Taylor Swift’s deep fake diplomatic counsel

Plus: A 70-hour work week in India?, SBF is guilty and more [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a focused but playful account of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Must-Reads - Play it again, [Sam](. And again and again and again ... - A deadly [numbers game](. - When the [Aussies]( come-a-calling. - Everyone wants digital dollars in [Hong Kong](, except taxis. - European stocks are [cheap](. No, it’s not time to switch. - KKR’s endless [Italian caper](. - A [superstar]( team-up of chefs. - But there are [only 24 hours in a day](! Australian Rules for Speaking to China It’s disconcerting to hear someone speak a language you’re sure they can’t. I’m talking about Taylor Swift holding forth on various subjects in Mandarin Chinese, a compilation that’s been making waves on the web this week. Even though the video is prominently billed as an AI deep fake, it’s so convincing I can’t shake it off (Sorry, not sorry). [YouTube: Making Taylor Swift Speak Chinese wit...]( But it makes you think: Would it pay diplomatic dividends if more Western leaders were fluent or proficient in Chinese? The 31st president of the United States was: Herbert Hoover learned it when running a mining enterprise near Tianjin, China, at the end of the 19th century, though it didn’t help him think highly of Chinese workers. In any case, as president, he had to deal with the onset of the Great Depression, which did not require a polyglot head of state. (In the White House, Hoover did speak to his wife in Mandarin to avoid eavesdroppers.) More recently, Jon Huntsman, Jr. — who campaigned for the 2012 Republican nomination for president — also spoke Mandarin. He was Barack Obama’s bipartisan ambassador to Beijing. But his candidacy sputtered early on, and fellow Utahan (but non-Chinese speaker) Mitt Romney became the GOP standard bearer. (Huntsman would go on to become Donald Trump’s ambassador to Russia.) In Australia, Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister twice (2007 to 2010, and then briefly in 2013), spoke excellent Mandarin. His language skills impressed mainlanders, as did his public stance of being an honest but frank friend of Beijing, willing to be critical while sympathetic to China’s global ambitions. However, according to the [Wikileaks document]( revelations, he was rudely critical of Beijing in private. His years in power also saw a deterioration in Australian relations with China. Whatever admiration the Chinese had for him at the start dissipated. He is now Australia’s ambassador to the US. This weekend, the current leader of Australia, Anthony Albanese, will pay a visit to Beijing. As Karishma Vaswani [writes](: “He needs to use some of that infamous Australian directness and sense of fair play to make strong demands while he is in Beijing, to get more give-and-take out of the Sino-Australian relationship.” It’s the kind of balance that Rudd tried but couldn’t achieve despite his language skills. Albanese will be bringing along his foreign minister to help him with this giant task. Penny Wong — who has already helped engineer an improvement in ties — is of White Australian and Malaysian Chinese descent. She’s fluent in Bahasa Indonesian. Karishma calls her “formidable.” She’s going to have to talk tough. That may be clearer than a common language, or anything artificial and fake. In Gaza, Netanyahu’s “Long and Hard” War Will Be Just That How bloody could the Israeli campaign be to flush out Hamas? In his latest column, Marc Champion [brings up]( a couple of not-too-distant comparisons: the Chechen city of Grozny, pulverized two times by the Russians with the loss of 30,000 people and the 87-day siege of Vukovar in Croatia, which resulted in 3,000 deaths. Then there is the name Americans will still remember: Fallujah. It was two battles. The first lasted a day shy of four weeks and the second more than a month and a half. Marc writes: “Israel has moved quickly to shape Gaza city into a battlefield it can control, driving to the coast just south of the city to cut off Hamas from the tunnels across the Egyptian border, on which it relies for supplies. Another force is pushing down the coast from the north, to cut off access to the sea. But once that is done, the grim business of clearing Hamas from the city in house-to-house, and tunnel-to tunnel fighting will begin and it cannot be done quickly without even more devastating consequences for civilians.” There are already estimates. Marc cites T.X. Hammes, former US Marine and now a senior research fellow at the National Defense University: “On a per capita basis, the death toll of Israelis on Oct. 7 would be equivalent to 53,000 Americans, he said in a Q&A with the website War on the Rocks. The toll in Gaza – 7,000 at the time Hammes made his calculation — was equivalent to 1.13 million Americans dead, he said. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that last figure would now be 1.5 million” Publicly, Israel has yet to articulate an end game, that is, what goes into Gaza post-Hamas. In the meantime, it has to fight an enemy that does not flinch over its own civilian losses. Marc points out that while Hamas has built a complex network of tunnels for its fighters, it has created no equivalent system of bomb shelters for civilians. The resulting outrage over their deaths will stymie the Israeli campaign. Says Marc: “The more Palestinian civilians Israel’s bombs kill, the less time it will likely get to finish off Hamas.” All Work and No Play Narayana Murthy is one of the co-founders of Infosys Ltd. and thus a legend of Indian business. (He is also the father-in-law of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.) So when he says young Indians aren’t working enough, the country trembles. He declares: “Our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I want to work 70 hours a week.’” That’s 10 hours a day — or 14 if you really have to take the weekend. Mihir Sharma [pushes back]( in his latest column. First, studies show that productivity is not linked to long hours. Secondly, Indians already work very long hours. In China (which Murthy fears India may never catch up to if it slacks off), the average employee “spent just under 45 hours at work, though more than 40% reported that they were working over 50 hours a week.” He concludes: “Indians should be encouraged to work smarter, not longer. An exhausted nation won’t have the time to upskill or the wherewithal to innovate. India should not be too tired to grow.” Telltale Charts “Justice has been served — and swiftly, too. A jury found fallen crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried [guilty of seven counts]( of fraud and conspiracy after just five hours of deliberation, markedly less time than it took for jurors to puzzle over Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos scandal or Raj Rajaratnam’s insider trading at hedge fund Galleon. … Having lost a lot of people a ton of money, Bankman-Fried’s lack of empathy and remorse played a big role in this trial. And that matters when committing corporate crimes: If you don’t care about other people, especially your customers, it becomes very easy to exploit them.” — Lionel Laurent in “[Sam Bankman-Fried Won't Be the Last Crypto Mogul Behind Bars](.” “Recession looms for the euro area, with the latest batch of data showing momentum has evaporated. The economy contracted by 0.1% in the third quarter, most of the bloc’s economies are flatlining, and Germany, its biggest engine of growth, is shrinking. Even supposedly good news, such as slowing inflation, just illustrates how quickly the outlook is deteriorating.” — Marcus Ashworth, “[Europe Has Yet to Solve Half the Stagflation Puzzle.](” Further Reading Why isn’t China a [culinary superpower]( like, say, Spain? — Howard Chua-Eoan The [leaky mess]( at the Bank of Japan. — Gearoid Reidy and Daniel Moss Asia’s new [crypto]( capital is ... — Andy Mukherjee Shrink-free clothes or [shrink-free forests](? — Lara Williams How war makes [oil market]( bravery foolish. — Javier Blas China’s [unhappiness](index. — Shuli Ren and Elaine He Drawdown No “Walk of the Town” this week — another kind of locomotion is taking over on Sunday. Run strong, New York. ”Yes, mom, it would be a sin to carbo-load and then skip the marathon.” Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send strongly-worded feedback and running commentary to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. 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