Opinion

President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan is smart to look beyond ports and potholes. But I worry about the part of the plan aimed at expanding broadband. It’s both too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Make no mistake, broadband is infrastructure. It’s unacceptable that American schoolchildren have to piggyback on the Wi-Fi provided by fast-food restaurants to submit homework, ...

Italy’s parliament has approved Mario Draghi’s 261 billion-euro ($315 billion) spending plan to resurrect the euro zone’s third-largest economy from the ruins of the pandemic. Now comes the hard part: Implementing the tough structural reforms Italy needs to drive growth and rebalance public accounts, and convincing Italians it’s the right path. Failure to do so would consign Italy to decline ...

Elon Musk has done a better job at selling and making cars in China in just two years than he has in the US over the past decade. As a foreign business, he’s also had a smooth ride with the authorities — until recently. Last Month, a Tesla Inc owner at the Shanghai Auto Show protested the company by jumping ...

Many of us spent the better part of 2020 trapped in our homes — not able to travel, attend a live event, see a movie on a big screen, or get together with friends and family outside of our immediate pods. But judging from corporate disclosures, it seems these restrictions didn’t apply to a small subset of people — specifically, ...

Delivering the official rebuttal to a presidential address to Congress has never been an especially auspicious assignment. At best it is a mixed blessing; at worse, a ticket to oblivion. That’s what made Senator Tim Scott’s speech last week so exceptional. In both tone and content, it shows that the Senate’s only Black Republican is a rare political talent who ...

Four months from now, the last 2,500 American troops will have left Afghanistan. The British, Australians, Canadians and other allies will be in the same boat, figuratively if not literally, having also sacrificed blood and treasure in the 20-year struggle first, to remove Kabul’s Taliban government, thereafter to sustain its successor regimes. Why has President Joe Biden lost patience, the ...

For the past generation, Amazon.com Inc has been the centerpiece of a prevailing view that the growth of the internet has had a deflationary impact. Online shopping brought transparency to every aspect of the economy, increasing competition and taking pricing power away from companies that used to have it. Now Amazon may be leading the marketplace in a new direction ...

Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley has proved skeptics wrong: Hanging on to the British bank’s large securities business has been a blessing, especially during the pandemic. Staley was under pressure at various points to cut back on riskier trading activities. He held off and his firm — like its Wall Street peers — has prospered, riding the wave ...

With a month to go before a showdown with activists at its annual meeting, Exxon Mobil Corp is putting its best face forward. The activist argument rested on two pillars. First, Exxon’s strategy for managing the energy transition was, at best, unclear and at worst barely in existence. Exxon has moved to defang that with a shift in messaging around ...

If you are lucky enough to be healthy in Covid-haunted Delhi, life feels strangely disconnected. Offline, there’s an undeclared lockdown. The normally noisy city is silent except for the sound of birds. Social media, on the other hand, is an unfolding tapestry of tragedy. People beg for help finding hospital beds and life-saving medicines. Friends and acquaintances call and text ...