Opinion

It’s a familiar phenomenon for anyone who regularly shops online: A single tube of toothpaste arrives on the doorstep with lightning speed, but it’s in a box that easily could have housed an entire medicine cabinet’s worth of toiletries. This is partly a reflection of how retailers have optimised e-commerce for convenience, making the click of a button a viable ...

There is still a lot to fix at Deutsche Bank before it can hope to get near a decent return on equity, but in one area it has made definite progress: the cost and stability of its debt. Stock market investors should care. Deutsche Bank’s funding costs matter for its revenue prospects as well as for the expense of its ...

The placement of energy pipelines has always been shaped by political considerations, often at the expense of commercial ones. But the operation of existing lines is increasingly becoming politicised, too. And that’s going to hurt everyone. There are many examples of pipeline routes being selected to serve geopolitical ends. Russia’s construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany ...

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi isn’t used to backing down. So his move to repeal three contentious laws that have drawn tens of thousands of farmers to protest at the borders of the capital for over a year is significant. It’s easily the most serious political setback of his seven years in power. Almost half of India’s 1.4 billion people ...

There’s been a lot of discussion, since the Facebook Files were leaked, about how to repair the social media platform. A lot of this talk centres on how algorithms manipulate the feeds, and how we users are profiled and fed exactly the content that arouses us to fits of hatred, conspiracy theorising, and even domestic terrorism. This is true and ...

Thanksgiving 2021 should be the reward for abstaining from 2020 celebrations until Covid-19 vaccines rolled out. Why not? The virus is still very much around, but times really have changed. Remember those 11th-hour pleas from the US Centers for Disease Control to cancel last year’s gatherings as a big fall surge was building? They were reasonable, then: Big holiday celebrations ...

The supply-chain crunch appears to have already peaked in the US. Over the past two years, just about anything that could go wrong with global supply chains has gone wrong, from volatile swings in demand, a wave of extreme weather events and even a container ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal. But evidence keeps piling up to suggest that ...

Just three years after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 shortly after takeoff from Jakarta precipitated a chain of events leading to the worldwide grounding of Boeing’s flagship 737 Max 8 plane, a strange thing is happening. The single-aisle jet — whose crashes in Indonesia and, less than five months later, outside Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, “exposed fraudulent and ...

The bargain bonanza that is Black Friday has begun. Only there are fewer special offers this year, and those that are being advertised aren’t quite so eye-catching. You can blame the global supply chain meltdown for the dearth of doorbusters. Even when toys and TVs start flowing through trade arteries again, retailers should maintain a more disciplined approach to discounting. ...

Hype is never far away from cryptocurrencies. Punters taking public transport or navigating social media are bombarded daily with enticing advertising and billboards dangling the next big coin, while self-proclaimed experts and gurus offer hot investing tips before the inevitable tired disclaimer: “Please do your own research.” But when London-listed fintech company Mode Global Holdings Plc announced it would expand ...