Opinion

The bonfire of the inanities. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng isn’t pulling any punches with his first moves in office. First, he unceremoniously fired the most senior civil servant in the Treasury. Now he is contemplating taking an axe to European Union regulations on financial services. But he is starting on the latter in a very odd way ...

  We’re living through arguably the most truly global attempt to tighten financial conditions in memory. This is shifting the tectonic plates beneath the world economy, and threatens dangerous developments in society and in politics as we all try to adapt. And yet what strikes the eye after a week of market landmarks and aggressive interventions by central banks is ...

  A proposal by the Group of Seven to impose a price cap on purchases of Russian oil is so neat that it’s been derided as an academic parlor game. Can the world’s wealthiest countries really reduce Moscow’s revenue while keeping crude flowing into global markets? As it happens, the answer is probably yes. The plan has plenty of flaws, ...

What happens in Italian politics doesn’t often stay in Italy. From Fascism to Nazism; from Berlusconi to Trump; from the rabble-rousing Five Star Movement to the disruption wrought by social media, Italy has often served as a political laboratory for liberal democracies. So, would a victory in Sunday’s election by the far-right Brothers of Italy and its leader Giorgia Meloni ...

After carving a fifth off the market value of FedEx Corp when it withdrew its annual forecast and announced preliminary results that fell well short of expectations, investors were in a more forgiving mood for the full quarterly report. They mildly welcomed FedEx’s effort to chop as much as $2.7 billion of costs over the next 12 months to offset ...

  The European “way of life” has always been a vague concept, but — after Covid-19 — it chimed with a new generation looking for la dolce vita. Citigroup Inc is one unlikely poster child. At its new office in Malaga, Spain, junior bankers can expect to be paid half the salary of their London peers — $100,000, reportedly — ...

  California governor Gavin Newsom signed a landmark bill into law, forcing large internet companies like Facebook to make their sites safer for children. Aside from sparking irritation in tech circles, it has put a spotlight on an area where states are making greater headway than Congress: passing laws to regulate the free-wheeling dominance of Big Tech firms. Rallying against ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin tripled down on the war in Ukraine in a short but defiant televised speech. Politically, he announced that a series of referendums on joining Russia would be held in the conquered territories of eastern Ukraine. Militarily, he repeated previous not-so-veiled threats to use nuclear weapons, and announced a mobilisation of 300,000 reservists to be thrown into ...

When Indonesia’s Joko Widodo visited Ukraine and Russia this summer, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi explained the president was “choosing to try to contribute, instead of choosing to be quiet.” And yet now, with the world at a perilous juncture, he has bafflingly chosen silence. Jokowi, as the president is known, is once again sitting out the United Nations’ General Assembly, ...

  The US dollar has surged almost 14% from its low last year in trade-weighted terms. This has led to a huge terms of trade shock (the price of exports compared with the price of imports) affecting any country that imports a lot of energy, which trades in dollars. On top of that, in Europe and the UK, at least, ...