Opinion

In 2014, the US led the effort by governments to blunt the world’s biggest outbreak of Ebola, which took more than 11,000 lives in West Africa before it was declared over in mid-2016. Now, a smaller but more complex outbreak rages in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the US response has been shaped by indifference and bureaucratic haggling. The ...

Jerome Powell’s half-hearted rate cut incensed President Donald Trump, who immediately took to Twitter to say the chairman of the US Federal Reserve had “let us down”. Global equities sunk and the dollar strengthened as Powell chose to cut rates by a quarter- rather than a half-point and said this wasn’t the start of a “lengthy cutting cycle.” But the ...

With trade talks collapsing between the US and China in Shanghai, there’s even less hope of any resumption in American farm exports, which were once portrayed as the foundation of any agreement. That’s not good enough, according to President Donald Trump. Had a trade detente materialised, those expecting a rapid return to the status quo on farm trade likely would ...

Can the company behind Aston Martin avoid tapping its shareholders? Yes, if everything goes to plan. The snag is that Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc is proving increasingly accident prone. Shares in the sports car maker fell as much as 22 percent. That’s all too familiar. The stock dropped 26 percent and 18 percent on consecutive days last week. ...

Backyard industrialisation has been tried; it was a miserable failure. During the so-called Great Leap Forward in China under Mao Zedong, peasants were encouraged to erect steel furnaces in their back yards. Predictably, most people had no idea how to build a mini steel plant much less make steel, and there was no market for their wares. The result was ...

For much of the past two and a half years, the UK has had the luxury of negotiating the terms of its departure from the European Union under little pressure from the financial markets. The new prime minister Boris Johnson could soon come to pine for those calmer days. Sterling fell by more than 1.3 percent to $1.22, hitting its ...

German courts, regulators and legislators are deeply suspicious of Big Tech’s business practices. Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that, when they intervene to fix them, they only skim the surface of what’s wrong with the internet majors. That’s not necessarily wrong, either. Take, for example, Facebook’s practice of collecting data from third-party websites that have embedded the social ...

Tesla Inc. refers to its most head-snapping level of acceleration as “ludicrous” mode. What the company needs, though, is escape velocity. And what it needs to escape are its operating costs. The company didn’t manage to turn a profit despite record vehicle deliveries in its last quarter. As cheaper Model 3s account for a bigger proportion of sales, bringing down ...

European nations, alarmed by Iran’s capture of a British oil tanker, are mounting a response to protect their commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf. The Royal Navy has started to escort British ships, and a plan for a European naval mission has been endorsed by Denmark, France and Italy. It’s a promising start. But effectively curbing ...

Having reportedly agreed on a short list of candidates to replace Christine Lagarde as managing director of International Monetary Fund, European governments are set to announce their nominee by the end of this week. What they should be doing instead is support merit-based nomination of candidates from both inside and outside Europe, as well as a better due diligence process. ...