Ireland gets a windfall Apple picking season

Plus: More Christians in China and more [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a concatenated quintessence of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Must-Reads - Trump’s not wrong about [Armageddon](. - A brave new [post-Brexit world]( - Germans? Radicals? [Nein]( - The UK’s [beloved health system]( is sick but it’ll survive. - A yen for [intervention](. - India’s new [slumdog millionaires](. - Why the US issued [a warning on Hong Kong](. - Does [dual nationality]( mean double the taxes? When Irish Eyes Are Smiling Don’t feel too sorry for the tech giants. Apple Inc. and the corporation formerly known as Google got major-dinged by the European Union — €13 billion ($14.4 billion) for the Cupertino titan and €2.4 billion for Alphabet Inc. — for back taxes to the Irish government and platform rigging, respectively. But, as Parmy Olson [says]( the fines “are just a cost of doing business — pocket change, really — and the companies can pat their lawyers on the back for dragging the cases out in court for years with endless appeals.” (Apple’s market cap is practically $3.4 trillion; Alphabet’s is almost $1.9 trillion.) Lionel Laurent [says]( that Ireland can use the windfall to fund the programs and benefits that the country didn’t spend on its own citizens while Apple’s Irish unit (the base for its European operations) enjoyed a tax rate of only 0.005%. Says Lionel: “Redirecting the €13.8 billion windfall into Ireland’s government coffers will help Dublin realize what its dependence on corporate smoke and mirrors has cost its citizens, from underinvestment in infrastructure to a housing shortage.” And while the fines may be mere rounding errors in the scope of Apple and Alphabet’s enormous profits, Parmy says the future may be less sanguine for them. Getting the judgments against the companies required a lot of creative lawyering. The EU has a new legislation in the books — the Digital Markets Act — that defines competitive compliance for Big Tech. “Instead of drawn-out legal battles and appeals, the DMA should also lead to swifter resolution: fines of as much as 10% of a company’s worldwide earnings, for instance.” By the way, Parmy has an insightful and timely new book out: Supremacy: AI, ChatGPt and the Race That Will Change the World. Check it out [here](. The Prospect of a More Christian China One startling statistic about China jumped out at me in Karishma Vaswani’s column on [Pope Francis’ trip]( to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore. “By some estimates,” she writes, “the world’s second-largest economy is on track to have the biggest population of Christians by 2030.” The number bandied about is enormous: about 294 million believers, according to Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang, authors of the 2015 book A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China. The current population of the US, for comparison’s sake, is 333 million, of which less than 80% is Christian. Most Christians in China, as in the US, are protestants, but Karishma says the pope’s journey along the southern periphery of the People’s Republic is geared toward the still substantial number of Chinese Catholics, who are caught between loyalty to Beijing and the Vatican. Rome has had a presence in China since the latter years of the Ming dynasty and the succeeding Qing, with Jesuit priests providing Western technology and artistic influence to the imperial court. When Mao Zedong and his atheist regime took over the mainland, the Jesuits were expelled — and the Vatican took the side of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalists who’d fled to Taiwan. Some exiled Jesuits took up residence in the Philippines, where they set up a school just outside Manila. There they educated the sons of the islands’ ethnic Chinese clans in the language of their ancestral homeland, imprinting Catholic perspectives on those young minds. That’s where I was educated when I lived in the country. It was first startling and then unsurprising to hear wizened Basque and Canadian priests teaching or berating us in Mandarin — and writing beautiful Chinese characters in chalk on the blackboards. My school was named for Francis Xavier, the pioneering Jesuit missionary in Asia (he died just off the coast of China and his body lies in Goa, India). Xavier School in San Juan, within metropolitan Manila, is also known by the Chinese given name of the Jesuits’ most prominent Ming dynasty convert: 光啓. The exiled priests translated those words — guangqi — into Latin to become my school’s motto: luceat lux,  let your light shine. There are 400 years of cultural transubstantiation in that. Pope Francis is the first Jesuit elected Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. He has a lot at stake reconciling with the mainland. Telltale Charts “A combination of increased respiratory infections in the wake of Covid and deteriorating mental health have propelled sickness absences to the highest in Germany’s post-reunification history, impairing economic growth and exacerbating labor shortages, while heaping extra burdens onto businesses and the roughly one-third of workers who consistently show up. Suspicions are growing that some employees are staying home even when they’re not ill, enabled by generous sickness-pay arrangements and pandemic-era rules that make it easier to phone in sick.” — Chris Bryant in “[Why the Sick Man Germany Is Paying Up to Curb Sick Days]( “Europeans, surprisingly, have more savings than Americans. At the end of 2022, EU households had €1.39 trillion ($1.53 trillion), while those in the US had €840 billion. But too much cash is stuck in bank accounts in the EU and stays within national boundaries, whereas Americans invest far more in large and deep capital markets. European banks are much bigger compared to the EU economy than US lenders to US gross domestic product. But the stock market value of JPMorgan Chase & Co. alone is greater than the top-10 EU-based banks combined because Europeans do less with their money, market activity is weak and banks earn far fewer fees.” — Paul J. Davies in “[Can Mario Draghi and UniCredit Revive Europe’s Banks?]( Further Reading Trump has enfeebled [his GOP](. — Timothy L. O’Brien The broken business model of [EV charging](. — David Fickling Hong Kong’s [billionaire landlords]( vs the Fed. — Shuli Ren Mario Draghi’s [love letter]( might end in tears. — Adrian Wooldridge Huawei and Apple underserve China’s [consumers](. — Catherine Thorbecke Remember [the battle of Yarmouk]( You should. — Marc Champion Walk of the Town: Fun and Fungi at Fortnum & Mason The Piccadilly facade of the legendary foodie destination Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg As a foodie and [a newly minted British subject]( I realized I was remiss about never being inside Fortnum & Mason’s opulent main shop on Piccadilly. The gourmet food purveyor — founded in 1707 and thus much older than the US — has enjoyed royal warrants almost its entire existence. So I walked the two miles from the office, past Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, to the Georgian-style department store for the opening of its festival of mushrooms and mycological derivatives. Fun with fungi! Mycelium madness! Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg If I’d been apprehensive about taking on UK citizenship in addition to my American one, I was put at ease by how many people I knew at the event, from food writers to chefs to, for want of a better word, alimentary artisans (folks who innovate products both edible and utilitarian for the kitchen). A couple of people introduced themselves as followers of some of [my social media feeds](. It was all very flattering. After six years of living in London, London has become a professional and personal place to hang my hat — and sit down to wonderful meals. I still consider New York home. But so is London. Drawdown Here’s a bit more food — for thought or debate. Don’t be petty now ... ”I have concepts of a plan for dinner!” Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send doggerel, catcalls and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. 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