Opinion

With an eight point lead in the opinion polls, an 83-seat majority in the House of Commons and economic growth figures for the second quarter revised upwards from 4.8% to 5.5%, what does UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have to fear? Plenty. Although the opposition Labour party requires an enormous swing of more than 10% at the next general election ...

Almost 47 million people voted in the German parliamentary election last weekend. It was the closest vote since 2002; the center-left Social Democrats beat the conservative Christian Democratic bloc for first place by about 1.8 million votes. Party leaders will need every ounce of their negotiating skill to form the next government. Imagine how the outcome could have been swayed ...

There it is again: Another automaker makes a big announcement about its electrification plans with a battery manufacturer. Going by previous proclamations, that’s not just ambitious but far-fetched. Ford Motor Co and SK Innovation Co announced they’re partnering to spend $11.4 billion on three electric car battery plants across the US, making it the most sizable investment in the automaker’s ...

Singapore is very proud of its reputation for technocratic excellence. In recent months, government officials have tried to tackle the country’s most pressing question — how to live with Covid-19 — by scrutinising, modeling and projecting data, as if staring hard enough at those little gray-rimmed boxes on Excel would produce the answer. The trouble with this strategy is that ...

Japan’s outgoing prime minister gave his successor, Fumio Kishida, a gift. In one of his last acts, Yoshihide Suga will lift emergency pandemic restrictions that have hampered the country’s most economically vital regions. It gets progressively harder for the new leader from there. Kishida emerged from a four-way ballot on Wednesday to become leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ...

Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to a corporate income tax increase has Democrats taking another swing at a carbon tax. If they manage to rally around the idea, it could be a milestone in global climate policy and the defining initiative of Joe Biden’s presidency. Whether Democrats can make this proposal happen is anyone’s guess. But it would have a better ...

The cryptocurrency crowd has wasted no time in dancing on the grave of China’s “FUD” (internet speak for fear, uncertainty and doubt). Last week’s move by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to ban crypto transactions and mining dented the prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital currencies, but they’ve largely rebounded. The bulls reckon the latest attempt by Beijing ...

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, landlocked between the teeming multitudes of China and India, shot to global fame in the 1970s with gross national happiness: a broad measure of overall welfare it prefers over the more traditional metric of gross domestic product, which only includes production of goods and services, even those that ultimately leave us miserable. More recently, ...

While traders and policy makers preoccupy themselves with the question of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s reappointment, a quiet battle for influence within the institution is intensifying. The exit of two regional officials could quiet dissent and further strengthen the chair’s considerable grip on monetary policy in the world’s largest economy. Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Fed, and Robert ...

The results of the German election are in, and in one respect they’re clear. We won’t know for weeks or months who the next German leader is, as the parties haggle over a coalition. During that time, outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel will keep minding day-to-day business as a caretaker. But her time in power is over. That also means the ...