Opinion

If elections have consequences, as the cliché goes, then so do lies. Both kinds of consequences were on display this week in Georgia. On the same night that former President Donald Trump was on Fox News minimizing the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a law restricting voting rights in the state. Think of it ...

There’s growing enthusiasm inside and outside the Biden administration for establishing a market that would make carbon dioxide a cash crop for US farmers. The potential climate benefits are huge: US farms have the capacity to sequester hundreds of millions of metric tons of C02 every year — many times the amount of carbon offset annually by the country’s solar ...

The investment giants kicking up a stink about Deliveroo Holdings Plc, the hot startup that is preparing to list in London next week, are only half right. Legal & General Investment Management, Aberdeen Standard Investments and Aviva Investors are among the asset managers who have said they don’t plan to invest in the initial public offering, which will see the ...

As global supply chains buckle under Covid-19 stress, those in Japan remain sturdy, free of inflationary pressures and fitful economic activity. Container shipping costs aren’t spiking and delivery times aren’t delayed. Industrial activity is humming along while manufacturers’ sentiment is at its highest in almost two years. Overseas orders are recovering. It’s all the product of hard lessons learned — ...

A blustering prime minister and a rule-breaking UK government present few problems for the European Commission. It has long experience of dealing with troublemakers on the fringes of Europe. A sweetly reasonable Boris Johnson, however, is a more formidable opponent. He should try making nice more often. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is under fire across the continent, especially ...

Gun control is back on the national agenda. While the killings in Georgia two weeks ago mostly prompted dialogue about motives and anti-Asian hate crimes, the murder of 10 last week in Colorado led President Joe Biden to urge Congress not “to wait another minute” before acting on gun regulation proposals, including a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. ...

The European Union’s attempt to protect the environment by developing a complicated, wide-ranging definition of green investments has run into yet more problems. This time, it’s opposition from those who support a more incremental approach. A new draft of the bloc’s sustainable finance taxonomy, which seeks to catalogue only activities aligned with climate protection, includes some forms of unabated natural ...

A vigilante and a gambler walk into a bond market. No, that’s not the start of a new joke, just the comical look of India’s fixed-income saloon nowadays. There’s no dearth of liquidity, but the bartender — the central bank — is having a tough time getting orders for the good stuff even by cajoling and threatening customers. At the ...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been known to apologize publicly from time to time, both for what she considers her own mistakes and for government decisions that she feels are justified but that can make voters unhappy. The latest Merkel apology was special, though, because it came with an abrupt reversal of a decision Merkel had engineered in one of ...

With broad swaths of the US economy locked down for more than a year, those with good-paying jobs have had fewer opportunities to spend. The result is the highest saving rate on record and an estimated $1.7 trillion stockpile of pandemic savings. It’s widely assumed — and even encouraged — that consumers will spend a good portion of that money ...