Opinion

Anything with a hint of green was taking it on the chin after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia rejected the Build Back Better Act. President Joe Biden’s signature legislative package contained roughly half a trillion dollars of support for various forms of cleantech, the biggest federal commitment to the energy transition by far. Tesla Inc, the electric-vehicle pioneer, took ...

  As omicron cases rise rapidly, there are urgent questions about how aggressively we should respond. At one extreme are reactions like that of the Netherlands, which has moved into full lockdown mode to blunt the variant’s spread. Another possibility, so far the default in many parts of the US, is simply to not do very much, whether out of ...

  Do you think JPMorgan was doing a lot of crimes in the group chat? We have no way of knowing. Last week US regulators fined JPMorgan Chase & Co a total of $200 million for violating record-keeping requirements. From the Securities and Exchange Commission’s announcement: As described in the SEC’s order, JPMS admitted that from at least January 2018 ...

  The supply chain crunch has turned the once-staid world of manufacturing and industrials upside down. The imbalance is so severe that consumers are feeling the pain, as prices of raw materials and goods are thrown out of whack. Debates about inflationary pressures are raging. What more could go wrong? Well, a lot. Especially if the grease that makes the ...

The stimulus era is formally over. The Bank of England’s (BOE) surprise 15 basis point interest-rate increase finally moved the agenda from pandemic recovery onto fighting inflation. The pound rose nearly 1% versus the dollar and the entire gilt yield curve rose about eight basis points. The conditions were just too strong for the monetary policy committee to ignore any ...

  On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. On Decmber 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the US. On August 8, 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. The point here is that for the best part of a thousand years, a convention prevailed that before one state waged war against another, it formally announced its intention to ...

  President Joe Biden’s signature economic legislation isn’t dead. In fact, if Democratic Party leaders could only bring themselves to make a few hard choices, Build Back Better could even get better. Momentum for the nearly $2 trillion bill has seemingly collapsed, with talks between Senator Joe Manchin and the White House breaking down and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s ...

  Back in 2006, the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb risked a sketch in which they played two Waffen-SS officers towards the end of World War II. Reflecting on the Totenkopf (death’s head) badges on their caps, Mitchell asked the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?” An increasing number of anxious American political commentators are asking themselves a ...

Some of the US’s largest employers, including General Motors, IBM and Meta, have formed a new venture with a laudable goal: ensuring that artificial intelligence doesn’t perpetuate or worsen discrimination in hiring. The mere existence of the Data & Trust Alliance, as it is called, is good news — but it needs to be a lot better. Hiring has changed ...

  FedEx Corp has cracked the code on how to hire in today’s tight labour market: higher wages, better benefits and more flexibility. Who knew? After offering those three things, the company received more than 111,000 job applications, the most in history and up from 52,000 in the week of May 8, Chief Operating Officer Raj Subramaniam said after the ...