Aurelia Butler

UK growth slowed more than expected in the third quarter as the boost from businesses reopening eased and shortages of goods and workers hit economic activity.Gross domestic product rose by a monthly rate of 0.6 per cent in September, up from the 0.2 per cent expansion in August, according to data from the Office for National Statistics on Thursday.The September figure was stronger than the 0.4 per cent forecast by economists polled by Reuters. Output was 0.6 per cent below February 2020 levels suggesting the economy has largely recovered from the hit of Covid-19 restrictions. In the three months to September, however, UK output grew 1.3 per cent, less than the 1.5 per cent forecast by the Bank of England due to downward revisions to figures for both August and July. Growth was also sharply down from the 5.5 per cent expansion in the second quarter when it was boosted by the reopening of many businesses. Alpesh Paleja, lead economist at the CBI, said it was “encouraging” that the economy maintained some momentum in September, but “there’s no denying that this rounded off a tough quarter for businesses, with supply constraints biting hard”.A combination of rising Covid cases and shortages of raw materials, components and labour “came together to present significant headwinds to growth”, he said. China’s economy exceeded its pre-pandemic level last year and the US did the same in the second quarter. Assessing the extent to which the UK economy is near pre-pandemic levels is complicated by differences in which the ONS calculates monthly and quarterly data.Based on quarterly data, which are those used by the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, output was still 2.1 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels, a larger gap than any other G7 country.The Bank of England forecasts growth to slow in the fourth quarter to 1 per cent, reflecting supply chain disruptions and the impact of higher inflation on businesses and household spending.James Smith, research director at the Resolution Foundation, said “the prospect of a winter living-standards ‘crunch’ providing a further headwind in the coming months means that we are not out of the pandemic woods yet”. He added that this was why the chancellor “was right to provide more support for the economy at the Budget, and the Bank of England did not raise interest rates last week”.While the uptick in growth in September was encouraging, economists pointed to some areas of concern. The September expansion was largely driven by health activity and a large rise in face-to-face appointments at GP surgeries in England, which are considered a temporary boost following a backlog of work accumulated during the pandemic. Lawyers also had a busy month as housebuyers rushed to complete purchases before the end of the stamp duty holiday, providing another largely temporary boost.But car production was down 8.2 per cent, registering the largest fall since May, together with a fall in car sales as the sector was badly hit by semiconductor shortages and supply chain disruptions. Manufacturing as a whole was marginally down in the month and well below pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, business investment in the third quarter remained 12.4 per cent below its pre-coronavirus pandemic levels, suggesting uncertainty over the pace of the recovery and the impact of Brexit.“Lower business investment could reduce the future supply capacity of the economy meaning the economy could grow less quickly without generating inflation,” said Thomas Pugh, economist at RSM UK.The UK goods and services trade balance also widened in the third quarter as imports grew while exports fell. UK exports were well below the 2019 average as “exporters have struggled to capitalise on strong external demand, most likely due to Brexit and some Covid-related shortages,” said Gabriella Dickens, economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. More

Loan volumes at lenders like OSB have risen recently as a shift to remote working and a government tax break boosted housing demand and helped counter a hit from record-low interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.OSB said its lending and savings franchises performed well, despite mortgage lending for homes hitting a 14-month low in September after the tax break expired and as worries over higher inflation curbed consumer spending.”We remain mindful of uncertainty in the outlook for the UK economy, however, demand in housing and rental markets remains strong,” Chief Executive Officer Andy Golding said in a statement.The lender, which specialises in buy-to-let, commercial mortgages and residential development finance, said underlying net loans stood at 20.6 billion pounds ($27.88 billion) at the end of first nine months of the year, compared with 19.0 billion pounds a year ago.The group also said it remains on track to deliver about 10% underlying net loan book growth in 2021. More

“On the back of the lower-than-expected core inflation in October, the CBT’s recent emphasis on current account adjustments, as well as the increase in required reserve ratios for FX and gold deposits announced this week, we expect the CBT to lower the policy rate faster than initially anticipated,” said Fatih Akcelik in a note to clients late on Wednesday. “Our year-end policy rate (and terminal rate) is now 14.0% (previously 15%).”Deutsche Bank also said it expected headline inflation to stay above 20% in the first half of next year and end 2022 at 16.0%. More

Good morning. Stocks have fallen two days in a row. It’s a correction! Or something! Whatever it is, we’re back to talking about inflation. Email us with your thoughts: [email protected] or [email protected]. Prices and politicsOctober inflation in the US came in hot. For now, this is probably a bigger deal politically than economically, but the politics will matter to markets.The important number from Wednesday’s consumer price index report is inflation ex-food and energy, which rose 4.6 per cent. This tells us core inflation is about as hot as it has been since June:

The July and August reports were a bit of a head fake. They made us think inflation was cooling. It is not. But it’s not really getting worse, either. Because October’s 4.6 per cent is 10 basis points higher than June’s 4.5 per cent, we can have headlines about a 30-year high in inflation again, but core inflation is roughly 4-4.5 per cent, and that’s where it’s been. Don’t freak out.We have strong demand, fuelled by government stimulus, and supply bottlenecks which are causing price spikes, especially of goods. Some people think when those bottlenecks go away, and things will go back to normal. Other people disagree. Unhedged has no idea which side is right, but in any case is not convinced we got very much in the way of new information in yesterday’s report. The best case for freaking out is based on the housing component of CPI, which is stable, sticky and big (a third of the index or so). It rose by 3.5 per cent, and the trend looks like this:

Part of the issue here is that houses are assets, not goods, and we are in something that looks an awful lot like an asset bubble. If you strip out owners’ equivalent rent (which reflects house prices), the picture is less bad. Plain old rent inflation is still below pre-pandemic levels:

If house prices keep going crazy, rent will eventually follow, but we are not there yet. So we are where we were: waiting to see what happens when the bottlenecks clear (including the labour bottlenecks, which show up in things such as food away from home prices). Federal Open Market Committee members who were dovish before are unlikely to be suddenly more hawkish now. Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell has stated plainly he thinks “transitory” is compatible with inflation that doesn’t start to normalise until the second half of 2022. Team transitory can still say, “We should keep monetary and fiscal policy loose, prices will cool, higher wages will stick, and there will soon be happiness all across the land.” But for now there is not happiness all across the land, because fuel prices are high and real wages are stagnant at best. Nominal wage growth minus inflation including food and energy (a volatile series that is not predictive, but which reflects the world people live in) looks like this:

Vulgar language is warranted here. Objectively, this sucks. If team transitory is right, the trend will reverse, perhaps dramatically, and the journey will have been worth it. But the economic debate about what kind of inflation we are seeing cannot obscure the reality — and the political reality — of that chart. Here’s a tweet from Joe Manchin, the swing vote Democrat in the Senate:“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”This is factually false. Inflation is not getting worse by all accounts. But it is accurate emotionally. It’s time to think about the market implications if President Joe Biden’s agenda is dead in the water. Forward guidance cannot deliver on its promises When a central bank surprises the market, the C-word starts to fly. “The Bank blinked on rates and now its credibility is on the line,” read one headline after the Bank of England held UK interest rates steady last week.Barclays’ Moyeen Islam, writing in the FT on Monday, suggested the BoE might protect its credibility by adopting something like the Federal Reserve’s dot plot — a chart of the monetary committee’s expectations for future policy rates. The idea is this: if central banks say they are going to do something, and then do it, markets will believe them the next time they talk. This lets policymakers affect rates with talk alone — and potentially affect rates all along the yield curve, not just at the short end. But credibility can only be a byproduct of good policy. Whatever yesterday’s guidance was, things change, and the important thing is doing the right thing today. Here’s how the former Fed economist Claudia Sahm put it to me:“At the end of the day, credibility rests on making the right decision . . . Frankly, the Bank of England to some extent could have been blindsided by the data. Again, at the end of the day, you should do the policy you think is the best policy. If the world gives you the opportunity to be able to signal it, this is even better.”Our colleague Martin Wolf makes the same point, in an email:“The sensible way of thinking about this is that the central bank will actually do what it thinks sensible at the time, given its targets. Unless it is stupid, it will not do what is now obviously the wrong thing to do even if it has indicated before that it might do something else that it then thought was the right thing to do.”There are two things a central bank really needs. A policy framework that is not only wise but clear enough that the market can roughly anticipate the actions it will dictate; and unified, consistent and persistent communication of that framework.The US central bank has been exceptionally good at communicating its intentions lately. As a result, we seem to be tapering without a taper tantrum. This is good, and a welcome contrast with the BoE. But the Fed’s policy framework is a bit of a mess. Its average inflation targeting framework is vague. As Sahm put it: “They can’t even agree on what an average is.” This might cause trouble before long, dots or no dots.Forward guidance might be useful as an internal reference tool. A dot plot might give individual monetary committee members a bit of autonomy, which might make them behave more responsibly. And guidance might, under certain fortunate circumstances, give central banks a bit of power to jawbone the yield curve. But it can only be a weak tool. There will always be dissonance between central bank decisions and market expectations. Below is a chart of one-year London interbank offered rate, in blue, plotted against what one-year-hence expectations for that rate had been a year before, in orange (thanks to Edward Al-Hussainy for suggesting the chart). The two are proxies for what traders thought Fed policy would be, and what it turned out to be. Unsurprisingly, the dot plot’s introduction in 2012 did not stop people from putting bad bets on Fed behaviour:

Dots, schmots. Hedge funds are gonna hedge fund. (Ethan Wu)One good readAswath Damodaran on Tesla’s valuation. He is very optimistic about the company’s future, and still thinks the stock is wildly overpriced. More

Good morning and welcome to Europe Express.With EU trade ministers gathering in Brussels today to discuss the bloc’s state of play on trade deals with other countries — many eyes will turn to France. We’ll give you the low-down as to why Paris has postponed two agreements until after next spring and what other topics ministers will discuss. Rekindling our Thursday profile tradition, today we’re looking at Petr Fiala, who is likely to replace Andrej Babis as Czech prime minister — and who couldn’t be more different from his predecessor.And with the months-long consultation process on the bloc’s future strategy for defence and security finally resulting in a draft paper, I’ll unpack what the so-called Strategic Compass is all about. Meat-less talksTrade ministers are preparing for a lively lunch when they discuss the bloc’s recent lack of trade deals today. Chicken and lamb are unlikely to be on the menu after worries about meat imports prompted France to hold up plans to conclude talks with Chile and New Zealand, writes Andy Bounds in Brussels. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, has an election to win in April and does not want headlines about cheap foreign food putting farmers out of business.He had personally lobbied Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, to ensure the deals were not signed until after the polls, two diplomats told Europe Express. When word reached Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister and many European leaders’ favourite leader outside the bloc, she scrapped plans to visit Brussels this month.That has sparked a backlash from other member states, which feel French electoral sensitivities could gum up Brussels’ policymaking wheels for the next five months, especially as Paris takes over the council presidency on January 1.“It is going to be heated,” said one diplomat, criticising the European Commission for agreeing to delay the deals. “Trade is an EU competence. There is a mandate and the commission should not be stopped by one member state.”“What is the purpose of EU trade policy? We are good at opening talks but not good at closing them,” mused another EU diplomat. The EU’s Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with China was shelved when Beijing put sanctions on some MEPs. Talks with Mercosur, a trading bloc of some South American nations, have dragged on for more than a decade and those with Australia are stalled by Canberra’s decision to cancel a French submarine contract to work with the UK and US instead.It adds to a sense that the EU’s sleek trade cruiser is being encrusted with barnacles slowing it down. In return for access to their consumers, who are becoming more hostile to globalisation, EU leaders say they must ask overseas countries to improve labour and environmental laws.The parliament and many voters are pushing for more and more conditions in deals on issues such as climate change and forced labour in non-EU countries. The Mercosur deal has been delayed as the EU tries to find a way to commit Brazil to protect the Amazon rainforest.Today’s discussion includes a request by the Netherlands, backed by Belgium, Luxembourg and France, to debate how the EU can better enforce sustainability clauses about labour rights and other issues in countries that are part of negotiations. “Is the Christmas tree getting too many balls?” wondered one diplomat in festive mood.New face in PraguePetr Fiala could not be a much bigger contrast to the man he is set to replace as Czech prime minister, writes FT’s Central Europe correspondent, James Shotter.For the last four years, the country has been run by Andrej Babis, a combustible, extroverted billionaire-turned politician. But if all goes according to plan, the central European nation’s next leader will be a mild-mannered former academic, who has authored publications on everything from secularisation to the theory of political parties.Like Babis, however, Fiala is a relative latecomer to politics. The bespectacled 57-year-old began his political career in 2011 as chief science adviser to the then prime minister, before becoming a non-partisan education minister. He only joined ODS, the biggest party in the rightwing coalition he led to a surprise victory in last month’s parliamentary election, in 2013.

Petr Fiala may become the next Czech prime minister © AP

“He was not part of the political establishment. He entered politics a decade ago . . . as somebody from the new generation,” said Milan Nic, senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “This will be a new style, he seems to be consensus-orientated.”He will need to be. To oust Babis, Fiala’s three-party Together coalition has teamed up with a second coalition of the Mayors and Independents, and Pirate party. Between them, the five parties control 108 seats in the Czech Republic’s 200-member parliament. But keeping them together over a four-year term will not be straightforward.“I would say they are all centrist or centre-right parties. But there are different approaches, more conservative or more liberal,” said Vladimira Dvorakova, a political scientist at the University of Economics in Prague. “What could be a problem for Fiala is ODS itself. There are different factions, and for some, Fiala is too moderate.”Managing his coalition is not the only challenge Fiala will face. Even before Fiala takes office, there is speculation that President Milos Zeman, who asked Fiala to lead talks on forming a new government earlier this week, could still complicate the process by objecting to some of the proposed cabinet ministers.Assuming that Fiala can navigate that process, he will then have the small matters of a ferocious surge in Covid-19 cases, as well as vaulting inflation, a yawning budget deficit, and problems in the energy market to deal with. “He’s taking over in a crisis,” said Nic.Chart du jour: Germanophone anti-vaxxersSwitzerland, Austria and Germany — all German-speaking countries — are experiencing surging case numbers far worse than those of their western neighbours. (More here) Fear of ‘strategic shrinkage’Forget FOMO (fear of missing out). Brussels has come up with a new phobia: fear of strategic insignificance. Or as they put it, in the latest draft of the bloc’s Strategic Compass seen by Europe Express: “to prevent the major risk the EU is facing: that of ‘strategic shrinkage’, or the risk of being always principled but seldom relevant”. The “compass” — a defence and security strategy paper — “is neither a crystal ball for predicting the future, nor a ‘silver bullet’ that will magically enable Europe to develop a common defence policy overnight,” the draft paper reads. Nevertheless, it puts forward proposals and assessments that will be discussed by foreign ministers on Monday, with the aim of adopting the new strategy in March, under French EU presidency — this being yet another Paris initiative with little buy-in from countries in the east and south which fear this will be seen as a side-project challenging or duplicating Nato. Here are a few of the ideas in the “compass”:Don’t call it an EU army: The bloc should set up a force of up to 5,000 troops by 2025, called the EU Rapid Deployment Capacity — with regular exercises starting from 2023, aimed at improving readiness and interoperability. (Never mind the EU’s existing “battle groups” created in 2007 which have never been deployed.)Naval gazing: Next year, the EU seeks to expand its co-ordinated maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific and starting from 2023, organise regular naval exercises. Cyber musketeers: The bloc will organise drills on mutual assistance in case of an armed aggression, including cyber exercises starting from next year. Defining China: The strategy defines Beijing a partner (on climate change), an economic competitor and a systemic rival that gains from EU divisions, shuts out European companies from its markets and seeks to push its own global standards. China “pursues its policies including through its growing presence at sea, in space and online”.Zero-sum Russia: The draft describes Moscow as an “important global actor who attempts to widen its geopolitical sphere of influence based mostly on a zero-sum logic”. Use of hybrid tactics, cyber attacks and disinformation are “part of the reality in dealing with Russia”. The EU strategy aims at engaging the country on climate change while pushing back aggressive acts and constraining its capacity to undermine EU’s interests.What to watch today European Commission puts forward its autumn economic forecastEU trade ministers meet in BrusselsNotable, Quotable

Belarus sanctions: The EU has vowed to broaden its sanctions on the country as it accused Minsk of seeking to destabilise its democratic neighbours by engaging in a “cynical” power play over migration on its borders with member states.Brexit clearing: Brussels will extend its temporary permit allowing European banks to access UK clearing houses, heading off a potential threat to financial market stability when the arrangement lapses next summer.Google battles: The US tech group yesterday won an appeal at the UK’s Supreme Court, blocking a class-action lawsuit over the tracking of personal data. Over in Luxembourg, however, the EU’s General Court dismissed the company’s appeal against a €2.42bn fine for anti-competitive behaviour.Le Covid-vaccin: The EU has approved a deal to buy up to 60m doses of Valneva’s Covid-19 vaccine over two years, boosting the French company’s fortunes after the UK cancelled its order.Croatia raid: EU public prosecutors teamed up with the country’s anti-corruption sleuths yesterday to raid the ministry for regional development and EU funds in Zagreb, arresting four people suspected of fraud.Recommended newsletters for you More

Joe Biden’s White House is scrambling to tame soaring inflation as rising prices threaten to undercut the US economic recovery, jeopardise his spending plans and doom the Democratic party’s chances in next year’s midterm elections.The fight against inflation marks a big shift in economic strategy for Biden compared with his early months in office, when the administration’s main goal was to revive the pandemic-hit US economy with a jolt in demand through fiscal stimulus.But battling high prices has now become a large focus for Biden’s economic team after incoming data have confounded its expectations that inflationary pressures would be shortlived. On Wednesday, the US consumer price index showed a 6.2 per cent gain in October from the previous year, its fastest increase since 1990.“We are not sitting here and saying just wait until the longer-term things take shape,” a White House official told the Financial Times. “We have a set of actions and interventions that we have been engaging in for weeks now . . . we are going after this.”In the near term, White House officials are trying to dampen price pressures by exploring ways of easing some of the supply-chain bottlenecks, from semiconductor shortages to delays at ports, that are raising costs. Biden this week spoke to large retailers including Walmart and Target to discuss ways they could reduce price pressures.But the steps undertaken have had limited results, raising doubts about the White House’s ability to influence the factors driving inflation.Internationally, the Biden administration has tried and failed to persuade Opec+ to increase production of oil, which could ultimately lead to lower petrol prices. And it has not yet given in to demands from businesses that want the White House to ease tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese imports, which could exert downward pressure on consumer prices.“There’s no slam dunk lever that they can pull even if they wanted to,” said Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, adding that the best hope for the White House might be that inflation eases as the pandemic recedes. “I don’t think that we have to go from 6 per cent to 2 per cent in three months for all this to fade away as a top-of-mind issue economically and politically,” he added. “All we have to see is the trend lines looking a lot better.” The persistence of higher inflation has clouded some of the more positive economic news for the White House, including strong job creation numbers last month, a sharp decline in unemployment claims, and the passage in Congress of Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill after months of wrangling on Capitol Hill. It also contributed to Democratic setbacks in state and local elections earlier this month, including the loss of the Virginia governor’s race.“I think [the Biden administration] are definitely worried about it, and I think they definitely realise that it’s a problem for them politically,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank. “[But] they’re struggling with what to do about it.”Biden acknowledged the pressure that inflation was putting on family budgets during a visit to the Port of Baltimore on Wednesday afternoon. “Everything from a gallon of gas to loaf of bread cost more,” he said. “It’s worse even though wages are going up. We still face challenges.”“We’re tackling these issues and trying to figure out how to tackle them head on,” he added. Persistently high inflation could also pose a threat to the second plank of Biden’s legislative agenda — a $1.75tn social spending and climate bill — that Republicans and even some Democrats have warned could fuel higher prices.

The president has insisted the bill will help ease inflation by reducing housing, child care and education costs for many families. But Republicans have called for Biden to scrap the plans in response to higher prices.More worryingly, Joe Manchin, a centrist Democratic Senator who has said he is worried that a big spending bill could fuel price increases, on Wednesday warned that “the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse”.“From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day,” tweeted Manchin, who must vote for the spending package if it has any chance of passing the Senate. The inflation worries at the White House have also come at an awkward transition for the Federal Reserve, as Biden weighs whether to reappoint Jay Powell for a second term as chair or replace him.

The US central bank has said it still expects supply chain strains to ease over time but senior officials now acknowledge that inflation is subsiding much more slowly than they anticipated, raising fears the Fed will be forced to tighten monetary policy more quickly than markets expect.The central bank has already announced the wind-down of its $120bn-a-month asset purchase programme at a pace that signals the stimulus will cease altogether by June. Economists and market participants are increasingly of the view that the Fed will raise interest rates soon after.“Strong demand and supply constraints are not going away any time soon,” said David Riley, chief investment strategist at BlueBay Asset Management. More

The writer is publisher of The Overshoot research service and co-author of Trade Wars are Class WarsIf the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that downturns are essentially optional. Governments across the rich world were able to protect household and corporate balance sheets from the most severe disruption since the second world war simply by printing money.How should we use this new knowledge? Anyone thinking seriously about the potential risks and rewards of the policy mix that might be called “full Keynesianism” should consider the ideas of the economist Janos Kornai, who died last month.Kornai grew up in Hungary and spent much of his life in the Soviet satellite, which gave him first-hand experience of a society where “full employment” was the norm and the business cycle had been outlawed. The result was not a paradise for workers or anyone else, but instead what Kornai called a “shortage economy” of wasteful producers and deprived consumers.For Kornai, the essential feature of the “capitalist” economies is that businesses face “hard budget constraints”. If they do not make money enough from their operations, they need to raise funds from banks or the capital markets. And if they can’t raise funds, they go bust.This constraint forces producers to conform to the desires of consumers. Companies cannot survive unless they are able to provide the goods and services that people want at prices they can afford. At the same time, businesses also have to be focused on efficiency and cost control so that they can cover their own expenses. Kornai believed these imperatives drive competition that leads to innovation, productivity gains, and sustainable increases in living standards.Hungary and the other “socialist” economies, by contrast, were characterised by what Kornai called “soft budget constraints”. Enterprises never had to worry about breaking even, much less generating profits. Instead, they knew that they had unlimited financial support from the government. They could always “afford” to employ workers, invest in physical capital and accumulate raw materials. It did not matter whether any of that activity was actually valuable.That removed the incentive to innovate to meet the needs of customers and to hold down costs. Consumers were forced to adapt to the whims of producers. And since managers were personally rewarded based on the reported size of their enterprise — but not by other metrics such as value generation — they were highly motivated to get as big as possible by hoarding workers, land, and material inputs. To use Kornai’s word, enterprises’ demand was “insatiable” even as their production of useful goods and services was limited by the weak incentives embedded in the system.Chronic shortages were the result. There was not inflation in the conventional sense of rising consumer prices, because those prices were either explicitly or implicitly set by the state. But ordinary people felt the squeeze in a variety of ways.They had to spend inordinate amounts of time waiting for things they wanted, whether it was a decent apartment, a new appliance, or even just groceries. Even then, many consumer goods and services simply were not available. Workers were severely restricted in their ability to change jobs or ask for higher pay. And the state violently suppressed other forms of labour activism such adversarial unions and strikes.The rich democracies of the 2020s are a world apart from the Eastern bloc of the 1970s that inspired Kornai’s work. In fact, Kornai probably would have approved of the extraordinary measures taken to preserve household and business incomes over the past 18 months, including wage subsidies, forgivable loans, foreclosure moratoriums, and eviction bans. But it is possible to imagine how we might inadvertently catch the “soft budget constraint syndrome”, as Kornai put it, in the aftermath of the coronavirus.The danger, for Kornai, is that one-time emergency measures become routine. What would the world look like if consumers and businesses came to believe that governments would respond with similar force every time the economy turned down?To be sure, we would probably all be better off if there were less self-insurance for bad times and a greater reliance on a robust and reliable public safety net. But it is also easy to see how exploring the possibilities revealed by the pandemic could potentially create a new set of social problems as expectations and behaviours adjusted. Undermining the incentives that make workers and businesses productive would ultimately make everyone worse off.  More

Rivian’s roaring IPO, cocaine and climate change Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.comUS consumer prices jumped in October at the fastest pace in three decades, and shares of electric truck startup Rivian soared on its first day of trading. Plus, the FT’s Latin America editor, Michael Stott, explains why Colombia’s president is castigating cocaine users for their role in destroying the Amazon rainforest. US consumer prices rise at fastest pace in three decades – with Colby Smithhttps://www.ft.com/content/5a5a7e5f-4207-4de1-9432-002f96de67bbElectric vehicle start-up Rivian soars on stock market debut – with Dave Leehttps://www.ft.com/content/e2fb010f-0d29-4e80-8ad7-797973d463f7Colombia’s president says cocaine users culpable in Amazon destruction – with Michael Stotthttps://www.ft.com/content/375f07cd-4c3b-404a-b812-1b81dca7c1c7Disney’s streaming growth disappoints in fourth quarterhttps://www.ft.com/content/9d8fedd1-36db-45c8-8596-dce1905ec6f7The FT News Briefing is produced by Fiona Symon and Marc Filippino. The show’s editor is Jess Smith. Additional help by Peter Barber, Gavin Kallmann and Michael Bruning. The show’s theme song is by Metaphor Music. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.Transcripts are not currently available for all podcasts, view our accessibility guide. More