Opinion

Italy has adopted seemingly draconian measures to stop the outbreak of Covid-19 that has killed 500 people in the country so far and [the number of virus cases soared by 25% to 9,172 on March 09]. [Italy imposed national restrictions on its 60 million people to control the coronavirus on Tuesday.] Initially, the government had announced the lockdown of northern ...

Bungling the rescue of a bank that has more than $20 billion in deposits is probably the costliest own goal India has scored since its foolish November 2016 ban on most currency notes. Arm-twisting government-controlled State Bank of India to inject capital into failing Yes Bank Ltd was the only option left for New Delhi. But the halfhearted bailout just ...

You may not have been exposed to the new coronavirus yet, but you’ve almost certainly been exposed to an adjacent contagion. Maybe you’ve even helped spread it. It might be retweeting Australian complaints about supermarkets sold out of hand sanitiser. Liking Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram post of herself in a face mask. Scrolling agog through Facebook photos from a friend in ...

“Enlightened statesmen,” wrote James Madison, “will not always be at the helm.” His genius extended to understatement, and until Tuesday it was approaching probable that by midnight of November’s first Tuesday, sensible Americans would be elated and distraught — elated because someone grotesquely unsuited to the presidency would have been denied that office, but distraught because such a person had ...

It was December 2017 and Apple Inc’s recently released iPhone X was delighting a small cohort of owners with its upgraded technology and blazing performance. At the same time, a different cohort of iPhone owners was dismayed by the slowing performance of their older models. The culprit, it turned out, was Apple: It had sent a software update that slowed ...

In ordinary times, February’s US jobs data would have been labeled as nothing short of a blowout. Treasury yields would have climbed, with the expectation that the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates alone and let the labor market run hot, reviving dormant inflation. Needless to say, these are far from normal times. US payrolls surged by 273,000 in February, ...

Since taking over as the euro zone’s main banking supervisor, the European Central Bank (ECB) has spearheaded efforts to reduce the amount of bad loans that had cumulated throughout the great recession and the euro zone sovereign debt crisis. This pile has fallen from 6.8% of total loans at the peak in the December 2015 to 2.9% in September 2019. ...

As the coronavirus spreads, it’s increasingly clear that the US government has made mistakes. This is a difficult time to assess those mistakes, however; it’s not yet clear, and won’t be for some time, either the extent or the responsibility for things that have gone wrong. We’re going to see more articles about how things went awry, and that’s part ...

Recently, the S&P 500 ETF SPY traded over $100 billion in volume in a single day. With a .1% financial transactions tax, something that a few US presidential hopefuls had proposed, that volume would have generated $100 million in government revenue. Those types of numbers have lawmakers salivating over the potential to raise untold amounts of money from applying very ...

For travellers intrepid enough to share an aircraft with a group of strangers in the grip of an epidemic, now is a great time for bargains. Americans can get return flights from New York to Miami right now for around $51, Bloomberg News reported earlier. In China, premium budget carrier Juneyao Airlines is offering one-way tickets for the three-and-a-half hour ...