Rubric 03
EconPol
Economy and politics: policy, power and the mechanics underneath.
25EconPol
A 2010 Promise And A 2026 Ledger
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg used the opinion pages of the Washington Post to state that Facebook did not sell user data. In 2026, that sentence is less a corporate pledge than a piece of evidence. Lawyers for New Mexico...
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26EconPol
What 17,025 Earnings Calls Say About the Next Day's Price
London, the third week of October 2026, and abrdn's quarterly call has reached the slide that matters most to its retail army: customer cash. Siobhan Boylan, the group's finance chief, puts the figure at £8.3 billion,...
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27EconPol
What the Walls Do Not Show at Closing
A heat pump sized to the actual load of the house. A rim joist the wooden beam at the top of a foundation wall where the floor frame meets it sealed with foam so winter air stops moving through it. Insulation blown into...
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28EconPol
The Microphones Warm Before the Ballots
Nothing in the arena in Youngstown had been counted yet, and the night was built on that sequence: the sound first, the tally later. President Donald Trump came to northeastern Ohio in October 2026 to lift two...
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29EconPol
The Deposit Shrinks and the Debt Remains
Britain has run this experiment before. In 2013 Help to Buy let buyers put down a 5% deposit on a newly built home worth up to £600,000, with up to 20% of the cost funded by a shared equity loan that was interest free...
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30EconPol
Riyadh Postpones Its Desert Davos as the War Reaches the Capital
For most of the past decade, the last week of October in Riyadh belonged to a fixed ritual. Ballrooms filled along the capital's main arteries. A stage went up. Money managers from three continents flew in, suits...
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31EconPol
The Strait, the Recruits, and a Vote Cairo Has Not Cast
Two forces are moving toward the same narrow water on different clocks. Since mid September, Houthi forces have pushed south along Yemen's Red Sea coast in an attempt to take control of the Bab al Mandab the narrowest...
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32EconPol
A Budget Written by a Number That Shrank
In March, the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated that the government's first fiscal rule would be met with £23.6bn of headroom. The Budget on 28 October is being written around what is left of it. John Healey...
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33EconPol
Japan's Inflation Target Is No Longer a Distant Hope
"Underlying inflation near 2% target." 1] Five words, delivered at the start of the week by the governor of the Bank of Japan, Kazuo Ueda. 1] For a central bank that has spent more than a decade trying to generate price...
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34EconPol
When Sixteen Hulls Become a Border Argument
The Taiwan Strait is where fishing is a livelihood and a legal argument at the same time. On 18 October 2026, sixteen hulls arrived that Taipei says did not come to fish. Taiwan's coast guard reported that it confronted...
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35EconPol
The Cheaper Barrel Is Not Under the Sea
The fear worth naming first is the familiar one: that any move away from fossil fuels is a bill paid in lost work, and that green policy is a luxury bought with somebody else's job. It is not an irrational fear. It is...
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36EconPol
Five Days, Three Questions, and an Empty Podium
The lectern was the first thing to go. Katie Zacharia stood at the White House briefing room podium on a Tuesday, read from her notes, and finished after 14 minutes. She took three questions. Her sentences came apart in...
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