Opinion

From Monday there will be just one oil company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average — Chevron Corp. The removal of Exxon Mobil Corp from the index after an uninterrupted presence since 1928 shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s not the end of Big Oil, but it may signal the start of the beginning of the end. It may seem ...

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister, is resigning due to ulcerative colitis. He leaves behind a Japan that is both economically stronger and more socially liberal than the one he inherited. When Shinzo Abe took over Japan’s leadership in late 2012, I was extremely skeptical. After a short and unimpressive tenure in office in the mid-2000s, Abe seemed unlikely to ...

When the employees of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc read that coronavirus lockdowns and home-working have ignited a technology boom, they could be forgiven for weeping. The company makes the jet engines that power large passenger jets, which is one of the most technically complex engineering tasks known to man. And yet, most of Rolls-Royce’s products are grounded right now because hardly ...

Ordinarily, a new medical treatment is approved only after at least one large-scale, randomised controlled trial shows it to be effective without being harmful. Yet at times — and notably during epidemics — evidence can mount that a treatment is safe and effective before we have that final evidence. We think this is the case with Covid-19 and convalescent plasma. ...

After a more than year-long review of its monetary policy strategy, the Federal Reserve has decided it will throw away the rule book and let inflation run higher and unemployment run lower before seeking to tighten financial conditions. To be clear, this change leaves the central bank pursuing an almost completely discretionary monetary policy, one where the risk is that ...

Nobody wants to go back to a national coronavirus lockdown. France’s Emmanuel Macron and Spain’s Pedro Sanchez are ruling out blanket stay-at-home restrictions, even as Covid-19 cases surge higher. Their motives are clear: Another round of widespread lockdowns would tank the economy and split society, and would also be an admission of defeat from politicians and public-health officials who — ...

The evidence is in: At least during the first wave of Covid-19, countries with female leaders suffered far lower death rates than comparable nations led by men. This doesn’t mean that the trend will necessarily persist in a second or third wave. Nor does it imply that women are also better leaders when it comes to whatever else governments find ...

Valuing billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group, which filed its prospectus for a mega initial public offering, will be more art than science. It looks like a financial-services company but sells itself as a technology firm. Is it a MasterCard or a PayPal? On a number of counts, Ant is more like the former. First, the company has made a lot ...

The ship has been steadied but when’s the right time to unfurl the sails? The European Central Bank (ECB) has done everything it can to maintain the stability of the continent’s finance system during the Covid crisis. In June it doled out 1.3 trillion euros ($1.54 trillion) of super-cheap loans to the banking system at a negative 1% rate; it ...

President Donald Trump is in much worse political shape as the Republican convention begins than he was at the start of the year. He was unpopular even then. At the end of January, he was about five points behind Joe Biden in national polls, which also showed that a small majority of the country disapproved of his job performance. But ...