bn, according to the IMF. Domestic public debts were equal to 32 per cent of GDP, or about $24bn.Ghana halted payments on most of its external debts in December and called on holders of about $11bn of its domestic debt to take part in an exchange that would significantly reduce the cost of debt service. Holders of about 85 per cent of the eligible domestic debt had agreed to take part, Ofori-Atta said. More

Croatia’s central bank governor has batted away complaints that the introduction of the euro has led businesses to increase their prices substantially, saying its adoption had only raised costs “a little”. Boris Vujčić told the Financial Times the country’s decision to become the eurozone’s 20th member in January had led to higher prices for takeaway coffee and men’s haircuts. However, he said the overall cost of living had hardly budged.“We can now say with confidence that the impact of the euro introduction was not significant on prices,” said Vujčić, who added that it pushed prices up by 0.4 percentage points at most.When other countries adopted the euro it often led to howls of protest from consumers, who argued that businesses used it as an excuse to raise prices. Critics in Germany invented the word “Teuro” to describe the phenomenon in an adaptation of teuer, which means expensive in German. It has been a similar story in Croatia, which joined the bloc at a time when inflation was already at double-digit levels. The country is also poorer than many European countries — its gross domestic product per capita was half the EU average in 2021, according to the World Bank — meaning people are more exposed to price rises.“A lot of my friends are upset,” said Andrea, a waitress at a small Italian café a few streets from the white stone columns of the central bank in Zagreb. “They preferred the kuna. I think they imagine a lot of this, but many of them blame it for the high prices.”Aware of the risk of public discord, the country’s economy minister, Davor Filipović, warned retailers against “trying to cheat Croatian citizens”. In the first two weeks of euro usage, inspectors imposed a total of €234,000 in penalties to companies for unjustifiable price rises. The government also capped the price of eight essential goods from sugar to chicken, requiring shops to display the cost of goods in both kuna and euro until the end of this year. The central bank tracked prices of restaurants and cafés by “web-scraping” data from Wolt, the delivery service, and checked shifts in the online prices of thousands of other items. Only 10 per cent of prices at big retailers rose after the euro’s introduction, while a quarter fell and 65 per cent were unchanged, according to a blog by officials at the Croatian central bank and European Central Bank.Vujčić, who celebrated the smooth launch of the currency with staff over a euro-shaped cake and champagne, said some of the biggest price increases had been in hairdressers, coffee shops and beauty parlours. “That’s where people rightly feel prices have gone up,” he said.However, officials also found that some price increases in January were reversed a few weeks later. “Some guys who increased prices too much, they found people don’t want to buy their coffee so they started to reduce it.” Markets were “still alive and they still work”, he said. The euro traded at 7.5 kuna before the switch to the common currency. Before the switch, Croatian retailers priced most items at psychologically more attractive prices, such as 9.99 kuna. One of the big worries was that, after the switch, those prices would be rounded up to a more expensive price, such as €1.39. However, the central bank found that only a limited amount of retailers used that trick. Yet consumer groups are unconvinced. Six of them have been running a “secret shopper” project to track the price of 55 goods and services since the switch to the euro and found evidence of prices being rounded up and of sharp increases.Tanja Popović Filipović at CEIP, one of the six groups, said many Croatians had a “negative image” of the euro, associating it with inflation, and the results of the project “proved that citizens’ concerns about price increases after the introduction of the euro as the official currency were justified”.A pedicure and some haircuts, which were tracked by secret shoppers, cost a quarter more in January than before the euro’s launch, she said. The price of a 1kg bag of rice rose 14 per cent between December and January, while a 1kg sack of potatoes almost doubled in price from November to January and the price of a tub of yoghurt rose by a quarter.The ECB, where Vujčić is the newest member of its rate-setting governing council, has raised interest rates by an unprecedented 3.5 percentage points since last summer to try and bring inflation in the bloc back to its 2 per cent target.Establishing himself in the camp of the more hawkish council members, Vujčić said: “There are more rate rises ahead from where we are now. How much? I don’t know. More. The fight against inflation is not over.”Before he would support an end to rate rises he said there would need to be “a reversal in core inflation dynamics”, meaning a significant deceleration of prices excluding energy and food, which continued to rise in March to hit a eurozone record of 5.7 per cent. More

The writer is chair of Rockefeller InternationalThe irony of the Silicon Valley Bank saga is now complete. The crisis started inside the American tech sector’s favourite bank, but the government rescue has benefited Big Tech the most. As calm returns to the market, fuelled by megacap tech stocks, investors are naturally relieved. They need to be aware, however, of where a system built on bailouts is heading.Even two decades ago, capitalism was marked by boom-bust cycles that disrupted incumbents and created space for upstarts. While still a ubiquitous word, “disruption” is finally fading as churn in the market stalls. The big beneficiaries of post-crisis rescues are big, established companies — and this is not how capitalism is supposed to work.After the government stepped in on March 10 to rescue SVB, megacap stocks had one of their best runs ever. Today, all of the top five US companies are tech businesses and together they represent more than 20 per cent of the stock market — the highest concentration since the 1960s and more than double the figure a decade ago.The decline in competitive churn is a side-effect of the rescue culture that has been growing since the 1980s. Ever since the US Federal Reserve stepped in to prop up the market after the 1987 crash, the stock market has grown dramatically, from half the size of the US economy to two times larger at its peak in 2020. One might assume an expanding market should create room for more churn, but no, not in America.The number of US companies that remain in the top 10 from one decade to the next has risen steadily, from just three in 1990 to six at the end of the 2010s. And while churn has weakened in the US, it remains relatively robust across much of the world. From the start to the end of the 2010s, just two companies remained on the top 10 list in Japan, four in Europe, four in China and two in the global list, Microsoft and Alphabet.Today, the top five US companies are bigger than the next five by the largest margin since the early 1980s. The top two alone account for nearly half the market cap of the top 10, up from 35 per cent at the start of the pandemic. Apple is now number one, and is nearly six-times larger than UnitedHealth Group, in 10th place. Three decades ago, Exxon was number one but just over twice the size of the tenth company, BellSouth. Competing explanations for the rise of Big Tech include the natural advantage of size on digital networks, where companies can add customers at negligible added cost. But “network effects” can’t explain why three out of every four US industries — and not just in the tech industry — have been consolidating in the hands of a few companies. Sweeping government rescues that benefit incumbents can.In the past, disruption was particularly rapid in tech. New names rose to prominence with each new phase of the computer age, from mainframes to PCs to the internet and smartphones. Now, as the tech conversation shifts to breakthroughs such as AI, it still centres around the same old names led by Microsoft and Alphabet. And this rise of US monopolies has been accompanied by the decline of smaller US companies and start-ups.In China, where there has been more churn at the top, the prospects of internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent have risen and fallen mainly with the intensity of government regulation. More than network effects, Beijing is the decisive factor.The US government is not as intrusive as China’s, but if you think Washington is not distorting markets when it rescues banks, you are not reading this in Texas. There, the mayor of Fort Worth recently said that the “main thing” worrying business leaders is this question: if SVB had served the oil industry rather than tech, would the government “have stepped up the same way?” Inevitably, rescues distort the way capital is allocated, shifting decisions into political hands. Markets stop trying to figure out what makes economic sense, and start anticipating what the state will support. But a society exhausted by crises seems increasingly comfortable with this perversion of incentives.Rather than question the wisdom of rescues, many mainstream commentators are asking why governments don’t just double down and nationalise banks. Leaders in other troubled sectors such as commercial real estate are spotting an opportunity, claiming that their industries also pose systemic risks and therefore merit government support.But churn lies at the heart of capitalism. The state cannot keep all incumbents afloat. If there is any energy left in this increasingly deformed system, the coming years should see the big making way for new winners, not further entrenching themselves at the top. More