Opinion

Spending on US health care is out of control, expanding steadily from 5% of GDP in 1960 to 18% in 2018. There are, however, ways to curb the explosion in costs from both the demand and the supply side. Health care costs per capita in the US are almost double those of other developed countries, but life expectancy is lower ...

War with Iran has been coming at us in slow motion since 1979. Now, ominously, it’s really here, but we don’t seem any better at deflecting revolutionary Iran from its destructive course than we were at the beginning. The Iranian-backed militiamen with their battering ram at the gate of the US Embassy in Baghdad last week looked eerily similar to ...

Michel Barnier, the European Union’s top Brexit negotiator, is the Brussels equivalent of a rock star. For three years, the unflappable 68-year-old Frenchman has been hashing out the terms of the UK’s departure while making sure the remaining 27 members stick together. He is the real survivor of the Brexit saga. The fact that Barnier is still in the job ...

The seemingly impossible, paradoxical news that astronomers had taken a picture of a supermassive black hole captured our imaginations in 2019 for good reason. What they actually showed us was a sort of shadow — a spherical blackness surrounded by a cosmic hurricane of matter and energy — but that was enough to qualify as a sign of real human ...

Cause and effect. Action, reaction. As China cracks down on shadow finance, private companies and state giants alike are learning that the karmic wheel of money can come to a screeching halt. In April 2018, China unveiled far-reaching rules for its financial industry as part of an effort to curb risk. Banks were asked to spin off their wealth-management arms, ...

The much-anticipated arrival of virtual banking in Singapore is unlikely to be an “aha” moment for consumer finance, but corporate banking will be different. One should expect disruption. The application period for Singapore’s first internet-only lenders ended last week with five known hopefuls, so far, for as many licenses on offer. The move mirrors the grant of eight licenses in ...

Workers are delivering more, and they’re getting a lot less,” argued former Vice President Joe Biden in a speech at the Brookings Institution this summer. “There’s no correlation now between productivity and wages. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential rival, agrees. Her campaign website states that “wages have largely stagnated,” even though “worker productivity has risen steadily.” The claim that ...

Vivendi SA investors should be sighing with relief. The French media conglomerate announced that it plans to sell 10% of its Universal Music Group (UMG) record label to a group led by Tencent Holdings Ltd., the Chinese internet giant. The 3 billion euro purchase ($3.4 billion) implies an equity valuation of 30 billion euros for all of UMG, as the music ...

Centrifugal or centripetal, which force will prevail in the European Union (EU) in 2020? A lot suggests it’ll be the former, with the EU drifting apart. Its third-biggest member state is preparing to exit. Populists are railing against Brussels and want their “sovereignty” back. Conservatives in the north balk at deeper integration of the euro area. One woman who wants ...

From Google to Papa John’s to Buffalo Wings and Starbucks, more companies are introducing implicit bias training. These HR-sponsored courses are intended to foster diversity and inclusion by making employees more aware of unconsciously believed negative stereotypes. The idea is that if we can combat our underlying biases, we’ll decrease discriminatory behaviours at work and level the playing field for ...