Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Congo is a country beset by decades-old conflicts, but in the middle of it all there's striking

natural beauty. We visit a vast national park that's beefing up security, generating

electricity and providing new jobs in what should be a well-known tourist destination.

And it seems like some languages are just needlessly difficult. All those cases and clauses

and conditionals are well confusing. We look into new research that sheds light on why

languages grow and shrink.

But first, as it recovered from the financial crisis, America began more than 10 years

of economic growth. But worrying signs, not least a bumpy week in the markets, have many

concerned that the good times are coming to an end. The returns on bonds held for a short

time are higher than returns for holding them for years. That inverted yield curve has

in the past been a good predictor of a coming recession. As growth slows and the uncertainty

over trade tensions remains, nervous investors are wondering if the next downturn is around

the corner.

What we've seen in the markets this week is a kind of continuation of what we've seen

in recent weeks, a sort of growing anxiety about the global economy linked to America's

trade war with China. John Sullivan writes, button would, are calling on financial markets.

We've seen investors pushing even further into the safest sort of assets, so government

bonds. In Europe, that means that government bonds in Germany from overnight cash rates

to 30 years have now got negative interest rates on them. In Switzerland bonds right out

to 50 years have got negative interest rates. So there's a real pressure on and desire

...