The Economist Magazine Cover For 08/10/2024

The Economist Read in browser August 10th 2024 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image The Economist Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief We came into this week with one cover, but by the time we went to press, we had split the issue three ways. Early Monday morning, as share prices crashed in Tokyo, the markets were on our mind. Later that day, Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, fled her country, ending 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule. And by Tuesday, Britain was gripped by what seemed to us to have become its worst race riots since the second world war. All the while we were watching out for a catastrophic escalation of the fighting in the Middle East. Hardly the dog days of August. Traders say that buying and selling in a crashing market is like catching a falling knife. It’s the same with market covers: you never know whether a plunge like the one we saw on Monday is just the beginning of the red ink or a passing scare. Fortunately, if there was no crash, we had a theme there in front of us, because the fundamental cause of the sell-off was anxiety about an American recession. A stick of dynamite with a stockmarket index for a fuse gets across the excitement of the moment. However, it is hostage to the drama continuing. Imagine if, by the time we published, the fuse had simply gone out. Better to have the two parties turning on a dime. With a coin-toss election just three months away, the state of the American economy could not be more political. An outright recession would probably spell doom for Kamala Harris. But even if the economy is only cooling, as is likely, it could harm her and help Donald Trump. This is clever—we have two traces outlining the two candidates. On the face of it, Ms Harris should be able to campaign on the Biden administration’s record. In the second quarter the economy grew at an annualised pace of 2.8%, above its long-term trend. Workers’ median real earnings are 9.4% higher than when Americans went to the polls in 2016. However, Republicans’ perceptions of the economy are warped by their politics—as are Democrats’ in the other direction. And voters as a whole give the Democrats’ economic management a worse rating than Mr Trump’s, perhaps because price levels are higher even if inflation has slowed. Every time they go shopping, they suffer sticker-shock. This design has two problems. One is that today’s bout of stockmarket wobbles are almost certainly too far removed from everyday life and too transient to have an effect on their own. The other is that Ms Harris and Mr Trump look as if they are lying side by side. This is much stronger. The quarter has become a wrecking-ball—though in the final cover we wanted it to be more battered and hanging from a heavy-duty chain. The threat to Democrats is not the markets, but the underlying slowdown that helped unnerve them. At the start of the year, real incomes were rising at an annualised quarterly pace of about 1%. As the economy has cooled, this has fallen by roughly half. In a tight race, many factors could be the difference between vic­tory and defeat. But if Ms Harris wins, it will not be because she was helped by the economy. Ever since three little girls were slain in Southport, in Merseyside, on July 29th, indefensible anti-immigration protests have flared across towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland. Mosques and police officers have been attacked. In Rotherham criminals tried to set fire to a hotel they thought was housing asylum-seekers. Thugs in the streets have been egged on by hatemongers online. Our cover needed to set out what to make of the riots incited by the far right and how to respond to the fact that immigration has become the running sore of British politics. We thought about a conceptual cover. A distinctive, Britain-shaped hole in a smashed window is powerful, but misleading. To their credit, Scotland and Wales have not succumbed to violence. The puppeteer is more accurate: influencers have indeed exploited online networks to foment hatred and incite protest from their keyboards. But it is not the whole story. Many of the troublemakers over the past few days have been youngsters drawn by the thrill of mindless violence. Given how raw the riots felt, we favoured a photograph. Unfortunately, we had a lot to choose from. Shades, bricks and a hoodie are all you need to spread mayhem. We also had burning cars and confrontations between lines of police and protesters. In the end we chose an image with the flag of St George and the Union Jack. For the far-right to display them on the streets of England and Northern Ireland this week was an act of defilement. On August 5th Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, fled the country she has ruled with an increasingly harsh grip since 2009. She was driven out by days of demonstrations in the streets of Dhaka, the capital, to be replaced by a caretaker government, backed by the army and led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace laureate. More than 450 people have died in Bangladesh’s riots, but another photograph of protesters on the streets would sit oddly next to our cover in Britain. Instead, we wanted to celebrate Bangladesh’s people power. The flag-waving men have an aircraft behind them—as if it was actually carrying the departing Sheikh Hasina. Too bad that they looked as if they were themselves calling out to be rescued. We found another picture of a crowd on top of a roof that was altogether more impressive. Mr Yunus has won the task of cleaning up a rotten political system. Bangladesh’s economy is resilient and its civil society robust; but its politics is venal and its institutions weak. Like Mr Yunus, many Bangladeshis are calling this a “second liberation”, half a century after independence. They have only a short time to set their country on a democratic path. Cover image • View large image (“Will the economy swing the election?”) • View large image (“How to respond”) • View large image (“Bangladesh begins again”) Backing stories → Will America’s economy swing the election? → How to respond to the riots in Britain → Bangladesh has ousted an autocrat. Now for the hard part