Opinion

Vinted, the Lithuanian app that lets users buy and sell pre-owned clothes and accessories, was valued this week at 3.5 billion euros ($4.2 billion), not far below more established European retailers such as Hugo Boss and Sports Direct owner Frasers Group. The Vinted fundraising underlines the current vogue for vintage and secondhand apparel — including anything from bootcut jeans to ...

Hong Kong’s cozy all-male boards have been put on notice. Rules that could become effective within months will force them to appoint at least one woman director. It’s an overdue change that may go some way to bolstering the city’s dented status as an international financial centre. The territory is an embarrassing laggard in the worldwide trend toward greater gender ...

Inflation is coming. Or wait, it’s already here. Bond investors are looking at the 4.2% annual rate that US consumer prices jumped to in April and wondering if it’s all because of depressed levels from last year. Could it be that the Federal Reserve is wrong about higher prices being transitory? In that case, the Fed and other central banks ...

I have a simple and depressing model for understanding the corruption of today’s political discourse. Not only does it explain the issue on both sides, it is likely to offend both of them, too. Start with the Republicans. Early on in Donald Trump’s presidency, he perfected the technique of “the big lie.” Outrageous claims would be put on the table, ...

Bangladesh is deep into its second month of a coronavirus lockdown that has shuttered schools, public transportation and most workplaces. But thanks to lobbying by the country’s garment manufacturers, millions of factory workers are still on the job every day — even though many have complained of pay cuts, late wages and inadequate Covid protections. Eight years after the notorious ...

Innovation in central banking often starts in small markets. New Zealand was the first country to formally adopt inflation targeting as we now know it in 1990. Today the Bahamas and Cambodia lead China in piloting central bank money in electronic form. However, few realise it was Finland that pioneered the world’s first central bank digital currency. The experiment has ...

What a difference a year makes for many corporate bosses in advanced economies. Some 12 months ago, they were dealing with the sudden and brutal disappearance of demand for their products. Today, demand is not a problem for most of them; it is surging. Rather, they are struggling to secure supplies, including the raw material inputs and workers needed to ...

Although the eradication of Sars-CoV-2 would be nice, most people accept we’ll have to live with the virus for some time, almost as we do with the flu. But a variant from India is now forcing the UK to define just what “living with it” means. It comes as England reaches another milestone on its roadmap to unlocking. From Monday, ...

China’s slowest population growth in decades may be felt more acutely beyond its borders than within them. The economy will keep humming and incomes can continue to climb, albeit at a slower rate. The rest of us, however, will need to adjust to a persistently slacker pace of global expansion and the prospective ebbing of deflationary pressure. The caricature of ...

Over the last two weeks, protests against a tax reform proposed by the Colombian government have left dozens of people dead, injured hundreds more, and brought much of the country to a standstill. At least 15 people have been killed in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, where more than 10,000 troops and police officers are fighting rioters who’ve barricaded the main ...