Opinion

Time and again during the past year, we’ve seen how the pandemic has accelerated shifts in consumer behaviour. So it stands to reason that a retailer would respond to that sped-up pace of change by pulling forward investments to accommodate it. That’s the lens through which to view Walmart Inc’s fiscal-year guidance, which includes $14 billion in capital spending, a ...

The details of what went wrong in Texas — most likely the biggest forced blackout in US history — will take time to establish. So will exactly what to do about it. But this emergency already underlines something that should’ve been obvious before. As the growing threat of extreme weather puts vital economic systems at risk, climate resilience needs to ...

One week after Donald Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, and not before time, attention is turning more squarely to President Joe Biden and his agenda. Unfortunately, it’s already clear that moving past the political turmoil that Trump inflicted on the US will be difficult. Biden hopes to unite the country around efforts to support the economic recovery. He restated his ...

“I came in expressing a strong spirit of bipartisanship,” President Barack Obama said, “and what was clear was that even in the midst of crisis, there were those who made decisions based on a quick political calculus rather than on what the country needed.” At the start of 2010, his second year in office, Obama was remembering what he called ...

Venezuelans had rare occasion to celebrate last week when a government directive cleared the way for hundreds of thousands of their compatriots in harm’s way to receive doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Oh, wait. The compatriots in question were immigrants, having exited their failing homeland to make a new life abroad. The government was Colombian, whose directive to protect expatriate Venezuelans ...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s strategy for broadening its reach beyond Wall Street and the wealthiest clientele made all the sense in the world. It already had a consumer bank, Marcus, that offered options like higher-interest savings accounts for individuals. So why not let them invest their money through Marcus as well, even if the sums are comparatively modest by Goldman ...

It was already pretty safe to say that Warren Buffett wasn’t going to get in on the overzealous GameStop Corp buying action of late. But a regulatory filing signalled that the famed investor is still hesitant about stocks generally, with his Berkshire Hathaway Inc back to hoarding cash while riding out a market that’s been disjointed by a global pandemic, ...

Trade deals, like peace agreements, aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on without good faith vested in their implementation. Just weeks after the Brexit trade agreement entered into force, intentions over the part of the deal that applies to Northern Ireland have been called into question by both the UK and the European Union. Once again, the relationship between the ...

The world’s largest carmaker doesn’t have a chip-shortage problem. In contrast to the rest of the auto industry, Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp said it wasn’t expecting a shortfall of semiconductors to affect its production. In the company’s earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Kenta Kon said that as part of its business continuity plans, Toyota — which makes more than 10 ...

Neil Woodford, the storied UK fund manager who spectacularly crashed 16 months ago, is planning a comeback. If he’s successful in persuading investors to make him the steward of their money once again, it will defy economic Darwinism. Woodford was forced to close his eponymous firm in October 2019 after the administrators of his flagship fund dismissed him as its ...