Opinion

Americans are in the final sprint of a record year of e-commerce spending, filling their digital carts with holiday gifts and decor in a year when public health concerns are keeping them away from stores. That online haul, though, foreshadows an unfortunate aftershock for retailers: A potentially unprecedented deluge of merchandise returns. Online purchases have long had higher rates of ...

A long overdue antitrust push is gaining steam. But it’s focusing on large technology companies like Facebook Inc and Google-parent Alphabet Inc, which present complex problems that classic antitrust approaches won’t always solve. The cases are based on very standard stuff. The US Justice Department is accusing Google of illegally preserving its dominant market share in search and search advertising ...

This week offered another illustration of a dual policy dynamic in the US that has been undermining both short- and longer-term economic prospects for the past few months: too limited a response for necessary fiscal measures and pro-growth structural reforms and too much reliance on monetary policy tools that are close to, if not already past, the point of limited ...

While much of Joe Biden’s first term in office will involve digging out from the Covid-19 pandemic and recession, the incoming president has also vowed to change the way the US manages its supply chains. This is framed as a way to make America more resilient in the face of crises after struggling to secure much-needed protective and medical materials ...

“In a West End town, a dead end world,” sang the Pet Shop Boys in the mid-1980s. Fast forward 35 years and the electronic-pop duo would be just about right. Covid restrictions and a lack of global tourism have turned the West End, London’s premier shopping and dining district, into a shadow of its former self. Sales from retail, hospitality ...

There’s a good reason that breaking up tech giants is the nuclear option: It’s a deterrent. If everything works as planned, you should never have to do it. European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and internal market commissioner Thierry Breton announced a range of new tools to tackle the excesses of the West Coast’s finest, including the ability to dismantle ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) is due to update its guidance for next year on how banks handle their capital buffers. There has been an effective ban on dividends and stock buybacks since July and extreme moderation urged on banker pay. While the ECB review might lift the cap on shareholder payouts partially, banker compensation is trickier. A slew of ...

For more than a decade, companies like Apple Inc have entertained the idea of evolving away from China-based supply chains to have their devices made in lower-cost locales like India, Vietnam and Mexico. The challenge of such decentralisation became brutally evident last weekend with an uprising at a factory operated by Taiwan’s Wistron Corp that makes iPhones in India. Workers ...

The incredible first-day action in the stock prices of recent technology IPOs — particularly DoorDash Inc and Airbnb last week — has reignited a debate that goes back to the dot-com era over whether the process is broken. Critics are blaming bankers for vastly mispricing the offerings, resulting in companies’ missing out on money they could have pocketed at a ...

The world needs China more than ever. Thank goodness it’s showing up: Economic data released on Tuesday all looked strong and in line with forecasts. The upbeat projections for a strong global rebound in 2021 depend on Beijing maintaining this momentum. Most of the traffic from other consequential economies is going the wrong way, owing to restrictions aimed at suppressing ...