Opinion

  Ukraine’s president wants the West to ban Russian travellers in the hopes of boosting internal pressure against President Vladimir Putin. Calls from European states for a crackdown on visas are also growing louder. Such measures may seem appealing in light of Putin’s aggression, but there’s no guarantee that they’d work as proponents expect. Far better to lay out the ...

The history of warfare has no precedent for what is happening right now in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Never before has a nuclear power plant been on the front line of a major war, and indeed a main object of the warring parties’ strategies. How Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world handle this moment of peril is becoming a test ...

One may earn a high salary, but only real estate can build up wealth — for decades, that’s been the Chinese mentality. Real estate accounts for roughly 70% of China’s household wealth, and as much as 30% of its economy. But China Evergrande Group’s debt blowup, with the tumbling home prices and mortgage boycotts that followed, have sent the economy ...

  Investors are eager to understand what’s happening at FedEx Corp’s Ground unit, which has been the company’s crown jewel of rising sales and profit for a couple of decades. That’s why almost a dozen Wall Street analysts and two big FedEx investors traveled to Las Vegas over the weekend to hear the view of contractors that make the last-mile ...

  Last week’s enactment of the 2022 budget-reconciliation bill, also known as the Inflation Reduction Act, is being treated by many analysts as a major turning point in Joe Biden’s presidency. As recently as last month, when it looked like Congress might not pass reconciliation legislation this year, conventional wisdom in Washington suggested that Biden was a failing president who ...

Europe wants US tech giants to pay more taxes, but it’s been oddly reticent about the cosy and highly unusual tax arrangements of one of its own dominant industries: container shipping. Given the outsized profits the industry is generating, the current regime is unsustainable. Freight rates have soared in the past two years as pandemic disruption and surging US demand ...

Space scientists have waited nearly four decades to send a taxpayer-financed spacecraft on a death plunge into the atmosphere of Venus. Rocket Lab USA Inc, a private space launch provider, announced that the wait is nearly over. But rather than rely on a government space agency to pay the fare, Rocket Lab will finance the mission itself, launching in May ...

  The latest buzzword among many economists and investors is “ noise.” It’s being used to refer to any piece of economic data that doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative, which is happening a lot these days. This economy is proving hard to understand. It is very strong in some respects and very weak in others. The official government data shows ...

  You have to hand it to Haruhiko Kuroda. Despite his caricature as a laggard in a world where interest rates are marching higher, the Bank of Japan chief was cutting-edge when seeking to exceed his inflation target. It’s just taken a while to get there. Six years, in fact. Tempting as a victory lap might be for Kuroda, who ...

Indonesia wants Tesla Inc. to make cars — and batteries — locally. That might be the smartest bet Elon Musk can make, and it won’t be so hard. “What we want is the electric car, not the battery. For Tesla, we want them to build electric cars in Indonesia,” President Joko Widodo said in an interview with Bloomberg News’ Editor-in-Chief ...