Opinion

You can have a good war and still be seriously wounded. South Korea has been relatively successful at controlling Covid-19 infections, and made good progress in reopening its economy. But it’s still suffering a serious downdraft, with consumers pulling back at home and demand collapsing in key trading partners. Some kind of recession for this trade-dependent economy looks assured; only ...

There’s no question about it: Holding successful elections under current conditions is going to be difficult. The good news is that a group of experts put together by election-law maven Rick Hasen, the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy, has thought through many of the major issues and published solid recommendations for getting it right this November. ...

With his poll numbers looking wobbly, President Donald Trump wants the Lincoln Memorial as backdrop for a Made-for-Fox-News event on May 03 intended to portray him as the kind of leader he is not. It won’t work — not just because the juxtaposition of Trump with Abraham Lincoln is so spectacularly unflattering to the current president. When historians rank American ...

As April turned to May, more than a dozen states opted to relax coronavirus shutdowns and at least partly reopen their economies. This is not a public health decision, but an economic and social one. Still, they can contribute to public health by providing data all 50 states can use. Nobody knows exactly what level of restrictions we need to ...

Lockdowns have devastated retailers and restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic. An easing of restrictions won’t be the magic wand that waves their worries away. Even when it’s possible for consumers to walk freely into their favourite shops, they may be nervous about doing so. That puts the onus on retailers to make their locations as reassuring as possible. ...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell calls it the “announcement effect.” When financial markets were buckling in March because of terror about the emerging pandemic, the Fed’s simple pledge that it would use its “full range of authorities” to maintain the flow of credit was enough to restore order. The Fed’s success is a lesson in how the credibility and ...

It’s what we all needed to hear: “Nothing can stop America” — Warren Buffett’s way of saying, “We will get through this.” Saturday evenings aren’t normally the ideal time for tuning into a multi-hour investor conference, especially after being cooped up all week working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But mere minutes into the live-streamed Berkshire Hathaway Inc ...

Almost every scam is a little bit funny, even when linked to the deadly serious coronavirus. Consider BuzzFeed’s latest installment in the genre: The site reported that Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, managed to make millions of dollars selling ventilators he apparently never had and never could supply. Three days — three days! — after he tweeted ...

Who knows what the new normal for oil demand will be once Covid-19 is firmly in the rear view mirror? It is likely to be lower than it was in 2019, and it could be that way for many years. That’s going to create overcapacity throughout the oil supply chain and weigh on prices. While signs are emerging that we ...

The US government has spent $2.6 trillion to support the economy as the coronavirus pandemic spreads, and the Federal Reserve has about matched that amount in asset purchases. We’re not finished fighting Covid-19, so protecting the economy in 2020 may be the most expensive thing the US has ever attempted. Consider that the US spent about $4 trillion in today’s ...