Opinion

Just two days after the French government’s lockdown went into effect, the bakery in my village outside Paris started rationing baguettes. The limit of five per family per day is still a lot of bread, but it is disconcerting that anyone is trying to stockpile the most perishable of loafs. I can’t judge them, however. Although I haven’t been panic-buying, ...

This should have been Ocado Plc’s crisis. The online-only grocer should have been capitalising on shoppers avoiding crowded stores. Instead, last week it temporarily closed its website, potentially upsetting its customers. Still, investors clearly believe that it will emerge as one of the winners from the rush to buy toilet paper and tinned soup. Ocado’s shares were up for the ...

In a battle reminiscent of the initially unsuccessful efforts to pass legislation to address the Great Recession in 2008, Republicans and Democrats have thus far failed to advance a $2 trillion relief bill for the coronavirus recession. The only way forward may be to let the Federal Reserve resolve this dispute. The sticking point in negotiations is a provision giving ...

Covid-19 is make or break for the euro. The only way the European Central Bank (ECB) can convince markets that it will do whatever it takes to save the single currency in the current crisis is to abandon the self-imposed political constraints on the assets it can buy under its Quantitative Easing (QE) programme. These encompass the so-called “issue limits,” ...

When something is in short supply, getting it can depend on who you know. That’s true of the coronavirus test, with an added twist. A striking number of rich and famous people, from basketball star Kevin Durant to Senator Rand Paul, have tested positive for Covid-19 without showing symptoms of the disease, let alone being hospitalised. That’s led to charges ...

In a matter of weeks, the world’s fourth-most populous nation went from reporting zero coronavirus cases to having the highest death toll in Southeast Asia. Now its currency is tumbling, growth forecasts are buckling, the capital is under a state of emergency, and an archipelago of 18,000 islands has effectively sealed its borders. With a global recession in the cards, ...

Few words are more overused in our debates than “crisis”. We have many — the education crisis, the inequality crisis and the environmental crisis, to name just a few. The word suggests an impending calamity unless we take instant action. The reality is that most crises are not calamities. They’re stubborn problems that, for one reason or another, defy a ...

Just six weeks ago, Chairman Masayoshi Son was crowing about the value of SoftBank Group Corp and brushing off the notion that he should sell his prized stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd after a terrible quarter and massive asset writedowns. Things change. In a surprise announcement on March 23, the Japanese conglomerate said it plans to peddle or monetise ...

Lockdowns imposed to control the coronavirus have battered China’s appetite for everything from coal to copper, pushing stockpiles of raw materials higher and global prices lower. The next crunch could come from supply. The risk of an outbreak is growing in ill-prepared producer countries, with mandatory quarantines and border shutdowns threatening to choke off production. Prices of bulk commodities are ...

Unlike in 2008, when the banking sector brought about the financial crisis, today it can help keep the economy from suffering a deep recession — but only if reforms enacted by regulators in the last decade are relaxed. Central banks around the world have quickly sprung to action cutting interest rates and reactivating various financial crisis era programs. Although these ...