Opinion

When the European Union first suggested a tax on financial transactions a decade ago, the idea was savaged by banking lobbyists and nixed by many of the bloc’s members. The UK said it was “madness.” The initial ambition to raise up to 35 billion euros ($40.6 billion) a year was reduced to a mere 3.5 billion euros, with only 10 ...

The United Nations currently predicts that by 2027, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country. Estimates suggest India and Nigeria will together add 470 million people in the next three decades — almost a quarter of the world’s population increase to 2050. According to a new study from the University of Washington (UW), however, several developing nations ...

Users continue to flock to Twitter Inc’s social media platform, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any better of an investment for shareholders. Twitter posted strong audience growth for its second quarter. Its key user metric — average monetizable daily active usage — came in at 186 million for the three months ended in June, up 34% from a year ...

It’s sinking in: most of the 130,000 schools in the US will likely not fully open as Covid-19 diagnoses continue to break records. Should parents admit defeat and have one parent quit the workforce to provide childcare and supervise remote learning? Before making this decision, consider the longer-term costs of taking a break from work. Taking a career break means ...

There’s nothing arbitrary about an epidemic. While each disease is the product of a chain of accidental genetic shifts, the process that turns a novel infection into a devastating outbreak is as much social as biological. The vast majority of new conditions will die out before they spread beyond a handful of people. Only rarely will one exploit the fault ...

Millions are unemployed, public budgets are falling apart, the economy is struggling, and the Covid-19 epidemic is raging anew — and most of the $2.7 trillion floor Congress put beneath that misery will soon be gone. So Congress and the White House are back at the drawing board. Formal bailout packages haven’t surfaced, but policy makers are saying the right ...

Boeing Co’s 737 Max may be on track to finally return to commercial service later this year, but the plane’s biggest customer isn’t eager for fresh deliveries. Southwest Airlines Co doesn’t expect to take any new Max jets this year, Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The airline had previously said it would add ...

You know Tesla Inc is maturing as a carmaker when it manages to be slightly dull. The earnings update was even more eagerly anticipated than usual after the recent surge in its share price. Elon Musk’s company has added an astonishing $200 billion to its already ample market capitalisation since the end of March. Confirmation that Tesla will add a ...

US just took a step beyond funding Covid-vaccine research towards actively securing shots. The government signed an agreement with Pfizer Inc and BioNTech securing 100 million doses of their vaccine candidate for $1.95 billion, payable if the inoculation succeeds in clinical trials and gets approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Vaccine pricing is always contentious, and even more so ...

Negotiations started — finally — on the next congressional pandemic-relief and economic-stimulus bill. Meanwhile, the Defense Authorization bill is under consideration in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Which means that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats will have two big choices to make. In both cases, Democrats have to figure out their endgame in order to ...