Opinion

Americans have become polarised over something other than politics. We’re now divided into those who are washing our hands more carefully and more often, but otherwise living as usual, and those who are buying a year’s supply of toilet paper at Costco and, at the extreme end, ordering $400 bottles of now-rare Purell. For every Covid-19 headline urging “don’t panic,” ...

Wall Street’s giants are grappling with an unprecedented test of their business resilience — arguably their biggest challenge since 2008. A potential pandemic is forcing a complete rethink of how they operate, while stock markets plummet amid fears of an economic slump. For JPMorgan Chase & Co, the world’s most systemically important financial institution, the sudden absence of its powerful ...

Might as well be blunt about it: Mick Mulvaney, ousted last week, was probably the worst White House chief of staff ever. And there’s no reason to believe his replacement, Mark Meadows, will be any better. If anything, he looks like an even worse fit for the job than Mulvaney. Mulvaney’s main accomplishment seems to be that he was able ...

School nurses are already on the front line battling epidemics, from asthma to obesity to teen suicide. Now, as the coronavirus epidemic forces schools to shuffle sports schedules and debate whether to cancel proms, school nurses would seem to be ideal leaders to help guide the response, from offering prevention tips to correcting the kind of misinformation that inevitably courses ...

Hong Kong has fewer coronavirus cases than the US, Singapore or Italy. That might seem surprising for a city that sits on the doorstep of mainland China and has intertwining business, tourism and personal connections with the source of the epidemic. The reason can be summed up in one word: Sars. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in ...

Britain’s largest grocer is heading for the checkout in Southeast Asia with an impressively full trolley. Tesco Plc said it had sold its Thai and Malaysian business to entities linked to Dhanin Chearavanont’s Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group for more than $10 billion, a heftier than expected price. It’s a bold bet on billionaire clout. Picking a buyer that already touches ...

Former vice president Joe Biden’s astonishing political success over the past week has felt like a bandwagon for sensible politics. But to keep it rolling towards the general election in November, Biden will have to do something his rival President Trump would never consider: admit that he and his son made mistakes. Trump’s allies are already aiming their next artillery ...

The banging comes first, followed by the screaming. I could try to blot out the noise and carry on, but proximity to family is supposed to be one of the benefits of working from home. My one-year-old son knows there’s a computer keyboard on the other side of the door that needs a merry bashing with his tiny fists. I ...

There is perhaps no greater success story in the world over the last three decades than Colombia. To see this, just stand in the middle of the Plaza de Bolivar in the centre of Bogota. In 1988, there was a gaping hole along one entire side of the square. That was where the Palace of Justice had been, before guerrillas ...

There was a time when Bitcoin earned its stripes as a safe asset in times of crisis or uncertainty. Now, it seems that a global disease outbreak has proven too much for the premier cryptocurrency, with prices plunging over the past month. Bloomberg Opinion first stumbled across the notion that Bitcoin was a sanctuary four years ago during Brexit fever, ...