Week signals: Dog days
Week signals: Dog days
Plus: watch points for China, the US, Indonesia, and the Pacific.
This week:
IN REVIEW. A busy summer, messy maps, and dodgy data.
UP AHEAD. Chinese cartography, GDP revisions, RFK’s confusing polls, protests in Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands Forum.
The Week in Review: It’s about to get Sirius
According to several reckonings, Friday marked the end of this year’s ‘dog days’, measured by the transit of Sirius, the Dog Star. Others will cite a different date – it depends on the latitude – but today, dog days are mainly associated with the hottest weeks of the northern summer, and the time to take off work, rather than the celestial calendar.
This year, however, they may be remembered differently. As heat records lose their shock value, and work and leisure get blurred, this year’s dog days were perhaps more notable for the elections in Britain, France, Iran, and Venezuela; the intensification of the US presidential race (from the attempted killing of Trump, to Biden's exit); and escalations in the Middle East and Ukraine (from the death of Ismail Haniyeh, to the invasion of Kursk). Add in English riots, a Japanese market crash, and Bangladeshi regime change, and it seems there’s been more news in the languid heat of this year’s summer than in the totality of a normal year. And that’s not counting the Olympics (or mpox).
But lest this present a high noon as it were, the pace is likely to only pick up from here, as August moves to September, the US election gets closer, and other polls – from Algeria and Austria in September, to Uruguay and Uzbekistan in October – get started. Economically, there are big moves to come as well. In policy, there’s a likely easing of US rates in September and an OPEC meeting in December. In markets, there are possible IPOs for Klarna, Stripe and Shein.
But returning to this week and next – where forecasting and analysis tend to be more incisive – what’s on the nearer horizon? The biggest event we see coming up, and which has already shaped some of this week’s developments, may surprise you: