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A new study by finance professors Aleksandar Andonov of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Joshua Rauh of Stanford University looks at expected returns among more than 230 public pension plans with more than $2.8 trillion in combined assets.

For their portfolios, generally consisting of cash, U.S. and international bonds and stocks, real estate, hedge funds and private-equity or buyout funds, these pension plans report that they will earn an average of 7.6% annually over the long term. (That’s 4.8% after their estimates of inflation.) These funds often define “long term” as between 10 and 30 years.

Based on how they divvy up their money, how much are these pension funds assuming specific assets will earn?

They expect cash to return an average of 3.2% annually over the long run; bonds, 4.9%; such “real assets” as commodities and real estate, 7.7%; hedge funds, 6.9%; publicly traded stocks, 8.7%; private-equity funds, 10.3%.

consider bonds. The simplest reliable indicator of how much you will earn from a portfolio of bonds in the future is their yield to maturity in the present. With 10-year Treasurys yielding 2.6% and investment-grade corporate bonds averaging under 3.7%, it would take a near-miracle today to get anything close to 4% out of a high-quality fixed-income portfolio.

That’s below the U.S. average of 10.2% annually over the past 90 years. But stocks were far cheaper over most of that period than they are today, so their returns were naturally higher.

stocks aren’t likely to earn more than an average of 5.9% annually over the long run from today’s lofty prices.

Among those, the least implausible scenario is higher inflation. So the pension funds could hit their 8.7% stock return that way — but such a surge in the cost of living would crimp their bond returns. What they would gain on their stocks they would lose on their bonds.

the new study of estimated returns finds that the older a pension fund’s holdings of private equity are, the more likely its officials are to extrapolate those returns — as if the good times of the early 2000s, when deals abounded and buyouts were cheaper, were still rolling.

Why do expectations among pension plans run so high? Because they have to, the chief investment officer of a large public pension plan tells me. State laws guarantee generous retirement benefits for millions of current and former government employees. To appear as if they can meet those obligations, the pension plans have no choice but to set their expected returns higher than reality is likely to deliver.

That’s the exact opposite of what the rest of us should do. Sooner or later, investors who build their expectations on hope rather than on arithmetic end up sorry.

Acemoglu and Robinson outline a theory of how economic and political institutions shape the fate of human societies. They reinterpret the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, showing how differences in institutions interact with changing circumstances to produce development or stagnation.

It also has implications for the contemporary United States, where increasing inequality and the growing influence of money in politics threaten to reshape our political institutions.

In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth.

Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: "[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty." Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.

The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor

Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people," write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions -- based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices -- create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth.

Acemoglu and Robinson differentiate their account from alternatives that they label the "culture," "geography," and "ignorance" hypotheses.

An example of the first is Max Weber's famous argument that Calvinism lay at the roots of capitalist development

the best-known recent example of the second is Jared Diamond's explanation of the Spanish Conquest as the inevitable outcome of geographic differences between Eurasia and the Americas.

Most economists, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, subscribe to the ignorance hypothesis, according to which "poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them." According to this view, development can be engineered through technocratic policies administered by enlightened experts.

this focus on policy obscures the fundamental importance of politics.

Their perspective is informed by New Institutional Economics, an approach developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and associated with prominent economists such as Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, that focuses on how economic forces are mediated by institutions such as political systems and legal codes

A state based on extractive institutions, whether the Kuba Kingdom of seventeenth-century Central Africa or more recently the Soviet Union, can generate growth, especially when starting from low levels of development. But in most of these cases, the ruling elite is unwilling to allow inclusive economic institutions because they would threaten its political supremacy; the inevitable result is economic stagnation.

This leaves open the question of why some societies end up with inclusive rather than extractive institutions -- why some are rich and some are poor. The answer, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that institutions evolve -- and that history is messy.

Institutions change in subtle ways over time, allowing societies to drift apart. When major shocks occur, small differences in institutions can send societies down vastly different historical paths.

Early modern England, France, and Spain were all feudal societies with power-hungry monarchs. But the English Parliament had slightly more power than its continental relatives; as a result, the crown was unable to monopolize trade with the Americas, which made many merchants rich instead; in turn, this new commercial class became an important part of the coalition that overthrew James II in 1688, successfully fighting off absolutism. In Spain, by contrast, the monarchy controlled overseas trade, quashed internal challenges to its authority, and maintained extractive economic institutions -- and the country went into long-term decline. Crucially, Acemoglu and Robinson remind us that these outcomes were not preordained. James II might have suppressed the Glorious Revolution, or the Spanish Armada might have succeeded a century earlier. History is like that.

In this light, the material prosperity of the modern world, unevenly distributed though it is, is a fortunate historical accident.

But inclusive institutions can also break down. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a small group of families transformed Venice's semi-democratic institutions into a hereditary aristocracy and then monopolized long-distance trade, spelling the end of the city-state's economic expansion

Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, examine why nations fail. Societies, in their telling, are like Tolstoy's families: The success stories are similar -- pluralist democracies with regulated capitalist economies -- but failure comes in different forms. There are many ways in which elites can impose extractive institutions that cripple economic development.

The United States is one of the happy families of Why Nations Fail. Although our institutions have often been deeply flawed, Acemoglu and Robinson show how crucial moments in history, from Jamestown to the Progressive Era to the civil-rights movement, have led to the expansion of political democracy and economic opportunity.

Rather than as a series of inevitable triumphs, however, this history can also be seen as a warning -- that our institutions are fragile, always at risk of being subverted by elites seeking to exploit political power for their narrow economic ends. That risk has reappeared today.

The power of the financial sector is only one example of the broader threat to our inclusive political institutions: namely, the ability of the economic elite to translate their enormous fortunes directly into political power. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, super PACs can mobilize unlimited amounts of money--and can accept contributions from 501(c)4 organizations, which do not have to identify their donors.

This may seem like a level playing field. But money is not distributed evenly. American Crossroads, for example, has consistently raised more than 90 percent of its funds from billionaires (with a "b"). The recent, breathtaking rise in inequality has put unprecedented resources at the disposal of the super-rich. With the ability to secretly invest unlimited sums in political activities, they now have the opportunity to swamp all other participants in American politics.

Rising inequality and deregulation of political spending have made possible a new kind of class warfare. The 1 percent can blanket the airwaves, install their chosen representatives, and sway public policy in their favor.

The most direct way to translate political power into cold, hard cash is to advocate for lower taxes. Republican presidential candidates spent the past year competing to offer the most bountiful tax cuts to the super-rich

Showering goodies on the rich would require draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- programs that are popular among the Tea Party rank and file. Republicans' current anti-tax orthodoxy reflects the interests of their wealthy funders rather than their middle-income base.

As Warren Buffett observed, "there's been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won." This should be little surprise: "My side has had the nuclear bomb. We've got K Street, we've got lobbyists, we've got money on our side."

Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents were instrumental in unleashing unlimited corporate political spending in Citizens United, accelerating the concentration of political power in the hands of the super-rich.

The most potent bulwark of inclusive institutions is probably the rich variety of influential interest groups that all have the ability to participate in politics. Still, the accumulation of huge fortunes and their deployment for political ends has changed the nature of our political institutions. Funding by the economic elite is a major reason why Republicans advocate transfers from ordinary people to the rich in the form of tax cuts and reductions in government services -- and why Democrats have been dragged to the right along with the GOP

Acemoglu recently said, "We need noisy grassroots movements to deliver a shock to the political system," citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as potentially helpful developments. As he recognized, however, the one with more staying power -- the Tea Party -- has been co-opted by well-funded, elite-dominated groups (including Americans for Prosperity). If a popular movement can be bankrolled as easily as an attack ad, it is hard to see what money can't buy in politics. The next test for America will be whether our political system can fend off the power of money and remain something resembling a real democracy -- or whether it will become a playground where a privileged elite works out its internal squabbles.

When faced with new competition, New York City’s immigrant drivers are supposed to learn new skills—they’re supposed to enroll in their local coding academy at night, or enroll in master’s programs in social-media marketing or food-truck management—and allow newcomers to take their place on the bottom rung. But what if climbing the ladder isn’t quite as easy as it sounds?

One of the reasons younger Americans are so optimistic about immigration, I suspect, is that many of us are the children of newcomers who, in earlier eras, were fortunate enough to make the transition from working-class service jobs to jobs that offered a bit more pay, status, and stability

To allow for the possibility that low-skill immigration has different implications today, when the prospects for upward mobility among low-skill workers are almost universally acknowledged to be bleaker than in years past, before a cavalcade of social and technological changes greatly reduced their power, seems almost sacrilegious. It smacks of dishonoring one’s parents or grandparents. And so piety wins out

We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner

And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century, and before the potential of labor-displacing automation is close to being fully realized.

What we are seeing in certain corners of New York City is not a story pitting scrappy immigrants against hateful nativists who resent their rivals for being culturally different or for the color of their skin. It is more like a desperate contest between people who are trying and failing to escape the pull of American poverty and others for whom American poverty still feels like deliverance from something much worse

This story does not compute for those who worship at the altar of Emma Lazarus, and who congratulate themselves for tipping their immigrant drivers generously or, better still, who deign to praise them for their marvelous work ethic. What they won’t do is stop to consider that we as a country are creating a new underclass for their convenience, and that the desperation of this new underclass might one day cause serious ructions that they won’t be able to ignore.

In total US executives sold about $9.2bn in shares of the companies they run in the five weeks before the start of the stock market rout. Selling before the 30% collapse in the market saved them from paper loses of $1.9bn.

It helps, a little, to think in meteorological terms. View it as a major hurricane — one that still appears to be gathering force.

With a decline in American stocks of more than 20 percent from their peak, the 11-year American bull market died on Wednesday.

All on its own, that would be monumental. So would the virtual halt of major sporting events, the cancellation of conferences and the banning of flights, to say nothing of the great diaspora of office workers who have been sent home

Yet even these developments seem trivial in the face of the rising death toll, with mind-boggling predictions of millions of additional infections

There is no shortage of solid suggestions. Providing paid sick leave and medical coverage to those who don’t have it, strengthening unemployment insurance “and generally repairing the frayed social safety net in the United States” are useful options,

Professor Rogoff estimates that a global recession is “at least 80 percent likely,” with China bearing much of the brunt and other emerging-market countries likely to be severely pounded.

“the financial power of the United States has grown in stature since the 2007-2009 financial crisis.”

That power would be wasted, Professor Rogoff said, if the United States did not use its resources both to aid other nations and provide succor to the impoverished people within its own borders.

some officials and scholars are contemplating even more radical experiments than the banks have engaged in over the last decade, like buying corporate debt in the United States or even issuing digital money that would pay variable interest rates, targeted to the borrower.

Whether this event really turns out to be a storm from which the economy rebounds, or a cataclysm that wreaks far more consequential changes, cannot be easily answered.

the most important boon to the economy might come from something simpler: a general conviction that government, businesses, nonprofits and individuals are responding effectively, and that a semblance of normal life will soon resume.

But the epidemic’s relentless math, and the bumbling start to the recovery effort in the United States, suggest that we won’t be close to that moment for many weeks.

Most economists assume that a worldwide recession is already underway — a synchronized downturn that is punishing countries indiscriminately, turning traditional economic strengths into alarming vulnerabilities.

The disruption of industry worldwide has drastically cut demand for commodities, walloping copper producers like Chile, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, along with zinc producers like Brazil and India. Oil exporters are especially susceptible to the downturn as prices remain cheap, pressuring Colombia, Algeria, Mozambique, Iraq, Nigeria and Mexico.

As the coronavirus pandemic brings the global economy to an astonishing halt, the world’s most vulnerable countries are suffering intensifying harm. Businesses faced with the disappearance of sales are laying off workers. Households short of income are skimping on food. International investment is fleeing so-called emerging markets at a pace not seen since the global financial crisis of 2008, diminishing the value of currencies and forcing people to pay more for imported goods like food and fuel.

In wealthy nations, quarantines have been mandated, while governments and central banks have unleashed trillions of dollars in spending and credit to limit the economic damage. But in poor countries, where families cram into teeming slums, quarantining may be impossible. People who support themselves by collecting scrap metal harvested from garbage dumps risk hunger if they stay home.

He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.

Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.

The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.

The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.

perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.

I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s

they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus

They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.

“It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”

the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines

In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.

In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions

On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma

A regular burglary would probably not be newsworthy. But this one involved alcohol - and lots of it. Again there are confusing reports but Reuters put the number well above 1,000 bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label - said to be worth about $80 each on the black market

Pakistan is a country where the majority-Muslim population is by law not allowed to drink alcohol. Some still drink, but alcohol is notoriously hard to come by. That has created a lucrative black market across the country.

This could mean two things: North Korean diplomats have been able to import a lot more than they are meant to and, unless they spend most of their days utterly drunk, they might have been selling the excess booze on the black market. North Korea's embassy has not commented on the allegations.

The proposed change was meant to reflect the growing importance of U.S. exports in global energy markets.

The changes also were due to affect contracts known as cash BFOE, which reflect the forward price of crude that doesn’t yet have a specific loading date. Making sellers responsible for freight costs in the cash BFOE market would have transformed a pillar of the North Sea’s vast and complex crude-oil market, analysts said.

The proposed changes initially sparked a big rise in the price of swaps that traders use to hedge positions in the physical market, as they sought to factor in the price of freight.

Platts signaled Wednesday that West Texas Intermediate will still be added to its Brent calculations at some point in the future.

Before the crisis, we forecast that income gaps between advanced economies and 110 emerging and developing countries would narrow between 2020 and 2022. But we now estimate that only 52 economies will be catching up during that period, while 58 are set to fall behind.

Last year, advanced economies on average deployed about 24% of GDP in fiscal measures, compared with only 6% in emerging markets and less than 2% in low-income countries

Insuring vaccine producers against the downside risks of overproduction may be an option worth considering.

Faster progress in ending the health crisis could raise global income cumulatively by $9 trillion between 2020 and 2025. That would benefit all countries, including around $4 trillion for advanced economies — which beats by far any measure of vaccine-related costs.

One risk going forward — especially in the face of diverging recoveries — is the potential for market volatility in response to changing financial conditions. Major central banks will need to carefully communicate their monetary policy plans to prevent excess volatility in financial markets, both at home and in the rest of the world.

For its part, the IMF has stepped up in an unprecedented manner by providing over $105 billion in new financing to 85 countries and debt service relief for our poorest members. We aim to do even more to support our 190 member countries in 2021 and beyond.

The alternative — to leave poorer countries behind — would only entrench abject inequality. Even worse, it would represent a major threat to global economic and social stability. And it would rank as a historic missed opportunity.

A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.

“Every additional home that gets pulled off the market incentivizes someone else to not sell their house,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “That’s a self-reinforcing cycle.”

Add all of this up, and for every tale of someone who ran off and bought in the suburbs or paid all-cash sight unseen in some far-flung town, the larger story of the pandemic is this: Americans have been staying put.

Recent research by Arpit Gupta at N.Y.U. and colleagues suggests that rents have fallen the most in close-in urban neighborhoods.

“We’re all looking for a unified field theory for what’s going on,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We have all these disparate pieces of information.

Right now, in a number of metro areas, home prices and rents aren’t just drifting apart; they’re moving in opposite directions. Prices are rising while rents are falling.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a housing market quite like this one,” said Jenny Schuetz, a researcher at the Brookings Institution. “And other recessions looked a little bit different, so that makes it hard to know what’s going on.”

The last decade has also been a period of relatively low interest rates. That incentivized many homeowners to stay in their homes longer than they would have in the past, clinging to cheap mortgages.

The ratio of home prices to rents in many metros is now as high as it has been since the housing bubble — but it has spiked during the pandemic in part because rents have fallen, not solely because prices have soared.

The pandemic will also eventually subside, and people will gain more certainty about remote work, and more confidence about having strangers in their homes. But for anyone waiting for the typical spring surge in inventory, these reasons for optimism may not materialize in time.

What awaits at the end of this frenetic period is not likely to resemble the 2008 housing bubble, which brought on a drawn-out crash when it finally burst, they said.

Nationwide, housing inventory was at a record-low 1.03 million units at the end of February, down 29.5 percent from a year earlier, a record decline, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“It gives the feel of a bubble,” Mr. Yun said, recalling the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis that cratered prices after 2008. “But the fundamental factors are different.”

“We don’t have the reckless lending that we had before,” said Mr. Miller, and so even as market conditions get frothy, some may find that they overpaid for their property, but the ebb and flow will be more in line with regular economic cycles.

He also expects home prices to keep rising in the short term, because of more than a decade of sluggish housing construction, hobbled by restrictive zoning and high labor costs.

Unlike much of the country, New York had a glut of luxury inventory before the pandemic, and prices had been softening since around 2017. From 2018 to the end of 2019, Manhattan saw a roughly 15 percent drop in sale prices, Mr. Miller said.

In the week ending April 11, there were 783 new signed contracts citywide, the highest since the company began tracking weekly pending sales in 2019, when the peak was 491 contracts, she said.

“The rate at which homes are selling nationally is not sustainable, but in New York, the uptick is just getting started,” said Nancy Wu, an economist for StreetEasy, a listing website.

The price cuts have been a boon to a broader range of people. First-time buyers made up 41.9 percent of sales in Manhattan last quarter, the highest share in at least seven years, Mr. Miller said.

“It does have the potential to last for a while, because the results are only based on a half-tank of gas,” Ms. Olshan said, referring to the fact that most of these signings were from domestic and local buyers, as international buyers remain mostly on the sidelines with travel restrictions.

New York’s revival also challenges one of the early assumptions during the pandemic — that the suburbs would benefit at the expense of big cities, where buyers, untethered from office commutes, could choose to live farther from work.

So far, thanks to limited supply, many suburbs remain in high demand. Fairfield County, Conn., for instance, recorded 3,045 sales last quarter, the most in that period in more than 16 years, along with the lowest inventory in 25 years, according to a report from the brokerage Douglas Elliman.

“Manhattan finally joined the party,” he said, referring to the city’s sales turnaround. “But we’re not sure if this is the party we want to be in — because there’s uncertainty about how this plays out.”

nnual sales in excess of $86 billion.

Until recently, Mr. Ma, who is a Communist Party member, was held up as a role model by the Party for his contribution to the “digital economy.”

Regulators regarded the speech as a direct attack against them, and Ant’s public debut was halted just two days before its big day, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally intervening to scuttle the market listing,

spoke at a financial forum in Shanghai.

delivered a speech that was highly critical of Chinese regulators, who he said had stifled innovation in the financial industry.

Shortly after the speech, regulators scrapped a planned initial public offering of Ant that would have been the world’s largest to date, raising more than $34 billion from listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Mr. Ma last appeared publicly in late October,

Beijing is now looking to shrink Mr. Ma’s technology and financial empire and potentially take a larger stake in his businesses,

Alibaba is now facing an antitrust probe by Chinese market regulators, who are investigating claims that the company abused its dominant position in the e-commerce industry to pressure some merchants to work only with its platforms.

In November last year, Mr. Ma didn’t appear on an episode of a television show in which he was set to appear as a judge,

An Alibaba spokeswoman said his absence was due to a scheduling conflict, and declined to comment on Mr. Ma’s activities.

t isn’t uncommon for Chinese billionaires to disappear from the public eye for long periods during legal and regulatory investigations.

I

Its market capitalization dropped in the final days of 2020 to less than $600 billion, from a high of $859 billion just before the Ant IPO was scuttled.

Alibaba owns one-third of Ant. Its shares have fallen by a further 2% so far in 2021.

How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?

I posed these questions to a wide range of experts. This column explores their replies.

While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence

White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.

It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future.

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.

“lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”

This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, createsa bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power

there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.

Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:

When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.

What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?

One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

violence is:considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.

“Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”

A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.

In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”

there isvery consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market whereyou can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.

The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”

A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.

Trump, Richeson continued,leaned into the underlying White nationalist sentiments that had been on the fringe in his campaign for the presidency and made his campaign about re-centering Whiteness as what it actually means to be American and, by implication, delegitimizing claims for greater racial equity, be it in policing or any other important domain of American life.

Whites in the last 60 years have seen minoritized folks gain more political power, economic and educational opportunity. Even though these gains are grossly exaggerated, Whites experience them as a loss in group status.

all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right wing:As the voices of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized communities grow louder the frame of reference from which we tell the story of American is expanding

The white male story is not irrelevant but it’s insufficient, and when you have a group of people that are accustomed to the spotlight see the camera lens pan away, it’s a threat to their sense of self. It’s not surprising that QAnon support started to soar in the weeks after B.L.M. QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system. It’s an organization that validates the source of Q-Anoners insecurity — irrelevance — and in its place offers a steady source of self-righteousness and acceptance.

“compared to other advanced countries caught up in the transition to knowledge society, the United States appears to be in a much more vulnerable position to a strong right-wing populist challenge.”

First, Kitschelt noted,The difference between economic winners and losers, captured by income inequality, poverty, and illiteracy rates within the dominant white ethnicity, is much greater than in most other Western countries, and there is no dense welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.

Another key factor, Kitschelt pointed out, is thatThe decline of male status in the family is more sharply articulated than in Europe, hastened in the U.S. by economic inequality (men fall further under changing economic circumstances) and religiosity (leading to pockets of greater male resistance to the redefinition of gender roles).

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

On top of that, in the United States.Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.

for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

“white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

nlike most European countries, Kitschelt wrote,The United States had a civil war over slavery in the 19th century and a continuous history of structural racism and white oligarchical rule until the 1960s, and in many aspects until the present. Europe lacks this legacy.

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president.

What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

Going by “Jay Y. Lee” in the West, he has led the Samsung conglomerate since his father was incapacitated by a 2014 heart attack. But with his father’s death in October, Mr. Lee was expected to formally take the Samsung chairmanship, a transfer he will now have to navigate from behind bars.

His father’s death triggered a hefty inheritance tax under South Korean law. It puts Mr. Lee, his mother and two sisters on the hook for more than 11 trillion South Korean won, or roughly $10 billion, to inherit the patriarch’s shares in various Samsung companies. The tax must be paid over the next five years.

In Australia, nearly 42% of the country’s goods exports went to mainland China in October, near the all-time monthly high from earlier in the year, before slipping to 37% in November, according to Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

The U.S. is also grappling with extreme political stress. This year, it is expected to grow around 3%-4%, but its economy likely won’t get back to its 2019 size until the second half of the year, according to some economists’ forecasts.

Orion’s operating profits in China jumped 28% in the first three quarters of last year compared with the same period a year earlier, thanks to the introduction of new products into the market, including glutinous rice cake-inspired Choco Pies. China sales accounted for 48.2% of Orion’s overall revenue in 2019, compared with 38.7% in 2010.

By early April, more than 97% of China’s larger enterprises had reopened, according to Zhang Weihua, an official with China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

Consumer spending in China bounced back by the fall. China’s personal luxury-goods market is expected to have grown 7.6% in 2020, even as the global market contracted 20%, according to research firm Euromonitor International.

Indonesia’s clinical trial for CoronaVac covered only 1,600 participants, compared with more than 12,000 health care volunteers in the Brazil trial. It isn’t known in either case how many people were infected; researchers usually only unveil data, including which participants received the vaccine versus placebo injections, when positive Covid cases reach a certain number.

270 million, which has seen a surge in Coronavirus cases over the past few weeks, with around 9,000 new cases a day recently despite low levels of testing. Indonesia had already distributed hundreds of thousands of CoronaVac doses to provinces around the country last week in anticipation of the emergency approval, with the goal of quickly vaccinating doctors and nurses, many of whom have been sickened during the pandemic.

As of last week, the country had only 3 million Sinovac doses on hand. In a statement last week, Mr. Widodo said another 15 million doses were expected from Sinovac this week in bulk form, and they would be prepared for use by state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma before being distributed around the country.

These online crusades can be waged in good faith or in bad faith, and some can become deeply destructive. (The classic example of a bad-faith battle is Gamergate, a 2014 culture war that started as a feud over video game journalism but morphed into a toxic campaign of violent misogyny and racism that paved the way for the alt-right.)

because trading stocks costs money — and required some level of expertise and time commitment — it was mostly left to professionals.

Smartphone-based trading apps like Robinhood changed that, by introducing commission-free trades and an interface that made executing a gamma squeeze as straightforward as ordering a burrito from Uber Eats. Suddenly, millions of amateurs could organize themselves, generate their own market research and investment theses, drum up excitement in Reddit threads and TikTok videos, and enter the casino with the big boys

author Martin Gurri calls “the revolt of the public.” Mr. Gurri writes that the internet has empowered ordinary citizens by giving them new information and tools, which they then use to discover the flaws in the systems and institutions that govern their lives. Once they’ve discovered these shortcomings, he writes, these citizens often rebel, tearing down elites and dominant institutions out of anger at having been lied to and withheld from.

Big banks and hedge funds really do play by different rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks really did get bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis while Main Street homeowners suffered. M.B.A.s in fancy suits are probably no more likely to give you good investing advice than guys on YouTube with names like “RoaringKitty.”

If you can get past the all-caps lunacy and strange inside jargon, the Redditors make some good points

The result, Mr. Gurri writes, is a kind of vengeful nihilism, an urge to burn down the establishment without a clear sense of what’s supposed to replace it.

Retail investors, armed with new kinds of tools and information that allow them to compete on equal footing with professionals, are looking at the Masters of the Universe and going: Really? Those guys run the market?

this is not just a speculative bubble or a stupid prank. It’s an authority crisis. And even if GameStop stock crashes or regulators step in and call off the party, these disillusioned day traders will keep trying to create chaos for the elites they feel have spent decades profiting at their expense.

for the Reddit day traders, the important victory was always the symbolic one. They might lose their shirts, but they’ve sent the message that with enough passion and rocket-ship emojis, a crowd of profane, irreverent degenerates — again, their words, not mine — can turn the stock market on its head.

the rise of traders like Mr. Gill “would have been impossible even a few years ago” because every trade came with a fee and there was less focus on the markets on social media.

“That’s your ignition switch. A common enemy, so to speak,” said Rod Alzmann, 31, a corporate strategist in Florida who has bet on GameStop for even longer than Mr. Gill and posted online as Uberkikz11. “The speculation is a rush, plus fighting the man.”

On Thursday, several online brokerages shut down trading in GameStop, causing the company’s price to plunge by almost two-thirds before steadying. Even ardent supporters wondered if Mr. Gill had finally caved and sold.Mr. Gill then posted another picture on Reddit showing he had stayed firm — and had lost $15 million. His fans cheered.“IF HE’S STILL IN, I’M STILL IN,” over 100 different followers responded in quick succession.On Friday, their faith was rewarded when GameStop’s stock soared 68 percent