Opinion

As Britain basked in a mini-heatwave over the long weekend, you could have almost forgotten there were any remaining Covid-19 restrictions on restaurants. But social distancing, mandatory table service and a ban on groups larger than six are still in place in England until June 21, limiting the amount of people venues can squeeze in and crimping their profits. Keeping ...

The US housing market is on fire, with the supply of available homes falling drastically short of pandemic-stoked demand. Worrywarts are calling it a “crisis” and circulating weird tales of buyer desperation — including one about a supplicant in Bethesda, Maryland who apparently offered to name her first-born child after a seller — and warnings of stunted recoveries. Or maybe ...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s “mystery” may be moving towards resolution. When she led the Federal Reserve, Yellen puzzled over inflation’s failure to fire despite low unemployment, years of shallow interest rates and several rounds of quantitative easing. Claudio Borio, a top official at the Bank for International Settlements, likened the situation to peering through a looking glass: Central banks that ...

Half a century ago, in March 1971, Bangladesh’s founders declared their independence from richer and more powerful Pakistan. The country was born amid famine and war; millions fled to India or were killed by Pakistani soldiers. To the Pakistani military’s American backers, the new country seemed destined to fail: Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, famously called it a “basketcase.” ...

Even if we never learn whether Covid-19 escaped from a lab or jumped to humans from animals, the public is entitled to a closer look at what’s going on in virology labs. Some scientists worry that laboratory scientists are getting too little oversight on projects that could potentially start pandemics. Others worry about the global proliferation of labs that work ...

On September 16, 2008, the day after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck”: Its net asset value fell below $1 per share. The fund — often called the first money-market fund — held $785 million of Lehman commercial paper that was suddenly worthless. Although the paper represented only 1.2% of the fund’s total assets ...

To revitalise US science and technology with more government spending, it’s time to go big or go home. Tragically, it seems that both Congress and the Biden administration have decided to go home. Economists have been shouting their heads off about the productivity slowdown for more than a decade. Since around 2005, total factor productivity — the ultimate driver of ...

In cities at least, India’s nightmarish second wave of Covid-19 finally seems to be ebbing. Delhi has brought its test positivity rate below 2% for the first time in two months. The pandemic’s scars won’t be easily erased, however — and they should be a warning to other developing nations. Those countries must learn from India’s experience if they don’t ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us two sides of technological progress. There’s the positive side that’s delivered safe and effective vaccines in record time, helped economies with new stay-at-home online tools and improved disease surveillance and public health. And there’s the negative side that’s turbocharged malicious actors’ and authoritarian regimes’ disinformation campaigns, hacking and disruption of opponents, and fostered a ...

India’s internet future — free and open, or stymied and controlled — may be decided by a 224-page lawsuit filed by WhatsApp last week. Saying that it wanted to curb fake news, revenge porn and other ills, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced new rules in February that would compel social media platforms such as Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp to trace ...