Opinion

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the usually resilient aerospace industry to its knees. Air passenger traffic has collapsed by 90% in Europe and isn’t likely to get back to pre-virus levels for several years. Airlines are fighting for survival and have grounded their fleets. Passenger-jet makers Airbus SE and Boeing Co, after years of briskly building planes to meet booming ...

It’s finally going to happen. Apple Inc is on the verge of using its own chips over Intel Corp’s for its Mac computers. Bloomberg News reported that Apple is preparing to announce as soon as this month that it will use its own processors in Macs starting next year. The new Macs will incorporate the same internally-developed semiconductors, based on ...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants all 1.3 billion Indians to be “vocal for local” — meaning, to not just use domestically made products but also to promote them. India’s Covid-19 lockdown has severely pinched logistics, a perennial challenge in the huge, infrastructure-starved country. But more worrying than the disruption is the fruity political response to it. Rather than being a ...

Just how fast will the US economy recover from the coronavirus pandemic? The honest answer is that no one knows, but we are now beginning to get some plausible guesses. As you might suspect, the news isn’t good. The latest forecast comes from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and suggests that it may take a decade for the economy to ...

Gojek and Grab Holdings Inc have been battling it out for years in the brutal business of ride hailing and food delivery. They’ve burned billions of dollars in venture-capital money (thanks, SoftBank!), and created hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout Southeast Asia in the process. Yet talk to executives at either company and they’ll tell you that the real future ...

This week has started where last week left off for financial markets and policy makers — that is, trying to assess how much of the surprisingly good US jobs report is real and how much of it could end up being a head fake. Although markets are not waiting for the answer, and understandably so given the deep win-win conditioning ...

It’s always interesting to see who’s celebrating. In German politics, that’s currently the Left Party, a descendant of East Germany’s former dictatorship that likes to brew anti-Americanism and Russophilia into a toxic populist mix. The party’s bosses are delighted about a rumour, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that the US may pull out some 9,500 of the 34,500 ...

The military establishment’s anger at President Trump’s politicisation of the armed forces has been building for three years. It finally ripped open in the aftermath of the appalling presidential “photo op” at St John’s Episcopal Church. The break was a decisive moment in the Trump presidency. But such inflection points are mysterious. Why does a bridge that has carried a ...

Anyone who has ever waited at Primark to pay for cheap workout attire or a bargain dress knows just what a challenge it is to keep the snaking line in the right place. With precautions to control the novel coronavirus’s spread, that logistical nightmare will get even worse. Every second cash register will be shut and there’ll be an employee ...

There are good reasons for Britain’s AstraZeneca Plc to consider what would be the biggest pharmaceuticals deal in history by combining with US peer Gilead Sciences Inc. They may not be good enough to offset the risks that go with mashing together drugmakers with a total market value of nearly $240 billion. AstraZeneca approached Gilead last month, Bloomberg News reported, ...