The Economist Latin America September 10, 2022

Liz Truss won the leadership contest of Britain’s Conservative Party, thus becoming prime minister. Ms Truss appointed loyalists to the top jobs in her cabinet. Kwasi Kwarteng was appointed chancellor of the exchequer, James Cleverly foreign secretary and Suella Braverman home secretary. There was no place at the table for Rishi Sunak, her opponent in the Tory race. Ms Truss’s most pressing task is helping Britons through the cost-of-living crisis. She unveiled plans to cap energy prices in order to protect households and firms from surging bills. Feeling the heat Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, proposed a set of measures to cushion the impact of rising energy prices on Europe’s economy. They include mandatory consumption cuts, taxing the windfall profits of energy firms to provide rebates to consumers and…

Volkswagen said it would list Porsche in an IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange that will take place in either late September or early October. The German carmaker is offloading only a portion of the stock, some of which will go to the Porsche-Piëch families, VW’s biggest shareholders. The rest will be sold to individual investors. vw will retain the remaining shares. The flotation could raise as much as €10.6bn ($10.5bn), which would make it the biggest stockmarket listing in Europe since Glencore in 2011. OPEC+ decided to cut output by 100,000 barrels of oil a day, a slap in the face for Western governments that have urged the cartel to increase production in order to keep prices down. The cut is small (global demand is about 100m barrels a day),…

JOE BIDEN was talking about the United States when he warned, on September 1st, that “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated.” He might as well have been talking about Brazil. Next month its president, Jair Bolsonaro, faces an election that every poll says he will probably lose. He says he will accept the result if it is “clean and transparent”, which it will be. Brazil’s electronic voting system is well-run and hard to tamper with. But here’s the catch: Mr Bolsonaro keeps saying the polls are wrong and he is on course to win. He keeps insinuating, too, that the election could somehow be rigged against him. He offers no credible evidence, but many of…

FOR A YEAR Europe has lived under the shadow of an energy blockade as Vladimir Putin threatened to turn off the gas taps to the continent. Now the threat has become reality and the prospect of a cold, dark winter is hitting home. On September 5th Russia said it will shut down its Nord Stream pipeline for as long as Western sanctions are in place, sending benchmark gas prices surging by another 30%; they currently stand at the equivalent of around $400 for a barrel of oil. At today’s futures prices, annual spending on electricity and gas by consumers and firms across the European Union could rise to a staggering €1.4trn, up from €200bn in recent years, reckons Morgan Stanley, a bank. The energy shock is now a full-blown political and…

IN PENNSYLVANIA, A celebrity cardiologist who rages against the inflated price of crudités faces a tattooed lieutenant governor with heart trouble. In Georgia, the choice is between a pastor on one side and a former star of “Celebrity Apprentice” and “Celebrity Cook-Off” on the other. In November the results of these contests, and a few others like them, will determine control of the US Senate for the next two years. On this hinges the ability of the White House to staff its administration, to confirm judicial nominations and to pursue legislation. Because so much is riding on this election, The Economist has built a statistical model to try to predict what will happen (see United States section). Our past forecasts—of France’s presidential elections in 2017 and 2022, America’s midterms of 2018…

THE MOST important currency in the world is on a roll. The dollar has climbed by around 20% over the past year against a basket of global currencies, and is at its highest level in 20 years. One euro is worth less than a dollar, and other pretenders to the dollar’s throne as the world’s reserve currency, such as the yen, yuan or even crypto, have slumped. Even as America has used its financial clout to squeeze Russia, others have rushed to the dollar-based financial system as a safe haven. This cyclical strength of the dollar dominates the global financial landscape. But look closer and technological shifts that could eventually challenge it are gathering momentum. The dollar’s run reflects several forces. Even as Europe and China face a downturn, America’s economy…