Cocaine, spies and assassinations

Hello from the FT newsroom. It starts with a wedding in Dubai, and — via a mysterious murder in a small Dutch town — leads to a web of drugs, money laundering and state-sponsored assassinations across the globe.

Hot Money, the FT’s award-winning investigative podcast, is back. Of the many markets we cover, the cocaine trade does not often feature. But it is worth many billions of dollars, and behind it sits a network that looks much like a big multinational corporation. In this new series of Hot Money, Miles Johnson investigates a super cartel that is believed to control a third of Europe’s cocaine market.

My choices this week

1. COP28 negotiators are hoping to bolster the international market for carbon credits, a trade that is central to many governments’ climate strategies. At the heart of the solution, though, looms a power imbalance. The FT’s climate reporter Kenza Bryan gives her assessment from the summit in Dubai. (Free to read)
2. Whole neighbourhoods in Gaza have been levelled by Israel’s deadly campaign of bombing, launched in response to Hamas’s devastating attacks inside Israel on October 7. This richly researched piece examines the weapons behind the destruction.
3. Who should make decisions about artificial intelligence? Yoshua Bengio, winner of the Turing award, argues that we need governance that avoids single points of failure: the OpenAI saga should serve as a warning to us all. You can read this story for free by downloading our FT Edit app here.
4. Millions of Chinese borrowers have been blacklisted, having defaulted on debts from home mortgages to business loans. With the country in the midst of severe economic malaise, cash-strapped consumers are feeling the strain more than ever, as the FT’s Sun Yu reports from Beijing. (Free to read)
5. US interest rates are at a 22-year high: and leading economists expect them to stay there until mid-2024, contrary to what the market is wagering. An exclusive poll by the FT revealed that two-thirds of the academics surveyed do not expect a reduction in the benchmark rate any time soon.
6. Advent calendars have come a long way from revealing a religious drawing, or even a small chocolate — today, the small doors might hide anything from coffee to cosmetics. In a festive opinion piece, Franklin Nelson delves into the history of the advent calendar.

Thanks for reading,

Patrick

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