Opinion

  Less than three months into a coal output surge ordered by Beijing to paper over the cracks in China’s electricity grid, the signs of strain are starting to show. Emergency rescue services were rushed to an illegal coal pit in Shanxi province after 22 miners were trapped underground by flooding, one of the country’s worst mine accidents in months. ...

  Tory MPs describe Boris Johnson as a “greased piglet,” forever slipping from the clutches of his political enemies just when they think they have him cornered. The UK prime minister will require all his fabled survival skills after the Liberal Democratic Party overturned a large Conservative majority to secure a by-election victory with a 34% swing. Many Conservative MPs ...

Time to get ready for the party. You put on your Balenciaga cap, fasten your Rolex Daytona and don your Louis Vuitton cross-body bag. But this isn’t In-Real-Life bling. It’s all virtual gear, worn by your digital self, who’s about to be teleported into the metaverse. Welcome to the new world of luxury, where avatars wear Burberry “skins” and carry ...

  It has been 21 months since the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, but it has felt like eons longer. That’s in large part because we keep reliving the same story lines again and again. Business operations and air travel are getting disrupted yet again by a spike in Covid cases and the emergence of the ...

  On the campaign trail in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden posed as hawk on Russia. In response to reports (later discredited) that then-President Donald Trump had ignored intelligence suggesting Russia had paid for bounties on US forces in Afghanistan, Biden declared that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin.” Biden’s attitude was partly explained by his party’s obsession ...

  According to Vladimir Putin, “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Besides the delicious contradiction there, it shows how far the Russian president’s designs on Ukraine stretch beyond the gas pipelines that fueled previous crises. Yet if Russia does invade Ukraine (again), the effect on energy markets this winter is something Western countries will need ...

  There’s been a discouraging development for renters who gave up on buying a house earlier this year because of dwindling inventory and rising prices, thinking they’d wait until things cooled off: The housing market is surging again. But why is it upshifting during what should be the slowest time of the year? One answer is rising prices in the ...

  Think the cost of electricity in Europe — where fuel shortages and the approach of winter recently drove prices over $200 per megawatt-hour — is crazy? You should check out Singapore. The city-state has seen wholesale prices rising as high as S$2,947 ($2,184)/MWh in October and $1,121/MWh last month. Those levels aren’t even particularly unusual in Singapore’s highly liberalised ...

  Although it has been a little wobbly over the past few weeks, the performance of the US dollar this year has been extraordinary. It has strengthened against just about every currency of consequence even though inflation pressures in the US have been worse than expected and the Federal Reserve has done nothing to counter them. Also remarkable is that ...

  Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi wants to make his country more friendly to outside investors. But an ongoing power struggle involving its largest insurer, its richest man and its most powerful investment banker is not a good look. Leonardo Del Vecchio’s fortune of nearly 40 billion euros ($45.1 billion) is rooted in his eyewear group Luxottica Group SpA, which ...