Opinion

Boris Johnson clearly wants to draw a line under the fiascoes of Britain’s handling of the pandemic and return to the “boosterism” for which he is best known. And as is often the case, his instinct is right. Doing so will be crucial to putting the economy firmly on a path to recovery. The UK downgraded its coronavirus alert level, ...

Until recently, it seemed like the contentious debate over lockdowns was over. By the end of May, many states were defying the warnings of public-health experts, reopening restaurants, retail and public spaces. The huge protests against police brutality and racism reinforced the notion that keeping Americans confined to their homes was a lost cause. Now, even San Francisco, one of ...

HSBC Holdings Plc had little choice. It’s a measure of how much the world has changed that the 35,000 job cuts it announced in February, a plan that looked like radical surgery at the time, are now almost certainly inadequate. The economic damage wreaked by Covid-19 and the political quagmire into which the bank has sunk over its support for ...

The European Union’s chief antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, has made her name tackling big corporate fish in pretty unconventional ways. A ruling on Alphabet Inc’s Google, which came with a seven-figure fine, argued free services weren’t always good for the consumer, while those on Apple Inc and Starbucks Corp deemed that low taxes were illegal state aid (though some judges ...

What’s worse than two populous, nuclear-armed countries killing each other’s soldiers? Two populous, nuclear-armed countries letting their longer-term relationship wither. Fighting along the Chinese-Indian border on the Tibetan plateau hasn’t come out of the blue. Ties, never solid, are increasingly becoming a casualty of the way New Delhi is being drawn into the wider rivalry between Beijing and Washington. If ...

Despite trillions of dollars of stimulus sloshing around and credit being funneled into the global economy, the coronavirus is forcing countless businesses into bankruptcy. The weak are getting weaker, and the big are thrown lifelines. That divide will only grow wider. The case of Japan, where insolvencies are rising sharply, shows that no matter how much cash you have, size ...

During the euro-zone crisis at the beginning of the last decade, many European citizens felt they were paying an unfair price for Greece’s problems. As the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic fades in Europe, it’s the turn of the Greek people to feel aggrieved. The country has had one of the best Covid-19 records in the European Union, thanks ...

And it begins. Apple Inc now officially faces a double threat on the regulatory front. The European Union announced it has opened two formal antitrust investigations into the tech giant to see if the company has broken competition laws with its App Store and Apple Pay services. Specifically, the regulators plan to investigate Apple’s rules surrounding its in-app purchase system, ...

As Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations continue to rise in the US and other parts of the world, Oxford University scientists provided a much-needed piece of good news: A large, randomised trial in the UK that compared dexamethasone — a generic steroid — to standard treatment found that the drug cut the risk of death in severely ill patients. The result ...

Can Nikolai Kondratieff save us — or destroy us? You say: Nikolai who? Kondratieff was a young Russian economist who died in prison in 1938. He developed an economic theory that purportedly explains both the dynamism and the destructiveness of the capitalist economic systems. The source of this explanatory power, he contended, was the existence of “long waves” or “long ...