Opinion

As you watch yet another congressional hearing where social media CEOs awkwardly put on suits and ties to defend the indefensible to the uncomprehending, you couldn’t be blamed for feeling hopeless. Our long-standing policies for regulating traditional media have collapsed in the face of user-generated content, with networks of tens of millions of people creating it in real time at ...

President Joe Biden has big, ambitious plans that will continue to ring up unwieldy bills for the federal government. His administration will have to fund a significant — but still undetermined — portion of those bills by raising taxes on affluent Americans. And that won’t go well unless Biden’s team can get ahead of well-heeled taxpayers who are inclined to ...

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” The quip is from the late libertarian economists Milton and Rose Friedman, who would not have been surprised that the same is true of war resolutions. But now a bipartisan group of congressmen is trying to change that. The Authorisation for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, ...

For the past year, an assumption — sometimes explicit, often tacit — has informed almost all our thinking about the pandemic: At some point, it will be over, and then we’ll go “back to normal.” This premise is almost certainly wrong. SARS-CoV-2, protean and elusive as it is, may become our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse. And even ...

The Covid-19 pandemic and the extraordinary stimulus unleashed has re-written the role of central banks. Now that economic recovery is picking up, there’s a global tussle over the spoils and just how much power monetary authorities have to surrender. Battle lines draw little distinction among regions and whether an economy is emerging or developed, rich or poor. In New Zealand, ...

If at first you don’t succeed with an IPO, try again with a special purpose acquisition company. Having failed abysmally when trying to go public the traditional way in 2019, office-space provider WeWork Cos is reportedly in talks to merge with BowX Acquisition Corp and thereby join the stock market. A SPAC transaction has obvious appeal. Merging with a $480 ...

Remember last year’s kerfuffle over whether providers of business interruption insurance would have to pay when local Covid-19 rules forced proprietors to close? The verdict is now in … and it hasn’t gone well for business owners. In fact, according to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which has developed a tool to track Covid-related litigation, the insurers have overwhelmingly ...

In a government poster from the early 1970s, a young Singaporean mother stands in a laundry-strewn apartment with a screaming infant on her hip. Her toddler is on the floor wailing and her husband stands disapprovingly in the doorway, disgusted by the messy home. A thought bubble appears above the woman’s head: “If only I hadn’t married so early.” The ...

The ruin that the novel coronavirus has visited on Latin America is hard to overstate. By almost any metric — 2.7 million companies shuttered in 2020, a 20% drop in investment, 44.1 million unemployed, 23.5 million projected to fall into poverty this year — the new report by the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean is ...

If the lockdowns of the past year introduced millions of people to the ease of online shopping, they also underlined some e-commerce pain points: clothes that don’t fit, returns that take ages to process, groceries that arrive nearly expired and tiresome customer service. If online retailers want to retain customers when physical stores reopen, these are problems they’ll need to ...