Opinion

Since President Trump moved into the White House, he has been eager for a dramatic initiative with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he may finally have found one in the latest announcement of a joint American-Russian-Saudi effort to stabilise world oil prices. “The big Oil Deal with Opec Plus is done,” Trump announced in a tweet thanking Putin and King ...

India has chosen an odd combination of strategies in its fight against the coronavirus: a harsh lockdown on economic activity and a meager fiscal response to the loss of jobs and incomes. What’s making this more painful is a denial of the role of finance in both containing the fallout of the outbreak and in supporting the recovery later. Allowing ...

Six governors from a string of contiguous eastern seaboard states stretching from Rhode Island to Delaware announced that they would form a working group to cooperate on reopening businesses in the region. This kind of state-level coordination is much needed. The federal government hasn’t taken the lead in ordering coronavirus lockdowns, and so it won’t take the lead in reopening ...

Covid-19 is not just changing Americans’ daily lives, it may also transform their system of government. On many important current issues, the US may end up with an arrangement that looks more like the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution. Consider how this might evolve. First, states and regions are recovering (or not) at dramatically different rates. The worst may ...

The coronavirus pandemic has closed schools, shuttered restaurants, emptied office buildings, put PM Boris Johnson in intensive care and forced much of the UK economy into cryogenic suspension. So far, though, it hasn’t derailed Brexit. Fronting the daily UK press conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak affirmed that the government was committed to its current timetable for trade talks ...

Global health emergencies will be a fact of life in the 21st century. So, too, will be the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chronic inability to rise to the occasion. President Donald Trump is hoping that the body’s failures in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic can be corrected with punishment. The US will halt payments to the WHO to hold it ...

There is no safe way to emerge from our collective shelter-in-place orders and restart the economy before an effective Covid-19 vaccine arrives — but there are smart, science-based ways to do it. The question can’t be left entirely up to experts. It’s not a safety problem so much as an ethical one; many of us would accept a certain risk ...

Because the United States’ unrivaled resources of human and physical capital have only been idled, not obliterated, the recovery might begin with a bang, propelled by a burst of pent-up animal spirits. The recovery could, however, be unnecessarily anemic, for two reasons. First, the receding pandemic (caused by a virus roughly one ten-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) will leave ...

For a man with a 100-year vision, Masayoshi Son sure seems impatient. We already know that the SoftBank Group Corp chairman wasn’t content letting Adam Neumann be slightly crazy in his plan to upend the short-term office rental market; indeed he encouraged the founder of The We Co to be even crazier. And when a young Ritesh Agarwal was building ...

Forget that $24 billion writedown on investments that SoftBank Group Corp. It’s bad. But it’s only paper. The Japanese conglomerate faces a far more tangible problem as the value of portfolios plummet and credit ratings get slashed. The issue is cash. Specifically, at the $100 billion Vision Fund. Most venture capitalists operate by taking in money from limited partners and ...