Opinion

Just over 10 years old, Bitcoin might already be the best-performing investment of all time. It might also be the most volatile, and volatility has a way of luring people into ill-timed and costly investing choices. So with all the headlines about Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, it seems reasonable to ask how its investors are doing. There’s no denying Bitcoin’s astonishing ...

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is nobody’s idea of a radical. But in his speech last week to the Economic Club of New York, he articulated an idea that upends generations of conventional wisdom and sets the stage not only for the Fed’s approach to the current economic crisis but also for President Joe Biden’s. “A strong labour market that ...

Ursula von der Leyen did the right thing last week after she’d tried everything else. The European Commission president finally apologised for the failings of the continent-wide vaccine procurement scheme. It followed an unseemly few weeks of battle over the vaccine, during which Von der Leyen scapegoated the Anglo-Swedish pharma company AstraZeneca Plc for supply holdups and threatened to close ...

Time to stop trash-talking inflation. Forecasts for a decent pickup in the pace of price increases ought be welcomed, and we’re a long way from the bad old days of the 1970s. While measures of US inflation gained at the end of last year, they are well below levels desired by the Federal Reserve. In China, consumer prices unexpectedly fell ...

In India, tens of thousands of farmers drawn from several northern states have camped outside Delhi since November, demanding the repeal of three new laws meant to liberalise the country’s agriculture sector. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government shouldn’t give in, but it ought to address the deeper worries behind the protesters’ complaints. The standoff is growing more tense. Protests turned ...

The City of London’s chief coping mechanism for dealing with Brexit’s threat to the financial services business is to dismiss the loss of jobs and investment as a trickle rather than a flood. Yes, cheerleaders argue, some 7,500 jobs have been moved to the European Union, but that’s a fraction of the hundreds of thousands predicted by the doomsayers. Sure, ...

When India’s minister for commerce and industry recently urged his followers to “connect with me” on Koo, an “Indian micro-blogging platform,” he did so on Twitter. That should be a lesson to the US social media giant: In its battles with India’s government and others around the world, the platform needn’t surrender its principles too easily. The implied threat from ...

Along with the news that founder and long-time Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos “will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021,” Amazon.com Inc’s fourth-quarter earnings release included the remarkable if not exactly surprising disclosure that the company had spent $42.7 billion on “technology and content” in 2020, up 19% from the year before and ...

Like the proverbial buses, we waited a while for an activist to show up at Exxon Mobil Corp and then three came along. The third is Jeff Ubben, founder and former head of ValueAct Capital Management, who is now reportedly raising an $8 billion ESG fund for his new firm, Inclusive Capital Partners. He arrives in the wake of Engine ...

Mario Draghi’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has consequences that go way beyond his own country. The man who’s credited with saving the euro in 2012 has some very clear ideas about the future of the monetary union. As he returns to Europe’s top table, he has a chance to put them into practice. The former European Central Bank ...