Opinion

The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy meeting this week is a chance for the central bank to get back on the same page with the bond market. The challenge will be pushing back market expectations that an interest rate increase could come as soon as the end of next year. How it delivers that message convincingly will be key. Chair Jerome ...

The stock market plunged, the dollar spiked and digital frenzy swept Brazil. Another record-breaking day for Covid-19 fatalities, or one more assault on civility by the nation’s provocateur-in-chief, President Jair Bolsonaro? None of the above. What has Brazilians in a lather is a new variant of a more familiar affliction — Lulapalooza. Until this week, the much admired and widely ...

Covid-19’s path of destruction has not exempted the pieties about it. People who said it was “just the flu” don’t look wise after nearly 540,000 deaths in the US. But “14 days to flatten the curve” didn’t turn out to be prescient either. The more partisan the narrative, the worse it has fared. Liberals have spent much of the pandemic ...

In the futurist law now named after him, the late Stanford University computer scientist Roy Amara once declared, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” India’s public digital infrastructure — in many ways, an immense online bureaucracy — is an outlier to this principle. The effort ...

Sure, life is inching its way back to normal, but not for taxpayers. That’s why the Internal Revenue Service should extend the filing deadline this year, just as it did in 2020. One of the main reasons to again give filers extra time after April 15 is the Covid-19 relief bill. The legislation calls for making some of the unemployment ...

Ten years ago, an earthquake triggered a tsunami that caused a meltdown. It wasn’t a mixed metaphor. Starting on March 11, 2011, people across the world watched agape as three nuclear reactors in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture broke down and spewed ionizing radiation far and wide into land, sea and air. Such was the shock that another chain reaction took place ...

In sharing his vision for the type of bank he intends to run, Credit Suisse Group AG’s Thomas Gottstein has been blunt. The giant Swiss lender mustn’t lose sight of its discipline over taking risks, and while mistakes will always happen, “we have no tolerance for unprofessional behavior,” the chief executive officer said recently. His promises are already being tested ...

There was something of a watershed moment in the $21 trillion US Treasury market. After a period of relentless selling that pushed longer-term yields to their highest levels in a year, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had one last opportunity to quell investors’ nerves before the central bank’s self-imposed blackout period. Instead, he said that he’s not too bothered by ...

House Democrats are reportedly pressing President Joe Biden to reverse US policy on Cuba once again, returning to the detente that prevailed before Donald Trump took office. Biden should indeed take the first steps towards renewed openness — and put the onus on Cuba’s Communist leaders to respond. As with so many of his predecessor’s policies, Trump was quick to ...

So we’re back to “never again.” Again. Those two words are best-known in association with some historic events in past. Now many view them as an empty mantra, representing the international community’s vow not to repeat its failure in the 1990s to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, despite explicit warnings of the impending bloodshed, or the atrocities in the Balkans. ...