Know someone who would like this newsletter? Forward it to them.
The World
India is due to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by mid-year, the UN has said, marking a historic shift for the two Asian rivals. According to the UN Population Fund’s World Population Dashboard, released on Wednesday, India’s growing population is to surpass 1.428bn by mid 2023, just above the more than 1.425bn people in China, where fertility rates are falling. Population growth is a politically sensitive topic in China and India and both governments were subdued in their responses to the demographic milestone. (Financial Times)
China's CCTV slams Western hype of its population decline: Western media reports on China's population being overtaken by India deliberately ignores China's development, using the topic to "bad mouth" it and advocate decoupling, state broadcaster CCTV said. CCTV's sharply worded commentary said the subtext from Western media in recent years was that China's development was in "big trouble" and that when China's demographic dividend disappears, it would decline, and the global economy would also suffer. (Reuters)
Taiwan wants to be bilingual by 2030, lifting English proficiency to take ‘another step’ to aid economy. Taiwan has rolled out a plan for NT$30 billion (US$982 million) of spending until 2027 to help meet its goal of increasing English proficiency by 2030. It is out to compete with Hong Kong, Singapore, India and the Philippines where English is used in the government and by the legal, professional and business sectors. (South China Morning Post)
Japan steps up diplomacy to avoid 'losing' Global South to China: Kishida plots Africa tour ahead of G-7 summit to compete for influence. (Nikkei Asia Review)
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will visit the United States on April 24-30 for a summit with President Joe Biden (Reuters)
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister visited Damascus for meetings with Syrian President Bashar Assad, as the latter continues to face hurdles to diplomatic rehabilitation among regional powers. Some Arab League powers are opposed to readmitting Syria, citing the Assad regime's illegal amphetamine trade and its refusal to conduct outreach to opponents it crushed during the decade-long civil war. (Financial Times)
Protesters greeted French President Emmanuel Macron with boos and calls for him to resign in his first public appearance since he signed into law an unpopular rise in the retirement age. Outside a factory he was visiting in the eastern Alsace region, Macron was faced with hostile banners and banging on pots. Unionized workers briefly cut electrical power inside the factory. (Reuters)
People all over the world lost confidence in the importance of routine childhood vaccines against killer diseases like measles and polio during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from UNICEF. In 52 of the 55 countries surveyed, the public perception of vaccines for children declined between 2019 and 2021, the UN agency said. The data was a "worrying warning signal" of rising vaccine hesitancy amid misinformation, dwindling trust in governments and political polarisation, UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, said. (Reuters)
The smaller banks that serve a wide swath of America’s consumers and businesses are starting to pay up to keep their deposits. Main Street banks such as Citizens Financial Group and First Horizon Corp. said in recent first-quarter earnings reports they are having a tougher time hanging onto customer money in a world where the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates. To keep those depositors around, some lenders are paying more on savings accounts and turning to products like certificates of deposit. Though profits rose at many banks in the first quarter, the deposit declines signal a fundamental change in their business. Deposits were plentiful in the era of superlow rates because customers had little incentive to move their money elsewhere. Banks grew to rely on them as a cheap source of funding that they could use to make loans or buy bonds and other securities. (Wall Street Journal)
US Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed a bill that would raise the US debt limit for about a year and cut federal spending, ahead of a planned House vote on the Republican proposal next week. The 320-page plan would increase the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, enough to stave off a US payments default until March 31, 2024 at the latest. It also contains a host of conservative proposals that are non-starters with congressional Democrats and the White House. (Bloomberg)
GOP holdouts coalesce around McCarthy's debt ceiling bill. (Axios)
Biden rejects McCarthy’s debt-limit plan. (Politico)
Texas Senate approves bill that would ban diversity programs in public universities: The legislation heads to the Texas House, where members have been more muted about the proposal to disband offices, programs and training that foster diversity. (Texas Tribune)
Unhealthy air pollution levels affect more than a third of all U.S. residents, according to an annual report published Wednesday. That's 17.6 million fewer people than in the American Lung Association's previous "State of the Air" report. The ALA notes in an accompanying statement that the number of people facing "daily spikes in deadly particle pollution was 63.7 million, the most ever reported under the current national standard." The report underscores disparities in the U.S., with people of color accounting for 54% of the nearly 120 million Americans living in counties with unhealthy air pollution levels. That's despite accounting for 41% of the overall U.S. population. (Axios)
Economy
Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman has warned investment banking revenues may not recover until next year after the Wall Street group’s net profits fell almost a fifth in the first quarter. A prolonged slowdown in investment banking activity has hit Morgan Stanley and its rivals as financial turmoil following the collapse of US regional lenders and Credit Suisse in Europe kept dealmakers on the sidelines. (Financial Times)
Japanese companies will fill 37.6% of job openings with midcareer hires this fiscal year, a Nikkei study shows, the share representing the largest-ever shift away from Japan's traditional lifetime employment model. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Australia said it would make broad changes to how its central bank operates, including who gets to decide interest rates, amid criticism from some lawmakers and economists that officials took too long to tighten policy in response to accelerating inflation. The biggest change will see the Reserve Bank of Australia adopt a monetary policy committee structure that has parallels to the setup of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said RBA policy makers would now gather to set interest rates eight times a year, compared with the current 11 meetings. (Wall Street Journal)
The Repo Man Returns as More Americans Fall Behind on Car Payments. With more Americans struggling to pay their bills, the $1.7 billion industry for repossessing such assets as cars, trucks and boats is gearing up for a boom. The effects are expected to reverberate through countless ordinary lives and onto Wall Street, where car loans are packaged into bonds and sold to investors. (Bloomberg)
China has seen the number of women inventors grow at twice the rate as the U.S. from 2001 to 2005 and 2016 to 2020, according to a study by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Global patent filings could reach gender parity in about 40 years, a rate that could have been slowed by the pandemic. (Fortune)
Research: Being Funny Can Pay Off More for Women Than Men. The stereotype that “women aren’t funny” pervades pop culture. But is it true? The authors analyzed more than 2,400 TED and TEDx talks, as well as more than 200 startup pitches, and found that female speakers who used more humor were more popular and perceived as more influential and inspiring than both less-funny women and comparably-funny men. They suggest that this is because humor conveys both warmth and competence, thus helping female presenters break free from the warmth-competence double bind that so often keeps women from exerting influence in professional settings. Of course, humor won’t be effective in every setting — and jokes that work well for one speaker in one context may not be as effective in another. But when done right, the authors’ research demonstrates the power of humor to overcome bias against women and help them succeed in public arenas. (Harvard Business Review)
Technology
Sources: Google released Bard despite staff concerns; one employee called the chatbot “a pathological liar” and one said its answers may cause “injury or death”. (Bloomberg)
Facebook parent company Meta began handing out a new round of pink slips, part of a months-long downsizing and restructuring effort that will trim 10,000 employees amid multiple waves of layoffs. Employees on the company’s technical teams were notified early Wednesday morning that their jobs were being cut, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. One internal analysis estimated that the company could shed 4,000 workers in Wednesday’s layoff, according to a different person familiar with the matter. Meta also is to announce reorganized teams and management hierarchies as the social media giant seeks to become leaner and more efficient in the face of mounting business challenges and an expensive pivot to virtual reality. (Washington Post)
Meta Opens Horizon Worlds VR App to Teens: Meta Platforms will allow teenagers in the U.S. and Canada to use its virtual reality app Horizon Worlds, the company announced Tuesday, defying lawmakers and children’s right activists who had called for the company to not open the app to teens. Meta said the roll out will come with a “robust set of age-appropriate protections and safety defaults.” But in a tweet following the announcement, child safety group Fairplay accused Meta of “once again putting its profits ahead of young people’s safety.” Meta has reportedly struggled to retain users on Horizon. According to internal company documents reported by the Wall Street Journal last October, the app had less than 200,000 monthly active users at that point—well below its goal of 500,000 monthly active users by the end of the year. (The Information)
Elon Musk indicated he was willing to sacrifice Tesla’s profits in the short term in an aggressive push for market share, with the aim of making more money later when the company’s cars are fully autonomous and can earn extra fees by operating as “robotaxis”. The Tesla chief executive’s unconventional justification for why shareholders should stomach lower profits came as the US electric-car maker reported price cuts this year had driven its profits margins in the first quarter below already-reduced forecasts. His comments on an earnings call pushed Tesla shares lower in after-market trading, adding another 6 per cent to the 10 per cent decline they had suffered since the start of the month on worries about falling demand. (Financial Times)
Microsoft plans to drop Twitter support from its ad platform on April 25; users won't be able to access or manage Twitter accounts through Microsoft's tool. (Mashable)
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death. When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span. It had set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping containers to the concrete floor to quickly make lab space for the scientists who had been enticed to join the company. Now MIT Technology Review can reveal that the entire sum was put up by Sam Altman, the 37-year-old startup guru and investor who is CEO of OpenAI. (MIT Technology Review)t
Smart Links
Scientists may have discovered why hair turns gray (tl;dr: stuck stem cells). (The Guardian)
Bitcoin Trading Signal Hints at an Upcoming Leap Back Above $30,000. (Bloomberg)
The global car industry faces massive upheaval. (The Economist)
3 New U.S. Employment Regulations That Companies Should Prepare for Now. (Harvard Business Review)