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The “pink tide” that’s drowning Latin America

🧱 Freshers’ tips | 🐅 De-extinction | 🛡️ Shonky superheroes

In the headlines

The Met Police officer who killed an unarmed man in south London in 2022 has been acquitted of murder. Martyn Blake shot dead Chris Kaba after he tried to ram his way out of a police stop while driving a car linked to a shooting the previous day. Met commissioner Mark Rowley says the fact the case went to court shows that the system for holding officers to account is “broken”. The UK will boost funding to Ukraine by £2.2bn, using the profits from frozen Russian assets for the first time. Defence Secretary John Healey described the scheme, part of a commitment by G7 countries to provide Kyiv with $50bn, as “turning the proceeds of Putin’s own corrupt regime against him”. A hoard of 2,584 silver pennies from the time of the Norman conquest has been bought for £4.3m, making it the highest-value treasure ever found in the UK. The trove, which was discovered by a group of metal detectorists in a Somerset field in 2019, will go on display at the British Museum in London next month.

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Brazilian president Lula da Silva in 2022. Daniel Munoz/VIEWpress/Getty

The “pink tide” that’s drowning Latin America

For the first time ever, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT, all five of Latin America’s top markets are “ruled by the populist left”. And guess what? In Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru, incomes are stagnating, both rich and poor are emigrating, and investors are “on the run”. Latin America has had the worst stock market returns of any region this year, falling behind emerging economy peers in Asia and eastern Europe. Partly, these “pink tide” governments are giving in to that classic leftist instinct: the spending splurge (or, as World Bank economist William Maloney recently called it, “pressure to stimulate growth by any means”). At the same time, “state meddling is rife”: erratic jabs at judicial reform in Mexico; constitutional reform in Chile; presidential interference in state-owned firms in Brazil. No wonder they are “scaring off international investors”.

The local outlier is, “of all places”, Argentina. As recently as last year the country was at a “more advanced stage of decline” than its neighbours – not just stagnant but poorer relative to the US than it was a century ago. But then fed-up Argentines voted for radical change in the form of “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, who has pushed reforms that “buck the pink tide”: slashing bureaucracy and subsidies, sacking civil servants and turning a chronic deficit into a surplus. “Investors have noticed.” Since Milei took office, Argentina’s stock market has boomed, and economists now expect it to shoot from the back of the LatAm pack to the front. It seems violet – the colour of Milei’s party – is “the new pink”.

🇲🇽 🤷🏼‍♀️ The squandered opportunity is perhaps most stark in Mexico. The strong US economy next door and the “nearshoring” of production from China should be giving the country a lift. “But there it sits.” In the past six years the government has “halted privatisation of the oil industry, shifted spending priorities from investment to social welfare, and increased the minimum wage by 145%, adjusted for inflation”, making Mexico far less competitive. The result? “Per capita GDP growth fell from disappointing to zero.”

Games

Scrambled Maps is a game where players are presented with the jumbled-up overview of a city and must work out the correct position for each tile by moving them around the screen. There is a new city every day, and you can increase the difficulty by adding more tiles. Try it for yourself here.

Global update

Yahya Sinwar’s death might have been a surprise, says Sabrina Tavernise on The Daily, but plans for his successor were in place a long time ago. Just hours after the Hamas leader was killed last week, he was replaced by his brother Mohammed, generally considered to be even “more hardline, more extreme, more lethal and brutal” than his sibling. Hopes were high that Sinwar’s death could be a turning point, but with Muhammad in charge the chances of peace look even slimmer.

An invitation from The Knowledge

To make sense of the new Labour government’s first budget later this month, we thought some analysis would be useful in your financial planning.

Join me for an exclusive free webinar where I take a first look at the Budget with Charlotte Ransom, CEO of Netwealth, and Gerard Lyons, Chief Economic Strategist at Netwealth. They will provide their initial thoughts, breaking down the key announcements and exploring their potential impact on markets, taxation, and your savings and investments.

I look forward to you joining us at 1pm on 1 November.

Jon Connell
Editor-in-Chief

Noted

The cast of Fresh Meat (2011)

In the past few weeks, teenagers across the country have been “decanted into freshers week”, says Caitlin Moran in The Times. For any fledglings “struggling to take wing”, remember: all you need are “bricks and noodles”. There’s a big difference between saying “hi” as you walk past an open door and working up the courage to knock on a closed one, which is why an old friend of mine wedged his son’s university bedroom door open with a brick on day one and told him to keep it there. And some decades ago, my husband was shipped off to university with 200 pot noodles. Word soon spread that if you were craving a midnight snack, “Pete in the East Wing” could sort you out. Once someone was in there waiting for the kettle to boil, they inevitably saw a record they liked or a favourite book and “the conversation started itself”.

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Ozzy Osborne in 1982. Eddie Sanderson/Getty

Bring back the days of badly behaved pop stars

Pop stars and politicians have swapped places, says George Pendle in Air Mail. Reading about the former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr – with his “lust demons”, heroin addiction, dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park and so on – the only comparison that really springs to mind is Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne, who lived on a “semi-permanent cocktail of cocaine, heroin, and cough syrup”, slept with countless young groupies, and bit off a bat’s head onstage. Joe Biden’s son is a former crack addict with a penchant for taking nude selfies. Donald Trump was recently convicted for paying hush money to conceal an affair with a porn star.

Perversely, the one place the public will no longer tolerate bad behaviour is the world of pop. Rapper Diddy is facing decades in prison for his depraved “freak offs”, while US politician Matt Gaetz has effectively laughed off sex-trafficking accusations and continues to operate as normal. When the singer Lana Del Rey posed with a gun on Instagram, fans declared it a “cry for help”; when Kamala Harris boasts about firing her Glock, it’s a “savvy political move”. Last year, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert was caught “vaping, caressing her male companion’s crotch, and having her breasts fondled” in a theatre. When challenged, she gave it the full “do you know who I am”. Meanwhile, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, whose music is essentially a “stultifying form of wellness” that preaches “vague progressive homilies and anodyne self-help messages”, says the band’s underlying message is: “no one is more or less special than anyone else”. Will someone please give the man a bat to chew on?

Film

Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow (2021)

You wouldn’t believe how dysfunctional big-budget superhero franchises are behind the scenes, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. I’ve heard stories of limos pulling up on set, the windows going down, and “new script pages for that day being passed out”. Insiders tell me it’s commonplace for stars to hire individual writers to punch up their characters’ lines, “and punch down everyone else’s”. And while the idea of starting production on a $300m movie with no sense of what the third act will be might sound insane, it has happened so often it’s almost “standard practice”.

Quirk of history

Days before signing the US Constitution in 1787, George Washington and his pals racked up a bar tab at Philadelphia’s City Tavern worth the equivalent of $15,600 today, says Gastro Obscura. For 55 guests, the damage included 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 12 bottles of whisky, seven large bowls of punch, eight bottles of cider, 22 bottles of porter and 12 bottles of beer. Talk about a more perfect union.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s Benjamin, the last known Tasmanian tiger, whose species could be brought back from extinction, says Sky News. The wolf-like marsupial, also known as the thylacine, was hunted to extinction in the 1930s. But a team of scientists has managed to extract a DNA sequence from a 108-year-old preserved specimen that they claim is 99.9% the same as the original. The plan now is to change the genome of the thylacine’s closest living relative – a marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart – to create a near-identical replica. Tasmanian tigers are just the start: the gene-editing boffins are also working on doing the same for dodos and woolly mammoths.

Quoted

“People think that you have to grow old to become wise. In truth, in old age you have to work hard to become as wise as you were when you were younger.”
Goethe

That’s it. You’re done.