Opinion

Joe Biden is getting a lot of unsolicited advice about a running mate. Here’s mine: Find yourself another Joe Biden. When Barack Obama was cruising to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, he chose someone who buttressed his political weakness. Obama’s overriding political weakness wasn’t hard to pinpoint: He was a mixed-race intellectual whose father was from Kenya. In ...

As with many other things, the Covid-19 pandemic has delayed the blockbuster fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes, whose start-up Theranos Inc went from darling to dumpster fire in a matter of months after the Wall Street Journal exposed huge flaws in the company’s promise its blood-test kits could detect an array of illnesses from a single “finger-prick” of blood. (Holmes ...

There’s one hope for oil market bulls facing into the abyss of the 9.3 million barrels-a-day demand slump from the spread of Covid-19: The aftermath will see a renaissance in car-driving. “People will use public transport less” because of fears about picking up infection on crowded trains and buses, Cuneyt Kazokoglu, head of oil demand analysis at energy consultancy FGE, ...

If you’ve been paying attention to the economic news over the past couple of decades — we’re talking here about long-term trends, not cyclical shifts — you know that one of the great disappointments is the lackluster performance of productivity. You’ll recall that productivity is economists’ jargon for what most people call efficiency. Productivity gains are the ultimate source of ...

The e-commerce rebels are making their advance. Last October, Shopify Inc CEO Tobi Lutke said his company’s goal was to “arm the rebels” against the Amazon.com Inc empire. Since then, the mantra has become a rallying cry for Shopify’s employees and the merchant customers that use its e-commerce store software. And now, the business turmoil sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic ...

What sort of green stimulus does the world need? Technologies that reduce carbon emissions are one of the most effective targets for the trillions of dollars of spending tied to coronavirus relief programs, more than 200 central bankers, Group of 20 finance ministers and top academics concluded in a study. There are three sets of clean power technologies that policymakers ...

China’s banks have a deposit problem. The timing couldn’t be worse. The virus shutdown pushed households to put their money in a safe place in the first quarter, with system-wide deposits rising by a record 6.47 trillion yuan ($912 billion). Some large banks did the same, parking their own cash at smaller peers that offer higher returns. At China Construction ...

When we were told over the Lunar New Year holiday that schools in Hong Kong would be closed to prevent the spread of a then still-distant illness, I went through all the stages of grief. Shock, denial, anger, bargaining. I settled on depression for a good while. With three primary-age children, my vision of juggling a new job, school, chores ...

Growing numbers of states are allowing their shelter-in-place orders to expire and letting businesses reopen. This has Republicans rooting for a rapid economic recovery as people get back to work and Democrats fearing a renewed spike in virus transmission. But take it from me, a Georgian who’s been legally permitted to get a haircut or a face tattoo for two ...

Among the many uncomfortable truths revealed by the coronavirus pandemic is, apparently, this: America can’t build anymore. Faced with an unprecedented emergency, US factories have struggled to make even relatively simple products such as swabs, masks and protective gear. This is more surprising than it seems. While millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the past two decades as ...