Opinion

The news from Washington last week, as usual, was grim. Senate Republicans blocked legislation to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Bipartisan talks over President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals are dragging out. Senators negotiating a police-reform bill missed their deadline. It’s disappointing to progressives who want to see the government get things done, ...

The jump in US consumer prices as the economy began reopening this spring — they rose 4.2% over the 12 months ending in April — has prompted a lot of historical comparisons to the bad old inflationary days of the 1970s. If we’re going to do historical comparisons, though, why stop at the 1970s? The Bureau of Labor Statistics has ...

The task of shifting the car industry from metal bashing and combustion engines to software and batteries is fraught with danger for incumbents such as Ford Motor Co. A big strength of Ford’s new boss Jim Farley is making the bridging of that epochal divide sound simple. The no-nonsense chief executive officer laid out how he plans to lead Ford ...

This year’s meme-stock phenomenon GameStop Corp is soaring again. But the Reddit crowd that loves trading the name may be getting too exuberant, especially considering Best Buy Co’s latest strong earnings report. The consumer-electronics retailer is crushing it at both its physical stores and e-commerce business, making GameStop’s turnaround that much more of a challenge. Best Buy said that it ...

Three of the world’s biggest publicly traded oil and gas companies — Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and Chevron Corp — were dealt stinging blows on May 26 by shareholders and a Dutch court demanding that they act more quickly to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Exxon shareholders voted to appoint at least two climate-conscious members to the ...

May was meant to be French President Emmanuel Macron’s Africa month, a chance to show off France’s influence on the continent — and not just among its former colonies. But Mali’s second coup in less than a year is an embarrassing reminder of the limitations of French leverage and of the president’s personal clout in the region. Authoritarian rulers of ...

With Covid-19 cases trending downward across the US, it’s getting easier to say the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Meanwhile, predictions that the pandemic will change our way of living forever are getting louder. Not surprisingly, many prognosticators see big cities such as New York and San Francisco declining, as urbanites tired of being cooped up in their ...

Some of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon are also becoming the loudest advocates of climate change, frequently spouting all the buzzwords that go with it: net-zero, decarbonisation and neutrality. Most earnings calls and various corporate sustainability reports are now peppered with this jargon. The plans sound lofty but the reality for shareholders is vague, at best. In recent months, ...

India’s vaccine strategy has flopped. A dismissive attitude towards the second Covid-19 outbreak that has raged uncontrolled, and a mistaken belief that indigenously made shots would be equal to the task of inoculating a billion adults, have left the nation scrambling. Efforts are under way to procure supplies from Pfizer Inc, Moderna Inc and Johnson & Johnson. But their order ...

More than 85% of the world’s central banks are working on central bank digital currencies, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has already implemented a digital yuan, and the European Central Bank (ECB) wants to launch a digital euro by 2025. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank will launch ...