Today—from our new print extra, Altered States:  What exactly is the problem with corruption? Justin Callais on what it does to an economy.

+ How to test “bear-resistant” trash bins. Why big Chinese banks are raising US$72 billion in new capital. &c.

But first …

• U.S. stock markets rose and fell wildly, rising after a report that Trump might pause the tariffs and then falling after the report was debunked—with the Dow Jones stock index ending the day down by almost 1 percent.
• Asian and European stock markets dropped even more; the biggest European markets were down by more than 4 percent for the day; and major Asian markets were down by around 10 percent.

What’s happening?

• Trump threatened to impose a new tariff of 50 percent on all Chinese imports if Beijing doesn’t rescind the 34-percent duty it put on U.S. imports in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs.
• EU officials say they’d offered a Washington a deal to remove all tariffs on U.S. goods in exchange for Trump not putting tariffs on European imports. They say the offer still stands—but they’ll impose tariffs on U.S. imports next week if nothing changes.
• Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer says his government will “step up” and offer financial help to key domestic industries.
• The price of oil fell again and is now down 15 percent since Trump announced the tariffs last Wednesday.
• Prices of copper and other commodities also fell, as traders hedged against lower demand in case of a global recession.

More and more, business leaders, including the heads of major banks and investment funds, are speaking out against the tariffs. Even some of Trump’s closest supporters are questioning them: Elon Musk, a White House official, says he hopes for tariff-free trading between the U.S. and Europe, and he questioned the thinking of Trump’s trade advisors. The major Trump donor Bill Ackman says the president should halt the tariffs, warning of an “economic nuclear winter.” But Trump doesn’t seem to mind the economic difficulties—on Sunday night, saying, “Sometimes you need to take medicine to fix something.”

• Since December, massive protests have brought out hundreds of thousands of people calling for the resignation of Vučić.
• The protests began after a roof collapsed at a train station in Novi Sad in November, killing 16 people. Protesters accuse Vučić of corruption in the deals for the station’s reconstruction.
• Vučić sacked the previous prime minister to try to calm the protests.
• Media reports say protesters won’t accept the new prime minister and still want the fall of the regime.

Now what?

• Protesters, led by students, say Vučić and those close to him profited from the station renovation, which was managed by China as part of its Belt and Road Initiative to build international infrastructure.
• Vučić says the allegations are untrue, but he refuses to make the government investigation of the incident public.
• He also says the protesters don’t reflect the opinion of the majority of Serbians.
• Vučić, who’s closely allied with Russia, served as propaganda minister for Slobodan Milošević, who was ousted by protesters 25 years ago.

Vučić is facing one other big problem: He has until the end of April to find a buyer for a Russian firm’s stake in Serbia’s only oil refinery. The U.S. says that if the Russian firm Gazprom doesn’t have a deal to sell by the end of the month, Washington will impose sanctions that could cripple the Serbian economy. But Vučić says Gazprom doesn’t want to sell.

• Sunday’s bombing shows a recent shift in Moscow’s tactics: It often focuses its firepower on one city each night now, instead of spreading out its attacks.
• Ukraine’s military said last week that Russia had fired 4,133 drones and missiles into the country in March, a marked increase from recent months.
• On Friday, Russia bombed Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The attack killed 19, including 9 children, and wounded 74, according to Ukrainian officials.
• Moscow said the Friday raid targeted a meeting of Ukrainian and foreign soldiers. UN officials inspected the site and say the only meeting there was among beauticians at a nearby restaurant.

Why the continued violence?

• These attacks are happening while Ukraine and Russia are in talks for a ceasefire.
• The two sides agreed to stop bombing energy infrastructure—but each side says the other already violated the deal.
• Ukraine and Russia looked like they were close to an agreement to stop attacks in the Black Sea, but they haven’t closed a deal yet.
• Last month, Kyiv agreed to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, but Moscow has rejected the offer.
• Zelenskyy says Russia’s attacks show that it’s just playing for time and isn’t serious about stopping the fighting.

Zelenskyy also says that there just isn’t enough international pressure on the Kremlin to halt the attacks. He doesn’t mention the U.S. specifically, but it looks like Washington hasn’t done much—at least publicly—to push Moscow to either reach a ceasefire or change its tactics on the battlefield. After the bombing in Kryvyi Rih, the U.S. ambassador said the incident was horrible—but she didn’t mention Russia.

Enigmas

One of the swiftest and most extensive humanitarian-relief efforts came from the United Arab Emirates. Coordinating through their embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the Emirates Red Crescent, the U.A.E. donated $10 million to Houston and surrounding areas, working with local organizations like the Greater Houston Community Foundation to help rebuild homes, schools, and community centers, and helping restore damaged medical facilities. “As Houston builds forward from the hurricane,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said, “we cherish our helpful partners such as the U.A.E.” Some communities in and around Houston are still dealing with the impact of the hurricane; many of them still remember the vital support.

Earlier the same year, three U.S. intelligence agencies—the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency—released a declassified report detailing a coordinated Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. It included hacking into Democratic Party email systems and releasing stolen information through WikiLeaks, using social-media platforms to spread disinformation and divisive content, and targeting election systems in multiple states.

The Russian Internet Research Agency created fake social-media accounts and paid for political advertisements to spread propaganda and inflammatory content. An investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI, led to multiple indictments of Russian intelligence officers, along with the former head of Donald Trump’s campaign, and detailed how Russian military intelligence carried out cyber operations targeting election infrastructure and political organizations.

While the scale and sophistication of this campaign were remarkable, its impact on the election outcome was never definitively measured, if that were even possible. Meanwhile, a number of prominent allegations about Russian interference in 2016 didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The most notable was the “Steele dossier,” a collection of reports by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, published by BuzzFeed News, that included salacious claims about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. Many key elements of the dossier remain unverified, and some have been proven false. McClatchy and other news organizations debunked the allegation that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague. The Mueller investigation, the FBI, and the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General all investigated claims about ongoing communications between Trump Organization servers and Russia’s Alfa Bank, and found them to lack merit. Initial media reports suggesting Russian agents hacked into Vermont’s power grid turned out to be wrong. The story that the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russia—which media coverage often referred to as “collusion”— was never substantiated, including by Mueller, whose team found insufficient evidence to establish any criminal conspiracy at all between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

It’s not always clear where foreign influence ends and interference begins—or even where benign foreign activity ends and influence begins: Houston may be a crucial energy-industry hub, important to the U.A.E.’s oil and gas interests; and the city’s aerospace industry, centered around NASA’s Johnson Space Center, may be increasingly important to the U.A.E.’s ambitions with its space programs; but neither makes the millions it put into disaster relief in Houston malign.

It’s also not always clear where the appearance of foreign interference is a specter—or even whether the reality of foreign interference has mattered much at all: Russia may have targeted U.S. elections in 2016 and 2020, as it would seem to have targeted Romanian, Moldovan, and Georgian elections in 2024; but it can be hard to say how far some of these disruption operations have gone or how much they’ve actually affected democratic outcomes. It can even be hard to distinguish dispassionate assessments of evidence of electoral interference from vexed narratives fueled by partisan grievances. Still, as Ben Freeman and Miranda Patrucić illustrate, any line of autocratic influence is a potential form of interference—and any form of autocratic interference is a potential vector of corruption. So what’s corruption here and what’s not?

Justin Callais is the editor at large for The Signal and the chief economist at the Archbridge Institute. While in some cases, the question is a matter of factual uncertainty, Callais says that in all cases, it’s a matter of interpretive ambiguity: When we understand something as corrupt, we don’t understand it simply as the violation of an enforceable rule; we understand it fundamentally as the degradation of a common good—and common goods can be debatable; they can be elusive; they can compete with one another; they can even change over time. Still, we can’t understand democratic life without understanding the common goods it’s grounded in—and, Callais says, we can’t understand autocratic systems without understanding how they depend essentially on degrading those common goods …

• It appears the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage knows how to test “bear-resistant” trash bins: “Video from the test shows bears making numerous attempts to get into the [them], occasionally managing to destroy them entirely.”

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Financial trouble in Big China

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