Opinion

The highly anticipated US jobs report for August should make us feel sorry for those having to navigate through the flood of economic data, be they analysts or, more importantly, policy makers. With another set of data subject to divergent interpretations, the post-pandemic economic landscape remains both puzzling and uncertain. Constituting a big miss relative to expectations, the headline number ...

For most of us, the growing evidence that the efficacy of Covid vaccines is declining over time should be a cause of worry. For the drug companies that have spent billions of dollars developing them, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Recent studies on vaccine effectiveness have led to a run of orders for boosters in recent weeks. The US will start ...

BMW AG is set to effectively bail out its flailing Chinese joint-venture partner. For the German carmaker, that’s a smart move. BMW’s China unit is close to a deal to buy production assets worth $252 million from the parent of its main partner, Brilliance Auto, Bloomberg News reported citing people familiar with the matter. The information was disclosed at a ...

China’s latest tightening of gaming rules is much ado about nothing. Except, of course, that nothing Beijing does is minor or inconsequential these days because everything the leadership says should be taken both literally and seriously. Shares of the nation’s leading games providers including Tencent Holdings Ltd, NetEase Inc, Bilibili Inc. and Huya Inc tumbled after the National Press and ...

Lost wars are supposed to provoke soul-searching. In America, they usually bring historical revisionism instead. When once-good wars go bad, Americans tend to conclude that there was never anything redeeming about them in the first place. This impulse is already coloring the debate over Afghanistan. It won’t help the US recover or learn from defeat. Much of the flourishing “who ...

In reimposing travel curbs on Americans, the European Union is sending a message to the US that is as much about diplomacy as it is about epidemiology. Sure, there is data to nominally support the decision. A surge in cases driven by the delta variant’s spread has put the US well beyond the recommended limits for non-essential travel to the ...

To say it’s absurd that an electric-truck maker that hasn’t yet delivered any trucks to regular customers should seek an $80 billion valuation is to state the obvious. That isn’t a knock on Rivian Automotive Inc, which announced that it has filed for an IPO confidentially. From what we can tell, it seems like the real deal. It’s just a ...

One of the less obvious outcomes of the Great Blizzard of 1888 was that, by the following year, crowds of New Yorkers were following workers around yelling “timber!” as they chopped down wooden utility poles. The ferocious winter storm pushed the city to get serious about burying the growing network of power and telegraph lines strung over its streets. Climate ...

In his address at the annual Jackson Hole economic conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell offered a finely calibrated message that I think is worth amplification: The Fed wants to do everything it can to restore jobs lost during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not taking the risk of inflation seriously. As I interpret his remarks, Powell remains ...

Angela Merkel has long had her admirers in the Anglophone media. In November 2015 the Economist called her “the indispensable European.” A month later the Financial Times named her its “person of the year.” Time magazine proclaimed her “chancellor of the free world.” When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, the New York Times dubbed Merkel “the ...