Regulators around the world have long looked to the United States for leadership in policing derivatives. That should continue, with America setting sound policy so innovation can flourish. The future of financial markets will belong to those willing to push boundaries while preserving market integrity. America has shown that these goals are not in conflict. Others are free to chart their own course. We intend to remain the global gold standard.■ Michael Selig is chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/08/06/the-new-era-of-finance-needs- innovation-more-than-consensus
FIFA needs a constitution for the commercial age Football can’t rely on a revolt every time its governing body goes too far, argues Lorin Parys, the head of a European league Aug 6th 2026 FOOTBALL STOPPED FIFA this summer. It took a public row, pressure from across the game and the threat of a wider revolt to do it. The cause was FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), a proposal to place the commercial rights and event operations of the game’s governing body in a new company. Outside investors would have been offered a 20% stake, raising up to $4.2bn at a valuation of about $20bn. FIFA argued that the deal could unlock much more money for development across its 211 national member associations. The promise of more predictable funding for football development was attractive, but the price and process were not. FFE would have given private investors a lasting claim on World Cup revenues and a role in core
operations before the valuation, safeguards, potential conflicts of interest and remuneration arrangements had been properly disclosed and tested. It also tied an irreversible transaction to the immediate promise of more money for member associations at a time when Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, is up for re-election. That is why opposition spread quickly across confederations, national associations and professional football, prompting FIFA to pull the plan. That was the right outcome. It was not, however, proof that the system works. A healthy governance model should not need a last- minute coalition every time a big decision goes too far. The easy response is to say that FIFA has too much power and should simply be weakened. I do not agree. A global sport needs a global authority. Someone has to organise the World Cup, maintain common rules and move money towards countries where the market would otherwise invest very little. One association, one vote is imperfect, but it gives smaller football nations a formal place in the system. I run a European professional league, so I am not a neutral observer. Leagues want more influence. Clubs and players do, too. But any reform must allocate influence according to responsibility, not wealth, while preserving the system’s global legitimacy. The main goal should not be to maximise monetisation. The real question is where FIFA’s authority should stop. The organisation’s structure rests on an old idea: that a national association represents football in its territory. That made more sense when associations organised most of the game. Today it is leagues, not associations, that often run competitions and sell collective rights, while clubs employ the players and unions represent their labour. FIFA regulates them all, sets the international calendar and sells competitions that rely on the same scarce time and talent. The work is now spread across several institutions, but the formal decision- making has not caught up. That is why the same disputes return: over the calendar, player release, transfers, new competitions and commercial control. Football needs a new compact. The outdated idea is not that national associations matter; it is that they alone can represent every interest in modern football. They should continue to elect FIFA’s leadership, control its
statutes, shape development policy and protect national-team football. But for a limited category of decisions that directly allocate the time, labour or economic value of leagues, clubs and players, wider input is required. Start with the international calendar. For a domestic league, this is not just some diagram discussed in FIFA HQ in Zurich. It decides whether clubs can play on a Sunday, how many hours a player must be given to recover after returning from international duty and whether a competition can keep the promises it has made to broadcasters and supporters. I would create a permanent calendar council with three constituencies: national associations; professional leagues and clubs; and players. Any substantial expansion of international windows, or of clubs’ obligations to release players for national-team duty or FIFA competitions, should require majority support within each constituency. FIFA should first publish evidence on what the changes would mean for player workload, travel, recovery and domestic competitions, as well as the consequences for women’s football and the impact on smaller markets. Until agreement is reached, the existing calendar should remain in place. Core commercial transactions require different safeguards. Prerequisites for a future FFE-type proposal should include an independent valuation, disclosure of conflicts of interest and remuneration arrangements. It should require supermajorities in FIFA’s Council and Congress, its main decision- making and legislative bodies, respectively. Development funding should be debated separately from any transactions proposed to finance it. Just because a deal is commercially attractive and generous to smaller associations, that doesn’t make the process legitimate. There has already been some progress. In June FIFA signed an agreement with FIFPRO, recognising the global players’ union as football’s employee representative. Future changes to the transfer system and player-welfare standards will be discussed through a “social-dialogue platform” and, in important areas, agreed collectively. Those are real gains. The agreement also shows how reform can stop halfway. By granting meaningful rights to one stakeholder, a governing body can increase inclusion while leaving its general architecture unchanged—and thereby
fragment the coalition pressing for systemic reform. That is not an argument against the players’ agreement. It is a warning that bilateral advances should not become a substitute for coherent rules across the institution. The obvious objection is paralysis. It should not be discounted. Football already has enough committees. Most technical and operational decisions should remain with FIFA’s administration and specialist bodies. The new safeguards would apply only to a narrow list of decisions that increase the burden on others or lock up long-term value. Thresholds should be clear and deadlines fixed. There must also be protection against capture by the richest European interests. Smaller leagues, non-European competitions and women’s football would need guaranteed representation. These are limited checks on FIFA’s authority, not a transfer of sovereignty. FIFA, in short, does not need to be dismantled. It needs institutions capable of stopping overreach before others in football feel compelled to mobilise against it. Clearer limits would make the governing body’s authority more legitimate, not less so. A global game needs a strong centre—but also rules strong enough to constrain whoever controls it. ■ Lorin Parys is the chief executive of the Pro League, Belgium’s top football league, and is completing a thesis about FIFA governance as part of an executive master’s degree. The views expressed are his own. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/08/05/fifa-needs-a-constitution-for- the-commercial-age
China’s AI drive threatens the world’s largest workforce Chinese leaders worry about workers being displaced by the tech they are promoting Aug 6th 2026 Li Dazhi paced back and forth on a set resembling a chief executive’s office as he rehearsed lines in Zhengzhou, a city in central China that has become a hub for microdramas. The serialised minute-long shows have taken over phone screens across the country; one in two people watch them. In 2025 microdramas grew into a 100bn yuan ($15bn) business, having created some 700,000 jobs and perhaps 1.3m indirect ones—a rare bright spot of dynamism in China’s sputtering economy. The booming industry had given Mr Li, a 32-year-old former traffic cop, a chance to try something new. He had been busy studying eight to 15
fantastical scripts each month. Then in February, ByteDance, a tech giant, launched Seedance 2.0, an artificial-intelligence model that can make impressively realistic videos. It quickly upended the business. Series now take days to produce instead of weeks, and are up to 90% cheaper (the bill is mostly tokens, instead of humans). Mr Li’s daily salary fell by half and gigs dried up. Many of his colleagues switched to selling insurance, setting up vendor stalls, delivering takeaway food or picking up passengers. “Advanced technology can improve people’s quality of life,” he says. “But for our industry, right now it’s doing more harm than good.” China has made an all-out push in AI, under the conviction that, in its competition with America and the rest of the world, dominance of the technology is an almost existential necessity. The Communist Party also sees a clear long-term need for AI to mitigate eventual labour shortages in a fast- ageing society. To meet that future China is aggressively pursuing AI- integration, especially in the form of “embodied AI”: bringing AI models into the physical world through robots and cars. China’s leaders envision an era to come of “human-machine collaboration”. But the party is increasingly concerned about how AI will displace workers. Advances in AI threaten both office jobs and blue-collar ones that have been the fallback for millions who have been laid off or paid less in recent years —in a system which lacks a strong safety-net. And, as demonstrated by the stunningly rapid disruption of microdramas, AI has the power to erase jobs in a keystroke. “This transformation involves both job creation and job destruction, yet the two effects are asymmetrical, with job displacement often preceding and surpassing job creation,” Cai Fang, a prominent economist at a top state think-tank, writes in a new book on the labour impact of AI. The government’s task is made harder by a bleak macroeconomic picture, potentially widening the gulf between China’s have-bots and have-nots. Some Chinese workers are already labouring alongside the technology that will replace them. Consider Jia Cunqi. For decades he clutched the wheel as he drove coal and bulk cargo across China, his back achy and his eyes sore after long stretches on the road. Now the 44-year-old has to move only when merging onto highways or driving short stretches on urban roads. That is because his lorry is equipped with advanced driver-assistance technology