Opinion

One constant in Facebook’s corporate culture is the ruthless aggression when it comes to growth and competition. To take just one example: More than a decade ago, a young, upstart Facebook smashed a wage-fixing cartel that than had been imposed by older, more established tech companies and it tried to hire the best tech talent. With Facebook now among the ...

As the novel coronavirus cyclones through Latin America, it has staggered almost every nation. So how to explain Uruguay? Its infection rate of 2.1 cases per million inhabitants is the second lowest in South America and already falling, with just 22 fatalities by May 27. Ahead of many of its neighbours, Uruguay is already glimpsing a safe return to economic ...

President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting social-media companies raises tough questions about presidential power, presidential bullying and freedom of speech. To understand it, we need to start with what’s clear, and then explore what’s not. An executive order is not a law. It doesn’t bind the private sector. It doesn’t require Twitter or YouTube to do anything at all. Many ...

Nobody in business likes auditors: They can be intrusive, meddlesome second-guessers. But managers of publicly traded companies understand that independent auditing is essential, because it protects shareholders against fraud and wasteful spending — and maintains public confidence in the enterprise. President Trump spent most of his career managing a private company. Public accountability wasn’t a big part of Trump’s business ...

My view of the dust-up between Twitter and President Donald Trump is simple: The company should treat him exactly like it would treat any other user. But I’ll also admit to a degree of concern about how it treats other users, particularly the company’s growing determination to regulate opinions expressed on its site. Twitter, long criticised by the left for ...

The Chinese consumer has been one of the most important drivers of the world economy over the past decade, fueling hopes of prolonged growth and profits. So it’s worth looking at what’s happening to household balance sheets as Covid-19 wreaks havoc on a population now feeling the downside of growing personal leverage from the boom. In the last major financial ...

Vladimir Putin has steadily expanded the Russian state’s involvement in an economy that’s increasingly dominated by large companies. The coronavirus crisis, with its lopsided financial assistance that benefits big employers more than entrepreneurs, looks set to continue this process. In the short term, this will strengthen the hand of a vulnerable president. Over the longer term, it spells stagnation. Governments ...

There are times when nations must do unpopular and painful things — and those are the times when a country needs a “leader”. Ours has gone missing in action. Worse, President Trump is actually subverting leadership. The resulting vacuum of power feeds confusion and chaos, as mayors, governors, members of Congress, doctors and scientists all strive to fill the vacuum. ...

The way the Covid-19 crisis ends is with vaccines — not a vaccine. More than one horse can win this race. Some of us might end up getting a shot of a more traditional vaccine, which uses parts of an inactivated virus to stimulate immunity. Others might get vaccines based on emerging technologies that use synthetic versions of the virus’s ...

It’s easy to ban a product that’s difficult to get your hands on anyway. That’s why Britain’s possible move to impose a stricter ban on Huawei Technologies Co seems opportunistic, even if it does now make sense. It’s taking advantage of harsher US sanctions on the Chinese telecoms-equipment giant to consider extending the UK’s halfway measures unveiled with great fanfare ...