🥪#10 英語の旅 | The Economist
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今回はThe Economistの…1 | America's soaring house prices…2 | France's burgeoning deficit…3 | Abortion pills come to SCOTUS…4 | Revolutionary roads…5 | Israel's ultra-Orthodox conscription rowについて紹介していきたいと思います。
1 | America's soaring house prices
Few parts of America's economy have baffled economists as much as the property sector over the past few years. Housing prices should in theory be very sensitive to interest-rate increases - expensive mortgages reduce housing demand, causing prices to fall. Yet since the Federal Reserve began tightening monetary policy in 2022, house prices have risen. According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a regulator, they increased by 6.6% year on year in December. The figures for January, due on Tuesday, will probably show another rise.
The reason is that American homebuyers typically obtain fixed-rate mortgages for 30 years, so few are willing to give them up when rates increase, leading to a drop in supply. Home sales last year fell to the lowest levels since 1995. A fall in mortgage rates has recently revived the market: sales rose by 9.5% year - on - year in February. But if demand continues to outstrip supply - as the National Association of Realtors, an industry body, says it does - house prices will probably remain relatively robust.
アメリカ。資本主義。
ビジネスの世界。
マイホーム。
それは誰しもが憧れる夢である。
2 | France's burgeoning deficit
The French government is bracing for bad news on Tuesday. Insee, the official statistics body, will publish figures expected to show that the country's budget deficit reached well over 5% of GDP in 2023. The government's official target was 4.9%. This makes France one of the countries with the largest deficit, relative to its income, in the euro zone. Pierre Moscovici, head of the Cour des Comptes, the French national auditor, calls the problem "very preoccupying".
Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, has promised to bring the deficit down to below 3%, in line with euro zone rules, by 2027. He has pledged an extra €10bn of budget savings. But up until now there has been little attempt to curb public spending in France, and revenues have diminished amid sluggish growth. Mr Moscovici nonetheless argues that France has no problem raising money on the markets and that its level of public debt, while high, remains sustainable. The ratings agencies will certainly be watching closely.
フランス。
マクロン大統領。
先進国。
多くの世界遺産。
3 | Abortion pills come to SCOTUS
On Tuesday America's Supreme Court hears a case that could lead to a clampdown on access to miferpristone, a pill that induces nearly two-thirds of abortions in America. It is the court's first foray into reproductive law since it ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
Last year anti-abortion campaigners presuaded a lower court to de-authorise the FDA's approval of mifepristone in 2000. An appeals court pared back that radical move but blocked changes made by the FDA in 2016 and 2021 that allowed women to use the drug later in pregnancy (up to ten weeks), to ask for a remote prescription and to receive the drug by mail.
The anti-mifepristone challengers want the Supreme Court to uphold the appeals court's ruling. They say that the FDA's decisions were based on "piecemeal analysis" of scant data. The FDA says they are justified by the drug's exceptional safety record. It also says that the plaintiffs who brought the case to the lower court had not suffered the "concrete injury" required for legal-standing - the right to bring a case in the first place.
中絶。
根深い問題。
何事においても。
リスクを考慮する必要がある。
ここから先は
¥ 500