Opinion

The volatility in government bond yields last week compelled several market participants to call on the Federal Reserve to say, or better, do something about it, though such calls have lacked specifics. At the same time, a handful of foreign central bank officials expressed concern that the financial conditions in their own countries are experiencing, to use the words of ...

In the first two columns in this series, I asked what the pandemic meant for short-term fiscal policy and, looking farther ahead, for measures to accommodate structural shifts in our economies. This time I’ll ask what it means for monetary policy — and the starting point is to look back at a key moment in history. March 4 is the ...

A booming stock market at a time of pandemic recession and widening inequality is an unfortunate combination, so the tax raid on the Hong Kong exchange shouldn’t be a surprise. Soaking well-to-do finance types to help pay for consumption handouts sends a convenient populist message. It may also serve to deflect attention from the government’s failure to tackle the biggest ...

Looking at the way the world’s carbon emissions have risen in recent decades, it’s tempting to believe that increasing pollution is an ineluctable law of nature. That’s by no means a heretical view. Vaclav Smil, the Czech-Canadian energy analyst revered by Bill Gates, has often pointed to the growth in pollution since the 1980s as evidence that a transition to ...

London’s regime for special purpose acquisition companies serves no one well. Its approach to investor protection is so crude as to have prevented the SPAC market from taking off at all. As the UK scrambles to bolster its post-Brexit finance industry, it should not dismiss the US model unless it can devise something better. SPACs are publicly traded cash shells ...

“The vaccine works. It is safe, effective, and potent.” In 1955, those were the words that told the world US scientist Jonas Salk’s polio shot was a success. It was news greeted with popular jubilation, ringing church bells and boldface banner headlines. The sort of heartfelt relief that most of us can readily identify with, more than a year into ...

Comfy shoes have never been so hot. L Catterton, the private equity fund backed by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE founder Bernard Arnault, is nearing an agreement to buy a majority stake in Birkenstock, maker of the famously clumpy sandals, for about 4 billion euros ($4.9 billion), Bloomberg News reported. This would be the second shoe to drop in ...

“All that’s required is the passage of time, an inner calm,” began a sentence in Warren Buffett’s annual letter to his followers. He was talking about the essentials of investing in a farm or business, but it felt like a metaphor for the collectively lonely and despairing moment that the world found itself in during the past year. With his ...

Human rights group Amnesty International has revoked Alexey Navalny’s prisoner of conscience status because of past xenophobic comments. The jailed Russian opposition leader’s anti-migrant statements and nationalist dalliances are well-known. He has never retracted those views. Yet history books are full of imperfect crusaders — proof we can’t always choose a model citizen to galvanise others in the battle for ...

The European Union has had a dire Covid-19 vaccination campaign so far, and there’s been plenty of buck-passing as a result. Slow regulatory approvals, contractual spats with drugmakers and doubts over vaccine efficacy have all been blamed. But the bloc is running out of excuses, and its leaders know it. The big issues look fixable, but the pace remains slow. ...