Такий сценарій експерти Фонду припускають у випадку, якщо російська агресія триватиме
…

За даними Головного управління розвідки, російська армія прицільно б’є по сільськогосподарській техніці України
…

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has confirmed the bloc is poised to impose a fourth round of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking in Skopje during a visit to the North Macedonian capital on Monday, the EU’s top diplomat accused Moscow of targeting civilians in its war against Ukraine, noting that “more than” 2,400 civilians had died in the besieged port city of Mariupol alone.

“Putin’s war is not only about Ukraine, it’s about security and stability of our European continent. It affects all of us,” Borrell said, adding that another package of sanctions targeting Russia’s steel, coal, and energy sectors, as well as its market access and membership in international financial institutions.

.

“This will be another major blow to the economic and logistic base upon which the Kremlin is building the invasion and taking the resources to finance it,” Borrell said. He gave no further details.

Some of the most severe fighting is taking place in Mariupol, a major port city in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have shelled a maternity ward and blasted apartment buildings, leaving the city in ruins.

The unceasing barrages into the city have also thwarted repeated attempts to bring in food and water and evacuate tens of thousands of trapped civilians.

Russia on Monday said it had created conditions to open humanitarian corridors and that a mass evacuation of people had begun.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said a convoy had been trying to reach the city to deliver aid and help evacuate women and children, but, as with similar attempts over the past week, that as of early in the afternoon it had not been able to reach the city.

 
…

The Ukrainian government is doing what it can to keep the country’s economy running. Still, its money is running out fast. The IMF executive board approved a $1.4 billion loan to Ukraine on March 10. But experts say it won’t last for long. Oksana Bedratenko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
…

Російське вторгнення в Україну вже спонукало європейські країни, зокрема Німеччину, Данію та Швецію оголосити про плани збільшення військових витрат
…

Germany plans to buy up to 35 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets and 15 Eurofighter jets, a parliamentary source said Monday, as part of a major push to modernize the armed forces in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The F-35 jets made by Lockheed Martin would help replace Germany’s decades-old Tornado fleet, according to media reports confirmed by the source.

Tornados are the only jets capable of carrying U.S. nuclear bombs stationed in Germany that are a key part of NATO deterrence.

Lockheed’s F-35 stealth jets are considered the most modern combat aircraft in the world, and their unique shape and coating make them harder to detect by enemy radar.

The additional Eurofighter jets Germany plans to purchase, made by a consortium that includes Airbus, would reportedly be used for other operations, including electronic warfare and escort missions.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last month pledged to invest $112 billion in the nation’s chronically underfunded Bundeswehr.

The spending boost marks a major reversal for Europe’s top economy, upending its policy of keeping a low military profile in part out of guilt over World War II.

After years of criticism that the country wasn’t shouldering enough of the financial burden in the NATO military alliance, Scholz also vowed to spend more than two percent of Germany’s gross domestic product annually on defense, surpassing NATO’s target.

The shift was prompted by the return of war to the European continent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, shaking Germany’s sense of security and shining a harsh spotlight on the state of its armed forces.

The F-35 purchase however raises questions about the future of a common European fighter jet being developed with Spain and France.

Known as the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the plane is slated to replace French-made Rafale jets and German and Spanish Eurofighter planes by 2040.

Scholz sought to allay fears that the project might become unnecessary late last month, by saying the joint European project was an “absolute priority.”

“It is important to me… that we build the next generation of combat aircraft and tanks in collaboration with European partners,” he said.

But the German Bundeswehr must replace its Tornado fleet in the short term because it has become “obsolete,” Scholz added.
…

Також 14 березня знову не відкрилися торги на російському. фондовому ринку – вже третій тиждень поспіль
…

Russia may default on its debts in the wake of unprecedented sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, but that would not trigger a global financial crisis, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Sunday.

Georgieva told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that sanctions imposed by the United States and other democracies were already having a “severe” impact on the Russian economy and would trigger a deep recession there this year.

The war and the sanctions would also have significant spillover effects on neighboring countries that depended on Russian energy supplies and had already resulted in a wave of refugees compared to that seen during World War II, she said.

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation.”

The sanctions were also limiting Russia’s ability to access its resources and service its debts, which meant a default was no longer viewed as “improbable,” Georgieva said.

Asked if such a default could trigger a financial crisis around the world, she said, “For now, no.”

The total exposure of banks to Russia amounted to around $120 billion, an amount that while not insignificant, was “not systemically relevant,” she said.

Asked if Russia could access the $1.4 billion in emergency IMF funding approved for Ukraine last week if Moscow won the war and installed a new government, Georgieva said the funds were in a special account accessible only by the Ukrainian government.

An IMF official said that referred to the “internationally recognized government of Ukraine.”

The IMF last year blocked access to Afghanistan’s funds by the Taliban after they seized control of the government, citing lack of clarity over recognition of the Taliban rulers within the international community.

Georgieva last week said the IMF would downgrade its previous forecast for 4.4% global economic growth in 2022 as a result of the war, but said the overall trajectory remained positive.

Growth remained robust in countries like the United States that had been fast to recover from COVID-19 pandemic, she told CBS.

The impact would be most severe in terms of driving up commodity prices and inflation, potentially leading to hunger and food insecurity in parts of Africa, she said.
…

David Hoffman remembers a time when the interests of the U.S. business community carried great weight in Washington, especially regarding U.S. economic policy toward China. Hoffman, who formerly worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, once led the firm’s technology and entertainment advisory practices in that country.

But sympathy for those interests disappeared during the administration of former President Donald Trump, Hoffman says. And it has not gotten any better under President Joe Biden.

“Business is vilified by its China presence in all respects,” said Hoffman, now at The Conference Board, a global business and research think tank.

An annual survey released this week by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found China remains a “top global priority,” but that many businesses are not planning on any major investments there this year.

Geo-political challenges

Sino-U.S. relations continue to be strained and further exacerbated by China’s close ties with Russia and Beijing’s desire to stay neutral on the war in Ukraine.

Even before Russian troops entered Ukraine, U.S. regulators and lawmakers had been weighing policies aimed at curtailing business and investment between the two nations over a range of competitive, national security and human rights concerns. China’s crackdown on its own businesses has also affected U.S. investors and firms, some of which have pulled out of the country over the past year.

“One of the things I noticed about the difficulty American companies face is pleasing Beijing and Washington,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at a recent event.

The China market

For multinational corporations, there is still no substitute for being in China, which after the U.S., is the world’s second largest economy with 1.4 billion people. Despite the at-times hostile political rhetoric, China remains the U.S.’s largest trading partner.

During his administration, Trump accused China of not offering an even playing field for foreign businesses to compete. The result was a trade war in which the two countries imposed high tariffs on each other’s products.

De-coupling efforts

While dialing down the rhetoric, the Biden administration has continued with Trump’s hard line. “Engagement,” Washington’s approach toward China for decades, has given way to harsher rhetoric of de-coupling or even punishing China, complain business community members.

In Washington, some recent China-focused legislation and proposals have the business community’s attention. They include a regulatory battle over Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges and proposals to review U.S. investments in Chinese companies.

U.S. business concerns

At a recent Asia Society of Northern California event on the future of U.S.-China relations, some speakers said they were worried about measures emanating from Washington and Beijing that seem to be pulling apart business ties between the two nations.

Nicholas Borst, vice president and director of China research at Seafarer Capital Partners, argued that the U.S. business community should have a voice when it comes to U.S. policy toward China.

“It’s one of the few areas between the U.S. and China where we can really get away from a lot of the zero-sum thinking, where China’s economic development doesn’t have to come at the expense of the U.S.,” he said.

Myron Brilliant, executive vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the gathering that Washington is going to tighten export controls and investment screenings.

“The political environment in Washington is that one thing that unites the two parties is China and the threat of competition,” he said.

Washington is going to put pressure on U.S. companies “to divest a little bit, to bring back resources here, to invest domestically and think about our own national security in the lens of economic competitiveness, which puts at risk U.S. engagement over a long time in China,” he said.

Washington’s concerns

In Washington, where U.S. business focuses its considerable lobbying efforts, the consensus has shifted to a more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government because of the increasing role of the Chinese government, under President Xi Jinping, in taking over large parts of the economy, says one lawmaker.

“The development of state champions in key industry sectors should have been a warning signal to the businesses in the U.S. business community,” said Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat congressman from Washington state and chair of a bipartisan U.S. China Working Group.

“If there are individuals and companies or industries within the business community who feel aggrieved or not being listened to, the government they need to first look at is the government of Xi Jinping. The Chinese government policy has been very clear over the last decade plus about its direction — further regulation, further state involvement in the economy, in fact, not just state involvement but the state taking over large parts of the economy.”

However, there is a role for U.S. business to help the administration and Congress understand the implications of its decisions, Larsen said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s going to change those decisions, just that we might make those with our eyes opened wider,” he said.

Business climate in China

Ken Wilcox, former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, went to China in 2010-11 to set up a joint venture. From experience, he says the Chinese Communist Party controls the outcome of foreign and domestic businesses there and “the party wants to control the entire economy.”

Both Washington and business are too extreme in their views about China, the former too negative, the latter too positive, “giving China a hall pass,” said Wilcox.

In the current climate, businesses would be wise to rethink their China strategy, said Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and now senior fellow and director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Yes, there’s a lot of money to be made, but these companies have to think much longer term and ultimately devise business strategies that don’t rely on the Chinese domestic market for long term growth, because that is ultimately ephemeral and there is a time limit on it,” he said.

Hoffman encourages U.S. companies to work with regulators to address national security concerns while doing business in China.

If they don’t, he argues, “any forthcoming ‘safe trade’ regulations will likely be more restrictive, less efficient, and more costly than they need to be.”
…

From the three-light traffic signal, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, color monitors for desktop computers, to the shape of the modern ironing board, the clothes wringer, blood banks, laser treatment for cataracts, home security systems and the super-soaker children’s toy, many objects and services Americans use every day were invented by Black men and women.

These innovators were recognized for their inventions, but countless other inventors of color have gone largely unrecognized. Others are completely lost to history.

“There were some instances where Black inventors would compete with Alexander Graham Bell, with Thomas Edison, where their inventions were really just as good and just as transformative, but they just did not have access to the capital,” says Shontavia Johnson, an entrepreneur and associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at Clemson University in South Carolina. “They did not have access to all these different systems that the United States puts in place to support inventors.”

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, but it was Lewis Latimer, the son of formerly enslaved people, who patented a new filament that extended the lifespan of lightbulbs so they wouldn’t die out after a few days. Latimer got a patent for his invention in 1882, something countless Black innovators in the generations before him were unable to do.

Free Black citizens could obtain patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but enslaved Black people could not. Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865, with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to that, the inventions of Black innovators were often claimed by their enslavers or other white people.

Modern-day research suggests that was the case with the technology behind the cotton gin — a device that separated cotton seeds from their fibers. It was largely innovated by enslaved Black people, but a white man named Eli Whitney obtained the patent for the invention.

“We often count our country as being this place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive,” Johnson says. “But when you completely exclude a group of people from access to the patent system, … exploiting their invention, then the natural result of that is, you look at the most important inventors and innovators in American history … and they pretty much are your stereotypical white male inventor, not because other people have not been innovative, too, it’s just these folks have been excluded from the patent system.”

This deliberate early exclusion of Black inventors from the patent system and, in large part, the pantheon of great American inventors, was rooted in racist assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, according to Rayvon Fouché, a professor of American studies at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

“Invention was seen as this God-given ability. So, as you can imagine, all the perceptions, ideas about masculinity, maleness, power [and] authority are all wrapped into this vision of inventiveness,” says Fouché, who also leads the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. “The inherent understanding of what an inventor is and was and could be — the framing of that term — eliminated the possibility for all Black folks and all marginalized people.”

Other barriers Black inventors historically faced included less access to equal education, systematic exclusion from professional scientific and engineering

societies, limited access to wealthy investors and mainstream banks for start-up capital to commercialize their inventions, and racial violence.

Black inventors were also less involved in patenting activity between 1870 and 1940, during times of lynchings, race riots and segregation laws in the United States.

There were also the Black creators who came up with innovations that didn’t necessarily fit the traditional ideas of inventiveness.

“For much of our history, when we think about the word ‘invention,’ it’s sort of freighted with these white, Eurocentric notions of what that means,” says Eric Hintz, a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Often, the traditional definition of ‘invention’ is something like a machine that saves human labor or animal labor, that does some task more efficiently.”

That kept certain innovations by Black people from being recognized by the patent system.

“[The patent system] is built on this model that basically assumes innovation is desirable when it’s tied to commercial benefit. But if it is rooted in community survival or the needs of society, that is not worthy of protection, and we see that in the law,” Johnson says. “There are certain types of things that are patentable, and certain things that are not patentable, and that is a distinction that I do think leaves a lot of people out of the ecosystem.”

A New York DJ known as Grandmaster Flash pioneered the use of record turntables as an instrument by using his fingers to manipulate the sounds backward and forward or to slow it down. He had an innovative style of mixing records and blending beats that pioneered the art of deejaying, but he holds no patents.

“Black people have been doing lots of creative, innovative things,” Fouché says. “We can think about all kinds of technological creative things within the context of hip-hop and music production and art in other ways. But of course, the patent office is driven by techno-scientific innovation. And I think part of it is, for me, to open up the conversation of what inventiveness is and can be.”

Museum collections have historically excluded the contributions of marginalized people, a failing the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center readily acknowledges.

“Definitely the Smithsonian and other libraries and museums have been complicit over the decades, over the centuries, of privileging white inventors in the things that we collect,” says Hintz. “We have a ton of stuff on Edison and Tesla [electricity] and Steve Jobs [innovator of Apple products and devices] and whomever, but it’s incumbent on us now to make sure that we’re preserving the stories of Madam C.J. Walker, Grandmaster Flash, Lonnie Johnson — who invented the Super Soaker, of Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who invented a way of eradicating cataracts.”

Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, built her fortune with a line of hair care products for Black women. Black people also invented the clothes dryer, the automatic gear shift in vehicles, the modern toilet, lawn sprinkler, peanut butter and potato chips.

But the innovation gap persists. African Americans and women still participate at each stage of the innovation process at lower rates than their male and white counterparts.

“How do you get more Black kids, girls [and] marginalized people into these pathways that have been traditionally white, middle class and male?” Fouché says, emphasizing the importance of sparking children’s imaginations, despite any obstacles.

“I’m more interested in saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do? How do you want to change the world? What are the things that are meaningful to you?’ and just impressing upon people the limitless opportunities. … So, don’t limit the possibilities.”
…