The Economist The pandemic has shown that Amazon is essential—but vulnerable

From: The Economist this week - Thursday Jun 18, 2020 06:58 pm


	June 18th 2020	Read in browser


	The Economist this week

	Highlights from the latest issue

We have three covers this week. In our Americas edition we report on the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. He is perhaps the 21st century’s most important tycoon: a muscle-ripped divorcé who finances space missions and newspapers for fun, and who receives adulation from Warren Buffett and abuse from Donald Trump. Amazon is no longer just a bookseller but a digital conglomerate worth $1.3trn that consumers love, politicians love to hate, and investors and rivals have learned never to bet against. The pandemic has fuelled a digital surge that shows how important Amazon is to ordinary life in America and Europe, because of its crucial role in e-commerce, logistics and cloud computing. Superficially it could not be a better time for Amazon, but the world’s fourth-most-valuable firm faces problems: a fraying social contract, financial bloating and re-energised competition.
In our UK edition we analyse why Britain has come to have the highest overall death rate of any country in the rich world. Britain was always going to struggle with covid-19. London is an international hub, Britons are fatter than their fellow Europeans and the United Kingdom has a high share of ethnic-minority people, who are especially vulnerable to the disease. Yet the government played a bad hand badly. It has been slow to increase testing, launch a contact-tracing app, stop visits to care homes, ban big public events, provide health workers with personal protective equipment, and require people to wear face coverings on public transport. The painful conclusion is that Britain has the wrong government for a pandemic.
In our other editions we look at the state of the world, 75 years after the creation of the United Nations. The UN is struggling, as are many of the structures, like the World Trade Organisation and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to help create order out of chaos. The system is beset by internal problems, by the global struggle to cope with the rise of China and most of all by the neglect—antipathy even—of the country that was its chief architect and sponsor, the United States. The threat to the global order weighs on everyone, including America. But if the United States pulls back, then everyone must step forward. If they do not, the world risks a great unravelling, much like the nightmare in the 1920s and 1930s that first impelled the Allies to construct a global order.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-In-Chief


	Editor’s picks

	Must-reads from the current edition

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Hotting up
How much can financiers do about climate change?

The role that green investing can play must not be misunderstood or overstated

Briefing

The pandemic and public finances
America’s state-budget train crash

Why this could cost lives and set back economic recovery

United States

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Global trade
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	The world this week

	Brazil reported a record 35,000 new cases of covid-19 in a day. Even that grim figure is widely regarded as an undercount. India is now recording tens of thousands of new infections each week. In America, Florida, Texas and Arizona set daily records for new cases. Although many places are easing lockdowns, Anthony Fauci, the leading adviser to the White House on infectious diseases, warned that the pandemic is far from over: “The numbers speak for themselves.”

	More from politics this week

	The Federal Reserve clarified its new bond-buying strategy, announcing that it would acquire individual corporate bonds on the secondary market. This comes on top of its purchases in exchange-traded funds, which include some junk-rated funds that track debt. But the central bank’s latest move comes almost three months after it first announced emergency measures to shore up markets. Questions have been raised about the length of time it has taken to roll out some of its programmes.

	More from business this week

See full edition


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The Economist The pandemic has shown that Amazon is essential—but vulnerable