Opinion

What some have called the mobile advertising Armageddon is finally upon us. Starting on Monday, Apple Inc will put in place new privacy protocols that will make it much harder for apps to gather user data for personalising digital ads. The change will have vast ramifications for how the app economy works and alter the dynamics of power among the ...

Workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, voted by a margin of more than two to one not to join a union. It’s a heavy blow for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, for the wider labour movement, and for the many politicians and activists who wanted the union’s push to succeed. But the workers have spoken — and ...

US Treasuries aren’t exactly an asset class that people should want to root for. Sure, there are any number of bond bulls who see ultra-low yields as a permanent fixture of a world beset by aging demographics and rapid technological change. But hoping for a strong and inclusive global economy, which I’d like to think most everyone wants to see, ...

India’s healthcare system is buckling under the weight of the Covid-19 pandemic: The country registered more than 1,500 deaths and nearly 300,000 infections on April 19 alone. Videos of crowded mortuaries and funeral sites, and grief-stricken relatives outside packed hospitals, are circulating among middle-class Indians. The Lancet says India could suffer more than 2,300 deaths every day by June. As ...

Get ready to pay more for some of the most utilitarian items on your shopping list. Consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co, maker of Pampers diapers and Tampax tampons, said that it would hike prices on items in its babycare, feminine-care and adult-incontinence divisions to cushion the blow of rising costs for raw materials such as pulp. The announcement comes ...

Already suffering from the world’s worst surge in coronavirus deaths, Brazil is now verging on political meltdown. Since late March, six members of President Jair Bolsonaro’s cabinet and the heads of all three armed services have left office, raising fears that Bolsonaro, facing re-election next year, will exploit the crisis to tighten his grip on power. The possible unraveling of ...

In recent years, Wall Street banks have dominated their European counterparts in most areas of global finance. But there’s one hot corner of the capital markets where European firms are staying ahead of their US rivals: the soaring market for green bonds. Overall, Europe’s banks have been laggards, even in their own backyard. In European mergers and acquisitions, for example, ...

Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. If you want to see why, look at what’s happening in India. Cases have been surging in the country of 1.37 billion people. 261,500 new infections were recorded. That’s as bad as the US during all but the worst five days of the pandemic in December ...

From e-commerce firms and payment processors to governments, everyone with half a server and an algorithm wants our data. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see at least one central bank expressly rejecting the idea of sweeping up personal information in designing its electronic cash. The European Central Bank (ECB) “has no interest in monetising or even collecting users’ payment ...

Up to now, President Joe Biden has resisted calls from the left of his party to cancel up to $50,000 of student loans for most borrowers. But the pressure from leading progressives such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and more recently from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, isn’t letting up. The president might be tempted to waver. He ...