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The Economist points out the shortcomings in Indonesia's effort to attract foreign investment and increase growth under the Widodo administration.

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Pfizer shares fell by 2.5% as the deficit deal of August 2 was announced. The deal envisages cuts to Medicare. Pfizer CEO Ian Read says the pharmaceutical industry is not immune to the macroeconomic trends. Another trend he described in an interview is the shift in buying drugs- with high unemployment people either going without prescription drugs or switching to low cost generics.

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Dirk Kurbjuweit of Spiegel says Merkel needs to show strong leadership to overcome the challenges with the rise of right wing populists in the U.S., Britain and France. He points to the leadership shown in the latter part of Kohl's term in office to promote German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The challenges include talking to the German people directly in a convincing way, and meeting the day to day challenges of life for the people with investments in education, health care, infrastructure so that people see real significant improvement. It is even necessary to reorder priorities such as the shift from nuclear energy so that this challenge is met. It is not enough to hope that more Christian Democrats turn out to vote than Social Democrats, that the fifth of Germans who feel the economy is not working for them and feel threatened by immigration see real changes being made to address their concerns.

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New information from the recordings of the World Health Organization as reported by Associated Press, show that during the week of January 6 WHO's lead experts were having difficulty getting information about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist and the WHO technical lead for coronavirus says she was going on very minimal information. The WHO's top official in China, Gauden Galea, says in one of the recordings that they were in the situation where information was given to WHo officials in China only 15 minutes prior to it going on China's state television CCTV. In early January Michael Ryan, the WHO's chief of emergencies, says he feared a repeat of the SARS epidemic in 2002, which was initially covered up by Chinese officials, according to the AP report shown in the Guardian. Ryan says he found himself in the same situation as in 2002 SARS, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on, and adds that WHO barely got out of the SARS with its reputation intact given the transparency issues, in the AP report shown in the Guardian. By June 1 about 6.3 million confirmed cases are reported of coronavirus in the world and 375,000 deaths, and huge losses to economies and people. China's authorites did not lockdown Wuhan till January 23, by which time this report in the Guardian says at least 5 million residents had left. China denied entry requested by the U.S.on January 6 for a team of experts into Wuhan, The team was not allowed into Wuhan for a crucial period of 6 weeks during which the virus had time to spread in the western world. This is taken up in Mr. Trump's letter to the WHO, and the work of Gro Harlem Brundtland is clearly stated in the conclusion of that letter. Brundtland was head of the WHO at the time of the SARS epidemic in 2003, and acted decisively with early warnings to prevent its spread.  Because of the extremely contagious nature of the coronavirus the failure of early warning systems resulted in enormous damage to lives and economic losses worldwide.  ...

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Greece's new finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos meets finance ministers of the EU in Brussels following the referendum. Chancellor Merkel opens the possibility of renegotiating the debt at a later stage. Merkel says: "Ofcourse, at the very end, one will have to discuss how debt sustainability can be recreated but not by saying first 'How do we close the gap?' but 'What can Greece do?' " Merkel added that "this program is, according to the now-withdrawn Greek request, meant to be two years long, so it is a multiyear program." This means that in addition to the pension cuts and tax increases rejected earlier, it would now have to include changes to labor laws to make it easier to fire workers, changes to product markets and the privatization of state assets.