Opinion

We have been too gentle with reality. It must be clear to almost everyone by now that the sudden and sharp economic downturn that began in late March is something more than a severe recession. That label was, perhaps, justifiable for the 2007-2009 Great Recession, when unemployment reached a peak ...

Back in March, Adidas AG Chief Executive Officer Kasper Rorsted likened dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak to a football match. There was a great first half of the game before the virus struck. The half-time break was longer than expected, but play would eventually resume. He showed just how damaging ...

It finally happened. After a month of threatening to do so, President Donald Trump issued executive orders that will ban the popular Chinese-owned social media apps TikTok and WeChat in the US on national security concerns. There are still some unknowns around the language and implementation of the decrees, and ...

Over the past decade, it’s almost been too easy for Americans to manage their wealth. A textbook 60/40 portfolio — in its simplest incarnation, exposure to the S&P 500 Index and Treasury bonds — was an effortless winner. The US boasted the world’s best stock market, and bonds, apart from ...

Seventy-five years ago, three days after the first use of a nuclear weapon, the second occurred. There has not been a third in the subsequent 27,394 days. One of humanity’s remarkable achievements is this absence of something. President Harry S Truman, who ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did ...

The Bank of England (BOE) risks being in a category of one. In its quarterly monetary policy report, it presented a surprisingly chipper assessment of how it expects the UK to recover from the pandemic lockdown. Its relative optimism was in jarring contrast to the gloom that’s engulfed Britain’s big lending ...

The true financial cost of Covid-19 is something India would rather not acknowledge, let alone bear — at least not until the pandemic has played out. That explains why the central bank allowed a one-time restructuring of corporate and personal loans that have been under stress ever since Prime Minister ...

In case it wasn’t obvious by now, the economic downturn in America has been most unusual during the past several months. But just to hammer home the point, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Report on Household Debt and Credit for the second quarter, disclosed that total household debt ...

Moments after becoming president on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford said, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Having served a quarter-century in Congress, he understood that presidents are to “take care” that laws produced by the first branch of government are “faithfully executed.” The nation in 1974 was eager for ...

Europe has the motivation, but not the means, to break up Big Tech. For the US, the inverse is true. That’s bad news for anyone hoping for a full regulatory reckoning with Silicon Valley’s and Seattle’s giants over their monopolistic tendencies. Washington lawmakers see their job as protecting the consumer ...