Opinion

As much as the US pines for the good old days of global semiconductor supremacy, Japan feels its loss of glory even more. Once a dominant name in electronic components, the nation has been overtaken by South Korea, Taiwan, and, more recently, China. Yet Tokyo may have a viable plan to revitalise its domestic sector. “Unlike the purely domestic, independent ...

One of the biggest questions hanging over the US economy right now is whether the government is spending too much money. Some prominent economists are warning it’s time to pump the brakes. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package came on top of $3.1 trillion in similar outlays back in 2020; and now the president is planning at least ...

President Joe Biden’s recently unveiled budget marks a new era in US economic policy making. Decades of trickle-down tax cuts are out the window; Biden is betting that trickle-up economics will deliver the kind of sustained and equitable growth we all want. But that’s a dangerously short-sighted strategy that in the long term will create far more stagnation than a ...

Thanks to a technicality of British parliamentary procedure, Boris Johnson has managed to avert an embarrassing showdown with lawmakers from his own party over the UK government’s budget for foreign aid. But Parliament was expected to vent on the issue on Tuesday, and plenty of other divisions are emerging within the government and the Conservatives on funding priorities. While Johnson ...

Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people ...

If still-incomplete returns are correct, a straw-hat-wearing, giant-pencil-carrying candidate for a Marxist party has just narrowly won Peru’s presidential election. It’s a razor-thin margin that points to deep rifts and spells lasting instability for a country that is not only the No. 2 copper producer today, but has also been seen — until now — as a key source of ...

The US Federal Reserve’s new approach to managing inflation, unveiled last summer, makes a lot of sense: By seeking to achieve an average of 2% — that is, by allowing inflation to overshoot enough to offset previous undershooting — the central bank should be able to keep people’s expectations better anchored around the 2% target. But, unfortunately, the way the ...

Janet Yellen may be doing a solid for Jerome Powell, her successor at the helm of the Federal Reserve. Yellen, now Treasury secretary, says higher interest rates would be beneficial for the US economy. Both borrowing costs and inflation have been too low for the past decade. “If we ended up with a slightly higher interest rate environment, it would ...

If you want an example of how major Western companies manage their great taxation sidestep, take a look at Apple Inc’s chief supplier. Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group and the largest assembler of iPhones, booked $57.4 billion in revenue from the Republic of Ireland in 2020, according to its annual report. That’s around 25% ...

The stronger the interest in China’s coming digital currency, the less we seem to know about it. Sifting through comments by officials thought to be the brains behind the project, Capital Economics’ chief Asia economist Mark Williams has raised an interesting question: What if the e-CNY, as some are beginning to call the new electronic cash, is not at all ...