The way to understand The Economist

is to look at the job advertisements in it-- lots of code there to interpret.  That tells you who the essential readers are.  It's the Murdoch sector- the nontransparent neocolonial bloodsucking corporations, the foundations and companies run by Third World kleptocrats (Middle Eastern, Latin American, East Asian, Russian), and the shady London and New York and Toronto and Munich corporate chieftains and their children who do business with them.  And all the clever, ruthless, careerist, but mostly disposable minions who come from nowhere (and almost invariably fade back into nothingness soon enough) that serve them.  It's the colonial overlord class in its contemporary form.  (Without going into details, I have a couple of acquaintances who went into that world.  One is an editor of The Economist.)  

The Bush/Blair/Putin era was great for these people- they got everything they wanted.  The showed their world their grandiose narcissism and cleverness, and the contempt they have for middle class and working class people (which oozes out between the lines everywhere in The Economist, though their editors remove as much of the evidence of it as possible.)  It also showed that if/when the world really becomes their playground, when there are not enough adults- academics and intelligent powerful leaders dedicated to at least a minimum of social decency- to rein them in, their boundless greed, narcissism, and nepotism leads to an hideous mess of things pretty quickly.

Okay, having said that...I think "Charlemagne"'s editorial is fairly superficial.  

(there's more, by killjoy))

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes