Opinion

  The past year saw a shift in consumer habits that was broadly helpful to the retail sector: Not only did we go to restaurants again and buy more glamorous attire, we also continued to spruce up our homes and shop online. This meant that even with supply chain snarl-ups, most consumer companies had a pretty good 2021. This coming ...

  The video-game business has a long and troubled history of gender stereotypes. A round of scandals at multiple gaming companies offered a sad reminder that the industry has a lot more to do to fix its culture and, eventually, repair its reputation. But the situation isn’t hopeless. As a hit release from Sony shows, there is a big market ...

  Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that, in response to the Omicron mutation sweeping Africa and Europe, Israel would be inoculating its vulnerable population with a fourth round of Pfizer vaccine, a booster to the booster. “The citizens of Israel were the first in the world to receive the third dose of Covid-19 vaccination and we are continuing to ...

  With inflation running at more than six percent and President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in peril, ’tis the season for second-guessing. So I’d like to focus on what may well have been the original sin of the Biden administration and the narrow Democratic majority in Congress: last February’s decision to reject Senate Republicans’ offer of a $600 billion Covid ...

A global shortage of semiconductors will ease a little in 2022 — likely driving stock prices down — leaving a lot of executives, bankers and shareholders left to question their ebullience in pouring record amounts of money into production facilities, and sending the market value of chipmakers ever higher. But it’ll take a while before the real pain from such ...

  For asset managers, next year is shaping up to be challenging, to say the least. Faster inflation will prompt central banks to slow, stop and possibly reverse their monetary support of economies, making financial markets trickier to negotiate. The pandemic is far from over. The industry will face even more pressure to allocate assets in environmentally friendly ways without ...

  For Americans under 50, inflation is little more than a theoretical concept. But for those of us born in the late 1950s and 1960s, the inflation of the 1970s was a formative experience we’d rather not repeat. Inflation was as much a part of our childhood as Covid is for today’s kids. It was always there in the background. ...

  George III was neither mad nor bad. The US Declaration of Independence filed 28 charges of misgovernment against the British king who lost the American colonies, but recent scholarship argues that his detractors on both sides of the Atlantic got him wrong. Far from being an enemy to liberty, George III was a sound constitutionalist and the first British ...

This could be the year when the global economy enters a new regime. No longer driven by minimal inflation in prices, negligible interest rates, steadily falling bond yields, growing inequality, and fantastic returns on asset prices, it’s possible that the return of rising prices in 2021 will at last force a new way of doing things. With inflation a serious ...

Two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse will keep us busy in 2022 as they did in 2021. One is plague — in our case the Sars-CoV-2 virus that keeps mutating. As predicted in March, people are in for a seemingly permanent struggle between us (science) and nature (evolution). People keep coming up with new and better vaccines, but ...