Opinion

The US has surpassed 28,000 dead from Covid-19, which is almost certainly an undercount, and is bracing for more. President Donald Trump’s partisan and incoherent response — the sum of his positions is that he has both total authority and zero responsibility — has made the crisis more political than it might have been. Multiple governors have shown a better ...

The coronavirus pandemic has gutted many US businesses. Amazon.com Inc, of course, is one of the notable exceptions. The e-commerce giant is thriving as self-isolating consumers make more and more of their purchases online rather than risk Covid-19 infection by shopping outdoors. To illustrate the magnitude of the recent ramp-up, the company announced earlier this week it plans to hire ...

So much of the news around Covid-19 is scary, but there is a hopeful item to share: A steep rise in the learning curve of doctors treating critically ill coronavirus patients. Doctors are learning more about just how weird this disease can be when people get sick enough to be hospitalised. Some say that unlike typical cases of severe pneumonia, ...

When Thomas Edison was asked about conducting thousands of experiments without results, he responded that he always got results: He knew “several thousand things that won’t work.” America’s states are, Louis Brandeis said, laboratories of democracy, and recently Wisconsin successfully demonstrated what does not work when holding elections during a pandemic. After insisting for weeks that the statutory election schedule ...

Apple and Google have generated much hope and controversy with their plan to create a Covid-19 tracking app. Too bad it won’t work. Public debate has focussed on how to balance the right to privacy with the potential to save lives. There’s ample reason for skepticism — for example, “anonymous” Bluetooth tracking can be deanonymised. But that’s not what I ...

Just how serious will the economic impact of the coronavirus be? Amid vast uncertainty, some very large numbers are flying around, and there’s a lot of confusion over what they mean. Peering through this fog, it’s worth noting: Authoritative official forecasters are far more pessimistic in the short term than most private-sector analysts. When Goldman Sachs, for instance, recently said ...

Doing “whatever it takes” to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The US government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including ...

It’s still early days in this pandemic, but not too early to venture a prediction: Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel, will come out of it looking quite good. What’s more, she may look even better as the outbreak enters its second phase, in which lockdowns gradually yield to uneasy resumptions of social and economic life. That’s because this pandemic ...

There is a sad inevitability about US department store JC Penney potentially exploring bankruptcy protection. The 118-year-old retailer has enough cash to survive the coming months, but it is looking into a possible bankruptcy filing to restructure its finances, Reuters, citing people familiar with the talks. JC Penney said it wouldn’t make a $12 million interest payment due April 15, ...

For Asia’s most prosperous societies, Covid-19 has exposed a big vulnerability: People simply aren’t having enough babies to replenish their aging populations. It’s foreign workers that make these countries function. That’s why pulling up the drawbridge to halt further spread of the disease and protect domestic businesses would be perilous. Even Japan and South Korea, often seen as hostile to ...