Opinion

If the world were ending, I’m convinced that all that would be left are cockroaches and the cable giants. Things aren’t quite that bad, but they aren’t good either. And yet, as the coronavirus pandemic sends the US into a recession, Brian Roberts may have reason to be among the least worried from his perch at Comcast Corp, the Roberts’s ...

Work-from-home neophytes are providing some much needed moments of levity right now. The Italian priest livestreaming mass with cat’s ears and whiskers accidentally superimposed on his head. The woman who failed to switch her camera off when she took a bathroom break during a conference call. Children and pets generally making a nuisance of themselves. Even if staged, they warrant ...

As the coronavirus crisis has rocked the world, America has been a sluggish and unreliable global leader except in one critical area — the Federal Reserve’s prompt moves to pump cash into traumatised international financial markets. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H Powell has been innovative in creating new monetary tools that can keep money and confidence flowing. The system was ...

One of the noteworthy aspects of our current coronavirus moment is the rapid proliferation of self-appointed data analysts. These armchair epidemiologists seem to believe they can project the trajectory of Covid-19 better than actual epidemiologists who have spent their whole careers studying the spread of disease. You know who I’m talking about: It’s not just the guy on Medium whose ...

The tension between the media and technology industries has long been characterised as a fight for users’ attention. The more of it they have, the greater the opportunity to sell new products and services. The advertising technology giants Facebook Inc and Google have turned that into a $200 billion-a-year business. Now that millions of people are stuck at home trying ...

The need for any kind of treatment to help stem the coronavirus outbreak is acute as cases and hospitalisations continue to mount. But there’s a strong need to balance urgency and evidence. President Donald Trump’s cheerleading of chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine — older malaria drugs with limited evidence of efficacy in Covid-19 — is arguably dangerous. As he touts ...

Since 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at a prime-time television address that he was withdrawing most of India’s currency overnight, such speeches have been preceded by wild speculation. Modi’s message was even starker than most expected. From midnight [March 24], this country of 1.3 billion will shut down: “For 21 days, forget what going out means.” Modi is ...

It’s no secret that US hospitals are facing a dire shortage of personal protection equipment for their workers. The surgeon general even urged the public to stop buying masks, stating, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities ...

Boeing Co is the least deserving of the corporate needy in the coronavirus crisis, but the nature of its position means it must get a special cut of a $2 trillion aid package working its way through Congress. As the only US company capable of producing a major commercial jetliner, the country’s biggest exporter, and a major defense contractor, it’s ...

What’s missing is confidence. Anyone who claims to know how this economic collapse will end is either lying or woefully overconfident. But whatever the prospects, they would be better if consumers, business leaders and investors were more optimistic. The economy’s performance is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. Optimism breeds optimism, and pessimism breeds pessimism. The best we can do as forecasters ...