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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Across the developed world, girls and young women have been pulling ahead of boys and young men in education for several decades, with much larger proportions going on to attend university than their male counterparts.

This trend has generally been treated more as something to remark upon than to act on. The myriad domains in which women remain at a disadvantage to men have understandably led to efforts at achieving gender equality becoming synonymous with advancing women’s opportunities and outcomes. Men have always gone on to have better labour market outcomes anyway, and if women outperform men in education, this helps narrow the overall male advantage — or so the thinking has gone.

The problem with this framing is that in an increasing number of countries, we have moved beyond a narrowing gap in socio-economic outcomes, and there is now a new and growing gap in the opposite direction.

Much less appreciated than the widening tertiary education gap is the fact that in several rich countries young women are now more likely to be in work than young men. The UK joined this group in 2020, and the female employment rate lead among 20-24s has since widened to three percentage points. The crossover is yet to happen in the US, but young women’s employment rate deficit has shrunk from almost 10 percentage points in 2006 to a single point last year.

Put another way, the UK is part of a growing list of countries where the answers to “who is doing most of the legwork raising children?”, “who is focused on getting a good education?” and “OK, but who is out working to bring home a good income?” are all: “Women.”

If this were simply a case of women making strides, it would be something to celebrate — and that side of the story certainly is — but a substantial minority of young men are actively moving backwards, with growing numbers increasingly disengaged from society.

Across the developed world, the portion of young men who are neither in education, in work nor looking for a job has been climbing steadily for decades. In countries including the UK, France, Spain and Canada there are now more young men than women in effect outside the economy for the first time in history. Unlike young women, these men are generally not occupied by caring for other family members either. They are adrift and likely to be the ones in need of care themselves. More than 80 per cent of this group in the UK report long-term health problems.

Perhaps most striking of all, 2022 was the first time the average young woman in the UK had a higher income than her male counterpart. This is due in large part to women becoming so much more likely to have a degree and the graduate salary that comes with it, but also to the deteriorating fortunes of non-graduate men, who have gone from earning 57 per cent more than non-graduate women in 1991, to 10 per cent less in 2022.

It is a similar story in the US, where young non-college women and college-educated people of both sexes have all seen incomes either hold up or increase, but non-college men have plummeted down the income distribution.

While shifting composition plays a role here — today’s non-college graduates are a very different group to non-graduates 30 years ago — it cannot explain the starkly different trajectories of non-college men and women, which owe more to the continuing transition from an economy where jobs requiring hands, hearts and heads were all plentiful and relatively remunerative, to one where the latter dominate.

But while discourse and policy remain focused on other things, the repercussions of these tectonic shifts are quietly playing out everywhere you look.

With socio-economic trajectories heading in different directions, a growing minority of young men and women do not see eye to eye. Young male support for populist rightwing parties is on the rise, particularly among those without jobs and degrees. Violent unrest is more likely with a growing pool of young men with little stake in society or their future.

And relationship formation itself is being affected, as growing numbers of female graduates discover a shortage of male socio-economic counterparts, and simultaneously have less need than ever to pair up with a man for financial support.

Reversing the slide among non-graduate men will not be easy, nor must it become a zero-sum game with young women, but it is an essential challenge for the decades ahead and will have positive spillovers well beyond those directly affected.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch

A surge in demand among Indian consumers for gold jewellery and bars after a recent cut to tariffs is helping to drive global bullion prices to a series of fresh highs.

India’s gold imports hit their highest level on record by dollar value in August at $10.06bn, according to government data released Tuesday. That implies roughly 131 tonnes of bullion imports, the sixth-highest total on record by volume, according to a preliminary estimate from consultancy Metals Focus. 

The high gold price — which is up by one-quarter since the start of the year — has traditionally deterred price-sensitive Asian buyers, with Indians reducing demand for gold jewellery in response.

But the Indian government cut import duties on gold by 9 percentage points at the end of July, triggering a renewed surge in demand in the world’s second-largest buyer of gold.

“The impact of the duty cut was unprecedented, it was incredible,” said Philip Newman, managing director of Metals Focus in London. “It really brought consumers in.”

The tariff cut has been a boon for Indian jewellery stores such as MK Jewels in the upmarket Mumbai suburb of Bandra West, where director Ram Raimalani said “demand has been fantastic”.

Customers were packed into the store browsing for necklaces and bangles on a recent afternoon, and Raimalani is expecting an annual sales boost of as much as 40 per cent during the multi-month festival and wedding season that runs from September to February. 

Raimalani praised India’s government and “Modi ji”, an honorific for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for reducing gold duties.

Expectations of rapid interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve have been the main driver of gold’s huge rally this year, according to analysts. Lower borrowing costs increase the attraction of assets with no yield, such as bullion, and are also likely to weigh on the dollar, in which gold is denominated.

The Fed cut rates by half a per cent on Wednesday, pushing gold to yet another record high, just below $2,600. 

But strong demand for gold jewellery and bars, as well as buying by central banks, have also helped buoy prices. 

India accounted for about a third of gold jewellery demand last year, and has become the world’s second-largest bar and coin market, according to data from the World Gold Council, an industry body.

However, that demand has meant that domestic gold prices in India are quickly catching up to the level they were at before the tariff duty cut, according to Harshal Barot, senior research consultant at Metals Focus. 

“That entire benefit [of the tariff cut] has kind of vanished,” said Barot. “Now that prices are going up again, we will have to see if consumers still buy as usual.”

Jewellery buying had been flagging before the cut in import duty, with demand in India in the first half of 2024 at its lowest level since 2020, according to the World Gold Council.

India’s central bank has also been on a gold buying spree, adding 42 tonnes of gold to its reserves during the first seven months of the year — more than double its purchases for the whole of 2023. 

A person familiar with the Reserve Bank of India’s thinking called the gold purchases a “routine” part of its foreign exchange reserve and currency stability management.

In China, the world’s biggest physical buyer of gold, high prices have meant fewer jewellery sales, but more sales of gold bars and coins, which surged 62 per cent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier.

“We observed strong positive correlation between gold investment demand and the gold price,” wrote the World Gold Council, referring to China.

All of this has helped support the physical market and mitigate the impact that high prices can have in eroding demand. 

“It acts as a stable foundation for demand,” said Paul Wong, a market strategist at Sprott Asset Management. “In parts of Asia, gold is readily convertible into currency,” making it popular for savings, he said.

Western investor demand has also been a big factor in bullion’s rally, with a net $7.6bn flowing into gold-backed exchange traded funds over the past four months. 

After hitting a fresh high on Wednesday, analysts warn there could be a correction in the gold price.

“When you have this scale of anticipation [of rate cuts], for this long, there is room for disappointment,” said Adrian Ash, London-based director of research at BullionVault, an online gold marketplace. “I think there is scope for a pullback in precious alongside other assets.”

Whether or not gold pulls back from its record highs, Indian jewellery demand looks set to remain strong through the coming wedding season, according to MK Jewels’ Raimalani.

Soaring prices of bullion have been no deterrent to his customers, he added. “Indians are the happiest when prices go high because they already own so much gold. It’s like an investment.”

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy is pushing for an emergency top-up to development spending as ballooning costs of supporting asylum seekers threaten to drain overseas aid to its lowest level since 2007.

The UK government spent £4.3bn hosting asylum seekers and refugees in Britain in the last financial year, more than a quarter of its £15.4bn overseas aid budget, according to official data. This more than consumed the £2.5bn increases in the aid budget scheduled between 2022 and 2024 by former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

People familiar with Lammy’s thinking say he fears that if Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, resists calls to at least match Hunt’s offer, the aid budget will be further eviscerated, undermining the government’s ambitions on the global stage.

Currently, the housing of asylum seekers in hotels is controlled by the Home Office but largely paid for out of the aid budget, a set-up introduced in 2010 when spending on the programme was relatively modest.

In the longer term, development agencies and some Foreign Office officials want the costs capped or paid for by the Home Office itself.

However, such a move would be politically fraught, the people said, as it would require billions of pounds of extra funding for the Home Office at a time the government is preparing widespread cuts across departments.

Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, is due to attend a string of upcoming international events, starting with the UN general assembly this month, then a Commonwealth summit in Samoa, a G20 meeting in Brazil, and COP-29 climate talks in Azerbaijan later this autumn.

International partners will be looking at these meetings for signs that the change of government in the UK marks a change in direction on development.

Britain’s leading role was eroded by Rishi Sunak after he cut the previously ringfenced spending from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent when he was chancellor in 2020.

“When he turns up at the UN next week and the G20 and COP a few weeks later, the PM has a unique opportunity to reintroduce the UK under Labour as a trustworthy partner that sees the opportunity of rebooting and reinvesting in a reformed fairer international financial system,” said Jamie Drummond, co-founder of aid advocacy group One.

“But to be that trusted partner you need to be an intentional investor — not an accidental cutter.”

Speaking on Tuesday in a speech outlining UK ambitions to regain a leading role in the global response to climate change, Lammy said the government wanted to get back to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas aid but that it could not be done overnight.   

“Part of the reason the funding has not been there is because climate has driven a migration crisis,” he said. “We have ended up in this place where we made a choice to spend development aid on housing people across the country and having a huge accommodation and hotel bill as a consequence,” he said.

Under OECD rules, some money spent in-country on support for refugees and asylum seekers can be classified as aid because it constitutes a form of humanitarian assistance.

But the amount the UK has been spending on refugees from its aid budget has shot up from an average of £20mn a year between 2009-2013 to £4.3bn last year, far more than any other OECD donor country, according to Bond, the network of NGOs working in international development.

Spending per refugee from the aid budget has also risen from an average of £1,000 a year in 2009-2013 to around £21,500 in 2021, largely as a result of the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact watchdog argues that the Home Office has had little incentive to manage the funds carefully because they come from a different department’s budget.

In her July 29 speech outlining the dire fiscal straits that Labour inherited from the previous Conservative government, Reeves projected the cost of the asylum system would rise to £6.4bn this year.

Labour was hoping to cut this by at least £800mn, she said, by ending plans to deport migrants to Rwanda. A Home Office official said the government was also ensuring that asylum claims were dealt with faster and those ineligible deported quickly.

But the Foreign Office projects that on current trends, overseas aid as a proportion of UK income (when asylum costs are factored in) will drop to 0.35 per cent of national income by 2028.

Without emergency funding to plug the immediate cost of housing tens of thousands of migrants in hotels, that will happen as soon as this year, according to Bond, bringing overseas aid levels to their lowest as a proportion of national income, since 2007.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “The UK’s future [official development assistance] budget will be announced at the Budget. We would not comment on speculation.”

Electric-vehicle makers boosted Hong Kong stocks on Friday, as major indices rose across the board in the wake of the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut.

The Hang Seng index rose 1.8 per cent, with Chinese EV companies Xpeng and Geely Auto adding 9 per cent and 4.8 per cent, respectively.

Japan’s Topix rose 1.5 per cent, while South Korea’s Kospi added 1 per cent.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.4 per cent, led by clinical trial groups Euren Pharmaceuticals and Telix Pharmaceuticals, which gained as much as 6.7 per cent and 4.9 per cent, respectively.

On Thursday, the S&P 500 gained 1.7 per cent, hitting a new record after the Fed’s half-point rate cut announcement on Wednesday.

Last week JPMorgan made headlines by announcing it planned to cap its junior bankers’ working week to 80 hours (“High pressure, long days, crushing workloads: why is investment banking like this?”, FT Alphaville, FT.com, September 13).

The media and most western professionals and other workers will see that figure as extraordinarily high — but the small print makes clear that the cap will not apply when junior bankers are working on “live” deals.

The 80-hour working week, it seems, is the routine baseline expectation.

Former investment banker Craig Coben, author of the FT Alphaville piece, outlined the history and factors that make the long-hours culture a seemingly intractable fact of life across the investment banking industry — and other related sectors such as Big Law.

As investment banking is a bespoke service the work cannot fit into a standard nine-to-five schedule. The question is: does this bespoke service require regular “all-nighters”?

Is this really the most efficient approach? Research shows that working long hours does not improve productivity. Studies document diminishing returns after a certain threshold — typically around 50 hours per week.

Coben also pointed to the mega-salaries junior bankers earn. In the end, there is no such thing as a free lunch in life.

They know what they are getting themselves into. The reality may not be as glamorous as it seems. Assuming an entry salary of £90,000, as indicated in the article, an 80-hour working week for 47 weeks a year — admittedly a very basic calculation — junior bankers would earn a higher hourly rate by doing private tutoring!

Yes, this is partly down to the nature of the business but it is also a self-perpetuating culture that is blocking efforts to at least mitigate its worst excesses.

Addressing this could, in fact, positively impact productivity as well.

Sonia Falconieri
Professor in Corporate Finance,
Bayes Business School (formerly Cass),
London EC1, UK

No publication has bettered the FT for the coverage of Boeing’s downward and tragic flight path resulting from putting financial engineering (sic) before real engineering. Rereading John Gapper’s piece about the revival of Rolls-Royce’s fortunes (Opinion, September 13) I was surprised to see no words of caution about the possible consequences of too much “squeezing” of a product that must work perfectly throughout its life, and no warning on the potential for a Boeing outcome.

For me, I am always reassured when I look out from a window seat to see the classic black and silver RR logo on the engine housing. Long may this continue.

Gregory King
Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, UK