Opinion

Count 2020 as a lucky year. This may sound odd given that the world grappled with a pandemic that has killed close to 1.8 million people and crippled many countries’ economies. The “luck” relates to the more than 90% efficacy of the two vaccines — Pfizer Inc-BioNTech SE’s shot and Moderna Inc’s candidate — that gained emergency approval after thorough ...

Bloomberg News recently reported that pandemic-induced economic deprivation, two fierce hurricanes and the hope that a new administration might ease security threaten to create a new wave of migrants at America’s southern border. “There are going to be caravans, and in the coming weeks it will increase,” said the head of a civil-society organisation in Guatemala. With the pandemic far ...

In 2019, Boris Johnson took power in Britain. In 2020, he took back control, leading his country out of the European Union. In the year to come, those voters who made it all possible will be expecting to see some of the benefits he promised. They will ultimately provide the thumbs up or down on Johnson’s big Brexit project and ...

Even if you resent China for being the epicenter of Covid-19, you’ve got to admire Beijing’s leadership skills. Less than a year after the pandemic erupted, life is back to normal, while Europe and the US are still struggling. The country is now the world’s shining economic outlier. Many good things can be said about China. Wearing a mask isn’t ...

It was a dreadful year, obviously, and that applies to US politics, too. Nevertheless, believe it or not, some stuff was worth celebrating. Here are five good developments: Republicans for democracy: In a year when the Republican Party overall showed an alarming and apparently accelerating lack of support for US democracy, we should recognise those who stepped up when it ...

Webster’s dictionary defines bipolarity as “characterised by two directly opposing opinions, natures, etc.” Three years after the mega-merger that created Standard Life Aberdeen Plc, it’s still trying to cure itself of just such an affliction. New chief executive officer, Stephen Bird, needs to get the firm pulling in a common direction. Since taking over at the start of September, Bird ...

Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle Corp said it would decamp for ...

A British banker and mother of two who has lived in Hong Kong since 2008 recently told me that “push factors are adding up” and she’s “close to the point” of taking the risk of relocating to Europe for the sake of her eight-year-old daughter’s well-being after a year of schooling disruptions. Welcome to the Covid-19 reset. This year has ...

As Bitcoin soared to above $28,000 over the weekend, talk resumed about the promising and dramatic future of cryptocurrency. The chief global strategist of Morgan Stanley Investment Management even suggested that Bitcoin could replace the dollar as a global reserve currency. Cryptocurrency serves some useful purposes. But there are some pretty wild speculations going around. One of the more fundamental ...

As long as Wall Street has been in existence, it has been a tradition around this time of year for market participants to make predictions about what might happen to stock prices, interest rates, commodities and exchange rates in the following 12 months. These predictions garner a lot of attention, as they are made by very smart people with access ...