Opinion

Italy is doubling down on its lockdown strategy to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, halting all non-essential economic activities for two weeks. There are early signs that these draconian steps are paying off, but the human and economic costs will be steep. The government made mistakes, ones that the rest of the Western world should have learned from ...

Fear is when you want to pick up the shiny nickel lying in the road, but freeze at the sound of the approaching steamroller. The currency market equivalent of this is a widening basis swap — free money that banks are too scared to pocket. For the fourth time in the past decade, the fear gauge is starting to go ...

Across the world, as governments take their first economic stimulus measures to address the Covid-19 crisis, debate is intensifying over the right form and size of that assistance. But this discussion hasn’t yet come to grips with five fundamental realities: First, mandating social distancing in response to the Covid-19 crisis requires socialising the economic costs of doing so. We as ...

“Worrying,” wrote Lewis Thomas, “is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.” Thomas — physician, philosopher, essayist, administrator (dean of the Yale and New York University medical schools, head of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) — thought we worry too much about our health, as though a human being is “a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and ...

A diamond is forever and so, perhaps, is Bernard Arnault’s interest in Tiffany & Co. Investors have been having some doubts that the chairman and founder of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA would deliver on his $16 billion takeover of the storied jeweller. But right now, Arnault is behaving like a classic luxury buyer. The bid for Tiffany is ...

It would be charitable to describe the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as sloppy and uncoordinated. Thankfully, there is a model for an epic national comeback. It dates back to the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, when President Roosevelt created the War Production Board, one of the most dynamic public-private partnerships in history. ...

With little but uncertainty ahead, Congress and the states must mobilise immediately to shift the nation to a largely vote-by-mail system by November. There are two obstacles to that goal — one practical, one political. Lurking behind both is the fear that President Donald Trump will seek to disrupt the vote to maintain power, and that Republicans and right-wing media ...

When my local supermarket opened for business at 6 am the other day, I had my plan of action in place. The instant the door was unlocked, I hurried to the pharmacy aisle, where I found, to my surprise and delight, three bottles of rubbing alcohol. But now I faced a puzzle. Should I play homo economicus and buy them ...

Apocalyptic visions of hastily-raised national barriers to trade, long lines of trucks gathering at the border, and shortages of essential supplies have haunted Europe ever since the UK voted to leave the bloc since 2016. If such a scenario is getting closer to reality, it has little to do with Brexit and everything to do with the coronavirus pandemic. Erratic ...

What scientists know about Covid-19 is changing fast. And people — from the public to politicians to the press — are confusing the possible with the probable. It’s causing a lot of undue guilt and fear. In times like these, we turn to experts — but what are we supposed to think when the experts themselves are so uncertain? We’re ...