THERE is an old children's game called Kerplunk. It is similar in concept to Jenga. Marbles are poured into a plastic tube through which sticks have been threaded. The players take it in turns to remove the sticks with the aim of avoiding the fall of marbles. The normal pattern is for a few marbles to drop until the unlucky player removes the strut that keeps up the rest. A noisy crash ensues.

Jerome Powell (pictured), the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, may be that unlucky player. Janet Yellen, his respected predecessor, managed to pull out five sticks (ie, raised rates five times) before she departed, leaving both the economy and the markets in fine shape. Doubtless, Ms Yellen was not happy when President Donald Trump denied her a second term. But it may have been a blessing in disguise. The task of the central banker gets a lot more difficult from here.

Mr Powell's first Congressional testimony as Fed chair yesterday was seen as bullish on the economy...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2HRj7ra

STOCK traders hang on central bankers’ every utterance. They scan news sites for market-moving events, such as terrorist attacks, and monitor President Donald Trump’s tweets for hostility towards publicly traded firms. Curiously, though, few analyse goings-on in Congress, which can shift the course of the world’s largest economy. Jonathan Strong, a former reporter (including at Roll Call, a sister publication of The Economist), hopes to change that.

With the help of 0ptimus, a firm of Republican data wonks, he has spent three years building Legis, an algorithm powered by vast quantities of data and a neural network (a computer system modelled on the human brain), which predicts the outcome of congressional votes. Each of the 44 votes it has forecast so far has been correct. Last year a hedge fund (which does not want to be named) began trading derivatives using its predictions.

According to legend, carrier pigeons brought news of the Duke of Wellington’s...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2FaKa29

THE cruise industry sells itself as a relaxing way to travel, a world away from the hassle, queues and crime of travelling on land. Yet not all holidays look like the brochure, and cruises are no exception. Earlier this month one such voyage, nicknamed the “cruise from hell”, came to a resounding end in Melbourne, Australia. Dozens of brawls had broken out on board the Carnival Legend, a ship owned by the world’s largest cruise firm, many of which had apparently been instigated by a family group of 23. It appears that the crew struggled to control the situation. One video seems to show crew members kicking a passenger on the ground. Another passenger told reporters that she had heard the captain respond to the violence by saying, “What do you want me to do about it, throw them overboard?”

Carnival, the cruise firm that operated the ship, says that it is investigating what happened. But this is far from an isolated incident. In fact, less than two weeks ago,...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2Cp8v39

WHEN bankruptcy trustees were appointed over a hectic weekend late in 2008, there seemed no end to the losses caused by the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Cash in the bank was no more than $150m. But the losses have been less, and the assets available for compensation greater, than had been feared.

On February 22nd Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the liquidation of Mr Madoff’s firm, announced that a fund set up to reimburse customers would make its ninth distribution, of $621m, bringing the total handed out so far to $11.4bn. Another $1.8bn is held in reserve for contested claims. This is on top of a separate distribution of $723m last November from a separate fund run by the Department of Justice. Another $3bn remains to be distributed in that fund and the bankruptcy trustees hold out hope that substantially more will be recovered and returned.

Mr Madoff, who will turn 80 in April, is serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina prison. At his...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2oyWzTc

RARELY in corporate history has a giant come and gone so quickly. Anbang was founded in 2004 as a small Chinese car-insurance company. By the start of last year it ranked among the world’s biggest insurers with some $300bn of assets, including stakes in hotels and financial firms across America, Europe and Asia. Given another ten years, boasted Wu Xiaohui, its swashbuckling founder, Anbang’s scale would “exceed your imagination”. But then, just as vertiginous as its ascent, came its fall. Alarmed at its debt-fuelled expansion, regulators started blocking its overseas deals, reined in its insurance business and detained Mr Wu. On February 23rd its disgrace became complete: the Chinese government announced that it had taken over Anbang and would prosecute Mr Wu for economic crimes.

The insurance regulator said it had intervened because illegal operations could have “seriously endangered” the company’s solvency. It did not spell out the exact nature of Anbang’s alleged...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2CtNQLw

KYLIE JENNER, a model and reality TV star best known for being the, er, second most famous Kylie in the world, managed to cause a stir on Wall Street. With this idiosyncratic tweet

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat any more? Or is it just me...ugh this is so sad

she knocked back the share price of Snap, the parent company of the video- and picture-sharing app. Ms Jenner’s influence in the target market is deemed to be huge; she has 24.5m Twitter followers, and her message has (at the time of writing) been retweeted 58,000 times and “liked” by 310,000. 

Snap’s share price fell 6%, reducing the company’s market value by $1.3bn. The decline was not just down to the influence of Ms Jenner, who recently gave birth to a daughter Stormi, named after the weather/porn star/grime artist. Investors were already worried about the impact of a recent app redesign. More than 1.2m people signed a...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2oB64Bp

WHEN Ken Frazier, chief executive of Merck, an American pharmaceutical giant, started his job in 2011, he had a hard decision to make. The firm had promising new drugs—such as Januvia, for diabetes, and Gardasil, a vaccine against cervical cancer. But the pharma industry was struggling with dismal returns on R&D and investors were questioning if companies were overspending on science. Some surrendered and started buying in drugs instead. But Mr Frazier opted to carry on backing his labs and promised publicly to spend on R&D for the long term, not for the stockmarket’s immediate gratification.

An opportunity to implement the pledge soon arrived. Merck’s merger with another pharma firm, Schering-Plough, in 2009, had brought it an obscure new cancer drug. At first Merck’s scientists were unimpressed and relegated the drug to a list of assets to be licensed out. There was widespread scepticism at the time about whether drugs that attacked cancer using the immune system would...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2ouWsc9

The coffee’s on us

WHEN Maria Veikhman, founder of SCORISTA, a Russian credit-scoring startup, was considering expansion abroad, China immediately came to mind. She believes the scope there is vast, for two-fifths of Chinese have no credit records. Ms Veikhman settled in Tianfu Software Park, a state-owned incubator in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province where city authorities “offer almost everything for free”. Complementary facilities range from office space, basic furniture and logistics services to detailed guidance on entrepreneurial methods.

Chengdu aims to catch up with Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, which at present are in a different entrepreneurial league—together they have over a hundred unicorns, or private startups worth over $1bn. The south-western city allocated 200m yuan ($30m) in 2016 to an innovation-and-startup fund for overseas founders, and hands out up to 1m yuan in cash to well-capitalised foreign startups and joint ventures. If the...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2BVfBvp

IN THE Russian business community Sergei Galitsky served as a rare example of a self-made billionaire who rose with relatively little state help and outside the natural-resources trade. He built his retail company, Magnit, from scratch into Russia’s largest network; it has more than 16,000 stores. Rather than moving to Moscow, he kept his headquarters in his hometown of Krasnodar, where he also founded a football club. On February 16th he made a telling exit, announcing he would sell nearly all of his shares in Magnit—29.1%—to VTB, a state bank.

That Mr Galitsky (pictured, above) decided to sell is the result of a tough business cycle and some strategic mistakes. More remarkable is that he found a buyer not on the domestic private markets, or from among foreign investors. Selling to a public-sector bank reflects the growing role of the state in the Russian economy. Russia’s federal anti-monopoly service puts its share at 70%. Yet the retail sector had largely been insulated from the trend. Now...Continue reading
First published here: http://j.mp/2EXD29Y

Beretta hits its sales target

IT WAS a blunder by Heckler & Koch, a big German gunmaker. On February 15th the firm apologised for a “mistake” after its American subsidiary posted a Valentine’s image showing a handgun surrounded by ammunition arranged in the shape of a heart. The image went out to social media shortly after a deadly school shooting in Florida.

The post was also a reminder that although Europeans often criticise lax firearm-ownership laws across the Atlantic, the region’s firms are increasingly present in America’s market for small arms—defined as revolvers, pistols, rifles and shotguns. Americans buy far more such weapons than any other nationality and their appetites have been growing steadily. This year they are likely to buy 14.5m such firearms, notes Jurgen Brauer of Small Arms Analytics, a consultancy. Europeans have proved deft at grabbing a sizeable portion of all this.