Born in Havana as Carmen Castellanos, she is quick-witted and favors bright, boldly printed blouses and blazers. As a girl, she memorized the lore of pirates and their trade routes, which she says was her first exposure to the idea that economic fortunes — and state revenue in particular — “can suddenly disappear without warning.” Article
Wagner called his last opera Parsifal a stage consecrating festival play, not an opera at all. In this brilliant staging at the Metropolitan Opera, a joint effort with the Opera National de Lyon and Canadian Opera Company, just the right tone is struck for Parsifal’s quest. Francois Giraud clearly understands opera, the mission of a designer to put the music front and forward. Article
Carly Fiorina discusses giving a leg up to women. Video
TESCO, a supermarket chain, has changed the way people shop in Britain and a dozen other countries. It is also planning a change in its own shopping habits. Like many multinationals, it buys a lot of stuff from China, and, like most foreign firms, it pays its Chinese suppliers in hard currency. But now it wants to pay them in China’s own coin, the yuan. Article
Imagine India in 2033. It has overtaken China as the most populous nation. Yet with 1.5 billion citizens to feed, it’s been three years since the last monsoon. Without rain, crops die and people starve. Article
Reform should thus focus on rich-world financial centres as well as Caribbean islands, and should distinguish between illegal activities (laundering and outright tax evasion) and legal ones (fancy accounting to avoid tax). The best weapon against illegal activities is transparency, which boils down to collecting more information and sharing it better. Thanks in large part to America’s FATCA, small offshore centres are handing over more data to their clients’ home countries—while America remains shamefully reluctant to share information with the Latin American countries whose citizens hold deposits in Miami. That must change. Everyone could do more to crack down on the use of nominee shareholders and directors to hide the provenance of money. And they should make sure that information about the true “beneficial” owners of companies is collected, kept up-to-date and made more readily available to investigators in cases of suspected wrongdoing. There are costs to openness, but they are outweighed by the benefits of shining light on the shady corners of finance. Article
The best opera reviewer in the US talks about the Metropolitan Opera’s new Rigoletto, set in Las Vegas. Eli Jacobson reports that Michael Mayer’s reset offers both inventiveness and misfires. Article
Call them the “whatever-it-takes” central bankers. As the world’s advanced economies grow at half the speed of the pre-crisis years amid persistently high unemployment, governments are turning to a new set of monetary-policy makers who in word — and they hope deed — are more aggressive than their predecessors. Article
