Opinion

So much for transitory. US prices rose by 7% in 2021, the highest gain for nearly 40 years. Remember: The Federal Reserve’s target for inflation is 2%, a fact that gets less attention than it used to, back when “hawks” and “doves” were measuring deviations in tenths of a percentage point. It’s an enormous overshoot, and some of it is ...

  There’s a strong case for getting vaccinated (and boosted) against Covid-19. The problem for President Joe Biden is that the case for getting vaccinated amounts to an argument against his attempt to make vaccination mandatory for employees of large companies. In the course of arguing against the mandate in front of the US Supreme Court last week, Benjamin Flowers, ...

Director Adam McKay’s climate satire “Don’t Look Up” isn’t exactly subtle. The hair is big, the parody obvious, the targets as plentiful as the star-studded cast competing for space — and the planet is about to explode. The whole enterprise is a monument to anger and frustration, which may explain why environmental scientists have warmed to the film more than ...

  Ouch. A record high of 5% for euro area inflation in December will cause a few red faces at the European Central Bank (ECB), which had been hoping that 2021 had already seen the peak. It was only a 0.1% uptick from the prior month. But the average of a wide range of forecasts was for 4.8%. So it ...

  Bonds have been as close to a sure thing as there is in financial markets over the past four decades. Since 1982, the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index has only had four down years, and never back-to-back. Yet, after falling 1.54% last year, the benchmark is already down 1.62% in just the first few days of 2022. Might this ...

  The world’s largest electric-vehicle (EV) battery maker is getting bigger. Whether it can maintain its global reign will come down to Beijing’s tolerance of a private enterprise’s monopoly in a key industrial sector. China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (CATL) announced it was investing 24 billion yuan ($3.77 billion) to expand its battery production capacity in Sichuan province, maintaining its ...

Environment, social and governance investing is all the rage, but most all investment goes into the “E” and, to a lesser extent, the “G” and not the “S.” We neglect social-welfare investment at grave risk and for no good reason. But there is a way to quickly change this by making ESG meaningful for an urgent social good: speeding treatment ...

  It’s private equity (PE) to the rescue. French big-box retailer Auchan couldn’t quite make a good enough offer to buy peer Carrefour SA when it tried a takeover last year. Now buyout firms may be on hand to juice up the bid. Securing a deal would involve the buyers making compromises. A willingness to do so suggests some desperation ...

  A year after Apple Inc supplier Wistron Corp. faced an uprising in India, its larger rival Foxconn Technology Group is encountering a similar rebuke. This time, their key client is getting drawn into what ought to serve as a wake-up call for Taiwanese manufacturers in the South Asian nation. Concerns about food safety and accommodation standards spurred Apple to ...

  Israeli scientists monitoring samplings of sewage water in 2013 made a startling discovery: an outbreak of paralysing polio was imminent. A national vaccination campaign was quickly mobilised and no cases appeared. That same year, Swedish scientists provided public officials with an early warning for outbreaks of hepatitis A and norovirus using the same methods. If we are to regain, ...