Opinion

Is India’s richest man betting on a tech cold war? Petrochemicals czar Mukesh Ambani plans to list his fledgling digital business overseas, Bloomberg News reported, citing people with knowledge of Jio Platforms Ltd’s initial public offering, which is planned for the next 12 to 24 months. Going to the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq would make sense. US-traded Chinese ...

The US and global economies are in a perilous state, and yet we may be underestimating the dangers. Just out of sight lies a second large threat: a global debt crisis that, centred in Europe, would further destabilise a world already struggling to combat the dreadful consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. In the United States and elsewhere, tens of millions ...

Meituan Dianping suffered from the Covid-19 pandemic in all the ways that investors would have expected: In-person activities got stung, food deliveries stayed relatively resilient and groceries thrived. As a result, revenue dropped and losses widened. What’s surprising is the area where China’s leading delivery and bookings provider benefited most: advertising. Even with business activity decimated, suppliers who rely on ...

Colleges and students in the US are engaged in a game of chicken as the fall semester approaches with no end in sight for the coronavirus crisis. The outcome could radically change the way Americans think about and value a higher education. On one side, institutions want students to sign up and pay tuition deposits, which are coming due. Most ...

An awkward question hangs over the Covid-shuttered world of Downing Street. At his daily morning meeting, Boris Johnson, back to full duties after suffering a serious bout of the virus, recently asked who was in charge of relaxing Britain’s lockdown plan, with all of the risks and uncertainties that entails for a government. “There was just silence,” an insider told ...

The Trump administration sent a characteristic mixed message on arms control: It announced a plan to quit the “Open Skies” agreement with Russia, even as it proclaimed its eagerness for a wider arms-control process that would include both Russia and China. Many analysts focussed on the treaty withdrawal as a sign of worsening relations with Russia, but I think there’s ...

The coronavirus has disrupted the world in very large ways. While that battle has been waged, however, another event has almost been missed: the birth of a new kind of fiat currency, which could forever reshape the relationship between money, economic power and geopolitical clout. An official Chinese digital yuan, more than five years in the making, is now in ...

Big spending numbers are being thrown around in China, once again. This time, it’s trillions of yuan of fiscal stimulus on all things tech. The plans are bold and vague: China wants to bring technology into its mainstream infrastructure buildout and, in the process, heave the economy out of a gloom due only partly to the coronavirus. But will this ...

The 2008 financial crisis led the public to discover the limits of economics. The Covid-19 pandemic risks having the same effect on scientists and medical doctors. Since the start of the outbreak, citizens have struggled to get clear answers to some basic questions. Consider masks, for example: The World Health Organization said early on that there was no point in ...

There are two important lessons in the announcement that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has finally succeeded in cracking two mobile phones belonging to the aviation student who killed three people last December at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida. The first lesson is that cracking an encrypted device takes time and effort even when the federal government brings ...