Opinion

A spate of looting in Chicago in mid-August should remind us that the problem of concentrated urban poverty still exists in the US. While looting is often an outgrowth of protests — not only in big cities like Chicago, but also more recently in places such as Kenosha, Wisconsin — it also can represent a response to a sense of ...

Strategists at JPMorgan Chase & Co wrote about the odds narrowing on a Donald Trump win in the US presidential election. His opponent, Joe Biden, is still comfortably ahead in the polls, but the bank’s commentary got me thinking about what impact the result might have on Europe’s markets, not least on the euro. What would four more years of ...

While US tech giants fall over themselves trying to snap up TikTok’s American business, there’s a large slice of the global short-video service that seems to be forgotten. Ever the deal hound, SoftBank Group Corp’s Masayoshi Son seems to have dug up what could be the smartest move he’ll make this year. Already an investor in TikTok parent ByteDance, SoftBank ...

Finding a vaccine against Covid-19 that works and can be distributed widely enough to help stop the pandemic is a global priority. Given the urgency, governments are doing all they can to fund research and incentivise firms to ramp up trials — pre-ordering doses, lowering regulatory barriers to market and granting manufacturers immunity from costly future injury-related lawsuits. But when ...

Government programs to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic will make the federal budget deficit much wider in 2020 than at any point in the last 75 years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s new forecasts, predict that the deficit will be over $3.3 trillion this year, or 16% of annual economic output. Measured as a share of GDP, ...

Well, that was a nothingbaguette. For French President Emmanuel Macron, his second visit to Beirut since the devastating blasts of August 4 yielded one memorable photo-op, some posturing before the international media, a few airy bromides about the need for political reform and an unspecified threat of sanctions against those who oppose it. For the Lebanese, it produced a loose, ...

It’s hard to believe that America’s legislators, whatever their political leanings, would willingly allow millions of children to go hungry. Yet that is what’s happening during the Covid-19 crisis — and unless Congress acts quickly, the problem’s about to get worse. In one of the world’s wealthiest nations, food insecurity should not be an issue. Yet it is. Even in ...

The “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” as the US constitution’s first amendment calls it, is one of the pillars of liberty. That’s why all liberal democracies guarantee and protect it in some form. But is this right absolute? Could there be, in well-defined cases, a liberal case for abridging it? This timeless question has just become newly urgent. ...

It would be easy to dismiss the Trump administration’s campaign against Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat as part of an election strategy to attack China from all angles. The moves, however, as well as China’s counter-response, are contributing to a deeper problem at the heart of the global economy — one that can’t be resolved unless the world’s two biggest ...

President Alexander Lukashenko’s Soviet-lite regime in Belarus has been dealt a blow from which it will not recover. Unfortunately, Russia can keep it on life support for some time to come. Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Minsk again last weekend, and the outrage remains palpable. That, unfortunately, may not matter. The Kremlin’s now overt backing has emboldened the ...