A tax or attacks: how the Houthis fund themselves
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.4 • 4.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The procedure is simple—genial, even. Contact Houthi rebels in Yemen and pay up, and your freight can pass into the Red Sea unmolested. We examine how this extortion affects world trade. China is fast closing its gap with America on AI innovation, and doing so far more cheaply (7:22). And a trip to a Ghanaian rum distillery reveals a regional trend (15:44).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Intelligence podcast is sponsored by Salesforce. What if the workforce had no limits? |
| 0:06.1 | Every business has more work than resources. Agent Force helps companies build AI agents that work |
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| 0:33.0 | The Economist |
| 0:34.4 | Hello and welcome to The Economist. |
| 0:43.2 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:44.4 | I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:46.0 | And I'm Rosie Bloor. |
| 0:50.3 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world. |
| 1:00.1 | From what you tend to hear about artificial intelligence, it's easy to assume that all the serious innovation is happening in America, with China playing the role of distant runner-up. |
| 1:06.0 | But that gap is closing, fast, and China is doing it very much on the cheap. |
| 1:12.9 | And our correspondent heads into the rainforest of Ghana to visit a distillery. |
| 1:18.5 | Booz has a long history in West Africa, but now some entrepreneurs are trying to take it up market. First up, though. |
| 1:36.2 | The Bab el-Mandab Strait is the most important strait you've never heard of. |
| 1:45.0 | It's a 25-kilometer wide gap that separates Djibouti and Yemen, Africa and Asia, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and in a very real sense, trade between Asia and Europe. |
| 1:59.0 | Ships have to pass through the strait when using the sewers canal. |
| 2:03.3 | That allows them to cut off thousands of miles of treacherous ocean around the Cape of Africa. |
| 2:09.5 | About 12% of world trade normally flows through it. |
| 2:13.7 | But since October the 7th, 2023, attacks by a Yemeni militia called the Houthis have made the shipping route far more dangerous and expensive. |
| 2:24.2 | The Houthi rebels have been attacking commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandab for more than a year. |
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