Opinion

As the United States’ confrontation with China escalates, the Trump administration may be making a classic American mistake: overestimating its adversary’s technological competence and ability to control events. The outbreak in Wuhan of the novel coronavirus shows how ragged and disorderly the Chinese police state was in the initial weeks of the pandemic. Beijing’s response was to suppress and manipulate ...

Many states are racing to reopen their economies before measures such as testing, contact tracing and full-time mask-wearing are in place. But the one of biggest economic effect of a hasty end of lockdowns adopted to limit the spread of the coronavirus won’t be to save businesses; it will be to kick people off of desperately needed government assistance. While ...

If you listen to the protagonists, Europe’s biggest telecoms deal in a decade is all about the customers. The details of the merger of Virgin Media, the British cable unit of Liberty Global Plc, and O2, Telefonica SA’s UK mobile carrier, tell a different story. According to the companies, the 31.4 billion-pound ($39 billion) deal is aimed at creating a ...

Governments around the world say they’re engaged in a war against the coronavirus. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked the legend of the Mahabharata, fought over 18 days, as he declared, with little warning, a devastating national lockdown. British PM Boris Johnson, who always seems to be mentally screening a film of Winston Churchill in World War II, said that ...

Covid-19 is hard on the elderly, with those 65 and older accounting for 80% of the US deaths from the disease for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released demographic data. But this is true of most illnesses: In 2018, 78% of all US deaths from internal causes (that is, excluding accidents, murders, overdoses and the like) ...

Too many US companies are building empires on the backs of low-wage workers. It’s a mistake to let it continue. California, for one, is fighting back. It sued Uber Technologies Inc and Lyft Inc in state court, contending that the ride-hailing companies violated a new state law by improperly designating drivers as independent contractors rather than employees to save on ...

Over the more than 100 years that luxury retailer Neiman Marcus has been in business, it’s quite likely some customers who shopped there were living beyond their means. A similar state afflicted the department store, as it filed for bankrupty, overwhelmed by its billions of debt. With its filing, Neiman Marcus became the first major department store to succumb to ...

A peculiar fact about the coronavirus catastrophe so far is that the world’s poorest have largely been spared the worst. Of the 10 countries with the most deaths to date, nearly all are among the wealthiest. But if the virus has overwhelmed places with modern hospitals and world-class medical infrastructure — as anyone who’s been in New York or Milan ...

If working from home during the pandemic has shown anything, it’s that apartments and houses are our castles, like it or not. Hong Kong is emerging from a semi-lockdown (restaurants open, schools shut, workers everywhere on the home-office spectrum) and it’s clear that investors see refuge in housing, too. The world’s least-affordable residential prices look likely to keep floating in ...

It’s not all sunshine and roses being Europe’s benchmark borrower. Germany has a unique problem in that its AAA-rated debt is so revered as collateral that it’s very expensive to actually buy. The country’s debt agency has sharply increased its second-quarter borrowing program to 130 billion euros ($140 billion) to help pay for the Covid-19 crisis. Given that investors already ...