Opinion

After decades of bitter fights, environmentalists seemed to be winning the war against single-use plastics in recent years, with cities around the world banning or taxing them. Then the coronavirus arrived, raising fears that reusable goods might lead to infections. The impact has been swift. From Maine to Hawaii, plastic-bag bans have been suspended or postponed. In San Francisco, reusable ...

So a deal was reached on the bill to supplement the money for small business and other new pandemic relief. Congressional Republicans had wanted $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program for small-business loans. The final bill added up to a $480 billion package, with Democrats winning aid for hospitals and increased coronavirus testing, plus provisions for smaller banks to ...

Aviation has always carried a whiff of the pirate ship about it. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, likes to describe himself as an “adventurer and troublemaker,” and once claimed to have found buried treasure on his private Caribbean island as a prank. Right now, the buccaneering executives who have driven the airline industry since the 1980s, when ...

China’s high-end consumers aren’t going on a “revenge spending” spree. They’re just bringing their love affair with luxury brands home. A surge in China sales for stores operated by the likes of LVMH and Hermes International has spurred optimism that consumer demand will snap back as the lockdowns lift. The reports offered a glimmer of light amid data showing that ...

For most of the nation’s history, the idea that people over the age of 65 would voluntarily herd themselves into special communities built around their needs would have seemed absurd, even dystopian. Yet a largely voluntary movement towards segregating people by age has reached extreme levels in recent years — and without receiving much attention at all. The coronavirus outbreak ...

Even before President Donald Trump announced that he intends to temporarily suspend immigration to the US because of Covid-19, it was becoming clear that the effect of the virus on migration would be powerful, long-lasting and unfortunate. Many countries besides the US have already shuttered or severely limited entry from foreigners — and many of those restrictions will not be ...

What exactly are we to make of the protests against the current shutdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic? For one thing, they’re small and unrepresentative: The vast majority of US citizens say they support the shutdown policy, and that support is if anything growing. Political scientist John Sides has the data. “Cancel all meetings or gatherings of more than 10 ...

In his absence, Boris Johnson’s British government has mainly followed the lockdown strategy that was determined before the prime minister was infected with Covid-19. Many are hoping that he will soon return to work and change course; that he’ll celebrate signs of a flattening infection curve and reopen Britain for business. It’s unlikely to work out that way. It’s true ...

Regulators and central bankers, pressed to keep economies alive through the Covid-19 lockdowns, have whizzed through their crisis playbooks to pump liquidity into the financial system. The mission is noble, and essential: to make sure banks can support companies and individuals until business activity resumes. But the methods need to be scrutinised carefully. There’s plenty that can go wrong when ...

President Donald Trump’s encouragement of protests against states’ stay-in-place orders is un-presidential in the colloquial sense: it’s unbecoming of a president. But Trump’s latest gambit is un-presidential in a much deeper sense, too. It contradicts the very constitutional justification for why we have a president in the first place. The whole point of the presidency is to have an elected ...